What if the wisest part of you isn’t your thinking mind, but the sensations already alive in your body? In this episode, executive coach and Enneagram expert Courtney Smith joins us to explore how fear quietly shapes our choices and how learning to feel what’s here now can restore agency, presence, and pleasure.

Courtney shares her path from Yale Law and McKinsey to a body first approach blending the Enneagram, conscious leadership, and somatic awareness. We unpack three core fears: loss of security, approval, and control, and how they keep us looping familiar conflicts and drama triangle roles.

We move into practice by welcoming fear, tracking it in the body, and asking, If I weren’t scared, what would I be doing? We also explore pleasure as information, not indulgence, but a compass toward aliveness and truth.

You’ll leave with tools to notice sensation, spot fear driven patterns, and choose presence over performance. If this resonated, subscribe, share, and leave a review, then ask yourself: if fear disappeared for one hour, what would you choose?

In this episode:

• 0:00 – Opening And Embodiment Mission
• 5:14 – From Head To Body-Based Presence
• 10:02 – Enneagram Beyond Typing
• 16:42 – Presence Begins With Sensation
• 23:57 – Bypassing With Self‑Knowledge
• 28:53 – Why Growth Is Uncomfortable
• 34:55 – Socialisation, Fear, And Scripts
• 41:48 – The Drama Triangle Explained

You can read the transcript here

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In this solo episode of How To Be In This Body, Ailey Jolie reflects on carrying breast implants for 15 years and the moment she finally had enough capacity to hear the “no” she couldn’t access almost two decades ago. This is a conversation about consent, power, and why trauma tools designed for single events often fail to address lives shaped by repetition, surveillance, and the gaze.

Ailey explores how trauma research centered on male bodies overlooks a common female experience: disembodiment without a clear origin story. From self-objectification to the dulling of interoception, she traces the cultural and clinical forces that teach bodies to doubt their own knowing.

Rather than chasing perfect regulation, this episode reframes healing as capacity—the ability to feel fear, grief, and hope while still moving toward what is right. Distinguishing “scoreboard” healing from “story” healing, it invites a different question: not what broke you, but what you were shaped to hold. This episode is for anyone who’s tried every somatic tool and still feels far from home.

In this episode:

• Opening And Embodiment Mission
• The Gap In Trauma Theory
• A Child’s Wish And Split Survival
• Patterning Danger And Adolescence
• Violations In Medicine And Aftermath
• Self‑Objectification And Losing Interoception
• Beauty Culture’s Profitable Wounds
• Choosing Explant And Choosing Trust
• Repair Through Consent And Care

You can read the transcript here

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What if the stories your body carries are the map back to belonging? In this conversation with Palestinian–American poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan, we explore how narrative, trauma, and the nervous system meet inside a living body. Hala shares how displacement shaped her love of books and oral histories, why writing still arrives as mystery, and how creative practice can offer coherence when life feels scattered.

We move beyond buzzwords to talk about embodiment as a political act—how storytelling becomes witness and resistance when institutions fail. Hala offers practical ways to return to your body: hand over heart, 4-7-8 breathing, hot baths without a phone, and the simple mantra “this is just what’s happening.” She also unpacks why perfectionism makes somatics feel inaccessible and how choosing to feel—even discomfort—builds resilience.

This episode is for anyone curious about creativity as healing, building distress tolerance, and holding grief and agency at the same time. Expect clear language, grounded tools, and gentle guidance for reconnecting to your body and your story.

In this episode:

• 0:00 – Welcome And Episode Setup
• 3:37 – Narrative As A Unifying Thread
• 9:53 – How Narrative Works In The Body
• 14:46 – Displacement, Reading, And Early Survival
• 20:47 – Creativity As Conduit And Mystery
• 30:17 – Safety, Downregulation, And Rewriting
• 36:52 – Storytelling As Survival And Alliance
• 42:12 – Memory, Erasure, And Resistance
• 49:07 – Embodiment As Political Practice

You can read the transcript here

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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What if a devoted practice is quietly pulling you away from your body instead of deeper into it. In this episode, we sit down with Megan Campbell, yoga teacher, trainer, retreat leader, and psychotherapist, to explore what embodiment really asks of us beyond perfect poses or polished language.

