Grief In the Body: How to Heal Through Body Wisdom w/ Abby Hildebrand
Release Date: 10/15/2024
Be. Play. Love.
Most people wait for burnout, conflict, or disaster before ending something that’s no longer in alignment. We’ve both done that in the past, pushing forward because things were “still going well,” even when a quiet inner voice was saying it was time to move on. But sometimes, the most life-giving move is to complete a chapter while there’s still joy, ease, and connection in it. In this special final episode, we pull back the curtain on our decision to end the podcast, while it’s still thriving. We explore why completion can be the most creative act of all. For us, it’s been about...
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Most people are either rehashing the past or obsessing over the future - never living in the present moment. The result? Walking around with major incompletions that keep us from connection, creativity, and wholeness. Carrying unfinished conversations, unspoken words, unresolved feelings, and unfelt experiences. And that robs us of something precious…all the incredible things we could be creating right now! Completion isn’t about perfection or checking every box. It’s the deep, often uncomfortable practice of letting go of past regrets, imagined futures, buried emotions, and the need to...
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We think our voices are just how we speak, how we communicate, how we’re understood, but they are so much more than that. They are our own unique vocal fingerprint, our own frequency, and a way people identify us, but it goes even deeper. Our voices are instruments that communicate our inner landscape, and they can be vehicles for aliveness, creativity, healing, and wellbeing. What’s funny is that we talk all the time, but many of us have never really heard our own voices. That’s because our true voices often get lost in society’s rules about what sounds wrong or right, or the polite...
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We live in a world that trains us to focus on negativity. A world that wants us to contract, to judge, and expect the worst from ourselves (and others). That’s why being self-critical is our default. We absorb the script early: that we’re not good enough, not lovable enough, not deserving of ease or joy. Over time, that internal voice becomes automatic, so automatic that we don’t even hear it anymore. Then your inner landscape shifts into wholeness, and you start to notice it more. How do we shift ourselves out of that default state of negativity? Sometimes, it’s as simple as anchoring...
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For so many people, excess weight isn’t about laziness or lack of willpower — it’s about carrying unspoken stories. It’s about living in a body that holds the weight of feelings your voice never got to share. Because when you can’t tell the truth — or even acknowledge what’s real — your body will speak for you. But what if the path to healing and releasing the excess weight is actually about allowing yourself to feel what you’ve buried? When you finally let yourself feel the big feelings, you stop accumulating them. You don’t have to numb out. You don’t need to overeat,...
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Fear isn’t just a fleeting feeling that visits quietly. It hijacks your nervous system, clouds your judgment, and makes even the smallest decisions feel paralyzing. It’s a fog that clouds your decisions, disconnects you from your body, and shuts down your creativity and sense of possibility. Triggered by something unexpected, challenging, or painful, fear can make us feel stuck, but there is a way out. There’s a surprisingly simple but profoundly transformational framework we can use to regain clarity, agency, and aliveness, even in moments of deep uncertainty. FACT is a way to access...
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What if the aches in your body aren’t entirely yours? The shoulder pain, the gut tension, or the sense of incompletion might not just be physical. It could be the echo of a secret held for decades, maybe even generations? Because here’s the thing: families hold secrets, but those secrets have a way of leaking out or leaving breadcrumbs. And if you’re connected to your intuition, you can sense that there’s something that’s not being said. Most of us were taught to look forward, to toughen up, to leave the past behind. But what if that very suppression is why we can’t move forward?...
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We all have secrets, painful experiences, and even childhood challenges that affect us to this day. What if keeping them is what’s keeping us unwell? Our culture teaches us to bottle in our truth, mask our emotions, and manage our image. But the body keeps score, and over time, that suppression turns into stress, disconnection, and even illness. What if healing is about processing these things through our bodies? That’s the lens Katie brings, not just as a psychologist or embodiment teacher, but as someone who’s lived it. Katie grew up in an environment where expression wasn’t welcome....
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Most people don’t think of themselves as creative. We say, “I’m not artistic,” or “I can’t perform,” and leave it at that. But the truth is, creativity isn’t reserved for the select few. It lives in everyone. It’s baked into how we think, feel, dream, and respond to the world. The problem is that most of us were taught to shut it down. We were told to color inside the lines, follow the rules, and keep things appropriate. Over time, we stopped expressing the weird, wonderful parts of ourselves and started believing that creativity belonged only to the professionals. But...
info_outlineBe. Play. Love.
