Somatic Rites of Passage and Radical Responsibility with Kimberly Ann Johnson

Transformational growth can be aided by mindset shifts but deeper change is initiated and sustained through the body. Jennifer talks with Somatic Experiencing™ Practitioner, educator and author Kimberly Ann Johnson about how to develop receptivity and activation so you can practice radical responsibility. 

Together they explore: 

• Why embracing your animalistic nature supports a healthy nervous system
• How to listen to and trust your body's signals 
• Why activating your nervous system can help you feel less exhausted
• How your natural body changes can be real-time rites of passage 

Tune into this honest and refreshing conversation about how to embrace your body as a portal to greater intimacy, possibility and liberation. 

Links & resources—

• Learn more about Kimberly Ann Johnson
• Follow Kimberly on Instagram or her podcast Sex, Birth, Trauma
• For more practices, invitations and writing from Jennifer, subscribe to Jennifer’s newsletter
• Follow Jennifer on Instagram or LinkedIn

Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.

Transcript

S3. Episode 15 Radical Responsibility and Somatic Rites of Passage with Kimberly Ann Johnson
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I'm not sure where I lost it, but it happened many times. That fierceness that I embodied as a little girl, my anger, my impatience, my capacity to activate strong boundaries. Be quiet, they said. Just stay calm, they said. Be nice, they implored. Stay neutral. They said, take the high road, they said. My fierceness, maybe like yours, was quelled by a lot of social conditioning, particularly for girls and young women.

And it often made me think it was better to keep my thoughts to myself, to hide my power, to make peace, to say, I never get angry. And in many ways, this served me, the social conditioning, softening the edges, the edginess, as I talked about in our last episode, I could be a good diplomat. I could find a way through tough conversations and find the middle ground. I could tuck away the intensity of my emotions and forget the impact that had on my body. I could survive in rooms full of mostly male CEOs who had a lot more authority and power than me and still find my place.

But it required a lot of rounding off for many years. 

And as we talked about in our last episode, there's a cost to softening the edges of our own experiences

and where we see a lot of encouragement these days is in our ability to name our emotions, to be emotionally agile, or to be in relationship with the full breadth of our own humanity. Without this breadth. Without the edges, it's really hard to take radical responsibility for our own lives, because without it, we have less information, we have less wisdom, With which to attune and discern how to respond with whatever is arising.

Today I'm in conversation with somatic experiencing practitioner and author Kimberly Ann Johnson. She has a deep knowledge and practice of our bodies through decades of yoga, sexology, rolfing, somatic experiencing, particularly, through the lens of women's bodies.

She is also an astute observer of the social field, stitching together our interior lives and our nervous systems as experienced in our own unique selves, with, The patterns of the collective. She's the author of Call of the Wild, how We Heal Our Trauma, awaken Our Power and use it for Good.

She's also written the fourth trimester, and most recently the book Reckoning. with Stephen Jenkinson.

I was drawn to Kimberly's work for many different reasons, but most recently, a pretty provocative post where she bust some myths of what it means to have a regulated, quote, unquote, nervous system. We have great fun in this conversation of talking about what it means to enliven our bodies and to make peace with our nervous systems, including in some real life hunting experiences where neither of us got anything.

But we learned something beautiful about this polarity between activation, and receptivity, and all the ways we're called to embrace our bodies as a portal to greater intimacy, possibility, and liberation. Enjoy. 

Jennifer: So I would love to start with unpacking mindset. I have appreciated your perspective that the transformation that our bodies, minds, and spirits need to undergo isn't just a mindset shift. It's a more embodied way of working with ourselves and mindset gets thrown around everywhere.

And I'd love to, unpack that with you. Like, why is that such a limiting perspective in this cultural moment?

Kimberley Anne: well, I think that we have tracks of what our mind wants, and then we have tracks of what our body wants, and then we have tracks of what our physiology is. capable of. So for instance and especially in a female body as I am, that can really change pretty quickly based on the monthly cycle, you know, part of the cycle feeling really capable and like my body is capable of something and I'm not even cycling really with the moon anymore, but on the other side of it being like, Oh, actually I don't have that capacity.

So sort of like, which of those do you pay attention to? Which of those should you make your business plan from? And in this part of my life right now, I'm going to be 50 in two weeks there's definitely things that even that feel like their sole missions that feel like this is a sole assignment, but that I don't have the physical capacity and physiological capacity to do.

