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Your body is giving you information all the time. Are you listening? Ricki is trying to, and you can too. In this episode, registered psychologist and embodiment expert Hillary McBride teaches us how to trust and find meaning in the cues our body is sending our mind for both everyday living and emotional well-being. Hillary describes the aha moment that led to her life’s work and offers practical tips on how to tune in to your body and live a more embodied life.

Show Resources:

• Follow Hillary McBridge @hillaryliannamcbride on Instagram and @hillarylmcbride on X.
• Learn more about Hillary’s books, including “The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living” at her website.

Follow Ricki Lake @rickilake on Instagram. And stay up to date with us @LemonadaMedia on X, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Dr Hillary McBride, Ricki Lake

Ricki Lake  00:02

This is The High Life with me, Ricki Lake, where we find out how my guests crack the code to living a full and vibrant life, so you can too. I’ve been hearing a lot about the word embodiment and what that means. I mean, I’m guessing it has to do with like being in touch with my body, going on my hike, spending time in my garden, cuddling with my guy, I just feel so much more in tune with myself, so much more present and alive when I do these things. Well, this term embodiment is something that’s been buzzing around the internet and social media for a while now, and while I think I know what it is, I really want to get to the bottom of it, what it is, and how we can practice it better. That is why I’m so excited to welcome today’s guest, who is an expert in embodiment. Dr Hillary McBride is a clinical psychologist, researcher, author of four incredible books, including Mothers Daughters and body image, the wisdom of your body, and a workbook called practices for embodied living. She also has a podcast with the incredible CBC show called other people’s problems, and she’s about to rock your world with a radical thinking on how to be a person with a body. Thank you so much, Hillary. Can I call you Hillary? I know you’re a doctor.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  01:10

You please, oh, I would love it, and I’m just so smitten with your introduction, that was very generous of you, thank you.

 

Ricki Lake  01:16

Okay, I have so much I want to get into with you today, but let’s start with our question opener, where are you getting your highs from now? Like, what? What is bringing you joy? It could be big, small, whatever.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  01:28

Okay, it feels a little on the nose to say this, but where I’m getting my highs are psychedelic psychotherapy, so that definitely feels to me like a big place of energy and vitality, just following the research, my own therapeutic work, working with my clients in the in the clinic that I’m a part of. So there’s so much aliveness for me around that field. And also, like the summer is doing something to me. This year, I came out of, like a, I would say, a really griefy, painful December, fall, winter, spring. It felt like extraordinarily, extraordinarily and acutely painful. And so there’s something about this, like the aliveness around me and the way that colors and smells, and even just like fresh berries, what I don’t know what it is the magic of berries. It’s like really doing something for me. So I think summer is where I.

 

Ricki Lake  02:20

Just had some organic berries, like, right before starting this. Honestly, it’s like, I go to the farmer’s market here, and it’s just, it’s such a gift. So okay, let’s talk embodiment. Can you tell us, where are you at physically right now? Because that’s so much a part of it, right? It’s like our present state, where are we?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  02:39

Yeah. So I’m noticing right now, as you ask that question, that I feel warm right it’s warm right now, and I’ve got the windows closed to minimize extra noise so I can feel the sweat on my skin. It’s definitely a reality in our non air conditioned home. And so I feel, I feel that warmth, and I also feel this like buzz of aliveness in my chest. I can notice like as I close my eyes, I can sink right into feeling like a vibrating, pulsing, undulating sensation in my feet, moving up my legs. And I think it feels like joy, excitement, aliveness, to be here in this conversation with you.

 

Ricki Lake  03:13

Oh my gosh. I love that. That’s exactly what I’m about. It’s like tapping into joy, tapping into play. That’s such a nice thing to hear.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  03:22

Can I ask you before we shift like, what’s happening in your body right now?

 

Ricki Lake  03:27

I feel very much at peace. I feel really happy. I’m a little anxious. I’m having a little bit of surgery tomorrow morning, so I’m a tiny bit of it’s more, I mean, I describe it as like, 90% excited and 10% a little anxious and nervous, you know? So it’s like that butterfly feeling.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  03:45

Do you touch your belly when you say the butterfly feeling? Is that what I’m saying? That’s so cool to notice that lives there, like it has a place.

