When Biohacks Become Body Control

Linda Villines 0:00

You only pay attention to your body when something is wrong, when there’s a problem, when you can’t sleep, when you have digestive issues, when you have skin issues, or when you’ve gained weight. And then you look up that quick fix or that diet, that supplement, right? The adaptogen, the mushroom, the light therapy, or whatever biohack is trending at the moment. And then maybe you learn a stress management technique, and maybe you start taking a new form of magnesium to relax, or maybe you try fasting or that new morning superfood smoothie mix. And then over time you develop like this arsenal of ways to quote unquote regulate your body, ways to manage your symptoms, which is really like this toolkit to quiet your body. Every biohack you participate in, every supplement you try is you telling your body, please shut the fuck up. Please stop being loud when I eat. Stop being loud with neck tension or back pain or stomach cramps, or just stop being loud when I try to sleep. And then you get annoyed, then you get upset, you get frustrated that you’re still dealing with sleep issues, with anxiety, with digestive problems, with backaches, with all of this noise from your body, with all of this stress, right? Because you think you know your body because you’ve spent years managing it. But what you’re familiar with is the symptom, not your body. Because when the digestive issues are not flaring or the migraines aren’t flaring or the back pain isn’t flaring, your body doesn’t really exist to you beyond the problems that you think that it creates in your life. Like, do you know what was going on in your body 40 minutes ago? Was there any specific tension? Was there any ease? Was there an emotion present? What was influencing your body? What was it doing? What was it saying to you? You may know like 20 different ways to regulate your body, but that doesn’t mean that you know your body. You may say that you take care of your body, but is that care and attention unconditional or is it conditional? Is the love you have for your body based on a mood or a circumstance? Like if you’re only paying attention to your body when something is wrong, like when it annoys you or doesn’t function the way that you want it to or look the way that you want it to, then the answer is yes, friend. The care and love you have for your body is conditional. And that conditional attention is the same conditional attention you received from your parent or that caregiver who only paid attention to you when you were crying or when you fucked up or when you finally did something right, or you stressed them in some way. That same parent, that same caregiver that you have been talking to your therapist about for the past 10 years, that conditional love has not only become how you love yourself, but it’s how you’ve become to relate to and love your body. So if you’re tired of managing your body, you’re tired of managing the stress and the issues that you think that it is causing you, this episode is for you. If you’re tired of doing everything right, but you still get activated by the same shit, you’re still dealing with the same symptoms, and you’re still stressed, regardless of how many self-regulation practices you do and you try, this episode