So it doesn't have anything to do with my mindset because it's not even a question of, can I do it or can I not do it? Or. This just isn't really possible with the current circumstances. So it's not a question of me thinking differently about it. It's a question of listening to what my entire system is available 

Jennifer: Mm. 

Kimberley Anne: And I see that a lot. I don't think that it's never mindset. I don't think that there's situations where changing a mindset couldn't be helpful. I mean, I parent a teenager and part of the time I'm trying to help her change her mindset. Nervous system state without being too obvious about it. So she doesn't roll her eyes and think she's my client and that part of the time I am trying to talk to her about Mindset in the way that she's speaking about it or thinking about it But what happens for me is that because I work with birth injuries, gynecological surgeries, sexual boundary ruptures most women have been told already that they just need to change how they're thinking about it and maybe they're telling themselves a lot, I need to have a better attitude, or, you know, I just need to think it's possible, or I need to do more manifestation, and if I just do the affirmations and I'm just committed and I'm more disciplined, then I'll be able to do it.

Do X, Y, or Z. And what I've found is that generally it's nervous system patterning that's influencing those thoughts. And so if you can change the nervous system pattern, then you change the thought. And so the thought is an outcome of changing the state rather than the driver for it. But certainly having certain kinds of thoughts can also change your state.

So it works. Mutually, but my work is really taking people into the animal body, trying to take them out of the social nervous system and out of comparison, out of fawning and fitting in and into more of an animal body understanding. And usually there's a lot more visceral sense of power that comes there.

And then. that mindset becomes less important. It's not even really a thing because you're just doing the thing you know that's yours to do. You're not convincing yourself that you need to do 

Jennifer: Yeah. great. And it seems to me too, and at least in my work, is that the mindset shift, while it can be helpful, and I think, yeah, that that's, has been made, but it's limited because there's also conditioned beliefs, just as there's I love that you're, into the bigger shifts and the, the power through the body. And and so I'd love to go there in terms of, you know, a group earlier this week and, and, somebody I need to learn way more about the nervous system and the nervous system being so much of the, underneath the ocean currents.

And so. Talk to me about your, around the nervous system and what drew you to that dimension of working with people in terms of transformation and why it's so critical to being able to access the power that you're speaking of, especially for women.

Kimberley Anne: Yeah, that's a great question and it's also a very big question. So the nervous system, I always like to start by saying it's a physical, tangible structure. So there's a lot of things about energy that if you dissected a body, you wouldn't see, but if you dissect a body, . You can see the nervous system.

You can see the brain. You can see the brain stem. You can't see the cerebral spinal fluid anymore because. There's fluids usually not there anymore. But you can see the nerves, and the nerves make the nervous system. You can't see the electrical conductivity between the nerves but you can see the structures themselves.

And so, Because psychology is the main frame, it's the new monotheism of today then everything gets psychologized, including the nervous system, so that when people relate to the nervous system, they relate to it as a theoretical framework, rather than a structure that lives inside of us that we can locate, that we can perceive.

That we can occupy and live in. So why the nervous system for me? Well, a lot of reasons. I was a yoga teacher. I was a dancer. I was also very intellectual and I am a very intellectual person. I went to a big college, an Ivy League college, and I graduated first in my class, not from that school, but another school that I transferred to from Northwestern, and I was always re positively reinforced a lot for my intellect, and I enjoyed that reinforcement, but I also felt that there was some part of me that I wanted to be recognized for, or that was maybe more important than that, that wasn't Totally revealed.

So when I graduated from school, I just thought, I just want to go do what I love doing. And I'm just going to move to New York and dance for a while. And I danced throughout high school. I had a great dance teacher and I was not an automatically coordinated person. I actually when I was an infant, I wore, but boots cause my legs were internally rotated.

So I had a bar that was between two shoes that I would wear at night and I had like a big, what they used to call a sway back. I had a big lordosis and so it was very uncoordinated until I was like 11 and I was known for being kind of clumsy and awkward and uncoordinated. So once I sort of got a little bit of coordination, I really just loved being in the dance studio and I wasn't really talented.

I have a little bit of talent for rhythm, but I didn't really have talent. I'd have no turnout to speak of. And I just worked really hard cause I just loved doing it. And I could feel that something else was happening, and my dance teachers were my first Dharma teachers. They were just, like, I'm so, I'm just so lucky in my life with the teachers that I've had.

