Welcome back to another episode of Inner Warmup where your inner work begins. My name is Taylor Elyse Morrison, I'm the founder of Inner Workout and you, as always, are our expert guest. Thanks for being here. If you listen to the show regularly, you know the deal. If you are new, I like to start episodes with a little mini practice to get you into the present moment and in this context, into your physical body. So what I want to do is just give you a few moments to start to move organically. And if you're not sure where to start, just move something; move an elbow, move a shoulder and let the movement continue to flow. From there, I can almost guarantee you that you will feel relief, release, or a stretch that you didn't even know that you needed. I can say that from experience. I did this right before I pressed record and found some opening in my back, in my side body where I wasn't even aware of how scrunched up I was. So I hope that served you. I hope you're feeling a little bit more in your body right now and that exercise is really a perfect segue into what I want to talk about today. We are exploring this question what feels good in your body? What feels good in your body?
And I love our tagline for the show, "where your inner work begins" because this show is also where my inner work begins. Every episode I'm sitting here, I'm reflecting on the question as well. And when I reflected on this question, it brought me back to like my teens. I thought about how, for a long time, I didn't really know what felt good in my body because I was so focused on how my body wasn't performing as expected. So in dance, I'd be thinking about how my leg wasn't as high as I wanted it to be. And track, I was focused on how I had too many steps between the hurdles. Even today, sometimes I can be doing some movements and traditionally, my upper body has not been the strongest. And so sometimes it can feel really hard to do push ups without padding my knees on the ground, especially if we've been doing a lot of other shoulder things with weights or with bands. And I can get so down on myself instead of being proud that I can do any number of push ups. I'm upset that at some point, I have to put my knees on the ground. And even when I first started my self care practice, one of my entry points into listening within and listening to my body more specifically was honing in on the sides of when something felt off. So I could notice the signs that a migraine was coming or that I was feeling exhausted, or that I was nearing burnout, because I wasn't feeling great, which is valid. It is really good for you to know your warning signs.
When the light is turning yellow just before it's getting ready to turn red, that's helpful. But I want our relationships with ourselves, in our bodies, to be more than that. And you can let me know if you relate to this but I feel like we can tend to focus more on where we wish our body could perform better, rather than what feels incredibly amazing in our body because of our society's obsession with optimization. And fundamentally treating our bodies more like a machine than like a home. When we start to view our bodies as homes, we want it to feel good. I want my home to feel good, I want the place I'm living in to feel good. And I want to pause here and say our bodies are just a part of us, the physical dimension is just one of five dimensions. And also, we experience the worlds through our bodies. The touch the taste, the smell of a sight, the sound is all through this vessel. So your bodies are not the most important or the most interesting thing about you but they are a part of you. And for me it's much more helpful to view it as a home than as a machine. Like think about your actual home. You could probably tell me the things that you do or the little ways that you might treat yourself to make your home feel even more homey. For me, I love having plants and I love having fresh cut flowers; that makes my home feel like home. I love having a cozy blanket that I can curl up under, I have temperatures that feel more comfortable at home. Even like having the snacks and the types of tea that I love make my space feel like home and I think it would be so cool if all of us could get to the point where we are able to know those same things for our bodies. We can know exactly what makes us feel good and at home and cozy and comfortable in these vessels that we get to live in for this lifetime.
When we are focusing on what feels good, and when we can hone in on that, we're building a certain level of body awareness. And we can seek out more ways, we can seek out opportunities to incorporate that goodness intentionally instead of having it be something that happens accidentally. And I also want to call out the fact that this can be difficult. If you grew up in a tradition or you were raised in a community where you heard messages that pleasure had to be earned or that pleasure was only allowed in certain context, it can feel weird to talk about feeling good just for the sake of feeling good. And I want to offer up a quote from Adrienne Maree Brown, I have been really savoring her book over the course of this year. Yeah, I haven't been forcing myself to speed read through it, I've just been allowing myself to sit with it whenever it feels right. And she has this quote where she says "there is no way to repress pleasure, and expect liberation, satisfaction or joy." So if our end goal, and if you're listening to this podcast, I think we have some similar end goals. If our angle is to work towards liberation, satisfaction in our lives, and to experience joy, we can't get there by repressing our own pleasure. So today, I want you to sit with the question what feels good in your body? When I sat with that question, here's what came up for me. Boxing feels really good in my body.
I feel so strong. I feel so energized. I feel so capable. I feel challenged in a really good way. Boxing feels good in my body. Cuddling with Matt, my husband, and my dog Blue, that feels really good in my body. Eating an acai bowl and we're kind of transitioning in weather in Chicago, so I'm specifically thinking of when it's like a hot summer morning and I'm putting my spoon into an acai bowl and it's like sweet, it's cool how that feel so good in my body. Eating some fresh fruit feels amazing in my body. Those are some things that come to mind. I can keep going, like the feeling yes of being in a bath but also when you step out of an Epsom salt bath and you just feel like this tension that you didn't know you were holding onto melt away from your body. Man that feeling is incredible. Also shout out because we do now have the soaks available. So if you're like yes, I'm into that experience, you should check out our reunion bath soak. I didn't plan that that's actually not in my in my notes for today. I started riffing some extra things that feel good in my body and a bath is definitely up there. So take some time, sit with this question, really start to explore.
And I don't want you to be discouraged. If you are sitting with this question, and you don't have answers right away, you're still getting information, this time of reflection is still worth it. Okay, so I'm turning the mic over to you. What feels good in your body? Thanks for taking some time for yourself to sit into your exploration. I hope you gain some insights that are going to be helpful for you and I've gotten this question as a starting point. If you couldn't fully answer it, you can spend the rest of the week the month your life answering it. I know I certainly am going to. Well, we're nearing the end of this episode. So this is where I get to ask you to share this episode if it resonated with you. That's how we get more folks to find out about the show. And if something really hit home, feel free to take a screenshot or send us a DM, we love hearing how these episodes hit home with you. Thank you for your time and thank you as always for your expertise. Take care!