 

Ricki Lake  03:51

Yes, and it really is like a, like, a prominent feeling, like it’s, it’s, you know, it’s not like subtle. And I know you live in Vancouver or in Victoria, right outside of Vancouver, when I read that and heard that, I have to tell you, one of the things that’s giving me great joy is I’m a Swifty. I’m a Taylor Swifty. And I scored tickets, very expensive, indulgent purchase, but we are going to see Taylor Swift my husband and I the last night of her tour in Vancouver. Incredible.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  04:26

The energy is going to be electric, like talk about embodiment, what it’s going to feel like in that space. You are going to feel.

 

Ricki Lake  04:32

Yes, I literally every hair is standing up, yes, so anyway, is this embodiment what we’re talking about right now?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  04:42

This is definitely a facet of it, and maybe, like, I’ll just step back and say embodiment is the lived experience of being a body as that’s shaped with how we engage with the world. What does it feel like to be in relationship with myself as a sensing being right? Because we have this data coming to our awareness all the time. That says you’re hungry, you’re full, you’re tired, you want that. You don’t feel safe. I like this, this feels good, this does not feel good. I’m tired, I’m overwhelmed. I hate this. Am I alone? I’m scared. So it’s not just the idea of having a body and how we think about our image, which would be maybe how we conceptualize body image, like the picture we have in our head of how we appear and then how we evaluate that image. This is more like being in the felt sense of our human experience, but recognizing that no felt sense experience of being a body exists outside of culture, exists outside of time, exists outside of environment and landscape and relationships like embodiment really is a reminder that we we are inter being all the time, with our environment, with people, with the stories that our cultures tell about what makes a good body, what makes you valuable, who has power, who doesn’t have power? So you can’t ever separate out the felt experience of being a body from from the context you’re in, and like our body is giving us that information all the time, and the ability to know what to do with that and trust it and make meaning of it in a way that supports our living I mean that in particular, feels like if we were taught that, that would change everything.

 

Ricki Lake  06:17

So what is the closest thing to being taught that as we as we’re in kids, like, I think of, like, physical education or something class, you know? What’s the closest we get to learning this practice?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  06:30

Yeah, well, I think it probably, again, depends on context, because some people grow up in families where they say I’m hungry and their parent goes, great, here’s a snack. And some people grow up in other families where they say I’m hungry and someone says it’s not dinner time, and right, there can be, like, contextual.

 

Ricki Lake  06:45

Does my household right?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  06:47

Finish your plate, right? Did you grow up in that environment?

 

Ricki Lake  06:50

Well, I was a, I was a chubby kid who got, you know, became obese, and my mother did not really, she was not, you know, she did the best she could. I really want to like say strongly that my mother did the best she could, but she did not. She didn’t know how to handle that. So no, I was never, ever told to finish my plate. I was told don’t finish your plate.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  07:11

Right exactly, even if you’re hungry, don’t listen to that cue, because if we step back, you have this sensation inside of you, both of what it’s like to be hungry and maybe also to feel like you know, there’s a story about your body, and if your body’s good or not good, and all of those things are interpreted in this cultural context in which your mom is likely heeding all of the messages, likely fear based messages about size that she’s getting from a culture that are shaping the very little comments she makes about how you interpret and relate to your body cues. So we have like culture, but culture is usually funneled through media, parents and peers and parents when it comes to these early developmental experiences, are often the leading voice in shaping can I listen to what my body says? Do I not listen to do I actually have to suppress so embodiment. I mean, again, I kind of want to make a technical point, because I think when we’re having conversations about embodiment, there can be this idealization of what we might call positive embodiment, which is where, like, deeply attuned and deeply connected, and, you know, treasure every intuitive knowing and give ourselves everything that feels pleasurable. And actually, embodiment is just a way to say, how in touch am I with what’s going inside of me. And we could say that for some people who have a lifetime of trauma, that their Embodied Reality is of dissociation, of not having being in touch with their body, and that is like a beautiful survival essential thing. So their Embodied Reality is one of disconnection.

 

Ricki Lake  08:43

Right, but even when you say that’s not ideal to live a life of being disconnected to your body.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  08:50

Exactly, and that’s that’s where I think this comes down to, you know, maybe this conversation is that no matter the circumstances that we grew up, in our bodies, adapted at some point, likely to do things that kept us safe, and we, at some point, usually in our adult lives, go, wait a second. I’m not living in that abusive household anymore. I’m not in that environment, or I’m not I’msafe and I’m free. But why am I still disconnected? And so those things that we learn to suppress, those survival strategies that our bodies did unconsciously to keep us okay at some point, no longer serve us, and they keep us from living. You know this thing that we were talking about, the aliveness, the pleasure, the sense of joyful vitality, the noticing and paying attention to what we sense.