In a world that worships productivity, we’ve traded our inner spark for efficiency and completely lost the creativity that’s vital to flow. For many of us, this disconnection with our creativity goes back to childhood. This is where we were taught not to be weird. Where we were trained to do things in one specific way, and forced to correct ourselves when we didn’t. For years, we’ve heard negative things that have shaped how we feel about our creativity, so no wonder we’ve suppressed it. But without play, coloring outside the lines, and trusting the parts of ourselves that don’t...
info_outlineAs mothers, we truly get to experience the magic and miracle of the female body as we carry our babies. Growing another human being makes us bring attention to our bodies in a profound way.
But at the same time, that beautiful experience gets interrupted in the birthing process, especially when it’s a traumatic one. Because the process of having a baby is governed so heavily by the mechanics and medicine of it, we can lose that connection with our bodies and struggle to reignite it. Perhaps you stop feeling safe in your body.
Or you escape into your brain to make sense of it all. Or you start feeling like you didn’t deliver (pun intended) on what’s expected of you as a woman.
Bringing attention to our body wisdom allows us to reclaim our bodies, but first, we have to grieve. We have to move through the sadness and feelings of loss in order to heal. If we learn to be with grief, our internal landscape expands and creates room for more joy, love, connection and self-love.
How do we heal ourselves through giving our bodies attention? How do we work through the aftermath of a difficult birthing process? In this episode, we’re joined by our good friend and collaborator Abby Hildebrand. She shares her journey into motherhood and how she’s reconnected with her own body.
Things You’ll Learn In This Episode
-Reignite the conversation with your body
As women, society gives us so many reasons to not feel safe in our bodies. How do we reclaim the connection and find the safety in ourselves?
-Birth and rebirth
Having a baby is a beautiful experience but a traumatic birthing process can leave us feeling like strangers to our own inner landscape. How does this emerge and show up?
-The friendliest way to be with grief
There’s a huge difference between riding the wave of grief and picking at a scab to continue the suffering. How do we let the grief move through us?
Guest Bio
Abby Hildebrand is a trauma-informed Breathwork Facilitator, Perinatal Mental Health Advocate, Emotional Transformation Guide, speaker, author and CEO of Wellness Creek Consulting. As an experienced human connection and development leader at a successful engineering firm, Abby thought motherhood would be a breeze in comparison. After navigating the ups and downs of postpartum anxiety and depression, she has dug deep into what creates massive emotional transformation and is on a mission to empower mothers everywhere to take control of their own health and wellness, one breath at a time.
About Your Hosts
Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D., BC-DMT*, is an evolutionary catalyst and freelance mentor who has been a pioneer in the field of body intelligence and conscious loving for over forty years. Katie has an international reputation as a presenter and seminar leader, bodifying the core skills of conscious living–authenticity, response-ability and appreciation–with conscious enthusiasts from many fields. She is the co-author of twelve books, including the best-selling Conscious Loving, At The Speed of Life and Conscious Loving Ever After: How to Create Thriving Relationship at Midlife and Beyond. Katie has been a successful entrepreneur for over forty years. She specializes in turning concepts such as commitment into felt experience and igniting new actions that emerge from the inside out. Her unique coaching and leadership programs have generated hundreds of body intelligence and relationship coaches in the U.S. and Europe. She co-founded the Spiritual Cinema Circle and the virtual Body Intelligence Summit. Katie has appeared on over 500 radio and television programs and traveled well over one million air miles as the ambassador for the work that she and her husband Gay Hendricks have developed.
Sophie Chiche is a seasoned coach and consultant who has traveled the world working with thousands of people and dozens of teams. With a passion for fully expressed living, Sophie coaches, and facilitates group sessions to help people and teams remove what gets in the way of them living their most meaningful lives.Not only does she work with clients to design the life they want, but she's also developed methods, mindsets shifts, and healing modalities to create it elegantly. Born in Paris, raised in Barcelona, and lived in LA for 30 years, Sophie now lives in the middle of nowhere Arizona, where she rides her Harley with her boo, Wall. And plays a lot of pickleball.
Being Current - rebuilding trust in choices