Ep136: Ask Your Body What It Needs with Beth Mielbrecht
What if your body could tell you exactly what it needs, without a blood draw, a needle, or a single guess?
Aimee sits down with Beth Mielbrecht, a mechanical engineer turned health coach and homeopath, to explore bioenergetic testing, a modality that blends cutting-edge technology with the body’s own wisdom.
Together, they unpack why science and energy healing aren’t opposites, why symptoms rarely have only a physical cause, and how Aimee’s own testing experience guided her toward the next step in her healing journey.
Beth takes us through:
What bioenergetic testing is and how it works
Why your symptoms are always connected to emotional factors
What makes a modality truly somatic and empowering
The difference between deficiency and toxicity in the body
Sleep, pain-free movement, and digestion as signs your body needs attention
How to build a personalized health team that supports your unique journey
And so much more!
Guest Bio:
Beth is a Health Detective and Precision Healing Expert. She works with women who are smart and intuitive and done with trial and error about their health. They've heard "everything looks normal" or "it's just age" too many times. They know their body holds the answers.
Beth uses bioenergetic testing to find hidden imbalances, bypassing the guesswork and going straight to what your body is asking for. She resolves health mysteries that traditional methods often miss, with engineering precision and a healer's wisdom. Clients describe Beth as having "Google Maps for your health." Learn more at yourhealthwithbeth.com
Connect with Beth:
Website: https://yourhealthwithbeth.com/
Connect with Aimee:
Instagram: @aimeetakaya
Facebook: Aimee Takaya
Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at https://www.freeyoursoma.com/
LISTEN WHILE READING!
A: Hey there, listener. Welcome back to the podcast. Aimee Takaya here on Free Your Soma today. We're gonna explore bioenergetic testing. Now, what is bioenergetic testing? I had a firsthand experience last year, and it's pretty remarkable.
It's a somatic modality, meaning that even though it's a machine and you know it's got this really awesome sort of futuristic feeling to the technology of it, it's also very much grounded in your body has the answers to what's going on in your body.
So we're gonna explore that today. I have a wonderful guest that you're going to get to meet, and she's gonna tell you all about bioenergetic testing. We're gonna talk about somatics and really about what it takes to heal from a whole variety of different challenges that many of us are facing in the world today. So stay tuned.
A: Every day there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering, remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion, and ultimately from fear to love. Hi, Beth.
B: Hello, Aimee. So good to see you today.
A: Yes, yes, it's great to see you too. And I you just told me a few moments ago, I just want to brag for you because I think it's really cool. You've been on over 60 podcasts now.
B: I have, yes. That is my favorite thing to do. I love being on podcasts as a guest. Cool.
A: Well, I think that's just so exciting. And you know, this is like episode hundred something of this, you know, third season, blah, blah, blah. So I feel you. It podcasting is really fun. And when we get to talk about somatics, it's even more fun.
And I know some of the podcasts you've been on haven't always been, you know, so somatically inclined. So I am looking forward to kind of getting to dive deeper with you today, especially since we have, you know, an in-person relationship. That maybe before I let you introduce yourself, I'll just kind of introduce like how I know you, right?
So Beth and I met through a women's networking group. It was like a very small group, and I was talking about somatics. She was talking about uh bioenergetic testing, and I got to give her an example of the hands-on somatic work that I do, and she was intrigued. And I was like, well, yeah, because this sounds like totally up your alley with what you're talking about with bioenergetic testing and you know, finding out what your body's saying. And so uh I did a couple of sessions with you.
You came to one of my events, and then you gifted me a bioenergetic testing session and like a it was like a you know, and you're gonna have to correct me later when you describe this, but like you work in the kind of like three-month intervals with people, three or four months, I keep recall. So I actually got to experience, you know, following the the guidelines that you had suggested. And I had a pretty amazing experience, I'll have to say.
I mean, it would came at the perfect time, like these things often do. Um, but I'm gonna share a little bit about that story today when the time comes. Before then, would you like to share a little bit about who you are and what is bioenergetic testing?
B: Absolutely. So yeah, I'm I really never thought I would be talking about these things, except for the fact that I've been intrigued by health my whole life, and I've raised my family in a pretty unusual way outside of normal health standards. And that has always been my way of operating in the world. I have a high degree of sensitivity and proprioception in my body.
So that's always guided me. But for 35 years, it guided me as a mechanical engineer. So I have been process and procedure and looking for what the underlying problem is and fixing things and very hands-on, just in a different way. And I really know energy. One of the foundational classes in engineer takes is electricity and magnetism.
I've aced circuits one and circus two, and I know electricity, but I didn't understand what energy felt in my body until I had an experience when my son was an infant. And actually, my first experience with acupuncture when I was in my early 20s. So at some point a few years ago, it became abundantly clear that when people are healthy, they solve problems better.
They're more creative, they're more fun. And I could see it in my team. I could see it in a company that I led. I could see it in a teams that I managed, that when people weren't healthy, everything suffered. And in business, it became my number one key performance indicator for financial success was the health of my team.