 

Ricki Lake  09:34

So Hillary, speaking of trauma, how do we tune into the body when being in the body feels bad because we have trauma.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  09:43

I love this question, it’s so important, and I think it’s a reality for most people, as we’re getting into the embodiment conversation, that at some point, if not right off the bat, then then eventually we’re going to meet something that we don’t necessarily want to be with. So a couple things come to mind. The first is that our nervous systems are developed to regulate in the presence of other people, and a defining characteristic of trauma is usually that we’re alone in it, that something is overwhelming us, right, and we’re we, it’s outside of our ability to feel on our own. So to be with what’s difficult inside of us and have someone there with us. Maybe it’s holding our hand, maybe it’s using their voice, maybe it’s guiding us through what to do next, and this could be a therapist or a partner or a friend or a pet, but some way of knowing I’m not alone in this, again, is proof that the trauma is over and that we have more than the resources on our own to be able to handle what’s going on. So co regulation is important. Another thing that we sometimes talk about is titration or.

 

Ricki Lake  10:44

What’s that? I’ve heard that word, but what does titration mean?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  10:46

Yeah, it means that we’re gonna we’re gonna step into it, and then we’re gonna step out of it, and then we’re gonna step in, and then we’re gonna step out. In contrast to what we might call clinically, a flooding experience, where we go, okay, let’s dive in all the way, head right to the bottom, and feel the overwhelm and hopefully make it through to the other side. So titration allows us to say, oh, this is a lot. Okay, how do we come out of it? Like I’m going to give myself permission to dissociate, to distract, to soothe, to shift gears, because, because I don’t actually have to put the pedal all the way to the floor, I can feel just enough to know that I’mkind of like one bite at a time, right? I had a mentor who always says you only eat the elephant one bite at a time, in reference to processing trauma. So we touch it a little bit, we take a break. We touch it a little bit, we take a break. But then I think a really interesting thing that we don’t often make use of when we’re talking about somatics and the body and trauma is I like to think about my myself or yourself as like a matrioshka doll. Are you familiar with the stacking dolls?

 

Ricki Lake  11:50

Yes, the Russian dolls,

 

Dr Hillary McBride  11:51

Yeah, okay, so who we’re meeting and who’s talking right now is the biggest, wisest adult self. But what might be happening inside that’s related to the trauma reaction is the tiny little doll at the bottom right, who’s like vibrating, knocking against the walls of the bigger dolls. So our ability to do something we call dual awareness, which in therapy, is our ability to know I am both the wise adult and I hold the scared self inside of me, holding those both at the same time is actually one of the predictors of our ability to complete or process a traumatic memory or experience, so our ability to go, okay, wait a second. I am 36 I’m here, I’m in Victoria. My feet are on the ground. I can smell the smell of my home. I wasn’t in this home at the time of that thing that happened, whoa so maybe this feeling and this memory is coming from a younger version of myself, and she’s inside and she’s speaking up and she’s got a story to tell. But I am also the version of me who knows how to listen and attend and care for so I’m both. And what that does is it allows us to step out of the sense of, like, a re experiencing of the overwhelm into a knowing, oh, I’ve got all of the capacity of my adult self, and I can bring that to the younger self who didn’t have the things that I have and know the things that I know now. So that would be a kind of, like we, sometimes we call it ego state work or, like, you know, parts work. There’s lots of different words for that, but we’re resourcing a younger self with a present self.

 

Ricki Lake  13:26

Wow, beautiful. Okay, we’re gonna take a quick break and we’ll be right back after this.

 

Ricki Lake  13:43

How did you get into this? Like, do you have, I mean, your own issue with I don’t know, maybe your mother told you eat all your food. What? How did you get started in this work?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  13:54

Oh, yeah, and my joke is that I’ve, like, monetized my own pathology, that I’ve like found a way to become an expert in the very thing that has like eluded me my whole life. So I had an eating disorder and was in and out of treatment, inpatient, outpatient, community type intervention for a really long time.

 

Ricki Lake  14:15

How old were you?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  14:16

It’s I would say that the first time I showed clinically significant symptoms I was 13, but the roots of the eating disorder were there for a really long time before that. And then I would say, probably the last time I was symptomatic in my eating disorder was in my early 20s. And yet, I think it took me a long time, even when I was post diagnosis, when I would consider I was like, in remission. I still had no clue how to be in my body. I wasn’t active in my eating disorder. I didn’t meet diagnostic criteria, but I had no clue how to actually feel good, or how to pay attention, or how to love being in my body, it was like, okay, don’t have an eating disorder, is that like the best that I can ask for?

