EP97 - The Body Doesn't Exist: Somatic Re-languaging For Intimacy and Self-Connection

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How does the language you use impact your connection to your body? Today, Aimee Takaya unpacks the profound impact of words on bodily awareness, healing, and self-acceptance. 

She shares her journey as a yoga teacher and somatic educator, revealing how shifting from impersonal to personal language transformed the way she relates to her students—and herself.

Tune in to explore: 

- Why "the body doesn’t exist" and what that really means

- How language creates connection or disconnection with your body

- The power of saying "your body" instead of "the body"

- How words influence somatic healing and emotional release

- Simple ways to shift your language and deepen body awareness

And so much more! 

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Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠www.freeyoursoma.com⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠

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A: Hey there, listener. How does your language reflect your connection to your body? In today's episode, I'm going to explore not only my personal history with changing my language as a yoga teacher to become more intimately connected to my students; but the way that you can start noticing your language about your body and about your life that may be limiting you. Stay tuned. 

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. 

Hey everyone. I'm a little nervous to talk about this subject today if I'm completely honest because it's one of these things that I'm aware that even other somatic practitioners, body experts, yoga teachers out there may find this a little bit difficult to hear, this subject that we're going to embark on today. You might have noticed that the topic of this podcast or the name of the podcast is the body doesn't exist. Now, what could that possibly mean? Why would that be an episode on free your Soma that the body doesn't exist? 

Like I said, I'm a little nervous to go into all of this, but at the same time I feel like I need to give some background and some context before I dive into the semantics of this sentence, the body doesn't exist. I started my career, many of you know, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, as a yoga teacher, specifically Bikram Yoga, thought 90-minute yoga practice, right? And we were to memorize a dialogue. 

And in this dialogue, for the most part, there was a lot of very direct languaging. But then as a teacher, you know, you take other people's classes, and you start to pick up on the way other people speak. Basically, by the time I, you know, came around to my somatic educator training, I had been teaching movement for quite some time. And I had certain habits of speaking that were being confronted by my somatic mentors. 

And I was like, really annoyed by it in the beginning, especially because as many of the listeners know, my dad was the one who first got me into Hannah's somatics. And so he was one of my first correctors. And let's be honest, nobody really wants to be corrected by their dad all that much, right? 

No one wants to be corrected in general. And so that was something that I had to just get really aware of was this sense that if I got something wrong, or if I didn't quite understand something, that it meant that I was wrong, that I was bad. And so I took some of these corrections rather hard in the beginning, right? 

And yet, what was kind of remarkable is that my mentors at my somatic educator training, they still continued to offer this correction because they felt that it was extremely important. They believed that it was part of an overall paradigm shift that was going to occur for me as I continued down this road of somatic education. And I have to say that years later, they were right. 

Years later, I am able to acknowledge the transformation that came from not just all the somatic processing and bodywork that I experienced and did, but the changing of my language and the changing of my perspective over time. And so I'm going to get into that today. I'm going to get into what does it mean when I say the body doesn't exist? There is no floating disembodied collective body. 

There isn't. The body does not exist. It is belonging always to a living being, right? Maybe the body could refer to like a dead body, but even if it was no longer living, its structure belonged at one point to someone. And that belongingness is part of somatic transformation, is part of somatic work. 

Our belongingness to our bodies and our allowing other people's bodies to belong to them, to give them back that ownership, right? And to give ourselves that ownership over our physical body and be connected to it and embodied in it is something that our language can accidentally sometimes take away from us. 

When we say the body, who are we talking about? Right? We are encouraging a disconnection. And now this may seem very heavy-handed. And like I said, it took me years to really process this because I said the body, I said the arm, the leg, the chest. But in doing that, what did that accomplish? 

Did you know that your muscles are holding onto 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. 

Let me tell you a little story. Let me illustrate a little bit about how changing from the to your shifted things for me. So when I started trying to rid myself of saying the body or the arm or the back in my yoga practice, and I switched it to your, suddenly I was confronted with why it was so more comfortable to say the body. And it was because I wasn't then addressing a specific person. 

