What is your body is trying to tell you?

Our body sends us signals all day every day, many of them we listen to without a problem, (I'm cold, I'm hungry) but other messages are more confusing. Our culture has taught us--both directly and indirectly--to ignore the needs of our body and second guess the messages we receive. It can be frustrating when someone tells you to 'listen to your body' to even know what that means. What I do is help people to identify what they feel, (surprisingly, it's often different from what they thought they felt!) and teach them full-bodied listening tools. The result is developing a loving relationship with their body.
 
Alora Kubanek runs an online pain recovery coaching business called Befriend Your Body. Her signature Body Dialogue sessions can effectively alleviate and eradicate pain by helping others understand the messages coming from their body. She blends biomechanics, applied neuroscience, pain science and artistic expression to help her clients change the conversation between body and mind. She can uniquely address complicated health issues that don’t respond to mainstream modalities and mainstream medicine and has helped thousands of people rekindle their relationship to their body.
 
 Key Points:
1. Challenges in Listening to the Body: Cultural conditioning to ignore feelings, lack of awareness of the body's 18 senses, and unconscious processing of information.
2. Physical Manifestation of Feelings: Feelings can manifest physically, and sometimes people confuse them.
3. Benefits: Improved family relationships, renewed physical activities, increased agency in the body, and improved emotional awareness.
4. Journey: The journey of learning to listen to one's body is personalized and typically spans three to six months.

LINKS TO OTHER SPEAKER RELATED INFORMATION
www.befriendyourbody.ca

Transcript
www.bodymindki.com/podcast

Author: The Holistic Health Show
Guest Speaker: Alora Kubanek
Category: Health and Wellness
Publish date: 2024-06-18
Duration: [00:11:30]

Transcript

[00:00:00] Amy: Hello, welcome back to the Holistic Health Show. Today on the podcast, we're talking to Alora Kubanek, who is a somatic self compassion coach, and today our topic is how to interpret what your body is telling you. I can't wait to hear about this, Alora, and thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

[00:00:23] Amy: I'd love it if you would just jump right in and tell me a little bit about what you do and why you do it.

[00:00:30] Alora Kubanek: Okay. Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I, above all things, I'm a body nerd. I've been studying especially biomechanics for quite a long time so that I could improve the way that I move and improve the way that I feel. And it's been a lifelong passion of mine.

[00:00:53] Alora Kubanek: search practice working with for myself and with my clients to, to really understand the body in, in a really kind of deep way. And what I do now is I, I work one on one with people to develop a conversation with their body so that they can really understand it deeply.

[00:01:21] Amy: It's so important. You would almost just assume that it's an intuitive thinking process that we have that, you know, [00:01:30] we know when we're hot and we're cold, we know when we're getting the sniffles, or if we have a sore throat, and those are really obvious signs. But when something else is going on that maybe we're less familiar with, It can be, you know, really easy to ignore or brush it off, first of all, but also I, it can be really hard to notice until you put that into practice.

[00:01:55] Amy: It can be hard to recognize even, Oh, actually I'm not meant to feel that way or, or even that I do feel something. , can you tell us all a little bit more about, that process how do I train myself to recognize and what am I looking out for?

[00:02:14] Alora Kubanek: Mm hmm. There's so much going on in our bodies at one time. And there are a lot of really good reasons why we might feel disconnected and why we might feel like it's hard to listen. One of the biggest reasons why is that our culture has taught us to ignore our feelings and to To not express them, right?

[00:02:40] Alora Kubanek: So having emotions and being emotional beings has kind of been off limits for a lot of us from a very young age. And we aren't taught that emotions themselves are actually a physical process. It's not a mental process. And so if we [00:03:00] cut off that part of ourselves, we're cutting off a lot of natural processing that our body needs to go through.

[00:03:08] Alora Kubanek: So that, that's a big part, element of listening to your body. But also, we're only taught that, we're taught that we only have five senses when in fact we actually have 18. We are collecting constant information from our environment that is, like, 95 percent of it is under the radar, and so we're not conscious of it, and yet we are always collecting it.

[00:03:39] Alora Kubanek: So our brain is working behind the scenes And unless we bring our awareness to that process of collecting information it does stay under the radar. And it can be very tricky for us to, to kind of sense what's going on.

[00:03:57] Amy: I'm surprised at the 18 senses. Can you give us a few examples?

[00:04:02] Alora Kubanek: Yeah, so , a lot of it happens through touch. So our skin is an incredible organ in our body that is sensing so many aspects. It's sensing not just whether something is touching you, but it's how much pressure is it giving you? It's what is the temperature? Is there force or energy behind it?

[00:04:27] Alora Kubanek: All of these cues that help you [00:04:30] to know, you know, if, you know, if you have to grab hold of something really quickly, if you have to be careful of something in your environment or to hold on to something a little bit tighter those sorts of things. 