 

Ricki Lake  14:59

Wow.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  14:59

So I had an opportunity in treatment. At the very last time I was in an outpatient treatment program, I was next on the list to get into a residential program for eating disorder treatment, and I instead, decided to go to grad school. I decided to do my master’s, don’t recommend for people necessarily, in my.

 

Ricki Lake  15:20

Psychotherapy?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  15:21

Uh huh, my whole treatment team was like, girlfriend, don’t do that. And I think there was, for me, this sense of like, I’ve done the treatment circuit so many times, and my whole world has revolved around what an eating disorder is and isn’t, in a way that I don’t actually know how to live, but I have this deep yearning to understand the places of pain inside of me and others. And for me, that meant like I want to learn, I want to understand, I want to know, but I want to know the place inside of other people and inside of me that all of this comes from. And so for me, that was the journey out of eating disorder, actually was into academia, into clinical psychology, and it was then that I started asking questions around eating disorder prevention, and I realized we don’t actually know very much in the academic literature about how to make things go right. We know a lot about what happens when things have gone horribly wrong, and so I really made it my goal to ask the question, how do we prevent the suffering? And what is it specifically about our culture, the way we are as women, the way that we are in our bodies, that allows us to think that this level of suffering is normal, and can we not do more for ourselves and for the next generation? And so really, this comes out of a personal place of pain and a deep hopefulness that, oh, there’s so much that we can do better.

 

Ricki Lake  16:45

So do you feel like do you feel grateful for having that, had that experience, because it brought you to this purpose that you are now living?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  16:54

Okay? So that always feels tricky for me, but I would say I like who I am because of what happened. I would never say like, I want this, but I really like who I am, and I really feel like who I am has been shaped by so many the painful things that have happened to me and then the way that I’ve been supported to metabolize and process them and make meaning of them and make them useful in my life, but it feels tricky to somehow say like, oh, I’m so grateful.

 

Ricki Lake  17:23

I yeah, maybe that was the wrong word, but I can say, you know, I feel like I am a better human having gone through the life experience, the trauma that I’ve experienced and overcome and lived through, like coming to terms with my body and acceptance and self love. It’s all wrapped together you know, in your book, you talk about the first time you got went into therapy with the disordered eating, and how you were physically sitting in that chair, and how different it was once you became well, right? Can you describe that?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  17:58

Yeah, I had this experience of being in therapy with a therapist who really was one of the first people to crack through what was going on. And interestingly, we were in an eating disorder outpatient program, and I’d seen so many therapists at that point, I felt like I knew how to say all the right things. Like, you know when we’ve been in treatment, and we’re like, we’re perceptive as people, we know, like, I can tell you what you want me to tell you, and you’re gonna let me get out of treatment, and then I’m gonna go, like, go lose weight again. I’m gonna go my right? I just know how to work this system. And she, in our treatment together, almost never talked about eating or weight, and it was an eating disorder treatment program. But she’s like, what makes you feel alive? Like, what? What brings you passion? Like, let’s talk about, like, let’s do consciousness raising work around the social construction of women’s bodies in North America. And I was like, Bert, like, this is like, I felt so engaged in that work. It was like she knew how to have access to the life force energy in me. And I remember this one point in treatment where I had actually, I had been well enough at this point where I was able to go traveling. And I came home, and I was telling her this story about being away, and I jumped off the front of the boat into this water. I was like, such an intense, embodied experience of like, joy and aliveness and risk. And you know, we’re like, having so much fun, fun in the experience and in the memory and she pauses me in the middle of the story, and it’s like, do you notice how you’re sitting? Like, notice what’s happening in your body? And I have to tell you, at that moment, I was like, you’re interrupting my great story. Like, this is like, this is good. About to get good. I’ve got some really good analysis coming. Like, let me tell you have like? What? Why this was meaningful? And she’s like, no, like, notice everything neck down. And the only way to describe it is like consciousness or awareness, was this thing that only existed right inside the very top of my head, and all of a sudden it was like it started oozing into my fingers and my elbows. And my knees and my toes, and I could feel that I was in the chair. I wasn’t floating six inches above my head. I was in the chair, and I was in myself in the chair. And it was kind of like the question caught me off guard, because again, I was like, no, like, I’m telling this great story. How dare you? And she, as contrast, said, can I show you how you were sitting when you first came to treatment? And she pulled her legs up into the chair and tucked her head down and put her arms around her knees like I, don’t think I knew until that moment how invisible I was trying to make my song like I didn’t. I don’t think I saw until she mirrored back to me that I was trying to disappear, and that was the perfect symbol of what my eating disorder was doing. It was saying, I’m gonna disappear. My voice is gonna disappear. My body’s gonna disappear. The things I know to be true about myself in this world are gonna disappear because they’re too much to be with and to see the contrast in her body, this woman who was so full in her presence, like become so small. It was like a magic trick to see her disappear. And I realized that so much had changed and I was missing how much had changed. I was missing how alive I was becoming, because I wasn’t experiencing it in a felt sense way. I was missing actually, like, it’s kind of like the difference between reading a recipe and tasting the pasta like.

