Hey, welcome to Lessons From A Quitter, where we believe that it is never too late to start over. No matter how much time or energy you've spent getting to where you are, if ultimately you are unfulfilled, then it is time to get out. Join me each week for both inspiration and actionable tips so that we can get you on the road to your dreams.

Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. You are in for a treat. Seriously, it's gonna be such a fun episode. I am so excited because I have my friend Victoria Albina on the podcast, and you'll get a glimpse of why she's an all around badass. But the reason I wanted to do this podcast episode so badly is because if you have, you know, been a frequent listener of this podcast, you know, we do all things thought work, and I love mindset work.
Obviously, I love thought work. I do credit it for changing a lot of my life. And for someone that is very logic based in my brain, like very logical thinking, I feel like thought work was like the gateway drug to self-help for me, personal development, because I needed something that rationally made sense to me. I needed to be able to think my way through what was going on in my body, what was going on in my brain, why I felt that way. I felt very lost, and a lot of the other stuff sounded way too woo woo for me at the time. I was like, eh, you know, like even meditation, like I couldn't sit still for long enough to kind of practice and figure out what that mindfulness was about. And so thought work gave me a way of like really grappling with the problem in a logical fashion.
Like, I can look at my thoughts and I can plug it into this equation and I can see what it's creating. And so it is wonderful. I still use it every single day. I still teach it in my program. So this isn't to say anything against that, but it is. But one tool, and I think one of the things I learned through my journey, and I really wanted to bring to you guys as well, is that I was extremely disconnected from my body. I did not feel my feelings. I tried to suppress 'em as much as possible. And one of the ways in which we buffer, or in which we try to get away from our feelings, is to intellectualize it, is to only try to think about it is to try to make sense of everything with our mind. When oftentimes there is no sense to be made.
There are just urges and reactions and you know, ways that you are evolutionarily wired that causes you to react in a way that maybe you don't even understand with your thinking mind. And the more I started learning about that, the more it started making sense that in certain situations, at certain times it did not help to just sit down and think about my thoughts. I was maybe in fight or flight, or I was in a freeze state and I needed to do things to get back into my body, to get myself out of this kind of stuck place before I could ever access my thoughts. And so that is why I wanted to bring Victoria on today, because I really want to talk about how we can learn more about our own nervous system and understand, you know, how we can work with it, how we can regulate it, how we can understand it in a way to help us in this kind of overly stimulated, overly stressed, overly triggered world that we all live in.
So Victoria Albina is a master certified somatic life coach, A-U-C-S-F trained family nurse practitioner and breath work meditation guide with a passion for helping humans socialize as women, reconnect with their bodies and mind so that they can break free from codependency, perfectionism, and people pleasing and reclaim their joy. As you will see, Victoria herself is a joy to be around, and she just has spent, you know, over 20 years helping people figure out ways to get back into their bodies so that they can let go of all of these tendencies that are very harmful that we may have learned early on in life, but that no longer serve us. So without further ado, let's jump in and learn from Victoria about what the heck we should be doing in our own bodies. Hello, Victoria. Thank you so much for joining me today.
It is such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
I'm so excited to get into all of the things that you teach because I know my people need it so much. But before we even do that, why don't you tell us a little bit about your history and what got you into the type of work that you do today?
So I come from medicine. I am a family nurse practitioner by training. I have a master's degree in public health. I am a real nerds nerd, and I've been studying somatics in the nervous system in some way or another for, gosh, over 20 years, which kinda like, every time I say 20 years, I'm like, how am I old enough? Where are the grownups?
Yeah, I know exactly.
We are the grownups. That's bon banana. We're so
Unserious.
Seriously. Anyway, so the long and short of it and why I do bring somatics into my life coaching and focus on life coaching Yeah. Is that after treating thousands and thousands of patients over so many years, what I kept seeing as this core thread through issue was this somatic self disconnection, which is a term I came up with to talk about how we end up walking through the world, like heads without bodies mm-hmm . Totally detached from our bodies, living from the neck up, not really present to what's happening to us as animals in the animal. We're walking in. And I think this is a thing that happens particularly to those of us who are very smart and intellectual and who have been praised over the course of a lifetime for being wicked smart. Right. It's been our, our go-to our, uh, raison dera. It's been the thing that gets us praise.
It helps us to feel safe, to feel connected, to feel like the smarty pants in the room. Mm-hmm . And because we lean so hard on our smarts, we forget that we are in fact a taller toddler. Right. , we are . We need nap time and sunshine and friends and snuggles. And to be read a book and have our little hairs, pat, you know, we forget to take care of and, and be present in our bodies. And our health suffers. Our mental health suffers. Our wellness suffers, our relationship suffers our work, our careers, it all suffers when we're not actually embodied or present in our bodies. Also because we deserve to be in our bodies. It feels fricking amazing to be in our bodies. Yeah.