Conditional Attention Creates More Symptoms

Linda Villines 3:19

is for you. I’m Linda Villines. Welcome to the Simple Source, where we go beyond surface-level self-help and self-love to show you how to actually heal as your embodied highest and sore self. You know, I did all the quick fixes too. I could write an impassioned essay about all the different types of magnesium and every diet that anyone has ever claimed to heal a body because I tried all of it for years. I spent a ton of money and I just got more exhausted, more stressed. So I know the stress of a body that you think is malfunctioning very well. I lived with various chronic conditions for decades. But you know what healed me? It wasn’t doing more, it was doing less. It was simplifying, it was resolving the chronic stress that kept my body stuck in trauma states and survival mode all the time. And you want to know who told me to do that? My body. Once I finally stopped doing shit to it, trying to manage it, and I became the one to shut the fuck up and listen. And so I actually asked my body what it needed. How outrageous a concept. My own body knew precisely what it needed. And you know what it was? Love and joy and simplicity. But we’re taught to dumb down our bodies. We’re taught to drown out the noise, to manipulate them, to look this way, to function that way. But we are not taught to simply pay attention, to be present with our bodies as they are, right? To get curious, to listen, to love them back. So when do you actually pay attention to your body? Probably when it hurts. When it’s dehydrated, when it’s exhausted or bloated or crampy or achy or when it embarrasses you in front of someone. That’s when you tune in. And you tune in with the intention of making your body stop bothering you. That means that what you think you learn about your body, you learned during its worst moments. So you know the panic attack, you know the migraine, you know the anxiety, you know the TMJ, the constipation, the gassy, uneasy stomach. You could probably describe how annoying all of that is in detail. Yet you probably couldn’t tell me what your body was doing 10 minutes before any of that started. You probably couldn’t tell me what your body does on a day when nothing is wrong, because on those days you’re not paying attention. And yet you think you know your body. Now, imagine if the only way that you knew your best friend came from the times when they raged at you or they cried in front of you. You’d think that they were just a mess. You’d have no idea who they were when they were fine, when they were at ease, or felt loved, or when they were just like chilling without a care in the world. That’s the same picture you have of your own body. This collection of crisis, problematic snapshots with all of the details missing. And that’s what conditional attention gets you: this incomplete understanding and relationship with your own body. When you only give your body focus when its state conflicts with what your mind wants, you only see this like partial and often very misleading view of the whole, right? The whole picture is that your body isn’t just sending signals when there’s distress because your nervous system is active all the time, 24-7. And your interoceptive ability isn’t just limited to pain and annoyances. And conscious awareness isn’t like the complete reading of what your body is doing. Okay. So the signals that are louder, that are more disruptive, more inconvenient, they’re naturally the ones that that grab your attention and naturally the ones that you remember. But your body isn’t like mute, like dormant the rest of the time. It’s always communicating, it’s always responding to its environment, to your emotions, to your life. And so your relationship with your body may be conditional, but your body’s relationship with you is unconditional. That’s what you’re missing and likely what you have been missing your whole life. Unconditional love. Because every time you learn that you only ever got attention and love by doing something that got you noticed, right? Like being loud, um, causing some sort of scene or being like exceptional or being a disappointment that just reinforced that original wound of you not being seen, not being loved and cared for unconditionally. And so your body is part of that wound because your body has been with you from the start. I realized something over a decade ago that changed my entire relationship with my body.

Meet the Body You Never Notice

Linda Villines 8:02

And that is that I have this one body in this life. This same body was with me at my birth. The same body is gonna be with me when I die. And nothing in my life is gonna be with me with that much devotion, that much commitment, period. Nothing and no one. And I realized that if I did not give that same devotion and commitment back to my body, I would be doing like the greatest disservice to the single, this single vessel that carries me through this life. It was like this aha moment that went so far beyond self-care or self-awareness. It was reverence. It was awe, it was like real gratitude. And only then did I begin to know my body for what it was and is. There is like a whole body that you have never met. Your body that doesn’t ache, that doesn’t flare, doesn’t cause you problems, doesn’t embarrass you. But the one that was there like every single second, like literally every single second of your life, doing a million different things simultaneously in order to love you. That is the body that you have yet to be in a relationship with. And that body has way more to say to you than you realize. But the issue is we’re taught in so many different ways to make meaning immediately, right? To project. That’s what everybody does unconsciously. They project. And so to try to solve the annoyance, right, you want to make meaning of what’s going on in your body. And so you miss so much by not really truly being present with it because what you’re already trying to do is manage the signal that your body is giving you before you’ve actually listened to what your body is saying. So see if you relate to this,