I wasn't specifically speaking to you, my yoga student about your body. And to use the word the added a little space that, you know, wasn't as intimate and therefore wasn't as uncomfortable. Instead of directly addressing your body, right, I was able to bypass the belongingness and it was easier to give a command or to give an instruction for the body, rather than speak directly to you. 

When I would speak directly to you, and I would say your body, your back, I would feel a sense of closeness and intimacy with my students that I was surprised was so alarming or so uncomfortable. And part of it is that sense of confidence in myself and that sense of embodiment in myself, confidence in my body, confidence in the things that I'm teaching from an embodied perspective, meaning that I've lived through these experiences that I'm guiding the others through. 

And I've come to the conclusion, I've come to the full circle experience of whatever it is that I'm teaching that I've actually kind of gone through the whole process and understand it. Saying your body and being intimately connected to what you are doing in your body was uncomfortable in the same way that being in my body was uncomfortable. It was even more comfortable, I noticed, to talk about my body as the body. 

So just think about that for a moment. Giving the ownership of my body to me, and not just speaking about it as an object, was much more uncomfortable. Giving the ownership to you, acknowledging that your body is unique and different from my body, and inviting you to connect with the uniqueness and differentness of your body in that moment, was uncomfortable compared to just speaking generally about a body that exists. 

It also gets us in touch when you connect with your body to the different sensations that are coming up in your body at this moment. And sometimes when we're teaching other people yoga practice, we might just feel more comfortable if we're like, I don't know, going through the motions with them and having them be a little bit detached from their body to do this. 

It sounds like it shouldn't be this way when we think about yoga practice, it should be about connecting with our body. But there's all these little subtle things that can kind of sneak in and they show up, especially in our language, that are not being fully comfortable with that ongoing sensational experience of being in our body. So when you speak about the arm and the leg, you don't have to get as much in touch with the sensations that will arise when you start connecting to it as yours. 

So let's approach this from a slightly different angle here. In teaching yoga, I was often giving people these directions, right? In the first form of yoga that I taught, I was sort of telling people what to do. And people were there following my orders and following along, you know, and there was a right way to do things. 

And there was a way that it should be done. And all of that, you know, kind of commanding energy or forceful energy is much easier to do when you are a little bit distanced from the individual or the people that you're commanding. Kind of like in one sense, the way that we have certain boundaries around power structures, you know, that, you know, shouldn't date, you know, someone who's your boss and vice versa, right? 

That's there for a reason, which is that, you know, their conflict of interest, I mean, there's layers to it, but, you know, that kind of intimacy with someone that you're taking orders from in this way, right, that you're under their command is sometimes problematic, right? 

And so this can actually be a case for why fitness instructors or people who are physical therapists, you know, they may very easily slip into the body and not address your body because it's much more comfortable from that standpoint, right, to not be intimately connected to you as a human being when they're there to kind of like tell you what to do. It can feel much more confrontational to be telling an individual, a person with a unique felt experience to tell them what to do can be much more uncomfortable than telling a generalized, non-specific, objective body what to do. 

Okay. When I started changing my language, when I switched to your, it was scary, like I said before, and I got in touch with the closeness that could be possible if I was able to move through my fear, right, the fear that I was going to get it wrong or that I didn't know what I was doing or that people weren't going to like me or whatever the fear was that would come up, right, that was part of why saying the was more comfortable. 

As I started to shift my language to your, I started seeing that I could be, there was a potential that I could be more intimately connected to each one of my students and much more comfortable in that intimacy with my students. Now, like I said, it all comes from our relationship to ourselves, to myself, my relationship to myself, your relationship to yourself, and whether or not I'm comfortable with myself. 

And this is a journey, right? This is not something that just we are. Maybe some people are more than others, but a lot of times if we've come from a background of pain or mental and emotional neglect or abuse, whether it was intentional or unintentional, right, we are starting from a place where we don't have that sense of total safety with ourselves. 