I love so much of what you said, and I think this is why you were the perfect person to bring on the podcast because I know me and most of the people that I tend to help. A lot of how I found thought work and a lot of what I teach, the reason why thought work resonates is for so many of us that are used to living in our head and are used to like wanting to logically understand everything and like make sense of it and had a really hard time, I know for myself, like as I was realizing, hey, something is deeply wrong within me, within my body, within how I feel every day, and I shouldn't be feeling like this,
But a lot of the other modalities seemed a little woo woo. Or like, okay, that seems all nice and fluffy, but like, I wanna know how to, you know, figure this out and this is the puzzle. And it really truly did help me obviously like start learning about my thoughts and feelings and, and things that I'd never really learned about before. But now having gone through so much of this work and then learning about somatics, I did realize like how much was just disconnected, how much it was literally just living in my head and never being in my body and never understanding, you know, what all of those feelings feel like in my body. Right. And how do you even, you know, describe that to yourself and how do you even notice what's happening when something is quote unquote threatening or when you get, you know, we love the word triggered
Or
Whatever it is. And so I know a lot of other people feel the same way, where it's like, okay, I can understand thought work that sort of makes sense. My thought creates the feeling dah, dah, dah, but I don't really understand this body. So can you give us a little bit of like an, you know, intro 1 0 1 to like all of the nervous system work that you do? Sort of the basic understanding of like this nervous system that we have and what it means to sort of regulate ourselves or learn this body, the somatic aspect of it.
I thought you'd never ask . Oh my God, I love nerding about this dose so hard. , . I'm like a little kid in a nerd. I love it.
I'm like, let's science. The nervous system writ large is the body's command center that coordinates everything we think, feel, and do through a very complex network that quite simply includes the brain, the spinal cord, and the nerves reaching out throughout the body. It not only manages essential function, so heartbeat, digestion, thyroid reproduction, right? Like basic human stuff. It also governs our emotions, our behaviors, the stories we tell about ourselves and the world and how safe we feel in our bodies and in the world. It's constantly scanning the entire world inside and out for clues of safety or threat. And it's pretty binary. It's either a lion or a tabby cat, and there's not a lot of gray in between. So our nervous system reacts to both real and perceived challenges and it creates both thought and behavioral patterns and works on patterns that were created from past experiences to create our present experiences to guide our future experiences, which is also where thought work comes in.
So the heart of the system, there's three branches and each impacts how we relate to ourselves and others. The sympathetic branch is really commonly known as fight or flight. This is the adrenaline mode. This is, there's perceived danger and we either need to confront it or book it the hell out of there. And then there's parasympathetic. And so the parasympathetic branch has the ventral vagal system, which is safe and social, the social engagement system. It's how I feel right now. I'm mostly in ventral with a little bit of like really nice excitement. Mm-hmm. Because I'm talking about something I'm super geeky, happy about with someone I feel safe with, right? Mm-hmm . So my social engagement system is humming. Everything in my body is working as well as it possibly can. Mm-hmm . We feel safe, we feel social, we feel open, we are connected to others.
We can experience intimacy with self and others. Connection, vulnerability, calm. That's ventral, vagal. Finally, there's dorsal vagal, which is responsible for immobilization. Mm-hmm . Yeah. So that's the shutdown. That's dorsal deer in the headlights, possum playing possum, overwhelmed, shutdown, numbed out too much. We feel frozen. There's a state called freeze, but this is when we feel frozen. It's, it's a protective mechanism. It's, this is just all way too much and I just fricking can't, it can be sort of like a end all intense moment. Or it can also be, you know, when you're shopping at the holidays and you're like at Marshalls or something and you're wearing your coat and your hat and you're too hot and your kids or your family or whomever is taking so long and you're like, I just, I can give no more in Spanish. We say, no, no. The way mess , I can give no more.
Yeah. And it's just like, I'm just done . Yeah. But there's some dorsal to there. Yeah. But it can also be like, there is too much threat. I am overwhelmed by threat. Yeah. By lions. Mm-hmm . Or psychosocial emotional lions. Yeah. And I shut it down. Yeah. And so the interplay of these three systems with our past in the present create how we contemplate others. How we think about self, how we react to the world. And so if your boss says, Hey, will you stop by my office at three? If your nervous system is in ventral vagal, you're chill and you're cool when they say that, you might be able to skate into it. Mm-hmm . If that activates a past moment when my boss said something like that, and then boom, you are fired outta nowhere. You're likely to go into sympathetic, but you may walk into the office having maxed out your sympathetic and having collapsed into a little dorsal that deer in the headlights, that what?