And it became so obvious to me that I decided I needed to take what I knew and share it with more than just my friends and family. It became that important to me that we didn't need to build another, I didn't need another project.
I didn't need anything else like that. I needed more healthy people in my life, in my community and in the world. So I decided to become a health coach and do everything that I know wrapped into one method. I call it the precision healing method, but it has everything that I know. And you should know that one of the tools I used to take care of my family was as a homeopath.
So I'm a homeopath, and I've been studying with a naturopath for years. So everything that I do is grounded in all of those old time things that used to work long ago that people seem to have forgotten about, but they still work and they work with your own body.
When I found bioenergetic testing, that was the last piece that dropped in that gave me the confidence that I could do this really thoroughly, objectively, comprehensively, and I could do it remotely. So it sounds like this very futuristic thing, but it's actually technology that's been in development for over a hundred years. And I just have something that's like the 2026 version that is super cool.
A: Did you know that your muscles are holding on to thoughts, memories, and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old, you're experiencing a buildup of tension from the life you've lived. Most people don't know this, but there is a part of your brain that can reverse and prevent chronic tension.
When you relax your muscles, you not only move better and regulate your nervous system, but you also free yourself from the grip the past has over your body. So you can live with freedom, confidence, and enjoy your life now. How does that sound? Join me, Aimee Takaya, and discover what my clients are raving about at YouCanFreeYoursoma.com.
A: Yes, absolutely. You know, I one of the things I just immediately found so fascinating about you is that for all intents and purposes, like you're an engineer and you're like a science-led person. And in this country, not in other countries, there's all this hullabaloo about homeopathic stuff not being real. And it's ridiculous because if you look in other countries, there's, you know, it's part of a lot of their health care for people in France, especially, right?
And so what I found so fascinating is that like kind of how I think about it with some of these more, at least in the United States, like out there methods of healing, right? It's only out there if you're staying in this box that does not actually take you into the quantum.
Once you step out of the box and into like the world of the quantum and the energetic, which we have actually, you know, science and a scientific understanding of, you know, over the last, you know, the 20th century, et cetera, and even, you know, more and more, like, then we can actually see how science and quote unquote spirituality or uh alternative healing, they they're they're right over there overlapping. They don't have to, they don't have to oppose each other, right? Exactly.
B: People say to me all the time, how did you go from one thing being an engineer all the way to being an energy healer? I said, Oh, it's they're the same thing.
Yeah, they're the same thing. The electricity powering our computers right now is the same electricity that's running through our bodies. Now we have the technology to be able to sense the frequency of the organs. And we've been using this in tech in traditional medicine. That's what a EKG is, that's what an EEG. So when you're measuring your heart frequencies or your brain frequencies, we're doing this. Now, how about we just expand it to the rest of the body besides those two?
A: Beautifully said, you know, it's um it's really uh can we start to include information? Can we accommodate more information versus like look at everything that's coming in that we don't understand as something that's other, right?
Like, for example, I think people forget that we have crystals in our phones, right? And then we got all this crystal healing, and we're like, oh, that's woo-woo, but there's a crystal in your phone that's part of your phone technology.
You know what I mean? We forget that silicone, right? Like we forget about all the ways that a lot of this stuff that's labeled alternative is actually very much integrated into our allopathic model, right? So, you know, when you told me about the bioenergetic testing, you know, I had heard of something like this before, but your uh method, and maybe some of this is how you do it, I'm not sure, like because you're such a thorough, you know, minded person. It just felt like it was so specific, right?
And you didn't take my blood, you didn't like, you know, I didn't have to take off my clothes. Like it was like you just got some information from me. And then it told me some things that felt very specific. And I can understand how some people might be just like disbelieving how how could this be? You know what I mean? But I was like, yeah, let's try this.
Like I'm curious, you know. And I remember it told me that I needed certain supplements. And one thing I thought was super fascinating is on the scan, like the printout that you gave me, it specifically said that my muscular system was under a lot of stress. And for me, as someone who works with helping people release muscles and release tension and pain, I was like, that's really interesting because I spend so many hours of my life releasing my musculature.
Like I almost have to do it like more than my clients do, it seemed, you know. And this is where, you know, information that you know, I know you know now, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about it. I didn't have the information last year to know exactly why my muscular system was so stressed out, given that I'm working with my muscular system every day to relax it.
You know what I mean? That information almost seemed like surprising to me, you know, like why would my muscular system be so stressed out if I'm like releasing it more than my clients are, right? The other thing I remember is it gave me some really specific supplements to take, which I just went in online and just picked them up and started taking them every day. And I started taking the the energetic, the homeopathic bottle that you gave me.
And, you know, the shift that I went through in a pretty short amount of time was like one of the most transformative periods for me of my year last year, even though it didn't like solve my problem, which you know, we'll talk about like why, you know, why I went through this really powerful transformative thing and still had an issue, right?