And that's a totally legitimate normal place to be. As you continue along the healing journey, your healing journey, the healing journey, your healing journey, it still happens. As you continue on your healing journey, which is unique and different than the healing journey, that's some person who we don't know objectively exists, might be experiencing, right? You discover or you may discover that you become more comfortable with other people and their pain and their discomfort and their sensations, right? 

And even their triumphs, right? You become more comfortable with other people in their entirety as you become more comfortable with yourself in your physical body. And so this was something that, yes, I started changing my language. I started noticing like how uncomfortable it was to change my language because I felt more intimate with people and I didn't know if I liked that all the time. 

And then I started realizing that there was a capacity for greater intimacy with my students and people that I was working with and I was really like, you know, allowing for, you know, when my previous language shift and it was not easy because it reflected on the spaces in myself that I was still growing, the spaces in myself that I was still feeling challenged, right? 

And so, you know, I want to tie this back into this type of somatic work that I do because the type of somatic work that I do is a very internal process, right? People are laying down on the floor, on their bed, I'm guiding them through really tiny micro-movements. They're not movements that we would even, you know, if I was videotaping people doing these movements, you'd kind of be like, what is this? Like slow motion, lazy yoga, right? 

It doesn't look like much, but internally, it's a huge change. Total reorientation to what we have known previously about moving our bodies or moving your body, right? That you've previously known about moving your body or interacting with the sensations in your body. In the somatic practice that I teach, you're going with the sensations that show up, you're going with the way that your body wants to move, right? 

Or you're going with the tension pattern, which usually feels less sensational than pulling against it, which we would call a stretch, right? Pulling against the tense muscle is a stretching sensation. And we go the other way in this practice, we go into the tight muscle by going with the pattern, and then we really, really slowly come out of it. And this changes a lot of things. First of all, it tones down the tension in that muscle so that it's less tight, starts lengthening it out internally. 

It starts telling your nervous system that it's okay to let go of stress, that it's okay to let go of tension, right? And all of those things that I just mentioned, the beliefs of like not enough, or, you know, are people going to like me? Am I likable? Right? Like all of these thoughts and insecurities that we have, or that you or I have, right? 

They came with a corresponding muscle pattern. You could think about the last time that you got really embarrassed, right? And you felt shame. Just think about that. What position does your body want to take? Right? What is the sensation in your body when you experience something like that? It's probably a little bit like pit in your stomach. 

It could be a lump in your throat. Your body's kind of rounding forward so you can make yourself smaller so you could hide, right? There's a physical patterning that comes with that. And every time you're thinking a thought of that moment, of that insecure moment, or you're remembering it, right? You're bringing up that physical sensation at a very, very micro level. And so when you somatically release the muscles on the front of your body, when you somatically release the muscles that would pull your head forward, you release unconsciously held patterns there of grief, of insecurity and fear, right? 

Of shame. And as you release these muscle tensions that most of us don't even realize that we're holding, right? Unless it's really extreme, we don't even necessarily feel it until it turns into pain. When you release these patterns, you feel less triggered and less pulled into that experience when it comes up for you. So just changing your language may shine a light on the ways in which you may be using the body or the arm or the leg to keep some distance between you and others to even keep some distance between yourself and your body. 

And it may also be that you need to physically, somatically connect with and release these tensions to actually move through those discomforts, those insecurities, those reasons why you might choose less intimacy with your clients or students. So, you know, sometimes people ask me, hey, how do I tell? And I'm looking around out there, how do I tell, you know, what's a legit somatic practice? What's a legit somatic educator person? 

And I don't think there's one way, right? But one thing that I often invite people to look for is the languaging. How much is the person speaking of your body and my body and using those possessive pronouns? 

And how much are they speaking of a general the body, the arm, the back? And it's not to say that people who are using this distanced language aren't, you know, doing good work out there. But we're, but, you know, in my experience from my teachers, we're talking about a deeper level paradigm shift where they are embodying, truly deeply embodying that sense of intimacy with their own body and being, right? Some people, some people might not be ready for that intimacy, right? 