Or the last time your boss said that, they were like, Hey, we got this amazing evaluation of you. I wanted to call you in here to give you this cake. And so the past is constantly, and this is, I'm bringing the past in really purposefully to say, thought work has a role, and this is what was always missing from thought work for me. Yeah. Is that story follows state in the nervous system. And so what that means is that the literal T-Line, the thoughts that are available to us are directly correlated to the state our nervous system is in. So if you're at the top of a rollercoaster Right. And you hate it, and you're like, what in the witchcraft who put me up here . Yeah. I hate this. Yeah. And the thought, right? And you're like in panic, of course your thoughts are, get me the hell out of this. Do not start this machine. Right. They're, they're panic thoughts panicked.
Right.
Same with dorsal, right? Yeah. If you're like, this is my destiny, this is my lot in life, I'm screwed, life will always be terrible. Yeah. It's because you're dorsal, you only have access to those thoughts. I think of them like a library, like the little, the little cards. Remember the card? The key? Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. The cards at a library do, he does the Yeah. Cards come, whatever. Right. Um, you can only access the ones that align with
Your Yeah. Oh, I love, it's how interesting, the reason I think that it is so important is that so many people that try to do thought work, and this was where I thought it was, you know, lacking too, is that oftentimes when you are in a heightened state and intellectually you understand that you are not in danger, like you understand it was an email, you know, you understand that like, okay, I'm not actually gonna die. Right. But your body is still reacting as though you are going to die. Sure. And so we get frustrated instead of like understanding and calming ourselves down, let's pile on the shame. Like, what the hell is wrong with you? It's just an email. Send it. It's not that big of a deal. And you're like, no, but I feel as though I'm gonna die. I can change my thought all I want, but if my body is in this place of like, there's a lot at stake here and I don't know why I am freaking out about this and I don't understand it. And I think that exactly what we say is like just understanding that like, okay, my body is freaking out for whatever reason. Like, what is going on with me and can I calm myself down? Like there's a time and place for that work. It's not when you're in the middle of a pan, like, it's not when you are like at this heightened triggered state Yeah. For you to be like, well, let me just sit down and fix my thought or my
Thoughts. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where thought work for me felt like a little gaslighting. Yeah. Of like, you should be able to change. Yeah. Totally. Just you can use thought work to change everything in your life. Yeah. Well, you actually can't. Yeah. If your nervous system is dysregulated, not just not science. Yeah. We have to work with the biochemical effect of being a human mammal or it's not gonna work.
Because I used to really get mad at myself of like, you know how to do this, or you know, how, you know, like, you should be able to calm yourself down. And I really thought about like when you were talking about how it's very black and white for your Yeah. Uh, nervous system and it's like threat or not threat. And I think about constantly like how
Your body
Literally has a physical reaction when you're watching a scary movie. You know, it's fake. Yeah. But your heart is beating, you're sweating. Right. You are freaking out. 'cause your body thinks you're gonna die. And so when I, I like to think about that to really like, sort of remind myself how much of just this animal I am and not, you know, this, it's not just because intellectually I understand something, there's something happening. And I am also, you know, this steward of this body. And how do I kind of learn how to, you know, like you said, like we're tall toddlers. I really think about that a lot with myself. Like how I would talk to my daughter and it's like, okay, we're freaking out right now, but like, you know, what do I need? What? Like, do I need to breathe through this? Instead of going to the, you should know this is fake. Like, why are you scared?
Right?
Yeah. So what are ways when you're saying like, you know, you can't really access thought work if you haven't regulated your nervous system. Like how do people start learning how to regulate this? Especially when it's maybe because of past triggers that are no longer serving you right now. Like, you really do feel like, hey, this is maybe an overreaction to what is happening in my life and I wanna stop reacting like
This all the time. Right. So the super annoying news that no one wants to hear.
Dang
It. Yeah. Interview over, get off my show. . We have to slow down. Okay. And no one wants to hear it
Because we Yeah. We hate
That we collectively want a fast solution. Yeah. I would like a silver bullet. Yeah. and, yeah. It's funny, I was had a mastermind with some coaches that you know very well, and one of them was like, I don't know why I'm always so upset. I'm always doing nervous system stuff. And I was like, girl, you need to be with your nervous system. Yeah. Oh, the side eye, she shot me , I think it actually like burned a hole in my face. You see it there? Yeah. Lasers through her eyes. We have to be with ourselves. Mm. We have to be with the discomfort. Mm-hmm . We have to stay with the feelings when they arise. It's the only way to create safety. So if you feel anger and you shove it down, same with sadness, same with grief, same with frustration, same with annoyance and irritability. If you shove them down, push them away and tell them, I don't want you, you have to stop, get away from here. I I'm gonna take a Xanax and you're gonna be gone. Yeah. Then you're creating more fear, more distrust, more discomfort with your own emotions, with the energy from your own mind body.