And that, that was no exception. I just had, like, these incredible teachers who taught the whole person, and movement was the medium. So I decided to dance and then I went into yoga, and of course yoga works the nervous system, of course it does, I mean the whole pattern is in breath, out breath, and moving and coordinating in breath and out breath, and an in breath and an out breath encompasses all the nervous system states, it encompasses sympathetic nervous system inhale, parasympathetic down regulation exhale.

And then I became a rolfer because I wanted to learn more about the body and the rolfers I knew were like the people that to me Knew the most about the body. So I was like, okay I want to go learn this so I can be a better teacher And that gave me another piece of the nervous system was like wow, here is the actual material that is communicating this thing and then fast forward seven or ten years or so and I became a mom and everything that I knew about yoga and It's Body work wasn't applying to me healing from my had all these tools and I had come from Boulder, Colorado, where I lived for five years. And I knew all the alternative holistic bodywork practices and none of it had to do with being a woman. None of it had to do with. being a mother. And I just found myself in this situation like that. Wow. This is sort of bizarre because I live at the hub of an intersection of all of these modalities and dharma teachings and human potential movements.

And, you know, I had done tons of awareness through movement, Feldenkrais work. I'd done body mind centering. I'd done so many things. And then I was just like, I don't know what to do with this body and energetic system postpartum. As I put the piece, I was told I needed a full pelvic floor reconstruction.

I didn't want surgery. I had had a home birth, and that's why, because I didn't want a medicalized transition. And so I just started putting the pieces of my own self together. And in the process of that, lots of other women started telling me their stories. And in that process, I found, oh wow, all the femaleness is draped out of these practices.

So like literally in massage school, you don't touch breasts or genitals. In rolfing school, we work in the nose and in the mouth, but we don't work in the pelvis. And there's good reasons for that, of course, but there's 

also like women miss out more because of that. And so I just started doing that work and I, cause I had friends coming to me saying, you know, my tailbone's been hurting for three years and then I say, well, what happened?

And it was like, I gave birth and then they said, oh, the doctor said after this, I had the second birth, it would be better and it's not better. And then I would work on them and then it would be better and it would never, it would just. Like, because the pelvis and the vagina and the anus are like these miraculous shape shifting organs that are so malleable and pliable, and with a little bit of input, they reorganize so quickly. after I started doing that work, I realized, okay, now I'm in territory that's, like, way beyond a lot of my education. I need to get more skills in unshaming this part of the body and I started having some experiences where like I went and taught this workshop and two of the women out of 12 had what they were considering kundalini experiences in my class but the only time it had ever happened was with me or sexually but I didn't know what I did to facilitate that.

And so, you know, I could be present with them, but I was like, I've got to figure out what's going on with me, that I'm setting this in motion with other people, not like it's bad or something, but like, let's figure out what the mechanism of it is, and let's figure out what my responsibility is in it.

Then I went to somatic experiencing training, which is where I learned the most about the nervous system. And realized that it was just sort of like opening up another layer underneath all of these things that I knew that were working with the nervous system, but now I had, like, a different level of understanding, and it also explained why, you know, sometimes people would get off the table with bodywork, and they would be reorganized, but they couldn't hold it, and then they would go back into a different pattern. And I started understanding how tissues hold nervous system patterns. And so without having skills to get into the somatic memory it's hard to completely reorganize in a way that the system will hold it. It will oftentimes default. And then when Me Too happened in 2017, the second wave of it, I realized, like, wow, we've got this huge polarization happening between what people are labeling perpetrator and victim.

And what I know about the nervous system is that we need to occupy the full spectrum of animal responses from predator to prey. And with this sort of mass Revealing there's not a container to hold this and I also felt that there was a lot missing from what women specifically could do to transform their experience so that it wasn't Like a scarlet letter, or it wasn't the thing that was their continual reference point.

So I started teaching about that. And that's when I wrote the second book called, The Wild Is Based On Three Years Of Teaching That Activate Your Inner Jaguar Work. So, on a practical level, it's like, you know, mindset shifts can work, and they'll work for a little while, but if the nervous system doesn't shift alongside of it, it's just unlikely that we can sustain that, because we haven't really grown our so I've worked on it with people with money, for instance, we all kind of know that we have a tolerance for like our bank account, like we can handle 10, 000 of debt or 2000 or 200, 000 and everyone's a little bit different.