So some people out there may be much more comfortable in a class where the body, they might be much more comfortable with the body, you know, is how they relate to their own body. It's just not the path that I was set on. It's just not the language that I use, or that my mentors used, or that many, you know, there's other yoga teachers and other people out there who talk about this, right? Even when I look back at my Bikram Yoga dialogue, you know, I would say like 80% of the time, he says, your, your leg, your toes, your back, there was very little the because he wanted you to connect to your body. 

Wanted you to feel it in your body. That was another reason, you know, for his weakening, we could definitely have a podcast episode about like the ludicrousness of Bikram Chowdhury and Bikram Yoga, right? But he did do some things well. Okay, he did. And so one of the things that he did very well is he understood that it has to be an inner connection that one has, that when people are there staring in front of the mirror doing their yoga in his class, he doesn't want them looking at the teacher. He wants them looking at themselves. 

And that's again, part of the connective language. He doesn't want you thinking about the body and how the body is supposed to be some idealized, perfect body out there that you're comparing yourself to, right? He wants you to connect with your body as is right now in this moment, right? So if you're, you know, looking at somebody's somatic education program or somatic healing retreat, and they're using very little connective language, right? 

That might be telling to you that they are still on a path to discover more intimate connection to their own physical body, their own somatic practice, or that they might need yeah, to do a few things to get more comfortable speaking directly to you and your body, right? So I know there's probably yoga teachers or other people out there who are listening who maybe feel like a little bit like triggered or a little bit like seen, but like not in a good way, right? Like I totally get that because it felt petty to me. 

It felt like some petty semantics, you know, and I was insulted sometimes, like when I would get corrected because I again was taking it personally, like it was some assault on myself. And, you know, even as I'm speaking here about there potentially being more of a place to grow, if you're finding that you're leaning heavy on the objective body that like I said does not exist, right? Objectively speaking, there is no objective body. There is only bodies belonging to beings who exist as them, they're living and bodied first-person experience of that body, right? And give them that ownership, like allow them that ownership with your language. 

Obviously, I have an opinion, right? Now I want to approach this from another angle, which is an interesting angle, which is that some people are not aware that they have trouble being in their body, or maybe they are. For example, people who are very psychic, who are very energetic, who are very empathetic, right? 

They may struggle to say your body and my body because they're still trying to figure out where their body ends and your body begins. They're still trying to figure that out, like energetically, because they meld so easily with other people. And so it ends up feeling like the body to them, because they're not sure what's what, and they're not sure whether it's your body or my body that is feeling this right now, because they feel sensations and emotions that sometimes aren't theirs. 

And I just want to say that's super legit, like it is. And sometimes I've interviewed people who are very into the energetics of things, who do a lot of energy work, who do a lot of intuitive work, and they tend to say the body a lot. And I don't judge it as there's something wrong. I don't judge it as like, oh, they're just not disembodied. 

But maybe they are a little bit disembodied, or maybe they just don't know those boundaries yet. And so to them, the body is making more sense to say, because they're not sure what's what. That's something I think that I was experiencing too for a while, and to start to draw lines and say, your body, or my body is a really helpful thing to do. But even more helpful than just shifting your language, which can be like a starting place, that kind of shines a light on things is actually doing the things to get more into your body. 

And I don't just mean like, I don't know, a meditation or something. I mean movement. I mean, moving your body. And I mean, obviously, I have a bias moving your body in a very particular way to get the motor cortex, the higher functioning part of your brain to connect with and relax your musculature out of whatever frozen patterns it's been in, right? 

And then begin to explore functional movement patterns or intuitive movement patterns from that place of having released the unconscious tension. And that as you do that, you literally will be building pathways in your body to sense and get feedback from more and more of your body. You'll be building neural connections that let you know where your body ends and where the world begins and gives you that sense of containment and ownership over your body, because you can feel it, right? And this is again, what I'm saying about it being a process. 