Yeah. Like, you're so scared of feeling that, that you're already triggered by the possibility that you might feel anxious or that you might feel sad or
Anger. Right. Yeah. Right. And so what would happen if you consciously thoughtfully carved out some time and space to let yourself feel sad, to let yourself feel truly happy? 'cause that's just as scary for some people, for really good reasons. Yeah. What if you let yourself feel anger and like truly feel it, not like just punch pillows. Yeah. Right. Because we focus so much on resetting the nervous system. Discharging the feeling. Yeah.
Healing it.
Yeah. Yes. Shh. Ba that enough. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Just be with it and let the being with be the medicine be the power, be the magic. Mm-hmm. Because it's through being with ourselves unconditionally that we start to show ourselves, I can be trusted to have this feeling. Mm-hmm. And I can trust this feeling. Anger's not gonna kill me. Now if you grew up with an angry parent, an angry sibling with door slamming, with screaming, for example, or I don't know, a president who throws hissy fits just Right. If anger is a really reactive thing and you're really scared of it, I understand that. Let's leave that for last . But also it's about creating safety mm-hmm . Around trusting yourself. Yeah. Right. So maybe that's where you do bring in thought work to do some thinking about what your story is around anger. Mm-hmm . If I feel anger, what am I making that mean? That I'm gonna punch someone in the snout. Mm-hmm . Okay. Well, are you, well, no. Yeah. Okay. To spend some time trusting that, believing that working on and with that, and then start with sadness, start with happy, start with everything else, and build trust and put the thing that scares the effing f outta you dead last. Mm-hmm . You don't have to climb up Everest first. Yeah. Right. Like, I love
That. And I'm gonna ask a very basic question. 'cause I know this is the question I get all the time too, when I try to syphilis teach
People. Is that the answer? Did I get it? It was, that was the answer. Right?
This might be my favorite interview syphilis ever. You're welcome. I love it. No, it's so last
Time you have an Argentine on, you're like, Argentines, everything's a joke. . It's true. It's true.
No, it makes, it makes this nervous system conversation so much more comfortable. I love it. I'm feeling so happy right now. I'm so glad, . No, I was gonna ask, because anytime I try to like work with processing emotions with people, like, we're so disconnected. Yes. So even saying like, sit with your feelings, people will
Ask,
Okay, what does that mean? Tell me how to do that.
So let's back it up way even before we even talk about sitting with feelings. Yeah. Let's, let's talk about coffee. Okay. Let coffee talk. Time it. So what is the first thing? The average American drinks first thing in the morning. Coffee. A cup of, cup of coffee. You wake up, you don't even think about it, do you? Yeah. No, you just, you just grab your coffee. It made itself. Yeah. Machine went on at five. You, you're fricking thrilled. You got your donkeys you feeling good? You didn't stop to ask your body, Hey, sweet pea are, are you a little dehydrated? Mm. Do do we hit the Malbec a little hard last night and you could use a little water first. A little water with lemon. Feeling a little nice. We don't stop to think about our bodies because all we do is think. So before we even sit with a feeling and the process of feeling , we need to remember, not learn, but remember how to listen to our mouth.
Yeah. And if you're like, girl, I never knew how to listen to my body. I think your mama would beg to differ because every infant, every newborn knows how to listen to their body. Right? Yeah. When I want milk, why I pooped myself. Mm-hmm . Like you, you know the basics. Mm-hmm . So we need to go back to the time and place where we knew what our bodies were saying. Totally. We knew how to listen to our biological impulses. Now, one of the many gifts of corporate America is that it has completely divorced us from our biological. How many women do you know who get up to pee when they have to pee, drink water? They don't eat. Yeah. You completely suppress every urge you have. And so, of course, when it's time to sit with your despair, , it's not an easy place to start. Oh.