But I really do think that some of what I went through was supported a lot by the gift that you gave me and by the bioenergetic testing and that information that I had that then guided me to somatically, you know, make specific choices and decisions about what I was doing with myself and what I was taking with, you know, my sub my food every day and all of that.
So before I kind of get any further into my personal experience, you know, did you before kind of like having experience of the somatic work that I do, did you think of this modality as a somatic modality? Was it packaged or sold that way to you as a bioedger energetic testing like trainee? Or was that how was that word used or not used?
B: So let's to answer that question, I have to tell you how I found it because I did not go seeking this. I was studying the relationship between iron, copper, and magnesium.
They work as a triangle. If you have lots of iron, but you don't have any copper, your copper isn't opening the doors for the iron to come in and do the job. Usually the analogy is the copper is the general and the iron are the soldiers. And you can have lots of iron, but if you don't have copper and magnesium, your iron is not working well.
And then that shows up as iron depletion and anemia and things like that. And I was fascinated with that because it's someone close to me in my life who was struggling with that, and I wanted to know more. And the foremost researcher on this offered a certification. And I was contemplating do I need to have this guy's certification to get my questions answered?
Remember, I'm an engineer, I want to get to the solution as fast as possible. And I decided that I would just go to his webpage and look at the practitioners he had already certified and pick one of them and book a consult with that person. So I trust some people use Oracle cards, some people use shuffle on their on their um phone with the music selection, and like that's the song or that's the card.
I trust that when I look at the name list of names, the one I pick is going to be the exact right one. And I was drawn to a woman. She's a doctor of naturopathy in North Carolina. She's a master herbalist.
I met with her, and she said, Yes, I will gladly answer all your questions, but you must pick a service. I it doesn't feel right. So here, pick something. And so I have like, ah, bioenergetic testing. I've never heard of that.
I'll pick that. So she answered my questions. That was wonderful. She does this thing called bioenergetic testing. We have a call. And she says, well, this was what was out of balance.
And here I'm going to send you homeopathic remedy that has everything. And she said, Oh, yes, and your right knee, when did you hurt that? I said, my right knee is fine. She said, No, you know, your right knee needs help. I said, uh, I ran track in high school, and like it, you know, it didn't work, you know. And I, you know, kind of fell down. I mean, this was in the 80s, people didn't rush off to orthopedic surgeons at the time.
Like, yeah. So I just, you know, hobbled around a little bit and and then, you know, I was back on the track running. She says, Well, well, your right knee still needed help.
It's like, no way. And I kept asking questions. And this is this beautiful earth woman, master herbalist, couldn't have been more different than me. And finally she said, let me just share my screen. She shared the screen of the software so I could see everything. I was like, oh my goodness, everything that she was showing me, she had no idea how much it connected with me and my body because she was just looking high level.
And like, tell me more about this. And she couldn't, because she's like, I don't really do it that much because I don't understand it. Right, because her hands are in the ground, she's growing her own herbs, she's making her own preparations and tinctures. This isn't her thing. She goes, I don't really do it that much anymore. But I was hooked.
And this system that I ended up purchasing, what is the most comprehensive and customizable? So it was like it was made for my brain. And when I found out the people who made this generation of technology, they're engineers. And it started in the 1940s with a German physician who was not happy with the results he was getting for his clients. So he studied traditional Chinese medicine. And then he said, Well, what if I measure the electrical resistance on those acupuncture points?
Could I tell if someone was getting better or not? And so that was the beginning of bringing electricity and measuring electricity in the body. And then over the next hundred years or 90, 80 years, between electrical engineering, digital technology, and modern physics, I have the equipment I have today. So what it is is a form of digital muscle testing. So your listeners are probably familiar with in-person muscle testing. There's a lot of chiropractors.
A: Arm goes up or down, leaning forward or back. Yeah.
B: Yeah. Yeah. So if you push your put your arm out straight, and then I would put my my fingers on your wrist and I would say, Your name is Amy, and your arm would stay straight. And then if I said your name is Louise, your arm would be would go down a little bit. And I've experienced that.
It's cool. And it depends on the practitioner. It depends on the question the practitioner's asking. It depends on if the practitioner can really feel the muscle variation. Depends on how much time you have in person to ask the questions. And then often those practitioners, the only thing they have to help you is to sell you a supplement, which isn't bad.
It's just, hey, this is out of balance. What can I do for you? I sell these supplements. Hold this. Oh, this makes you strong. Take this supplement. And the system that I use, the quest for, it's a homeopathic-based system. I send text messages to your body. I receive the response, and the response comes back in a strength. That strength is in a homeopathic dilution, which is wonderful because I'm a homeopath. So I understand it more than most.
I understand logic, objectivity, and comprehensiveness. I have a test that says, what is the next test? Because we're going to go where your body wants. Because if I said, I think Amy is under stress, or maybe Amy just got back from a retreat and she's jet lagged, I would have an idea of like, oh, let's guide the questions this way.
