Faith & Feelings is a podcast designed to help you untangle & honor your emotions, authentically practice your faith, and integrate both into your everyday life...
How to Begin Listening to Your Body (And Why It’s So Hard to Do)
God designed our bodies to tell us incredibly important things when it comes to growing and healing.
In fact, I believe that one of the primary places we can grow in self-awareness is not books or podcasts or personality tests...but learning to listen to our own bodies. Why is this? Our bodies know more than our minds often do. And they are constantly speaking, revealing truth about what’s happening in the present or what happened to us in the past.
In this week’s episode, I explain why it’s so important to listen to your body, and I offer one practical way to begin.
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17:06
Learning to Listen to the Story Your Body Is Telling with Chuck DeGroat
While the work of self-awareness begins with pursuing a better understanding of our lives and stories, so many of us can stop there.
As licensed therapist, author, and professor Chuck DeGroat and I talk about today, we often keep this awareness in past-tense, not understanding how our bodies are still holding these stories. We can ignore symptoms and bodily sensations like hypervigilance, sleeplessness, or exhaustion telling us the story of where we really are. And our bodies never lie. They often give us the best data about what’s happening within.
Chuck brings such beautiful storytelling and teaching to this conversation as he shows us what it looks like to practice awareness and attunement to our inner experience, and how to pay attention to what our bodies are telling us.
Check out Chuck's book Healing What's Within
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Learn more about writing coaching
Watch this episode on YouTube
Grab a copy of my book Stop Saying I'm Fine
Connect with me on my website
Find me on Instagram @__taylorjoy__
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28:19
How to Process Complicated Emotions with Anjuli Paschall
For most of us, feelings are messy.
Oftentimes, we don’t have words for what we’re feeling, and we get stuck in a dark and painful place. Because emotions can be complicated, we have so many strategies to not feel what we feel. But this often leaves us with a sense of numbness. We feel confused and chopped up inside.
Giving our feelings language is like turning on the lights. It’s how we begin to wake up to wholeness, to beauty, and to our own hearts again. Learning to notice, name, and process what we’re feeling is also a key vehicle for growing in self-awareness. That’s what author and spiritual director Anjuli Paschall and I talk about today. Anjuli brings such profound depth, vulnerability, and wisdom to this conversation as we talk about how to name our emotions, process them, and find God’s presence in them.
Check out Anjuli's books Stay and Feel
Get Faith & Feeling's weekly resource email
Learn more about writing coaching
Watch this episode on YouTube
Grab a copy of my book Stop Saying I'm Fine
Connect with me on my website
Find me on Instagram @__taylorjoy__
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30:22
When Crisis Invites You to Encounter the Deepest Parts of Yourself with Josh Summers
While Josh and his family was doing ministry in China, he was detained and interrogated by authorities and had no idea if or when he would be released.
In this week’s episode, Josh graciously shares some of his journey with self-awareness, and how this unexpected crisis led him to a deeper encounter with with himself.
While few of us will share the particularities of his experience, I think Josh beautifully puts words to the inner disorientation that all kinds of crises bring: feelings of shock and shame and a deep disrupting of identity. He transparently shares what it was like for him to begin processing this crisis. He talks about how he initially tried to distance himself from the pain, and also, what he began to discover – about himself and God – as he leaned in.
Check out Josh's podcast Memorize What Matters
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Watch this episode on YouTube
Grab a copy of my book Stop Saying I'm Fine
Connect with me on my website
Find me on Instagram @__taylorjoy__
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37:16
It's What You Do With Self-Awareness That Matters
One of the things that I’ve learned about self-awareness over the last few years is that self-awareness is something we can choose, but it’s also something that happens to us.
It comes at certain points in our lives without our consent, experiences of pain and crisis often becoming the catalyst for this deeper awakening. While I don’t hold to the idea that God causes crisis and suffering, I do know that these things come along, and God uses them. He often uses them to facilitate our own encounter with some of the deepest parts of ourselves.
In this episode, I talk about 3 kinds of crises that our journeys hold: developmental transitions, intrusive events, and internal uprisings. I also talk about why our responses to self-awareness are so important. How we respond can either increase shame or motivate change…and this makes all the difference.
*Some of the concepts of this episode were taken and adapted from “Regerts” by Jennifer Hunt.
Learn more about writing coaching
Get Faith & Feeling's weekly resource email
Watch this episode on YouTube
Grab a copy of my book Stop Saying I'm Fine
Connect with me on my website
Find me on Instagram @__taylorjoy__
Faith & Feelings is a podcast designed to help you untangle & honor your emotions, authentically practice your faith, and integrate both into your everyday life so that you can experience the goodness & delight that comes from living in relationship with yourself, God, and others.
Join author and clinical counseling grad student Taylor Joy every Monday, where she’ll share therapeutic insight and spiritual truth aimed at helping you implement small shifts into your daily rhythms and routines.