So I wanna invite you low stakes, man. We gotta, this nervous system stuff has to be super low stakes, or it's gonna freak us out. Let's start with your anger. If that's tricky. Don't start with the despair. Start with the morning beverage. In the morning. When you open your little eyes and you're brushing your little teeth, say, Hey body, what would you like to drink today? And you're gonna feel silly. And that's great. Welcome to silly. It's my favorite place on earth is silly. So just do it. Just embrace it. Yeah. And ask yourself what do you want? And if you hear nothing, great. Try it tomorrow until you maybe hear, oh, for the love of Mike, I'd love some water. Please try. Totally. For sake. Yeah. One of the things I'm most passionate about is to help us move out of unintentionally. Hmm. And back into choicefulness.
It's the, it's the true gift of somatic practice. Soma means body and Greek somatic means of the body. Don't let anyone sell you a somatic workout. They're pedaling garbage. Like, shut up, like bananas. And they're just using buzzwords. Yeah. So MAD's just returning to the body mm-hmm . Right? And so we return to the body time and time again to return to choicefulness. Our brains hold our socialization and our conditioning, our training in our families, our training in our society. Get up, drink coffee, go to work. Meow, meow, meow. Right? So slow down and step into choicefulness, and if your body still says coffee, please. Yeah. And you say, wonderful baby. Sure. Throughout the day, stop and say, do I have to pee? Because you mm-hmm . Probably aren't feeling the need to do. Yeah. And start retraining yourself to notice your biological impulses and heed them. And that's step one, where step 47 is, and then failure feelings in our body. .
Yeah. No, I mean, I think that that's absolutely right. Is that we've all been trained from when we were children, even in school, to suppress every urge, eat on a clock, go to the bathroom on a clock, you know, and, and if you pull all nighters, even if you're exhausted or whatever, it's, so you're constantly telling your body like, what you need isn't important. What I need is to get this done, this paper done, or whatnot. Right. And I think that beyond that, like, you know, a lot of the people that I work with that come to me, myself included this when I was a lawyer, it's like wild to hear how many physical symptoms people have where like your body is literally screaming, it's like panic attacks, uhhuh rashes, you know, like beyond like anxiety and heart palpitations and you know, irritable bowels and gut issues and throwing up every day. And you're like, I tell you something. And like you are constantly just either
Medicating
Or pushing through, like, okay, this is just the way my stomach is gonna constantly hurt, or I'm just gonna be shaking all the time, or I'm gonna have panic attacks once a month and this is just normal. And it's like, it's fine. It's not normal.
It's not normal.
And it, I it's, I know it's a very hard thing to face because then it's like, I need to make some real changes. Like, what is my body trying to tell me? But like Exactly. You say like, just start by listening to the body, like your body is screaming. Yeah.
And our body's allowing us to feel feelings. There needs to be a basis of trust. Mm-hmm . Right? Like, I don't walk up on to strangers on the street and be like, yeah, you know, really vulnerability with my dad, you know, as the eldest immigrant daughter. It's, it's a really complex thing, dude, on the corner. Right. We build trust before we can expect vulnerability. And so why do we not do that with ourselves? Build trust little babies before you expect your body to like really be in the kind of open-hearted connection we all want. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. Totally. And I know that it's baby steps, and we're not gonna change things quickly, but for people who do find themselves in a very triggered state or in a, in a state of like fight or flight or freeze, are there ways that they can practice certain maybe exercises or somatic practices Yeah. In order to help calm themselves down enough to be able to, you know, maybe do some thought work or to get themselves to a place where they can decide more consciously about how they wanna react to that
Situation. Absolutely. So the smartest way to calm the nervous system are the ways that help not distract it, but refocus it. Mm. Mm-hmm . And help the nervous system to remember this is metaphor. The nervous system doesn't have memory. Right? Right. But to help us as animals remember that there are alternatives to panic. Yeah. And so when we're in freak out, our prefrontal cortex is not the predominantly online system. It's not where the body is giving the full gas in the tank too. Yeah. Right. The amygdala, the fear center, the limbic system are taking over in this very animalistic lions, lions, lions, lions way. That's what rumination is, is full limbic merry-go-round of lions and lions and lions and lions. God, why did I say that dumb thing? Why did I say that dumb thing? Why did I say that? Ad nausea. Interesting. Yeah. And so what snaps us out of that is patterns.
Oh my God. It's so simple. It's so easy. It's ridiculous. Yeah. It's patterns. What's the best kind of pattern? Tiny math. I'm, I'm saying the word tiny. So nobody's like, oh, math . But get it. I, I was done with her a long time ago, but now I'm really out. We're not talking the Fibonacci sequence. You're fine. But really just counting your fingers. And I know, again, I, I went to like 20 years of school for this. But yes, , you have to give the brain a pattern and something to count that helps it to realize that you're able to engage in patterned repetitive rote behavior. Because no one is gnawing on your ankles. There is not a lion breathing down your neck. If not, if there was a lion breathing down your neck, you would be running in a zigzag across the Savannah from tree to tree.