 

Ricki Lake  21:30

Great analogy, wow.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  21:31

I was reading a recipe on aliveness, and in that moment I tasted it.

 

Ricki Lake  21:37

So how did that transform your life going forward?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  21:40

That was part of the impetus, and like I want this feeling, I started to become more aware of all of the places that I was feeling, and I was feeling scared, I was feeling alive, I was feeling lonely, I was feeling angry. It was like the body was all of this information that I didn’t know I could access, that would tell me more of who I was in the world. And so I think it started in that moment with just going, whoa, like I a good analogy would be you live your whole life in a house, and then you open up this door and there’s a whole wing full of all of the treasures you need to face, the most painful, beautiful moments, like what the all the best things are in that wing of the house like you never opened up that door, what on earth? Like we were living in such a small, much small corridors, like cloistered and yet there’s this whole other wing of our home. So for me, it was like accessing tools and information and slowly over time, then becoming aware of how scared I was of being my body, and how much work I had to do to learn to tolerate fear, aliveness, joy, sadness, anger, cute, like the cues, like if you don’t pay attention to your body, and I think this gives way to how much of our culture is built in a particular fashion. If you don’t pay attention to your cues, you can do pretty much anything right. You can override your fatigue, you can override your hunger, you can override your empathy. You can override your sense of longing for love. And you become, for a certain amount of time, invincible, until the body speaks up in chronic illness or disease or death or panic attacks or whatever it is or age, it says, like, stop ignoring me. I think it’s at the very heart of why this matters, is so much of what is bringing people to doctors in North America are things that have a lot to do with emotion, but we don’t really know what to do with emotion in our culture, and emotion that’s really painful, tends to kind of Max us out in some way. And so it can be, on some level, easy to dissociate from, because it’s just like our body makes that switch to say, like, just don’t go there, unconsciously, just don’t go there. But what happens is this information is being communicated to us about what hurts, what we need, what doesn’t feel good, where who we are, and it’s all coming to us in the form of emotion. Emotion is a physiological process. I think for as much as our conversations about mental health have moved the needle somewhat at destigmatizing our distress, we still have so much to go to understand that mental health is a physiological process as well. It’s an embodied process. So if we are not paying attention to emotion, our bodies are suffering and our minds are suffering, and emotion seems to be this magic link to helping the nervous system regulate homeostatically, when we can discharge our rage, when we can discharge our anger, when we can pay attention to our sadness and move it through us, when we can also stay connected to what feels good. It seems like our bodies actually know how to self correct a lot of the things that are creating our distress in our world.

 

Ricki Lake  24:55

And so how do we how do we recognize like on. Honor these, these emotions, you know, that are there? How do we not, you know, disconnect and disassociate, because that’s harming us?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  25:10

Yeah, so let’s give let’s put in an analogy to this, or kind of paint a vignette. Let’s just say I was really trying to get through to you. Let’s just say, you know, we’re in a relationship and we’re working side by side.

 

Ricki Lake  25:24

You’re my therapist.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  25:26

It doesn’t work for the analogy, so let’s just say we’re fine.