But often people are like, because there's not much difference between negative 10, 000 and positive 10, 000. It's just homeostatic. Set point so it's like what has to happen in the nervous system to shift that set point and I've worked on it with sexuality because some people either can't have an orgasm or only have an orgasm in a certain position or You know, require certain elements, but feel that they're missing something because they can't have a broader experience.

And that also has to do with our nervous system is how much charge we can contain, how much charge makes us go over the threshold. You know, for men, it's kind of obvious with what's labeled premature ejaculation, but for women, there's similar things too of like, oh, I can only really route myself. Or something that used to be appealing is not appealing. And I don't know how to stretch out the experience. I just help people understand the mechanisms that are in place and I think because I had a long time spiritual practice I also the nervous system piece came in and showed me that my spiritual practice was actually a comfortable free state That was a little bit better than earlier free states that I'd been well a lot better than earlier free states I'd been in but it still wasn't creating a level of repair that allowed me to access more Vitality ongoingly.

Jennifer: I love, as you talk, what's coming up for me is just this like, it's like a coral. I don't know. I'm getting this image of this coral reef that's like, just with all these different dimensions to it, you know, and fragile and, you know. squeeziness and fish feeding in. But there's a piece around this wisdom and this work that you're doing around the nervous system and the body and this departure from, and I love this, and I can really relate to your experience around being so prized for your particular intellectual strengths, but that's something you went under the surface.

into a world that is so alive and dynamic, if we're willing to kind of weave our way through all these both soft and really stable structures. And so tell me more about this spectrum of the predator to prey. I just love that it feels like such an honest reckoning with our animalistic bodies, and that there's a wisdom there.

Why is that so important to embody, especially for women in a culture in the democratic West, especially for white women, like there's a particular way of being. You know, as leaders in our community and positions in a heteronormative family that have a gravitational pull.

And what I hear you doing is sort of breaking that open and getting really curious about this broader vitality that we all have access to.

Kimberley Anne: Yeah, so I live in the suburbs, right? I do live near the ocean. I live in San Diego, and I am a big ocean person, so there is a lot of unknown in the ocean, and there are even, these days, there's great whites near where I live. I've never been in the water with one, but, you know, there are definitely, like, dangerous elements in the ocean here, but, I've always felt pretty at home in the ocean .

But you live in the real legit wilderness where, you know, you have real wild animals and real predators. So I want to like Say that because a lot of my experience here is more metaphorical than it is. Like, I've been on a hunting trip once precisely for this reason, to confront my own biases. And I do eat meat, which I didn't for 20 years, but I do now.

And so I wanted to see if I come face to face with this animal, like, can I do the thing that someone else is doing on my behalf? And Spoiler alert, I didn't even see a deer on five days of a trip, except for one that one of the other people that I was with got, and that I went with him to be with.

But, 

Jennifer: Yeah, that happens. Unsuccessful hunts. We 

had an unsuccessful bison hunt this winter. My partner and I. 

Kimberley Anne: And that's part of it, right? And that's real hunting, is not getting anything as well, because we just don't order it up on the menu. It just was funny to me because everyone's like, oh, it's so easy, you're gonna get one. And I thought, oh, I'm so good at quieting my nervous system.

They're never gonna smell me or know I'm coming because I can meditate forever and be in an ice bath for 18 minutes. And like, I literally, it was so 

crazy. I would go out and come back and the deers have like crossed my tracks, crossed my tracks, and I never even knew what crossed your tracks. meant for real.

And, I was like, Oh my God, I cannot even freaking pull. Are you kidding me right now? Like I haven't even seen one, let alone like come face to face and like had to pull the trigger. I mean, I didn't even get

Jennifer: Oh, my God, that 

makes me laugh. I'm crying. Like, I'm laugh crying right now. This is so funny. And me on my last hunt, I'm like, don't see one, don't see one, like, hide, hide. And we're coming. We're coming. I didn't want to see them at all. I didn't want to pull the trigger. I didn't want to be there. 

And we didn't see one either.

Kimberley Anne: Yeah, it's a skill, right? It's a skill and it's a lost skill because I haven't done it. And I did it one time and the people that I was there with, they go to the same spot every year. And They have a lot of experience that I didn't have. And one of them did actually they went home with an elk and a deer.