Right. Right. There would not be repetitiveness to what you're doing. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. So here's the stupidly easy thing. Teach your children. Teach your old, teach everyone take your paw. Mm-hmm . Any paw. Take your thumb, tap your first finger and say one. And if you're in sympathetic, if you're in fight or flight, if you're lions, lions, lions do this so slow. You wanna reach across the, the screen and smack me. And that's fine. Like hatefully slow. But I promise the slower you do it, the more better it'll go. One New York finger, two ring finger three. Ky four. I can come back. Hatefully slow. 4, 3, 2. Do you feel it? Yeah. One, you physiologically cannot help but be calm. And because you're repeating a pattern, the your prefrontal has to engage. Yeah. In order to to count. You can't count and be fully in.
Limbic it. The math doesn't matter. Mm. Now if you're that checked out, if you're like zoomed out of the room, you're gonna do wanna do it faster. 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1. One of my favorite examples, 'cause people often don't recognize when they're in dorsal, when they're checked out, you had this really great day at work. Let's say your, your boss called you into the office to give you that you did a great job cake and you're can't wait to get home until your partner and you're so excited and you're so happy. And this kind of thing never happens to you. You feel like you just are a constant F up and you're so happy. And you tell them on the phone, babe, I have great news when you get home, can I tell you the great news? And they're like, yeah. And you're like, ah, they're gonna be so proud of me.
And you get home and you say, Hey babe, listen, so this amazing thing happened at work. And then their phone buzzes and they look down and every inner child within, he goes, oh, right. I don't matter. Right. I forgot, I don't matter. They don't care about me. That's fine. Don't worry about it. And they look up and they looked at their phone 'cause it made a noise. And their mammals and mammals have reflexes and things make noise. And you look at things that make noise because that's how you don't get eaten on the savanna. Right? Right. But it's not 'cause they don't care. It's not because they care more about their phone. It has nothing to do with the phone. It's a mammalian frigging reflex. Right. But in those milliseconds, your body went into sympathetic and crashed down into dorsal. Oh right. I don't matter.
And so you go into your old unintentional habit and you say, forget about it. Hey, how was your day? Tell me about you. So you were meeting with micro accounting today. Right. How did that go? Because I know you were kind of nervous and then you overperform you over-function. Mm-hmm. You go into your old codependent, people pleasing dance to protect your tender nervous system. And all of a sudden it's all about them. And not because they don't love you, not because they don't care, they forgot about your thing. Because we all are so exhausted and spread so thin these days that of yeah, you led them away. What are they gonna do? But follow mm-hmm . Meanwhile your brain is saying more evidence. Nobody cares about me. I don't matter. Well whatever. Fine, fine. And then in five years you're barely talking. And in seven you're divorced.
Right. And you don't know what happened. But it's these little moments of disconnection from self disconnection, from other disconnection, from the moment, disconnection from your own safety, value, belonging and worth. Which is the crux of why I teach what I teach. Because when we are embodied, when we are present in our bodies, when we slow things down, we are present in that moment when they look away, we feel that. And we can pause and hear the story and say, oh, hold on, wait. Body, what do you do? Mm-hmm. Sorry babe, my body, you looked at your phone and my body interpreted it as I don't matter to you. Mm-hmm. And that's the story my brain started telling and my nervous system went into being six. And you know how my dad would like never listen and all of a sudden you have all this access mm-hmm . And you're not in the story. You're the consciousness seeing the story. Telling the story. Yeah. Not wrapped up in the story. Totally.
And it's, yeah. I think that's what I've loved the most about pairing or learning about somatic work with thought work. Yeah. Is that I felt always frustrated of like, why am I reacting like this? Why do I get so triggered when my family member says this thing? Why do I get so angry when this person does this? And when I slowed down enough to really just be with myself in the sense of like just curious, like, Hey, what's going on? Like, whatcha getting so upset about, you know, it was really like this. I had to think of myself as a toddler. Like what I would say if my toddler's having a tantrum, like, Hey, you're really upset. Tell me what's going on. Like, what's happening? Why did you get that upset? You know? And just from that it allowed me to sort of just be with like, huh, I am really triggered and that's okay. Like there's nothing wrong with that. This is my body. Like you were saying, sitting with anger. My body's angry right now. Why am I so angry? Even that I feel like just taking the shame off of it or the need to control it, right. Or the need to get rid of it helped lower the temperature a little bit
Of just like,
What's going on here? You know? Yeah. And then have more space for maybe the intellectual kind of exercise of what story did I make this mean? Or like, why my body really gets triggered when I feel like I'm being ignored or when I like my stuff is not important. And this obviously goes back to childhood and all this other stuff. But then I started learning about, oh, this really activates me. And like, then it becomes easier to see the patterns and it becomes easier to be like, oh, I'm outta my body again. Like I am just back in like, you know, my brain. And like you just said, I mean I think it's just really realizing like, oh, I have these huge reactions and I, I don't need to change it. I don't need to get rid of it. Even just noticing it is like half the
Battle awareness is essentially healing. Yeah. Awareness is healing. And if anyone tells you it's not, they don't get it. Yeah.