 

Ricki Lake  25:29

We’re best we’re best friends.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  25:31

And you have so much going on all the time that I’m like, Ricky, Ricky, I need you to hear me. I’m hurting, right? And you’ve got, like, you’re on the phone all the time, and then you’re writing emails, and you’re kind of like, off. You’re like, I gotta go to I gotta go do this thing. And I’m saying, no, listen to me. What’s gonna happen in the dynamic if all of a sudden you slow down and you give me your attention, and you say, okay, I’m hearing you. You’ve been trying to get my attention. I want to hear what you have to say. Usually one of two things happens, right? You could imagine I might go, oh, there you are. Or I might go, where the fuck have you been? And I scream louder. Now I’m angry at you for taking so long to listen to me. Sometimes we need to slow down, right? That’s actually just it. How we start noticing is we slow down, we clear our minds enough to, for a moment, go what’s happening inside of me, but then we have to stay long enough to actually hear what’s there. And sometimes what’s there is, I’m really angry, I’m really sad. I’ve got all this trauma that I’ve been carrying around for 30 years, and no one’s listened right? And that’s the information that comes. And then sometimes we get freaked out, and we’re like, I don’t want to listen anymore. Like, that’s too scary. That’s a lot. But other times what happens is we slow down, we go, oh, it feels so good to be in my life. And so we have to be prepared for the information that’s there to be anywhere along that spectrum. But often it’s like just clearing our attention enough to ask that question that we started with, what is happening right now? Where am I? What is going on inside of me? And then at some point, saying, Okay, what do I do next with that information?

 

Ricki Lake  27:15

Yeah, okay, gotta take a quick break. We’ll be right back after this sponsor.

 

Ricki Lake  27:33

How are embodiment and healing connected?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  27:37

So I would say healing, healing is happening all the time when we are connecting to ourselves. And this is what I love about embodiment, is it’s impossible to remove bodies from politics and from culture and justice and conversations about healing at a large cultural level. But I would say that one of the ways that we have carried trauma intergenerationally, again, particularly, I would say there’s a narrative around whiteness that we really need to unpack and look at as it relates to embodiment. Because people in other cultures, racialized bodies, have known embodiment forever. It’s actually kind of like the white conversation that’s catching up to, oh, we gotta move. We gotta sing, we can’t be so frozen. We have to feel, we have to have culture. We need to be connected to that.

 

Ricki Lake  28:21

Tell me more about that. Break that down for me.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  28:24

Okay, so in the 50s, a guy named Merleau Ponty, who was a philosopher and psychologist in France, said, Wait a second, I think, therefore I am. Where is the I thinking happen? It’s happening in the body. And he’s like, well, we  e have to remember that thinking and philosophy and existential matters. They don’t float somewhere in the astral plane. They’re happening in bodies like bodies matter to our sense of self. So he’s one of the first people to talk about embodiment in a western and philosophical context. But zoom out of Europe, zoom out of white male scholars talking about philosophy, and people around the world have been moving their bodies to process trauma. People have been feeling connected to their emotions as racialized bodies across the globe, as people of the global majority forever. So what we see in terms of the need to have conversations around embodiment is particularly located to the North American and Western European context, where, because of the dominant narrative of whiteness as superiority, we’ve bought into a story that we need to be disconnected from our bodies to be superior. We need to be disconnected from our bodies to have mastery, to have power, to perform within patriarchy. And there is something about the conversation here that I think warrants being able to say when we connect to our bodies, we de identify with the story of whiteness and patriarchy that separated us from body as knower, body as encultured, body as connected to the land body is the place of ancestral wisdom, and when we move towards that, I think we actually begin to heal not only the way that trauma lives in our body, but we heal the social divides that create hierarchies between us. So it’s healing at an individual but systemic level when we center bodies at the forefront.

 

Ricki Lake  30:22

That is fascinating. So are we as a culture, as you know, North American culture? Are we less embodied because of our obsession with power and like, like we are? It got worse.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  30:35

Yes, okay, let me translate this into language that I think or experience would feel really resonant for you. Think so your documentary business of being born so important to me. I do love it for a long time, and I just love I had home birth. I caught my girl and you […]

 

Ricki Lake  30:51

I read that article about you wanting to pose naked. You wanted photos with your daughters and your daughter.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  30:56

Yeah, but what I love about what you say in that documentary is you make the point about how women’s disconnection from their body has benefited a very masculine and medical way of conceptualizing the event of birth. And so it has benefited medicine and has benefited men. It has benefited systems. It has benefited corporations and companies.

