In This Body

Why can you understand your patterns completely and still feel them happening in your body?
In this solo episode, Ailey responds to listener questions about the space between what we know intellectually and what the body has learned through experience. She explores why understanding where a pattern comes from does not necessarily stop the stomach from dropping or the body from bracing when something feels unsafe.
Ailey considers how our bodies learn through repetition and relationship, often long before we have language for what is happening. She reflects on what can happen when we repeatedly override internal signals and why reconnecting with the body may require something different from simply understanding ourselves better.
The conversation also turns toward pleasure and the surprising difficulty some of us experience staying present when something feels good. Rather than treating disconnection as another problem to overcome, Ailey invites us to become curious about what the body may be protecting us from and to practise staying with sensation in ways that feel manageable.
Ultimately, this episode offers a gentler understanding of why healing does not always follow what we know. Sometimes the body needs time to experience something different before it can begin to believe something different.
In this episode:
2:40 Listener Questions And What’s Next
8:44 Beauty Standards Stored As Reflex
14:10 Untangling Inherited Body Disgust
18:34 Relearning Hunger After Dieting
21:48 Building Real Space To Slow Down
25:53 Why Talk Therapy Isn’t Enough
29:18 When Pleasure Triggers Numbness
33:34 Making Embodiment Last In Life
40:17 Final Invites And Closing Grounding
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What if the place you feel pain is not the only place asking for your attention?
In this episode, Ailey sits down with somatic sexologist and pelvic care specialist Serena Gold to explore what becomes possible when we begin seeing the body as an interconnected whole. Together, they consider how pain and numbness can carry information that is easy to miss when symptoms are treated in isolation.
Serena shares the fascinating relationship between the jaw and pelvis, offering a different way to understand tension and the patterns our bodies hold over time. The conversation invites us to become curious about what the body may be communicating before immediately trying to make a sensation disappear.
They also explore the role of scar tissue in healing, including the places where sensation may feel absent altogether. Serena offers a powerful reframe: numbness itself is a sensation. Rather than seeing disconnection as evidence that the body has stopped communicating, it can become another place from which we begin listening.
Ultimately, Ailey and Serena invite us to approach the body with greater curiosity, recognizing that healing may begin not by focusing more closely on one part, but by noticing the relationships that have been there all along.
In this episode:
2:57 Defining Embodiment As Home
8:41 Pain, Safety, And The Psoas
10:02 Why Jaw Mirrors Pelvis
18:58 Botox, Relief, And Disconnection
24:06 Head Carriage And Vagus Regulation
29:28 Scar Tissue Changes The Whole System
35:51 Internal Scars And Skilled Support
49:39 Slow Devotion And Real Integration
58:52 Where To Begin With Self Touch
1:03:23 Serena’s Offers And Closing Reflections
You can read the full transcript here.
Learn more about Ailey Jolie:
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What does it mean to feel at home in your body when the world around you does not feel equally safe?
In this episode, Ailey sits down with Dr. Krystal Redman, a self-published author, and a speaker throughout sexual and reproductive justice, and health justice movement(s), as well as in the public health sector, to explore embodiment beyond the individual. Together, they consider bodily autonomy as something shaped not only by our relationship with ourselves, but by the conditions that determine who gets to feel safe and free within their own body.
Dr. Redman shares how their understanding of care has been shaped by both their work in public health and their own lived experience. They reflect on the premature birth of their son while they were leading maternal and child health initiatives designed to prevent the very outcome their family was experiencing. That experience revealed the distance that can exist between what systems understand about health and what people actually need.
The conversation turns toward community as an essential part of healing. Dr. Redman invites us to consider what becomes possible when care is something we create together rather than something we are expected to achieve alone.
Ailey and Dr. Redman ultimately explore a vision of embodiment that makes room for joy. Rather than treating freedom as an individual destination, they ask what it could mean to build the conditions that allow more of us to feel safe enough to fully inhabit our lives.
In this episode:
3:30 Content Note And Gentle Care
5:26 Bodily Autonomy Needs Community
10:08 Care Beyond Capitalism
16:03 How To Find And Build Community
27:14 Pleasure Beyond Sex And Shame
34:20 Weathering And Oppression In The Body
41:57 Joy At The Centre Of Liberation
44:36 Closing Reflections And How To Support
You can read the full transcript here.

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:
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What happens when thinking becomes the place you go to avoid feeling?
In this episode, Ailey Jolie sits down with clinical life coach and former therapist Mollie Birney to explore embodiment as the practice of being present with ourselves rather than constantly trying to manage our experience. Together, they consider how overthinking and control can become ways of creating safety, even when they ultimately keep us disconnected from the body.
Drawing from her own recovery and clinical work, Mollie shares what it means to change our relationship with the inner voice that tells us how we should behave. Rather than waiting for that voice to disappear, she explores the possibility of loosening its authority and making room for what we actually feel.
The conversation also examines the difference between thinking about an emotion and allowing ourselves to experience it. Mollie offers a simple but powerful perspective: thoughts can give us somewhere to stay, while feelings can show us where to go.
Ailey and Mollie ultimately return to what it means to live with greater authenticity, finding the courage to trust your own voice without reshaping yourself to be more acceptable to others.
Please note that this episode includes discussion of eating disorder recovery. We encourage you to take care of yourself and listen in whatever way feels supportive.
In this episode:
4:14 Presence As The Core Of Embodiment
8:16 Patriarchy, Recovery, And The Inner Voice
13:34 Isolation, Grief, And Outgrowing Safety
21:53 Coaching Versus Therapy And Fit
26:52 Psychodynamic Training And Nervous Systems
32:02 Free Fall And Feeling Versus Thinking
38:58 Resonance, Voice, And Taking Up Space
47:49 Reflections, Clarifications, And Next Steps
You can read the full transcript here.
Learn more about Ailey Jolie:
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What if the voices we instinctively trust have less to do with wisdom and more to do with what our bodies have been taught to recognize as authority?
In this solo episode, Ailey explores how cultural conditioning can quietly shape whose knowledge we trust and whose confidence makes us uncomfortable. Drawing from what she has been noticing while writing her book, she considers how these patterns can live beneath our conscious beliefs and influence the way we respond to women in positions of authority.
Ailey reflects on the difference between confidence and safety, questioning why women are so often expected to prove their expertise while navigating the discomfort that can come with fully claiming it. She also turns toward the women whose work has profoundly shaped modern approaches to trauma and embodiment, despite their names not always receiving the same recognition as the ideas they helped establish.
Rather than approaching these biases as something to judge or intellectualize, Ailey invites us to notice them in the body. What happens when a woman speaks with certainty? What shifts when the same message comes from a man?
This conversation is an invitation to become more discerning about whose wisdom we receive, while creating more freedom for women to take up space within their own work.
In this episode:
4:07 The Question Of Female Authority
16:44 Confidence Is Not The Issue
22:22 Naming The Female Elders We Miss
33:22 Neuroception And Somatic Misogyny
37:20 Family Conditioning And Inherited Safety
39:29 Ageism And Women As Threat
44:06 A Body Based Practice For Change
47:03 Ways To Go Deeper Together
Learn more about Ailey Jolie:
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Email: info@aileyjolie.com
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Email: info@aileyjolie.com