They just don't get it. Awareness is profoundly healing because it brings in the potential for choicefulness. Mm. We've been doing this thing in my marriage the last two years of each one of us being really conscious of and aware of our tone and our, and our choice of words. Mm-hmm . And we've instituted the free take back policy, like it's a return policy on love that statements. Right. Where the other night I said, I was like, oh, I don't even remember what I said because it's irrelevant. It was the tone. Tone. And I said, bill, shoot, I did not like that tone. And she was like, wait, what? 99% of the time. The other one's like, wait, what?
Yeah, I didn't catch it, but I know that my animal was doing something funky. Was doing a like an under guilt. Yeah. You know, and you're like, oh it's fine. But there's an under guilt. Totally. Or an or like a something potentially detrimental to the relationship. Yeah. She's a therapist. I'm me. You know, we both know that even if the other one didn't consciously hear it. Yeah. The animal, the children within heard it. Yeah. And it can be hurtful. Totally. So it's worth it to say, yo, take back . Let me try it again. Yeah. And that's not possible if you're not. Yeah. Yeah. Embodi.
I think even what you're saying though too, again, why I think thought work is not the only tool you should ever use. Correct. Because what is lacking is again, I mean we pick up on social cues all the time. And so one of the things I hated about where it's like, well what were the exact words this person said? And it's like, I can tell you, you the words doesn't matter. But the way they said it is what triggers me The way they said it was that, are you mad at me? Like it makes me think like, oh my God, my husband may say like, no it's totally fine. But the way he's saying it makes me believe it's not totally fine. And so yeah. I, you know, and I think we interpreting those things, even like you said, maybe I'm wrong in interpreting it, maybe he is totally fine. Sure. And I'm just like, because I grew up in a house where it's like I wanna make sure no one's ever angry and no one's ever mad. And so I'm overachieving or over functioning to be like, make sure everybody's okay. You know, whatever that story comes from. But it is sort of noticing like, hey, even if what he said is not that big of a deal, this is how I'm feeling. This brought up a lot for me. What is happening here? Right. Yeah.
Sorry. So what you're speaking to is posity of voice. I got in so much trouble when I was training at the place we life coach training. Yes. so much trouble because they didn't understand the nervous system and told me I was wrong for incorporating it over and over and over again. Right. Yeah. Like that flat affect we were taught to have. Yeah. I was like, no, how can someone co-regulate? And I remember someone being like, what? What is that man? And I was like, , I'm in the wrong place. Which I was . But anyway, my point is posity of voice. So our middle ear muscle, like the bones move in response to different sounds and tones. Yeah. Like totally. The body's amazing. So you know that sing song voice, that new people who've birthed a baby, like when they've just met that new baby they birthed. Yeah. I have been a birth doula and been in on midwifery teams across the planet. Everyone makes that little coing kind of noise like Yeah. Right. In Senegal, in Mali, in China, like across in Boston like mm-hmm . Everyone makes a similar kind of noise. It's kind of wild.
It's crazy. It's
Crazy. Crazy. 'cause it's coded into our body that Yeah. A sing song, melodic voice is safe. Mm-hmm . Right. And then someone who talks to you in a monotone. So what is the thought that you are having , what feeling did that create? Like it literally signals danger to the body. Yeah. There's studies, ES has done so many studies about posity of voice. Yeah. Tone matters. Tone matters. Yeah. And if you're not realizing why a tone is setting you off, then there's beautiful work to be done there. Totally. Right.
Totally.
Yeah.
Obviously like I still teach thought work and a time time important place for sure's a time. Yeah, for sure. And I think part of it is just knowing that they are multiple tools for multiple things that we all need. That we come from a culture where it's like, I just want some solution and I want it to be fast. And it's like we are these very complex beings. Mm-hmm . That have thousands and thousands of thoughts a second and all these feelings and taking in all this information. And there's a lot happening. There's a lot happening all the time. Honestly, the reason I wanted to have this conversation is to simply like, if people haven't been aware, it's like this is another avenue, you know? Yeah. I don't wanna add more to what people have to do 'cause we're also overwhelmed. But it's simply like, I know for me it's been more of like, huh, this is just another way of me understanding.