 

Ricki Lake  31:19

For suppressed women. It has suppressed them. Yes, right?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  31:22

For women to be disconnected from the knowing that this is not a dangerous thing and I can trust my body. So what happens, right? Let’s flip it, what happens when women start saying, wait a second, my body isn’t dangerous. My body knows something. All of a sudden, this is not good for those systems that were benefiting on the back of women being silenced and oppressed. But if you think about that as not just being related to birth, but related to all other bodily events, what we see is that people connecting to themselves disrupt systems that interfere with what is actually good for us as people like when I am not as busy, because I’m not go, go, going. I pay attention to my garden. And what happens when I pay attention to my garden? I actually sleep better at night. What happens when I sleep better at night? I’m more present. When I’m more present, I actually don’t want to do so much. I don’t need to run from something, right? It’s like everything starts to kick.

 

Ricki Lake  32:20

It’s a ripple effect, absolutely, and that all of that is like it’s I relate to that so much I wanted society to understand what they are giving up. You know, this opportunity to be completely connected and empowered and embodied in this experience, this once or twice, you know, rare, rare experience to tap into the magic that is a woman giving birth. You know, in my case, on my own terms. I mean, there was so much about, you know, being in my own home, choosing to have the people I wanted there. You know, all of my wishes were respected and listened to. And I mean, that was beyond life changing, beyond becoming a mother, I feel like I came into my own. And for me, you know, I’ll add to I was, you know, I experienced trauma as a small child. I was sexually molested as a little girl, and, you know, I was overweight and obese for much of my early years. And I feel like in that experience of having my baby in my bathtub on my own terms, I healed from that sexual trauma, I appreciated my body. I was so self loathing and hated my body and being overweight, I came to a place of peace and acceptance. And truly, I mean, it’s like, it was, it was everything. And then the fact that I got to make a film that has impacted so many for so many years, you know, it’s, I think it’s what has brought me to this place of like just being completely content in this life and where I am now. And is that embodiment, what I’m describing?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  33:54

Absolutely an embodiment at its best, because I would say, and not necessarily, that that has to come through an unmedicated vaginal home birth.

 

Ricki Lake  34:02

Right? Absolutely yes.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  34:04

That we would say in the academic literature. And this is a finding from Dr Neva peran, who’s a scholar out of University of Toronto. She found in her research that a key feature of developing positive embodiment is a sense of agency, right? Having agency in our body again, in addition to that, just for curious listeners, like noticing pleasure, right? Sexual pleasure, any other kind of pleasure, any other kind of sense of what feels good inside of me, attuned self care, experiencing our body as an a subject, not just an object, right? Like there’s all of these different qualities that go into creating a sense of positive embodiment, but agency, we see, is particularly important for those who’ve lived through trauma. Because what does trauma do? It takes away agency. It’s a defining quality of a traumatic experience, is that we are powerless and overwhelmed. So to find places in our life, whether they’re in movement, we. Birthing in sexual experiences, in the way we spend our time in getting care right for our bodies, getting body work. I mean, whatever it is to feel like I have agency and autonomy over my body is a way to say to ourselves the trauma I lived through is over, and the proof is that right now I’m here, and I have a choice, and I can say yes, and I can say no, and I can feel good in the knowing that that will be honored, and we all deserve that experience, but that is defining in terms of the link between trauma and embodiment and healing to get agency. I mean, it can change everything for us.

 

Ricki Lake  35:37

Okay, so for people listening who want to be more embodied? What are some practical ways that you suggest they practice?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  35:44

Yeah, okay, so I’m gonna give something for various entry points, because I think what we often assume around embodiment is like Jedi level embodiment, where, like, we have a little sensation and we know that it’s like our grandmother calling and she’s giving us a message from beyond. And so we fight the fight, and we join the political protest. Like, okay, what a great idea, but really, for a lot of us, it’s, am I making space in my life to slow down and ask the question, what do I feel? I actually just did it right now, as I slowed down, I realized, like, oh, I was kind of like holding, I think the excitement and the energy of the conversation, it was like, feeling that. And I just for that moment, went, oh, there’s that there. That is, that’s where the energy’s living. So can I slow down and notice in any given moment what’s alive inside of me, what’s happening in my body? And I think there’s the next, maybe a next entry point would be when I get that information. Can I do something about it? Okay, I’m tired. Why am I up for another hour on my phone, on social media, in bed, my eyes and my body are telling me I’m exhausted. Like, what is that about for me? Could I put myself to bed? I think there’s like, I mean, this is where it gets to be super fun and a little kooky, but group movement, free dance, ecstatic dance, like these unstructured forms of movement where, like, no one’s telling me how to move, because when you think about it, like, why do I even sit in a chair like this? Because the chair was designed to keep my body in this posture. Why do I like, why do I eat at certain times, even if I’m hungry at other times? Well, like, we have a story that says, like, 9-12, and 6:30, we eat these meals, right? Like whatever. We have so much discourse that says, do this in this way with your body and to get into social spaces where, with other people, we’re like I, this is what I look like when I put myself in motion. Here’s how I feel. Here’s that, here’s that rage that needs to come out. And for anyone who’s too intimidated to do that in some other space, close the door, put on a song, and just see, like, what feels good. And then I think there’s all the way, like we can extend this all the way to really exploring traditions and ceremony around being in our body that connects us to ancestral ways of knowing, I think sometimes even getting our hands in the soil and noticing, like, what happens to my body when I regulate with the earth. There’s lots of experimental ways to be in this, but I think it all can be as simple as I’m hungry, I’m gonna feed myself. I’m thirsty, I’m gonna drink. I’m tired, I’m gonna go to bed. I’m sad, I’m gonna ask for a hug.