Megan shares how grief surfaced unexpectedly through practice, the allure and limitations of modern wellness culture, and the steady courage it took to move from the studio into the therapy room. Together, we examine the ways embodiment can become performative, and how returning to sensation, cycles, and nervous system awareness creates a safer path back to self.

This conversation offers a compassionate look at healing that values both story and somatics, honors fluctuation rather than fixing, and reminds us that sometimes the most therapeutic move is to slow down and feel more, not do more.

In this episode: 

• 0:00 – Setting The Embodiment Intent
• 7:08 – Teaching Early And Finding Voice
• 10:02 – Women’s Bodies, Ritual, And Safety
• 17:06 – Seasons, Cycles, And Chakras
• 20:28 – Naming Burnout And Aging Out
• 27:32 – Pedestals, Patriarchy, And Credit
• 34:27 – Fixing The Body Or Feeling It
• 39:42 – Seeing Nervous Systems In Motion
• 45:42 – Windows Of Tolerance In Practice

You can read the transcript here

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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What if your body isn’t a barrier to spirituality, but the place where the sacred actually meets you. This is the heart of the conversation with spiritual teacher and retreat leader Brandon Nappi, whose work weaves together Christian mysticism, Zen practice, and somatic healing.

Together, we explore a spirituality that is grounded, honest, and lived through the body. Brandon shares how his understanding of faith was transformed through contemplative practice and relationship, learning to hold both insight and belovedness at once. We name the ways body and spirit have been divided through history, and we also remember the quieter traditions that insisted on an embodied faith.

This episode offers a practical, compassionate invitation to begin where sensation and breath are available, to build capacity through daily practice, and to meet discomfort without bypassing it. For anyone engaged in leadership, healing, or inner work, this conversation is a reminder that the body can be a place of refuge, devotion, and return.

In this episode: 

• 0:00 – Welcome And Embodiment Framing
• 3:26 – Body As Home: Defining Embodiment 
• 11:11 –  Meeting Buddhism And Somatics
• 16:43 – Practice Grounding: Zazen And Breath
• 22:24 – How The Body Was Split From Spirit
• 29:27 – Slow Repair: Somatics And Unlearning
• 32:42 – Men’s Work: From Fragility To Feeling
• 39:34 – Why Spirit Still Matters In Somatics
• 46:00 – The Bandage Story: Sitting With Pain

You can read the transcript here

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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In this episode of How To Be In This Body, we explore the fawn response as an adaptive survival strategy (not a character flaw) and trace a gentle path from self-abandonment back to self-contact. Dr. Ingrid Clayton, clinical psychologist and author, brings together clinical insight, lived experience, and practical tools for building internal safety and reducing shame.

Together, Ailey and Ingrid unpack how fawning develops, why danger can feel familiar, and how our bodies learn to prioritize connection over selfhood. This conversation offers compassion, language, and embodied understanding for anyone who has learned to appease in order to survive and who is ready to begin coming home to themselves.

In this episode:

• 0:00 – Embodiment And Show Welcome
• 1:47 – Meet Dr Ingrid Clayton
• 8:16 – Agency, Validation And Reclaiming Story
• 16:28 – The Missing Discourse On Fawning
• 20:26 – Codependency Versus Trauma Response
• 23:27 – How Fawning Feels In The Body
• 28:34 – From Self-Abandonment To Self-Contact
• 34:57 – Fawning In The Therapy Room 
• 41:34 – Trust Your Body’s Unique Path
• 44:27 – Everyday Practices For Regulation

You can read the transcript here

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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Join Ailey Jolie for a raw and personal solo episode of How To Be In This Body. In this New Year's reflection, Ailey shares what happened when her body stopped letting her perform; a year of health crises, the real story behind her viral posts, and the decision to focus her attention on her upcoming book and course INBODY. 

In this episode, she explores what it means to let go of an identity built around being needed, why she's done setting goals from the neck up, and the question she's carrying into this year: how do I actually want to spend my time? This episode is for anyone in their own season of stopping, listening, or questioning what comes next. 

