When Overriding Your Body Becomes a Way of Life

For a long time, I thought I was taking care of myself.

I exercised for hours. I worked hard. I pushed through discomfort. I cleansed, fasted, performed, achieved, and kept going.

From the outside, much of it looked like discipline.

But underneath it was something else:

I was simply overriding my body.

And overriding wasn't the exception in my life.

It was the rule.

I now understand that this pattern is not unusual among women. Many of us learned very early that our needs could be inconvenient—and that being inconvenient wasn't always safe.

We learned to be good.

Be respectful. Be quiet. Sit still. Get good grades. Don't disobey. Don't disagree. Don't make things harder for the adults around you.

And when our childlike nature pushed against those rules, there were consequences.

The particular form those consequences took varied from woman to woman. But many of us grew up inside a larger cultural framework that taught us, directly or indirectly, to override ourselves in order to belong.

When your body becomes the inconvenient part of you

I learned that my body itself was inconvenient and insufficient.

I read magazines that taught me how to remove the "embarrassing" hair from my body, how to smell, dress, and appear in ways that would help me belong.

I absorbed the idea that achievement was inherently at the expense of my body—and that my body was inherently misbehaved.

Headache? Push through.

Menstrual cramps? An excuse.

Sick? Unless you're really sick, you're going to school.

Thighs don't look like the women in the magazines? Your body is the problem.

Hungry? Become smaller.

Tired? Work harder.

Need something? Don't be difficult.

These became governing principles in my relationship with my bodymind before I had the consciousness to choose them.

And given the conditions, learning to override my body was actually a brilliant adaptation.

It helped me achieve.

It helped me belong.

It helped me survive the construct I was living inside.

But there was a cost.

It made me numb.

When numbness becomes normal

Eventually, my body had to get louder and louder to be heard through all the noise.

But instead of listening, I often responded by turning up the volume of everything else.

More risk.

More intensity.

More work.

More exercise.

More substances.

More striving.

More thinness.

I thought taking care of myself meant hours of exercise every day while working two jobs.

It looked like cleanses and fasts between 5 a.m. nights dancing on speakers—which was fun, admittedly, minus a few of the vodka sodas.

But beneath all of it was the same pattern:

I was asking my body to accommodate the life I had decided I needed to live.

I wasn't asking the body what it needed.

The deeper pattern of overriding

This is one of the most important distinctions I now see in my work with women.

Overriding isn't simply pushing through pain.

It can look like ignoring hunger because you're busy.

Saying yes when your body is saying no.

Continuing to perform when you need rest.

Treating exhaustion as a personal failure.

Using exercise to control your body rather than inhabit it.

Making decisions based entirely on what you think you should want.

Distrusting your own sensations because someone else seems to know better.

It can even look like doing endless personal growth work while remaining disconnected from the body that is actually living your life.

You can become extraordinarily good at improving yourself while never actually learning how to be in relationship with yourself.

That was me.

I was willing to do almost every kind of work—

except the work of really loving and connecting with myself.

What feminine energy has to do with embodiment

This is where my understanding of feminine energy began to change.

For me, feminine energy is not about becoming softer, more passive, more agreeable, or performing some idealized version of femininity.

It is not another identity to achieve.

It is a relationship with the intelligence of being a woman.

And that relationship begins in the body.

Feminine embodiment asks different questions.

What am I actually sensing?

What do I need?

What feels true?

What happens when I stop overriding myself?

What becomes available when I allow myself to receive rather than constantly produce?

What happens when I trust sensation before I rush to explain it?

This doesn't mean abandoning ambition, strength, discipline, motherhood, leadership, sexuality, achievement, or desire.

It means learning to inhabit all of those things without abandoning yourself in the process.

That distinction matters.

Because the goal isn't to become less powerful.

It is to stop requiring self-abandonment as the price of power.

The beginning of coming home to yourself

When I finally began to understand what I was doing and why, I started a long and imperfect journey home—to myself and to my bodymind.

I began to reorient my relationship with nourishment and movement.

I began peeling back the beliefs that told me manipulating my body was keeping me safe.

And underneath those beliefs were questions I had been carrying for years:

If I stop pushing, performing, and overriding, will I still be enough?

If I age, will I still belong?

If my body changes, will my relationships change?

If I become vulnerable, will I lose my power?

If I stop striving, will I become unremarkable?

Those questions were much deeper than fitness.

They were about belonging.

About womanhood.

About relationship.

About whether I could trust myself enough to live differently from the culture that had taught me who I was supposed to be.

The story we inherit—and the story we continue creating

For a long time, I thought this was simply the way women were.

Everyone is insecure.

Every woman picks her body apart.

If you're not striving, you're falling behind.

This is just what it means to be a woman.

But eventually I realized something that changed everything:

The story I had inherited was not only something I had been subjected to.

It was also something I was continuing to create by believing it couldn't be otherwise.

That realization was a rupture.

Because if I was participating in the creation of the story, then I had a relationship with the story.

And if I had a relationship with it, I could begin to change that relationship.

This is where embodiment becomes so much more than another practice.

It becomes a way of knowing yourself.

A way of listening.

A way of cultivating self-trust.

A way of returning to the body not as a problem to solve, but as a place of relationship.

You may not need more discipline

If you are a woman who has done a lot of work on yourself but still finds herself overriding her needs, pushing past her body's signals, or feeling strangely disconnected from her own knowing, there may be nothing wrong with you.

You may simply be extraordinarily practiced at leaving yourself.

And that is something that can change.

Not through another program telling you how to optimize yourself.

Not by becoming better at controlling your body.

But by beginning to develop a different relationship with it.

This is the work of feminine embodiment.

It is part of what I teach through The Root Method: how to understand the relationship between womanhood, the bodymind, breath, fascia, the pelvic floor, sensation, and self-trust—and how that relationship can become the foundation for a more vital life.

Sometimes the most profound shift isn't learning how to become someone new.

It is realizing that you don't have to abandon yourself to become who you already are.

And that may be where your real work begins.

Big big love woman... If you recognize yourself in this story, reach out. I’d love to hear from you.