 

Ricki Lake  38:21

What about breath work? Is that part of this kind of work?

 

Dr Hillary McBride  38:25

Yeah, I would say that, like, when we’re dialing it up and we’re saying, okay, I’m not just, like, noticing what’s here, but I kind of want to experiment. I think breath work can be I mean, breath work is a whole field, a whole spectrum of exercises, all the way from tuning into my breath to Holotropic breathwork, where we’re actually trying to move, yeah? Move energy, move emotion, uh huh, which can be a great way to go, okay, body. I’m listening. Here’s, you know, here’s carte blanche. Tell me whatever you want to tell me about what’s inside. And here’s a doorway to move it through. So breath work can be this incredible way to give ourselves a place to put our attention when we don’t know where else to put it. And we’ll also say, and this is coming as like a trauma expert that for people, some people, we call it like a paradoxical reaction when they breathe all of a sudden, their anxiety through the roof. So knowing like, okay, breath work might be right for some people. For other people, it’s feeling your feet on the ground and undulating between pushing your toes and your heels in and taking a moment to notice, like, Oh, I’m connected to the earth. That’s cool great. I’m held, I’m not alone. Something’s supporting me.

 

Ricki Lake  39:34

Hmm, you’re amazing. I feel like, I just feel like you’re speaking my language. You know, I’m learning so much today, everything. I just so appreciate this conversation. Thank you so much.

 

Dr Hillary McBride  39:47

Ricki, it’s such a treat to be with you. Thank you for having me.

 

Ricki Lake  39:55

Wow, that was really an enlightening conversation. I so enjoyed Hillary, and what she had to say about embodiment, and particularly with trauma, and it made me actually think about, you know, when I lost my partner, Christian Evans, to suicide and bipolar disorder. I mean, I didn’t know that I was experiencing rage towards him. I mean, I at the time, I felt so like I understood why he had to leave, why this world was too much for him, like I really had, like, an understanding. And yet, a year later, I suffered from sciatica, like I’d never had sciatica in my life. And yet, this time, I was working on a show called The Masked Singer. I was getting ready to go to Burning Man. I had all these plans, and I couldn’t walk. I was in searing pain that was shooting from my right hip down to my foot, and I went to doctors, and I was working with a therapist, Nicole Sacks, my therapist, psychotherapist, and she had this program, and she had me journal. It’s called journal speak, where I would journal 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night, and literally write down as if I was a five year old throwing up, and just any emotion, however I was feeling, you know, if I was angry at my kids or I was angry, you know, whatever came up, I would write on a page. I actually typed it on my computer, and then I would just delete it. And what it did, it was a got that feeling that, you know, which I which I didn’t know I had raged towards Christian. I never could identify that, but it was in my body, and it took about five weeks, but she said it was gonna be like a light switch. It was gonna, you know, one day, it was just gonna be gone as quickly as it came. And she was right, and I was able to go to Burning Man, and I, you know, got through the masks in her that show, you know, hobbling. But it was so interesting, and I feel like you know, it just it, this conversation just connected me so much to that experience. Thank you so much for listening, and there is more of The High Life with Lemonada Premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like rapid fire questions with my recent guest, Death Doula, Alua Arthur, subscribe now in Apple podcasts. The High Life is a production of Lemonada Media. Isabella Kulkarni and Kathryn Barnes, producer show our mixes by James Sparber. Executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs, and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Additional Lemonada support from Rachel Neel and Steve Nelson. You can find me @Rickilake on Instagram. Follow The High Life with Ricki Lake, wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.