In this episode: 

• 0:00 – Welcome and Embodiment Focus 
• 1:16 – New Year Messaging Challenged 
• 3:06 – Illness as Unwanted Teacher 
• 8:15 – Writing from Inside the Body 
• 10:31 – Calm Versus Capacity 
• 22:31 – Stopping the Performance 
• 26:00 – Self-Regulation Needs Co-Regulation 
• 33:20 – Holding Less to Live More 
• 39:20 – Capacity, Fawn Response, and Needs

You can read the transcript here

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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Join Ailey Jolie for a tender and personal solo episode of In This Body, where she weaves a health update, insights from a sacred MRI, and listener questions into a nuanced meditation on embodiment. Ailey explores the delicate terrain between anxiety and intuition, the truth about hypervigilance and self-trust, and how regulation can sometimes be disguised compliance. She reflects on the role of anger as sacred information, the necessity of honoring the body’s pace, and the deep practice of meeting life without forcing it. Through her own story, she invites you to listen more deeply; to yourself, to your body, and to the spaces in between. We hope you enjoy the episode.

In this episode:

01:00 – Personal Journey through medical Challenges
03:18 – The Importance of listening to the Body
07:53 – Navigating Intuition vs. Anxiety
10:32 – Understanding Hypervigilance and Nervous System Regulation
28:29 – Navigating Disconnection and Cultural Norms
32:25 – Understanding the Threat of Embodiment Work
37:16 – Distinguishing authentic Needs from Conditioning
41:08 – The Challenge of receiving Love
45:06 – Authentic Regulation vs. Comliance
49:15 – Reclaiming Anger without bypassing

You can read the transcript here

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

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Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

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Join Ailey Jolie and Mariel Pastor, therapist, trainer, and creator of Character Mapping, on this episode of In This Body. The conversation moves through the heart of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy; exploring how self-energy, parts work, and somatic presence can bring us into deeper peace with ourselves and with one another. Mariel shares reflections on spiritual embodiment, cultural conditioning, and the healing power of love in therapeutic spaces. Together they speak to the nuanced relationship between trauma and creativity, the sacredness of the client-clinician connection, and how healing opens us to both tenderness and aliveness. We hope you enjoy the episode.

In this episode: 

• 02:04 Understanding Internal Family Systems (IFS) 
• 08:11 The Systemic Nature of Mind, Body, Spirit, and Culture 
• 12:09 Navigating the Challenges of IFS 
• 18:02 The role of Somatics in IFS Practice 
• 26:03 The importance of Connection in Therapy 
• 34:14 The Role of Nature in Healing 
• 37:21 Creativity and Healing: a deep Connection 
• 39:34 The importance of doing our own Work 4
• 43:53 Artists and the wounds of Creativity 
• 52:09 The Nuances of Performance in Therapy

You can read the show transcript here

To find out more about Mariel:

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Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

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Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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Join Ailey Jolie and Jambo Truong, bodyworker, yogi, clinician, and mystic, on this episode of In This Body. The conversation journeys into the rich intersection of yoga, trauma recovery, and spiritual ritual—exploring how forest yoga can become both a refuge and a catalyst for transforming self-loathing into embodied presence. Jambo shares his story of growing up between East and West, the healing potential of holding poses long enough to meet what’s hidden, and how mantra, tantric practice, and somatic awareness can root us more fully in our bodies. Together, they reflect on spiritual sovereignty, compassion as an embodied frequency, and how to meet discomfort with curiosity rather than escape. We hope you enjoy the episode.

In this episode:

02:48 – What It Means to Be Present and Embodied

03:45 – Bridging Buddhist Ritual and Western Healthcare

06:30 – Early Meditation Practice and Learning to Feel the Body

08:53 – What Is Forest Yoga and Why It’s Unique

13:03 – Eating Disorders, Self-Loathing, and Finding Joy in the Body

18:52 – Trauma, Karma, and the Gifts Hidden in Discomfort

24:28 – Adapting Ancient Practices in Modern Culture

30:08 – Mantra and Tantra as Somatic Tools for Embodiment

36:34 – How Tantra Can Ground or Dissociate Us

41:59 – Final Reflections on Choosing Practices That Cultivate Presence

You can read the show transcript here

Find out more about Jambo:

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Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

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Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

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To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

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