Yeah. What is happening. Right? Right. Why am I acting the way that I am? And that allows, like you said, that just that awareness allows me to heal. And just that awareness allows me to decide like what is something that I really wanna work on? And what is it? Just like whatever, this is what you're, whatever this is the way I operate. Sure. It is what it's, sure. Yeah. And it's just another tool. I use thought work all the time in my life. Yeah. And yet I have learned like, okay, there's just some places it's not gonna be used. Yeah. It's not gonna work. This is a place where like I just need to like calm down this reaction that I have and I need to do it physically in my body and I need to learn to be with myself and I need to just learn to process that emotion. Right. And I don't need to change anything. Right. Right. And then there's times where I'm like, okay, you know, I have these like thoughts about the Brisa making my coffee a wrong way and like maybe I wanna change that thought. Maybe I just wanna move on with my life. You know? And so it , there's just these different modalities that you get to use in different ways to ba
Help you
Make sense of what's happening in your
Life. Right. And I would say they both in their very different ways can lead us back towards what I call the essential human task, which is to live life in our authenticity and intentionality from our big open hearts. Loving what we love. Mm-hmm . Mm-hmm . And when we focus on that being our raison dera as human animals, everything gets easier. Yeah. Belittle. The piddly Bs doesn't matter. Totally. Okay. Your coffee's wrong. As long as it's not gonna send you anaphylactic, in which case speak up if the almond milks a murder machine. But other than that, maybe you take a deep breath.
Totally. Maybe
You let it be. Okay. And maybe you speak up against casual racism. Right. Maybe some things go up in importance. Right. And some things come down and maybe that cosmic balance is met in the middle. Mm-hmm . By coming back into presence and being into mindfulness and attention to your biological and energetic impulses. As a mammal. As a toddler. Toddler.
Yeah. I think before for so many of us, when we feel that fear or that freezing or a sign from our brain to stop. Right. Like don't go forward. Right. Right. And I think learning more about how I can handle emotions, how that anger isn't gonna kill me, how the sadness, I can deal with this. How this is what my body does when I am really nervous. It has allowed me to really understand. Of course I'm feeling all this when I'm going after, you know, when I wanna talk on a stage, but how beautiful is this? This is how my body is alive, this is what I want. And so I say this even to people who maybe don't wanna reg regulate on a regular basis or aren't in a place where they wanna, understanding how your body reacts is just really important in everything you do. Whether it's going after the bigger things and making bigger goals, whether it's healing yourself from burnout and all the overwhelm and all the anxiety that we all live in. There's just so much importance in really like being back in your body.
Yep. A hundred percent. Because it gives us the skills, the tools, the capacity to be unbothered.
Mm. Yes.
And what is more effing priceless than being un unbothered gift. It's the most magical thing. Yeah. Right. You just totally let life and then you save the reserve of your energy for the things that really matter. Mm-hmm . And everything else just washes past. Oh god. That sounds
Like a dream.
Especially, it's so good.
It's so good. I know. And that's the thing is like you wanna shake people and be like, you gotta learn how to do this. Listen
To your body. Listen, sit up. That's loving. You know what I think that is? That's loving. That is loving. I think we should form a service where you can hire us and we'll just come shake the heck outta you. We'll just shake you, tell you love yourself .
That could do really well. I'm gonna lie. Yeah.
You run it by legal since you are legal and back to me when I come back up. Yeah. I think that's gonna really fly. Well. Before
That, why don't you tell people the services that you do actually offer and where they can find you if they wanna do more of this work.
So I have a present for your listeners.
Ooh, we love present love.
Who doesn't love present? Listen. So I have for the a suite of meditations, nervous system guiding and balancing exercises, inner child meditations, all kinds of beautiful treats. If you go to victoriaalbina.comlessonsfromaquitter. I know it was super like really original of me, , but ,
We love it.
But if you go to there, uh, you can download this whole suite for free just for listening to the show. Amazing. And supporting you. Yeah. I really
Love, well, I'll definitely include that link in the show notes so people can't write it down. Awesome. And I'm sure they can just find everything about you on that one website as well. Yep,
Exactly. You can follow me on the gram. I give good gram at Victoria Albino Wellness. My podcast is called Feminist Wellness. It's for humans of all genders. You can work with me. I have a six month program called Anchored and a somatic program called the Somatic Studio. You can learn lots more at my website. So I love
That. I will include all that in initial notes. Thank you so much for being here, Victoria. This has been so wonderful, so fun.

Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.