Stop Projecting Meaning Prematurely

Linda Villines 9:45

okay? Your stomach clinches, right? It sours mid-conversation with someone. But before your stomach has even finished doing whatever it’s doing, you have decided what that means, right? You’re like, oh, it’s my intuition, or about my boundary was crossed, or that’s my trauma, or I’m dysregulated, or that’s my mother wound. You have all of this vocabulary now, and you’re just throwing out this vocabulary because you’ve read the books, you’ve studied Louise Hay, you’ve listened to the podcast, you’ve taken the courses and workshops, you’ve been in therapy. And so you feel like you can label that sensation and then you attach meaning to it immediately. And then that feels like you knowing your body. But did you really tune in and ask your body, or did you project? We all learn to do this from that parent, that caregiver who told us what we were feeling before we even processed what we were feeling. When they said, you’re not scared, you’re just tired, or you’re not upset, you’re just being dramatic. And of course, every version of that just teaches you to stop trusting your own signals because someone with like quote unquote more authority kept overriding them. And now you do this to your body and you call it insight. But the real insight is knowing that one sensation on its own doesn’t really mean anything yet until it’s a pattern. It reveals itself as a pattern, right? Your stomach turned. Okay, great. I mean, that could be hunger, that could be caffeine, that could be your microbiome responding to your emotion in that moment. It could be excitement that you haven’t registered yet, it could be dread, it could just be your digestion. And so pretending that you know what your body is doing without asking your body is how you end up with a body that you have projected these stories onto with no real relationship or two-way communication. So meaning is revealed when the pattern itself is discernible, right? Not that very first time, not the singular time, but like the fifth time, the tenth time. So, you know, that means your stomach turns every single time you say yes to something that you do not want to do. Your shoulders tense every time that person’s name lights up on your phone, or your breathing gets shallow before you have to do that work task with that coworker, or like your whole body shuts down in a specific environment and like nowhere else. A pattern is not something that you consciously decide. It is something that your body and your reality reveal to you over and over again until the pattern itself, again, is unmistakable. And so the meaning becomes unmistakable.

Let Patterns Reveal the Real Message

Linda Villines 12:21

The healing community is just so obsessed with regulation that they teach you to interpret so much faster as opposed to observing longer first. The regulation is only partially effective when you don’t know what you are regulating. And healing is often taught with so many holes from very limited and narrow perspectives that you’re taught to interpret without being taught to meet or relate to or listen to yourself first. Everyone is just in a rush to heal, right? And I really do get that. I have been there. When you feel like shit, when something is wrong, you just want to be done with it. You want it over, like now. But rushing actually prevents you from the thing that you want, which is body, mind, and nervous system in optimal states in order to heal. So what happens is you hurry to give the symptom or the issue meaning and then you hurry to resolve it. But because you are not in a real relationship with yourself and your body, you just end up managing. So that’s why you still end up stressed. And that’s why you’re still unwell, still unhappy. You can’t know what needs to be healed, like what is truly causing the nonstop stress and the issues, unless you witness them first with neutrality and acceptance. And then you allow the pattern to emerge because it will emerge when you stop coercing your body and you start paying attention with zero agenda. You cannot force meaning onto a sensation or onto attention or feeling, and then expect your body to respond the way that you want it to, because your body was speaking to you, but you were not listening. Make sense? It’s like a one-way relationship. You were projecting, you were managing, you were coercing, which means all of the signals that your body has been giving you just becomes noise. Not because like the signals are incoherent or like they’re useless, but because you haven’t learned yet how your body speaks and what it does say when it does speak to you. So you learn any language through repetition. That’s how we learn to speak and to write and to read, right? Through learning the language’s patterns. So to learn a language, you have to be there when it’s spoken. But then when it comes to your body, it’s usually like after the fact, right? Something flares and then you deal with it by ignoring it in the moment because you’re just like, I can’t deal with this, I’ll deal with it later. Then you like go home and you journal about it, or then you like talk with your person about it, or your therapist about it, or you’re like, I’ll do a meditation about it tomorrow, or you know, in a couple of days when I have more time. But by the time later comes, that moment has passed. And so your mind has already projected meaning onto it, even while you were trying to ignore it. And then when you deal with it, it’s like this whole story. But really, the moment was made up of like other moments and other bodily shifts and signals that you did not register. Not because you’re unintelligent, not because your memory sucks, but because that’s just how recall works for everybody. If you’ve been doing the work but still feel stuck, like no matter how much healing, manifesting, or personal growth you invest in, or spiritual practices you try, something just isn’t clicking. You’re not alone and you’re not failing. The truth is, most teachings and approaches are outdated and only scratch the surface. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect as You Are, helps you understand exactly why things haven’t been clicking and how to resolve the root of why you’re struggling. Unconditional self-love isn’t just a nice idea if you truly want to be free. It’s the missing piece and the foundation for everything you desire. And you don’t have to do or figure everything out on your own. You deserve clear, comprehensive, and empowering step-by-step guidance in self-love, self-healing, and spiritual growth. The Source membership gives you daily support and transformative tools to actually start living your healthiest and happiest life today and every day. 100% of members who follow the program improve their mental, emotional, and physical health by over 50% in one year alone. Real mind, body, soul transformation is possible, and you can achieve it with joy and ease instead of stress and struggle. So, as a thank you for being a listener, you can get 75% off your first month of membership with the code podcast promo. Your links are in the show notes. Now, let’s get back to the episode.