But I don't. I ask your body, which is similar to what you do. You ask the body with your hands and visually what you see. And so I was, I'm doing it electronically with frequency. And what comes back is what you need physically and emotionally.
And I capture all of that. So that's my that is how I was able to figure out, not me, not my brain, but my method of inquiry was able to ascertain that something with your muscles needed support. I don't know logically. I didn't use my oh general protocol.
A: Or the story of Amy that you have in your brain or your perception, right? This is like, you know, this in a some ways has just a more, there's a more neutral kind of, you know, the word I think about this is like you're getting resourced. And I think of you as a resource. Like not only are you a resource of someone who's been studying these things for a long time, but now you have at your fingertips this machine that provides this wealth of information. But, you know, the place where this becomes really, you know, kind of there's several pieces to what I would say are like a somatic modality, right?
One, it has to honor the living person as the authority, right? Which this machine is doing. This machine's not saying I have the answers, it's saying, let me ask Amy's body what Amy's body needs, right? And then providing those resources, providing that information. Now, the other part is that the information or the learning, right?
And the checking in, it has to become a source of wisdom and power in order for the modality to be, in my view, a somatic modality. If you get this information and then the um kind of method implies, well, just get over it. Well, let's cover that up with something. Well, why don't you just, you know, carry on, you know, like let's get you some injections and like just make it so you don't feel this anymore.
Let's give you a prescription so that you know, you don't have to feel this sensation, or you don't have to have this experience that's in your way. A somatic modality to truly be somatic gives a person back not only the authority of what is it that I need, but then the steps there are empowering. They're saying you figure out the way that you need to do this to meet your own needs because you know best. And it puts that position in a position of asking their internal wisdom.
So if, say, for example, like I got these, you know, sort of resources from you. Your your printout told me about things that I didn't necessarily know were going on with my body, but when I looked at them, I checked in with my somatic awareness and I was like, well, it kind of makes sense what she's saying, even though like I don't totally understand how this information, you know, came to be. Like I'm not asking, like, how did this happen?
I'm going, wow. I now that I look at this, like it kind of makes sense. What's gonna happen if I sort of take the initiative and I follow this track, right? And so what that looked like for me is I went to a water therapy training, because I my two loves are like the Hanna-somatic movement, Hannah Somatic body work, right? And integrating muscle tension and muscle memory. And then my other love is the water therapy that's very flowing, right? And I I went to this water training because I really felt like, first of all, I I love this work.
I I want to be able to bring it out into the world more, but also I knew it would take stress off my body to be in the water for five days, right? My muscle system. So I said yes to that, and I was taking your, you know, homeopathic remedy or the the, you know, bioenergetic testing. I was taking the supplements and I really just spent some time, you know, for my body to reduce that muscle tension or give my muscular system what it needed.
And the result of that was by the time I was done with the water training, then I went to this dance retreat that I was doing for myself. And I was practicing my somatic movement twice a day during that period of time. And I was taking the supplements and I was just really asking my body, like, what is it that you need?
What is going on in your muscle system that you need to release? And for a few years, I had been trying to turn my sacrum back into alignment. I had discovered, you know, it's from other somatic people and other, you know, body experts that my sacrum was out of alignment, my sacrum was twisted. And so I'd been learning all of this advanced stuff to bring my sacrum back into alignment. And I would kind of do it, and then it would just go right back out of alignment.
And I was so confused why, you know. And so I'm at this dance retreat, and I'm just I'm letting go on all this like mental and emotional level. I'm letting go of all this grief and all this fear of being seen. I'm letting go of fear of like being beautiful and embodied.
And I'm just like letting myself be like beautiful and embodied and like claiming that and like shaking off all of this pain, you know, that I'd been carrying. And during that time, I met with a uh cranial sacral therapist, and he turned, he just very softly and gently turned my sacrum back into alignment during the session.
And I was like, whoa, wow, like it felt so easy all of a sudden. Like my muscle system like was ready to do that, right? And then I stood up and it went out of alignment again, and then I moved it back into position. Like I stood there in front of him and just somatically turned my sacrum back into alignment. And then I was like, wow, okay, like how do I hold this here?
So then I tried. I was like walking around like with this internal awareness, just like, okay, when I'm my sacrum's back in alignment, it's a little easier, my legs move easier, my body's a little more relaxed, right? I ended up like holding my sacrum in alignment and then doing like my whole somatic movement practice that night.
Well, I thought things would just like be fixed now, you know. That's what I've been trying to do for two years is turn my sacrum back into alignment. Well, what I ended up discovering much, much later on, like six months later, actually January 20th of this year, and I have a podcast all about that, is that I actually was living with no hip joint on the left side at all. I had a complete dislocation on that side where my sacrum was turned.
It was turned because what I discovered was when my sacrum was in alignment, the pelvic bone and the top of my femur head would rub on each other. And my body found, you know, this somatically very alarming, you know. So it was like I went through this concentrated period where I took like the information you had given me, and I I basically took it as far as I could take it.