And it's not just a mental process where we change our language, right? Or we notice things, we notice stuff about ourselves, we notice things and analyze it. It's not just an emotional process where we get in touch with the feelings and the beliefs that we're being held. It's also a literal physical process of building out the circuitry in our system and getting information back from that circuitry that helps us create better boundaries. And that's really, you know, in some ways, what the my and your body does for you and it does for your students is it creates better boundaries. Boundaries that say your body belongs to you, you choose what to do with it. 

You don't want to do what I just said in this yoga class. You take care of that. It's your body. You do with it what you want. Whereas it's the body, right? They may not even really be connecting to their inner experience. They're just trying to get that body that they're in, that body that doesn't listen to them, that body that's struggling. 

They're just trying to get it to the next level. Just trying to get it to the next thing versus feeling and experiencing the feedback that their body or right that your body is giving you. So it's a journey and there's layers to it. There's the spiritual layer of knowing that sometimes you might feel or experience things in your body that don't really belong to you, meaning you didn't generate them. I think a lot of us experience that. We experience the stress of other people. We experience other people's nervous systems affecting our nervous system. Co-regulation works both ways. 

Co-dysregulation. And so if you're listening to this in your yoga teacher, just start listening to yourself and ask why is it so easy for me to say the body is just a habit? And what does it feel like when I start saying you're and my when I start giving those boundaries and those sense of belonging and agency to other people's bodies in the room, to myself even, because the body doesn't exist. The arm. There's no floating arm that is without sensing and feeling of a particular being that is inhabiting that arm. 

There is no arm that's just floating out there disconnected from a spine and from someone's brain who has a particular life history and who has a unique wiring. When we start to use connective language like you're and my, it's really quite beautiful because we get in touch with the uniqueness and the specialness and the individual moment-to-moment shifting that is going on in every bee. It's going on in every tree. 

It's going on in every cat or dog. It's going on in every insect. There's a moment-to-moment awareness that is constantly shifting and evolving. And this movement practice that I talk so much about, it has a huge potential to get you in touch with that moment-to-moment awareness and intuition through slowing everything down to be able to hear the quiet, the minuscule, the tiny, and the subtle. 

Right? And some people are already tuned into this way of being. Some people aren't. It's still your birthright. It's still a part of your brain that you can choose to develop and use. And I think that it's your right to know that it exists. Just like maybe it's your right to know that there's nobody. There is only your body and my body. And then of course, there's things we know objectively about human bodies. Right? But when we're giving directions or instructions or talking about an experience, it's always belonging to someone. 

Right? So, let's hear your feedback. I would love to hear from you on this topic. I know it's like a little edgy and controversial and not everybody is like stoked to hear, you know, a correction about how they speak. 

Right? I wasn't either. And maybe it's an invitation to just explore, you know, what would come up for you if you shifted your language, what comes up and why might it be easier or more comfortable to say the body because it could be different for you than the reasons were for me. And I'm curious because you have a unique and different perspective than I do. And that's beautiful. And so again, curiosity and wonder at why we have these differing experiences. 

Right? I'll tell you why because we have uniquely different wiring in our physical bodies and we have different environments that we were raised in and different food that we ate and different genetics and different, you know, ways that we are perceiving things in a moment-to-moment way. And while there may be similarities, much more similarities than there are differences, there are absolutely our differences too. And all of that is really wonderful and magical if we can honor it. 

Right? And if we can allow there to be the proper boundaries in place and the individual agency of each of us, right, to have that sovereign experience, to have that be part of what we're allowed to experience as human beings, what you are allowed to experience with, I am allowed to experience. So I invite you to send me an Instagram message. Tell me what you thought of this podcast. Tell me what you thought of this language situation. 

Right? And if maybe you start playing with it and if you're a yoga teacher, do a whole class where you say you're instead of the and notice how it feels, notice energetically how it feels different in your class. I would love to hear about it. Okay, everybody, until next time. Bye. 

Hey there, friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram @AimeeTakaya 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.