Why Memory Distorts Body Awareness

Linda Villines 16:59

Memory is reconstructive. Okay, so psychologists call this retrospective recall bias. Your mind rebuilds your day around the peak, shitty, annoying, frustrating, uncomfortable shit moments, right? And then how the day ends. And then all the other moments when your body was not in crisis, they’re just overshadowed. They’re not part of the memory reconstruction. And so you end up knowing just like this one part of your whole day and your whole body’s real experience was not accounted for, not in the total picture that you have. And this is like a known issue for researchers. Okay. So when researchers compare what people report later with what they report while an experience is actually happening, those two things often do not match. So one methodology researchers use is to sample people during their actual lives, like a few times a day or like in the middle of the day, you know, asking, what’s happening right now? Who are you with? How are you feeling? That methodology is called ecological momentary assessment. And it exists because what you remember later does not necessarily preserve all of the context, all of that moment-to-moment stuff that happened while you were actually in the moment. And this affects all of your practices too, because when you notice your body gets tight in a conversation or in a situation, and then you do that breath work technique that you learned, and then your body relaxes a little bit in the moment. Briefly, you’re like, huzzah, that worked. You know, you’re like, I found my thing. But what your mind registers from that moment is simply that breath work helped. But what does not get registered is your circumstance, your environment, like what you were doing, who you were speaking to, what you had just agreed to, stuff like that. So the practice did do something beneficial, but the pattern that required the practice in the first place that remains invisible to you. So you got relief without actually getting the information that could tell you why your body got tight and tense in the first place. And so you keep saying that you know your body because you know that breath work helps your body when it gets tight, but you don’t actually understand why your body gets tight from the truth of your own body’s experiences in the moment. Okay. Now, there’s nothing wrong with breath work. I love breath work. I teach breath work in one of my workshops and my mastery membership program. But every time you intervene on a sensation before observing its context, you actually alter the state before you learn why that state, like that stress, that symptom, that flare-up, that tension keeps returning. And that process is literally what management, symptom management, and not resolution is. You just treat the surface thing, but the thing underneath never gets resolved. And that is why I spent years, years and years trying to heal, but I never healed. I just kept dealing with the symptom. But a symptom is not the cause, and the symptom is not the context. This is why so many people think that healing takes so long, like such a long time, or it takes a lifetime when that is simply just not true. Your body knows how to heal. And decades are not a requirement for that. It’s that you just spent years treading the surface, years managing the symptom, years guessing, years fixated on the problem. What many people don’t understand about their bodies is that our bodies are