You know what I mean? In terms of addressing the things you had said, you know, and I had this really transformative breakthrough, you know, but it just led me to the next thing that I needed to take care of. And that's kind of like another thing I think was really great to talk about here because you know, you work with people and you provide them with like a piece of the puzzle, and then it's on them to do something about it. And then it's also not the end of the puzzle, you know, it's not the end of their health journey.
B: That's right. That's right. Yes. How beautiful that your body protected you all those years. It was so wise. And yeah, and you went through that journey and you are still going through it.
And it's it's an incredible honoring. I think you're doing it in a very gentle and honoring way to help your body be on two feet and be strong and in the best alignment you can be. But homeopathy, energy drops, frequency drops, homeopathy. It's not, it doesn't put joints back where there is no structure. Like there is a time and place for other modalities, even traditional methods. And homeopathy, I love so much because it always addresses physical and emotional at the same time.
And it is so gentle. But there are still feelings. You could be grieving and take a common homeopathic for grief, which is ignacia. It does not erase the sadness, it does not make you stop crying.
A: It supports the releasing of it, as far as I understand, which isn't always easy, right? Yeah, it helps you move through it. Yes.
B: So there are feelings that still come through. And clients come to me as they come to you, and they are in pain, both physically and emotionally, and they're just looking for anything to stop the pain. In my case, they've already come, they've already tried pharmaceutical methods or other methods that just put a band-aid over the check engine light.
They just like, how can I silence that down? And then the pain comes back stronger, the eczema flare gets bigger, because there's really in my what I see is two reasons for a symptom, and that's either deficiency or toxicity. And I'm identifying both of those, but you can be deficient and toxic emotionally as well as physically. So you're in charge of your health team. You're in charge of putting people together who can help you. And I certainly tell my clients, I'm not a mental health therapist.
I'm an engineer. You don't want me helping you through your big story. I will listen to you, but I'm not the right person. I'm the person who connects these dots. You're, like you said, gives you the information, gives you what your body asks for in form of the frequencies it needs in a homeopathic, but you need more. And sometimes sometimes there is a reluctance for people to go and find more because they say, well, can't you do it all?
And You can't. You need, I mean, I I love working with you, Amy and learning through you and your programs. And yet I still need to lift weights and play sport and do other things. Like I can't get my whole somatic life through through your practices. I need so much more that I enjoy. Yeah.
A: And I think things like homeopathy, what I offer, and it's kind of cute. Like one of my early clients, she called because the somatic movements that I teach are so tiny and soft and gentle, you know, or they can be compared to what we normally do for exercise. She called it homeopathic movement.
I was like, I like it. You know, and and kind of going back to that idea of like, you know, say echinacea in this case, like helping with emotional processing, like around grief. That's not an off switch, you know, Hanna somatics is not like a press the button and your body's perfect now. It's these are things that support at a fundamental level your somatic wellness so that other things can be more effective, so that you can lift weights more easily and more mechanically sound with less, you know, interference or pain, you know, that Hannah somatics provides like a foundation for your muscular system to be more efficient. But you know, it's not this gonna be the same as playing tennis or pickleball. That's a completely different activity.
You know, so for something like, you know, bioenergetic testing, you know, this is first of all, it's really personalized, which you know, some people among here might be thinking about like the kind of omniscient thing that we have with AI now where everybody just tells AI like everything about themselves, and then AI tells them what to do and what supplements to take. They're like, how's this any different? This is very, very different. You know what I mean? Like, first of all, like what you're working with is a technology that's not also trying to sell you stuff constantly. No, right there changes things, right?
B: I don't sell supplements. I think that's a conflict of interest. I will recommend something if I could if finally my husband said, Beth, just tell them where to buy it, please.
A: Yeah, have a list of resources of reputable companies that you think, you know, sell good supplements or something, right?
B: Yeah, totally. Totally.
A: Yeah, no, so it's uh it's really again, you know, why I think of this as thematic is like the person who's receiving this information about their body, they get to be the one to determine what they're gonna do about it, right?
At the end of the day, they're the one who needs to take the action to ask that question. Oh, wow, like grief is coming up here on, you know, the bioenergetic testing or uh, you know, with me with my muscular system, like how can I kind of feel into that in my body and in my life and ask the deeper questions of what does my body need to be supported, right? We've got the supplements, we've got like, you know, some, I guess you could say, like uh suggested roadways, you know, we've got some suggested routes to get there.
But at the end of the day, the person has to be empowered to do something for themselves and to get, as you said, that team set up to support themselves. Because I had, I mean, I've had a team, you know, and somatics is just part of the equation of you know, Hannah somatics of what I've done to heal myself, you know, doing somatics or you know, taking homeopathics, it doesn't mean you don't still also have to like eat nutritious food and like get outside in the sunshine and not have you know toxic people in your life who are calling you names or things like that.