[00:04:43] Amy: Yeah, that's really piqued my interest. So, I'm trying to understand the, journey of somebody who's, who's learning, you know, how to listen to their 

[00:04:55] Amy: body and is an over, are you finding the clients are finding it to be an overwhelming experience?

[00:05:02] Alora Kubanek: I think that most people expect it to be overwhelming. And again, it's that has to do with our cultural conditioning of not being allowed to, to feel our feelings. And so there's the fear there that once we open up a valve, it's going to be like a fire hose. in actuality, when we get started, it's super gentle and it's I really take my time with it and so no people, when they start, they don't actually feel overwhelmed, but I think there is that underlying fear.

[00:05:37] Alora Kubanek: That it will be overwhelming.

[00:05:39] Amy: And you've mentioned a couple of times about feelings and we all know, that feelings can manifest physically. So I guess what I'm curious.

[00:05:48] Amy: About is because I think, when I'm thinking, listen to what your body is telling you, I'm immediately going to, ow, that hurts, or my stomach feels [00:06:00] upset. So, are those also the sort of things that we're learning to interpret? Or is it purely the emotions behind it?

[00:06:08] Alora Kubanek: Yeah, no, absolutely. So there are a lot of people who do have challenges with these simple things like knowing when you're hungry or knowing when you're full and that can be a real challenge for people and it affects their relationship to food. And it's kind of you know, the body doesn't really discriminate between all of these sensations.

[00:06:32] Alora Kubanek: So if you start to pay attention, to some and maybe they're over here, you're actually going to be opening up your brain to sensing all of the other things going on as well.

[00:06:45] Amy: I'm wondering as well, you know, are we confusing certain feelings or physical ailments or whatever they are for something that they're not?

[00:06:56] Alora Kubanek: Absolutely. It's really normal for people to feel a worry as though they've, they have anxiety when actually they're feeling excited about something. Because in the body, if they feel really similar, there's a elevated heart rate and you know, like maybe my palms are sweaty and maybe I, my underarms get sweaty and all of the places and they tend to feel really similar.

[00:07:24] Alora Kubanek: And yet when you go underneath and and just get a little bit [00:07:30] curious, you'll see that they're actually quite different.

[00:07:32] Amy: And what is the process like? We talked a little bit about the journey and, you know, expecting it to be overwhelming and, and going gently and moving forward slowly and, you know, perhaps for what each client needs. What is the length of this journey, you know, from when someone gets in touch with you to, when you can kind of release them and say, okay, now you're on your own and go give it a try, 

[00:07:56] Alora Kubanek: 

[00:07:56] Alora Kubanek: Most people want to sign up to work with me for three months or six months to start and and oftentimes that's kind of, that's good enough to feel like you've got Your own legs and you've got a a practice that makes sense for you. I'm also really keen on making my programs personalized for, for how, how it needs to work with their life.

[00:08:22] Alora Kubanek: I always find that people develop this, this really fun curiosity that starts to, it becomes infectious. And so it, it evolves into like a lifelong learning and curiosity. 

[00:08:40] Amy: certainly. And I mean, once you start to see the improvements of, wow, I'm now recognizing these, these signals and I can do something about it. You know, it's only going to improve and who doesn't want to, for that domino effect to fall in and just continue on that, , beautiful journey and share it [00:09:00] and share it.

[00:09:00] Amy: I mean, your clients, they must be so much more able to care for their families or, you know, productive or even just having fun themselves and getting out there and creating new hobbies and seeing life perhaps differently once they're I'm really listening.

[00:09:17] Alora Kubanek: It's wild to see some progress that I would have never really expected, you know? Improving family relationships is one that I was really surprised at. So it goes beyond just the physical, but then of course, , I have clients who are able to go kayaking again. Right. Who thought that they had to give up certain physical activities.

[00:09:41] Alora Kubanek: So it really runs the whole gamut of developing a lot more agency in your physical body. And then it resonates in through relationships and how you, how you are able to be in touch with what's happening with you on the inside, no matter what's happening on the outside.

[00:10:01] Amy: It sounds like something everybody and anybody would, would want and enjoy and benefit from. And I'm curious, is there anything that you offer, where anyone interested can kind of get their feet wet, or look at some more information to

[00:10:16] Alora Kubanek: Absolutely.

[00:10:17] Amy: Hmm.

[00:10:19] Alora Kubanek: have some free resources on my website. I, I have a few different ways to check in with your body, have a little dialogue [00:10:30] with it and some guided attention exercises. 

[00:10:33] Amy: Awesome. And what I'll do, I'll make sure for everyone listening so that you can find that easily, I'll post it in the description of the video or the podcast episode, depending on where you're listening. So you can definitely find that. Allora, this has been incredibly informative. I think it's incredible work that you're doing, and I'm so excited to share it with everyone , I want to thank you so much for your time today.

[00:10:57] Alora Kubanek: It's a pleasure to be here with you. 

[00:10:58] ​