Training Your Attention Toward Ease

Linda Villines 20:30

dynamic. They’re they’re never truly stuck in a state, right? The state of your body fluctuates like all the time because your body is responsive, is adaptive by design. And I know it’s really easy to assume that if you have this one uncomfortable symptom that like your whole body is fucked up and broken, but your body is multidimensional and different parts can hold different states at the same time. Yet when you check in with your body, we are conditioned to scan like exclusively for what’s wrong, right? Where am I tense? What hurts? What doesn’t feel right, what doesn’t look right, because we’re conditioned to normalize anxiety, to fixate on problems. And part of that is survival programming. But the thing is, basically, nearly all the time in your normal life, you are safe. There is nothing to survive, right? In terms of your life being in danger, but you never journal. You never go to lunch and talk about how your chest was free and open at 2 p.m., you know, on a Thursday afternoon. Ease is just not something that interrupts you. And so you don’t give it any attention. And for many people, ease is also like suspicious, right? It’s like this, I don’t trust it thing. And so it just doesn’t get the day’s headline, but the stress does, right? The issue does, the complaint does. The thing is, everyone says that they want life to be easier. The thing is, your body doesn’t only send distress signals. Interoception includes pleasant, neutral, and comfortable sensations. But you’ve just been so focused on that other side for so long that you didn’t even notice that more than you think your body is telling you we’re safe. This moment is easy. And that also goes back to childhood. Of course it does because conditioning always starts in childhood. You know, so if your parent or your caregiver only showed up with presence or love or concern when there was something wrong or there was a problem or you fucked up, you know what it’s like to have your joy unseen, right? To feel invisible in your happiness because your body’s ease didn’t have a witness. And so now as an adult, you’re just doing the same thing to your body. But showing up with presence, regardless of what is wrong, that is what unconditional love is. Another major turning point in my own healing was realizing that all I did was focus on my problems unconsciously. You know, I wasn’t like, I’m gonna do this all day long. This was obviously an unconscious thing, but I just fixated on what was wrong. And so of course I was just stressed all the time. My joy, my ease, they got no attention, like not in any sort of like meaningful way. It was just barely registered because there was so much worry, so much stress about something happening in the future or in the past or in the present, some fear, some anxiety, something I had to do now or later that I had to deal with, that came with issues that plagued me, you know, whatever. It was just like there was always a problem because my mind was conditioned to fixate on what was wrong because of all of the trauma that I went through in my childhood. I just became hyper-vigilant to my own safety. And when I made that connection that my body was stressed because I was stressed, I then understood what my body was telling me. I’m seeing and feeling what I focus on. And when I consciously began to give my attention to not my problems, but to ease, to joy, to solutions, to letting shit go that did not matter in the moment, my body changed. And the symptoms that made life so miserable for so long, they started to resolve on their own because I was finally respecting what my body had been telling me, which there was ease in me and in my life. And when I gave those parts of myself attention, my body responded with more ease. So knowing your body means becoming familiar with what contracts it and also what softens it, right? What repeats? Who is there when something flares? Where are you when something relaxes in you, right? What are you doing? What’s happening when you respond to your body with any sort of attention or with love? What happens when you try to manage it from irritation or coerce it, manipulate it from desperation? How does your body respond to all of that? You are in a 24-7 relationship with your body, whether or not you realize it. And it is a bi-directional relationship, like all relationships. You know, it may be one-sided uh in some ways, but you know, a relationship takes two entities, two things, two energies. So anything you do say, feel, or think is received and heard by your body. And your body does respond to you immediately. We’re taught to think of our bodies as like this meat suit. I really despise that saying, but you know, people in the spiritual community say it all the time. And we’re taught to think of our bodies as this like biological system, and that’s it. But there’s like so much more to our bodies than that. Our bodies are so wildly intelligent, so multidimensional, and so unconditionally loving. And it says a fucked unto you all the time when you start paying attention. You know, the questions that you have about why you’re still stressed, why you’re still dealing with this problem or that issue, why you still don’t feel healed. Your body is answering those questions for you all day long. But most of us were just never taught to listen, to understand.