You know what I mean? Like there's all kinds of ways that we that we get supported, you know, kind of going back to the bioenergetic testing. I have a couple like really specific questions, right? Like when we're talking about symptoms, which is usually what people are coming to you with, right? When are those symptoms? Maybe this is something that's very like case by case. When are those symptoms like only, are they ever?
I guess this is a better way to frame it. Are the symptoms always also having like a psychoemotional aspect, or are they ever just, you know, physical, or is it always both? That's my question. This the symptoms. Yep.
B: I've that is a common question. And I will say that so far, it's 100% of clients have a physical issue. I mean, have an emotional issue going on with their physical symptom. It is never just you broke your arm. Because even if you broke your arm, there's going to be some trauma, like whatever happened, the fall or the accident is going to be there. The longer term that pain has been there in your hip, in your wrist, the more that becomes your area of weakness, and the more it gets sticky. And that's where the emotions kind of coagulate. So if it's like anything, if it's an acute something sudden comes on, it's more quick to leave.
If it's been there for years and decades, physically, it's going to take a little more time. And emotionally, there's just more stuff packed all around it. And you never know with someone what the way in is. Some people, the way in is emotional.
In some ways, sometimes it's physical. Some people have to change what they eat first, but often not. Um, a short story of a client who's overweight. She is very overweight. And she said her knees hurt. So anyone, any quote unquote health coach would say, well, clearly you need to change your diet and put on your sneakers and start moving, then your knees won't hurt.
I didn't do that. I asked her body, her body said, we've got these toxins in her knees. Like cartilage holds stuff, environmental stuff.
It holds metals, like it's either gonna go in fat or it's gonna go in cartilage. And her body said, we got to do that first. She texted me and said, Hey, I can walk up the stairs without pain. It's like, cool, awesome.
Isn't your body amazing? And then she decided to go back to dance class and she went to Zuma class. Not once did we touch food or movement.
I never came in and said, you know, we got to lower your carbohydrates. No, it's what is her body want. Her body needed to clear out some junk out of her knee cartilage. Then it needed emotional support. Then that led to her getting off the couch and getting a new job. And then she said, okay, I'm ready for you to talk to me about what to eat. Beautiful.
A: And yeah, and that's a very individual path, right? That's her, that's what her somatic journey there looked like. And I love that, you know, you're using a modality that allows people's, you know, internal preference or need to show up because how you described it with the, well, you just got to lose some weight, let's get you on a low carb, high, you know, protein diet, and like, you know, move. Meanwhile, it's like it's harder to move and exercise when you're hurting.
You know what I mean? Maybe her body, like you said, knew what needed to happen first. So this is a great, this is a great example of kind of what we're talking about here, because the other thing is that, you know, I when I found out I had this structural issue that'd been going on my whole life, hip dysplasia, right?
When it was in both hips, and obviously the left side was like really far gone at this point. But I had done so much emotional processing and releasing, trying to fix or heal this basically issue that could only be fixed and healed through surgery. And I would, in and when I found this out, I would have these moments of like questioning, like, what did I spend all that time doing then? Like what was I, what was the point of all that?
All those hours and all that money and all this stuff that I, you know, and then at a certain point, I just had to say it was all worth it because I would have had to do that stuff anyway. If I had never discovered somatics and I was just in pain and I had surgery, there's some people who, even after they have surgery, still have pain because they still have the emotional, you know, energy in those spaces, and they just collect, collect as you described, they fill up and they're already full.
And even though we did the surgery, now we have the trauma of the surgery on top of whatever other trauma I was holding in my pelvis, you know. So I went into my hip replacement surgery this year in relatively low amounts of pain and discomfort, you know, what I was experiencing being more limited in terms of what my body could do, because once I found out what was really going on, I wasn't like shaking my butt and dancing for eight hours anymore and then doing 40 minutes of somatics and taking supplements to reduce the pain.
I was like, let me just take a break from all that and let my body heal, you know. But yeah, there's there's so many ways in as you described. And some people need the physical thing per first, and some people it's the emotional first. And, you know, I think what you're saying is really interesting about always in your experience 100%, because I'm sure there's some people out there who, you know, whether you'd call it like a blind spot or denial, like don't think that physical things have anything to do with their emotions. What would you say to that for somebody who like just is, you know, doesn't believe that the physical and emotional are connected?
B: Well, we've all gotten an achy neck just from a conversation, just like, oh, like that feels weird, or just nervousness in your stomach. It could be so simple, and you could say, oh, but those don't count, but they do, absolutely.
And when you don't want to get up in the morning and then you're you get out of bed, but then your lower back goes out, or whatever the case may be for you, it's like you're what is your body trying to say? It's trying to say, no, stop, take a break. It's giving you a message and you push through. And that's emotional. When you feel like your body's talking to you, that's the emotional part.
A: Or when you're getting really frustrated with your body. I learned that too. A lot of us, you know, in this culture, especially if we're sporty and we're like athletic and we're, you know, kind of go getters type A, some people have, you know, a sense of not really feeling emotional in their body unless it's like being in love or or being frustrated with themselves, like frustration that my body's not doing what I want it to do right now, or I didn't, you know, win the sports game that I was playing.
You know what I mean? And I tend to think of like sometimes you're experiencing that frustration with your body because you have frustration in your body. Like it's not causative. It's like you're uncovering frustration that's there already, and you're tasting it because of this catalyzing element, you know, in your environment.
B: Yeah, yeah. Where I used to live, there was a yoga studio next to a small health food store that had a juice bar. And so I would go, a lot of us would go to the yoga class, the hot yoga class, and then next door, then go over and do the shopping. And there's this woman who was like an Amazon. She was tall and beautiful and tan and trained for triathlons and was like, could do every posture and was super fit.
And then we would go over and she would be there and she would be so angry, and she would bark at the green juice maker and get her green juice and then be frustrated because she had to pick up her kids and do this thing. And like in yoga class, we're not talking to one another, but she was doing her thing. And then her real emotional side would come out, and she had so much tension. And so all of those ripped zero percent body fat muscles were just it was showing that anger, that resentment. And I don't know what it was. She ended up hurting herself in a triathlon, and then her body was probably just saying, we gotta, we gotta stop this.
A: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's really true. I think injuries and illness, uh there are our body's way of saying, pause, slow down. We can't keep going the way that we're going. We need your attention about something, you know. I really believe that.
And, you know, there's a lot of kind of people within the you know, chronic illness, chronic pain world that talk about holy pain, you know, meaning it's this divine or spiritual, you know, or or deep energetic message from our soul or our spirit when we're having pain, when we're going through, you know, an illness or something, because it's something that's been going on.
It didn't start overnight. It didn't, you know, we didn't just like take that one yoga class and it happened during that yoga class. It's like it's something systemic, right? And so then that that pain or that injury or that illness is our body's way of like trying to get our attention, like, no, really now, like we cannot keep going the way we're going. I guess you have to like you have to like break your knee. You have to have an that's the only way we're gonna get you to stop, you know.
B: Yeah, yeah. There's so much tension that, you know, there's the it gives out. Yeah. Amazing.
A: Well, you know, let's let's talk about this a little bit more. I think this is a great question. You know, when specifically women push through their symptoms instead of listening to them, what is the impact that that has, you know, kind of specific to women? Because women are really, I mean, we don't always realize it, women are tough. We have like a higher pain tolerance than men.
We are, you know, are built that way to be able to like give birth, but that means we can really ignore a lot of our own physical symptoms and things that our body's saying in order to, you know, take care of the kids or take care of the people around us, right? What happens when women push past that over and over?
B: Something gives out. And it happens to give out when your hormones start going getting a little erratic, when it's there's a time of life where the kids are self-sufficient and maybe they don't need you as much. And probably in your career, you're just hitting your peak, and you're like more is expected of you. And your parents probably need you more.
So you're getting it from all sides. And I think that contributes to the fascination our culture has right now with putting labels on women. I don't use labels.
I find I don't find them helpful. But as soon as you don't have the same energy and reserves that you had at 25 as you do at 35 or 45, now we have to pathologicalize it, whatever word that is, patholize it and just yeah, yeah, and just really give it a name and say, now there's something wrong. Maybe you should go see someone about this. And it's not, it's because we are shifting from an other based focus, which is what estrogen does, to taking care of what we're going to give birth to within ourselves, our own creative expression.
And there is inherently a conflict in that because maybe you don't want to make dinner anymore. Maybe you don't want the same job anymore. Maybe you just realize like, I think I would like things to be different. And without enough role models of seeing people doing this and navigating the shift of, I am not going to be, I'm not a homemaker at 25 nor 35. And so I don't need to worry about being a homemaker at 45 and 55.
No, I've been kicking butt and throwing elbows in those decades, and I'm going to do it, and maybe I'll do it in a different way. And so when those symptoms come up, those are messages from your body saying, look at the whole picture. Your sleep is disrupted because there's a lot happening in your body, but also what is your entire environment? And it doesn't mean that, oh, we gotta like reconfigure your entire life, but it is it does mean that it's time to start thinking about what do you really like? What do you want to keep doing?
What do you want to say yes to and no to? It's not just my estrogen, progesterone and testosterone are out of whack. By the way, cortisol and insulin are also hormones. So we just having another glass of wine just makes those things compound. So what is it that your body's trying to say?
There is more to it. The two things I like to use as baseline, well, three, three things. One is you should be able to sleep through the night.
And when you wake up, you should be able to settle yourself back to sleep. If that doesn't happen, don't ignore it. It's not going to fix itself. Something needs to change. If during the day you cannot move throughout the day without aches and pains, don't ignore it. It's not going to magically fix itself. And the third thing is when you eat, you should be able to digest your food.
Without gas, without bloating, without burping, you should have normal bowel movements. If one of those things isn't present, it's probably not going to fix itself. You should investigate that. And there's an environmental part, like in your home life, in your work life, in your family life.