Why Finally Paying Attention is the App You Need

Linda Villines 25:55

And that is why I built my app, Finally Paying Attention. It’s a seven-day interactive experience that helps you discover what your body has been telling you all day, every day, underneath all that stress. And so instead of asking you to do like another meditation or some nervous system reset or some relaxation routine or stress management protocol, uh, you’re not adding any of that to your life. Finally, paying attention just meets you inside your life exactly as you are living it. And then just a few times a day throughout your day, it checks in with you for like, you know, 15 seconds, 10 seconds, and just asks your body what you’re doing right now, like where you’re holding tension, whether you’re at ease, what you’re feeling, where you are, who you’re with, what you’re doing. And so at first, you’re just simply noticing. You’re not changing anything, you’re not managing, there’s nothing to calm down, you’re not trying to get anything right. And then as your week unfolds, you begin connecting your stress that you have normalized with the emotional and everyday context around it. And so then, of course, you’re going to start responding to what you notice in your body differently, right? Through attention, loving contact, movement, and you start noticing the ease that your body has already been experiencing alongside the tension. And also your answers like disappear after every check-in. So you’re not monitoring yourself all day. You’re not trying to improve your numbers or your stats, right? There are no scores, no streaks, there’s no passing or failing, no performance goals. And then every evening you just get like a brief little cute glimpsey glimpse of the day, but your full week stays sealed until day eight. So then after seven days, you get your entire week experience back with depth, with specificity. And that’s when you see all the patterns that your body has revealed across the week through your real life, right? Where stress lived most often, where ease appeared, what was happening around you, what emotions were present, right, with your tension, what happened when you responded to your body instead of managing it. And so the result of finally paying attention, my app, is not just like more stress awareness, but you really get to know your body as like a living partner instead of just something that you pay attention to only when it hurts or, you know, when you get panicked or you feel tied or you’re tired or something needs to be dealt with. So for seven days, you stop doing things to your body in order to hear it, in order to love it back. That’s finally paying attention. Now it doesn’t replace your breath work or your supplement stack or yoga or meditation. You just you keep doing what serves you, but finally paying attention gives you what you have been missing underneath all of those tools, right? Enough familiarity with your own body to know what it actually responds to, what you respond to, instead of just waiting until something hurts or when something is tense or flares or when you don’t feel well. You’re developing the skill of listening and paying attention before all of that. And also what you get is a real relationship with your body in that week because you’re not managing it. You’re just being present with your body with zero agenda, other than to pay attention to what it has been saying to you all along. And that’s when you can give it love back. Your body should not have to suffer to become worthy of your attention. That’s what most of us have been taught since childhood, right? Attention and love are conditional. It’s the flawless and the flawed that get noticed, right? The flaws are shamed, the flawless are glorified. And so ordinary just doesn’t feel special. And that’s why people have to work on a gratitude practice. They have to develop mindset hacks to be more optimistic, less skeptical of joy, of ease. But the truth is, ordinary is where all of the magic lives in your day-to-day. And your body is magical, not just when it like heals or like does what you want, but every moment of your life, your body is doing extraordinary, incomprehensible things that science still doesn’t fully understand yet. So it really does deserve your attention, and not attention that you only give it when something hurts or doesn’t feel good or stops looking or functioning the way that you want. But attention that says, I see you, even when nothing is bothering me. Attention that says I appreciate all of your effort. I appreciate the million ways that you have been and that you continue to carry me throughout this life without asking for anything in return. I appreciate how much you have loved me unconditionally. And when you start engaging with your body with that type of relationship, just watch how your life and your ordinary day-to-day changes. Your body has been present for every single version of you. All the normal, all the shitty, all the boring, all the spectacular days, every single difficult season, every moment of pain, of heartbreak, of wonder, of laughter, of bliss. And it deserves a relationship with you that isn’t founded on problems or crisis or neglected from apathy. It deserves the same unconditional love and care that it has been giving you from breath one. Thank you so much for being here today. I hope this episode awakened you, inspired you, and reminded you of what’s possible when you love, heal, and free yourself, and reclaim your highest truth and power. If this show has transformed or enlightened your self-love, growth, and healing journey, please like, save, and share this episode and leave a positive review on Apple or Spotify. And subscribe to be reminded of new episodes. Your support is deeply appreciated and truly helps this show so much. And if today’s episode resonated with you, don’t stop here. Go deeper. My book, Unconditional, You Are Perfect As You Are, expands on these teachings and gives you the missing framework about self-love that no one is talking about. So get your copy today to start reading and loving yourself more. And if you’re ready for the ultimate healing journey with daily instruction and guidance from me, I’d love to see you inside the Source membership. The only holistic and comprehensive step-by-step self healing program that is proven to work. Remember, you were never meant to struggle or wait for what is already yours. It’s time to claim everything you want and more. All the links are in the show notes. I’ll see you next time.