There's nutrition, there's toxicities, there's things, all those things that can contribute. Are you the easy things? Are you looking at um screens right before you go to bed? Or are you eating foods that your body can't digest right now? So there's practical things, but then there's also emotional things.
A: And yeah, I was just thinking about that, like stressful conversations right before you go to bed, or looking at social media that's inciting emotions in you and getting you upset right before you're gonna go to bed, right?
B: Or dinner conversations that are not relaxing. Yeah, put on nice music and enjoy and eat slowly. So out of those three scenarios, that kind of covers almost all of complaints that people come to me with. Of course, people come to me with all kinds of weird things like tingling and numb arms and legs and all kinds of interesting things. But in general, our bodies start talking to us when we're not sleeping, when we can't move easily through the day, and when we're not digesting our food.
A: Yeah, those are some really great kind of barameters to have people check in with and like, you know, like you said, don't ignore it, right? Those are some big signs. And, you know, I think that this world that we're living in and the world that many of us have grown up in, it doesn't really support a lot of the things that we're talking about in this conversation. So I just want to really acknowledge that like the approach that you've taken.
And you taught- you said this right at the beginning of the episode, actually, that you've raised your family in a different way, right? When it comes to health and the path that I'm on, like these things, they're alternative because they're not mainstream yet, right? And that can sometimes make it more challenging just being different, making a different choice than your cousins or your parents or the people at work, right? And it can almost feel like, you know, going out on a limb when other people are like, well, what's that?
That doesn't make any sense to me. And you're like, well, I'm gonna try, you know, going this way. I'm gonna see what happens. You know, this does make sense to me. So I want to just speak to like how in the world we live in and in the culture of the United States, like the work that we're inviting people into can be very radical in the sense that we're really asking them to be connected to their inner experience and do something, you know, self-led about what's happening and what you're offering is an incredible tool.
You know, what I'm offering is a tool. And these somatic modalities are meant to support each other, right? That's what I really believe. It's like you said, having that team, having those that toolkit that you can take from and really, you know, meet your own body's needs ongoingly, not just once, not just like, you know, for you know, a week or two when you're at a retreat or something, but like ongoingly as a lifestyle, right? And it takes it takes effort to do that because we don't live in a world that is like this stuff is normal, right? Totally.
B: And it's one step at a time. I didn't get here overnight. This is my way of life now. I have some decisions that I've made, and most of the time I can stick to them. I make dinner and we eat at home.
When we go on a car ride, I pack food. I like to move my body every day in some way. I like hana somatics. I like doing those movements. Some people look at that and think, oh my God, that's so much work. I can't do that.
It's one step at a time. I'm a child of the 1970s. I grew up eating hamburger helper and wonder bread. And my broccoli came in a plastic bag with cheese in it that would be put into a pot of boiling water in the plastic bag. In the plastic bag. Yeah. Yeah.
A: I mean, I know people still do that, but like to me, because I mean, I did I grew up in hippie, Oregon, you know, like we had certain kinds of standards, you know, like, but it's so bizarre culture because like, you know, yeah, my mom didn't have a microwave, but like, you know, if it was like a really bad day, we'd like go to McDonald's. So, you know.
B: Yeah, McDonald's for my family was a night out. That was like special. And so, so here I am. And I started on a diet of hamburger helper wonder bread and you know, the weird vegetables.
Vegetables came in that frozen box that got boiled up with cheese. So everything is possible. It's one step at a time. Once you know something, you just make a different choice. And then over time you say, oh, this is just the way it is now. And I just, this is how I live my life. And one step at a time, you do that. Yeah.
A: Wow, I can very much relate in my own, you know, in the way that I have my things that I do and my things I've discovered, you know, it's it's part of what I think people need to see and witness is that there is another way because the pull in the other direction is just so strong sometimes, you know, if you don't, if you're not part of a community where people are living this way, you know, or aware even that it's a it's an option to live this way or make these kind of choices. So thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your journey, sharing about bioenergetic testing.
If you have some really confusing symptoms and you're been trying to like, you know, figure out what your body's been trying to tell you, definitely look into what Beth is offering, reach out. There's links in the bio here. Can you tell us a little bit about what you have in the bio for people? Sure.
B: Uh, the best way to get in contact with me is to go to my website, which is your health with Beth.com. You can book a call, but I also have a free quiz.
It's a 10 question, multiple choice quiz that you can do in one minute, and it'll give you my insights into the area of your body that you should focus on. And then you'll get a few emails from me that tell you what to do, all things you can do at home. Fantastic.
A: Yeah, thank you. And you know, on the subject of all of this with somatics and the way that you've been like deepening your understanding over the last year and you know, applying more and more of your own wisdom to the work you're offering others. Do you have any last words that you want to share with us about your somatic journey about what you're offering?
B: Your body wants to heal. Ask, listen, and take action.
A: Perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you, Amy. Hey there, friend.
A: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram at Aimee Takaya and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution. And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics, consider leaving a review or a rating.
And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.
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