And the deer, it was a gut shot, which he'd never done in his life, because he was using a different rifle. He let me come with him because he had to, he had to leave and let her bed down. And then he came back and said, do you want to come with me to do this? And so I did come with him and the kinds of things that he was, so in the nervous system world, we use the word tracking. We use that all the time. It's hunting language. You're tracking an animal. It's not really meant to say, like, I'm tracking myself and all these internal things. So, it was snowing, and he was picking up, like, miniscule grain of sand, red things, and, like, showing them to me, and being like, do you see this? And I'm like, dude, no!

Of course I didn't see that! I don't even know what you're looking at! And then we would come and he'd say, Oh, this is where she bedded down. Like, look at the position. Look at how her legs were. And I'm just looking at this like, Oh my gosh. So there was so much wisdom that was part of that experience. Anyhow, the predator prey thing.

Okay, so in English, we don't like the word predator. It's a bad word. We apply it to humans and many females have been the object of predation and don't like it for all the reasons that of course we wouldn't. And so we would never want to be the predator because we don't want to be the thing that harms us. But as you know, in the wild, we need predators and prey. And in fact, there's a relationship between the two of them. And. Of course, we're humans, we're not wild animals, most of us, we don't live in the wild exclusively, we're close to domestication. But within a nervous system, we need to be able to occupy the full range, because that's where our self protective, self defensive capacity comes from. And it's also where our drive comes from.

So, the huntress. Is knowing what you want and moving towards it until you get it and not being distracted and not being taken off course for the thing that's yours. So that's very threatening for most women to hear. Or they over exaggerate and take that to mean like I'm gonna be an alpha female and just, you know, puff myself up and walk around in the world like I'm ready to get into it with someone.

So I'm a single mom, and my daughter was five, and a friend of mine told me your daughter's gonna be a really authoritarian. And this is in Portuguese, so the English translation's not so great, but essentially, like, your daughter is running you around, and she doesn't understand her place in things, and this is ultimately not gonna be very good for her.

And I was so mad at this friend, and I was like, just didn't even like her anymore, but I kind of knew that she wouldn't have even said anything if it wasn't for the benefit, for the good, because why did she need to say that? And so I went to my somatic experiencing practitioner, and I was in training at the time, and I was telling him I was feeling really sorry for myself and saying I'm so exhausted, which is true, it was true, and I had lots of reasons to be exhausted.

And I am, like, I have to be the unconditional love, and I have to also be the disciplinarian. So in myself, this is what I had made out of mothering and fathering, and I have to be both. And he looked at me and he said, and this was in Brazil, I lived in Brazil for eight years, so he said, Did you know that I'm from the Amazon?

And he looked like a regular city person, so I had no idea he was from the Amazon, and I said, no. And he said, you're a jaguar. In Portuguese, ulça. And I was just like, okay. And then he said, look at you, look at your golden skin, and look at all your spots, because I'm redheaded and I have a lot of freckles.

And I was still sort of like, okay. And then he said, it's the females that teach the cubs to hunt. And in that moment, he just fractured this whole construct that I had made. And he gave me an assignment. He said, Go watch Jaguars with their cubs, and then do the same thing with your daughter. Copy what they're doing. And what they're normally doing is, like, rolling around on each other, and laying on top, and showing domination through physicality.

Jennifer: Mm. 

Kimberley Anne: stop talking so much, and And get on the ground with her and show her who's boss. And that's really hard for a lot of Westerners. I mean, I think even Brazilians would find it strange, but I did it. And I could not believe how much my daughter loved it and how much she craved being held down.

Now, of course, I didn't, like, force her down and not let her go. I let her come back against me and push against me. But I let her know that I was in charge without, you know, rationalizing and reasoning it out with her. And so eventually I could have some shorthand where I would just say to her, Que ne ousa?

Who's the jaguar? Because there's a baby jaguar's oncinha. Que ne ousinha? Who's the little jaguar? And then she would kind of know her. I could show her my canine tooth, like just flash her the canine, and then she would just understand in her body. A relaxation and an ease that because I'm like a lot of parents of my generation where I was just giving her too many choices asking her too much about what she wanted because it was only one child and one parent So I was sort of like do you want sushi or pizza?

I don't care, you know, and so she would choose so she was just used to getting her choice all the time And it wasn't going well so you know, I go into a lot more of this in the book because It goes down, not just from the nervous system states itself, but how our connective tissue contributes to nervous system states, how the ways that we move our bodies contribute to those states, how the ways that we breathe contribute to those states, and then there's a way that we can flip that from inside out.

So, for instance, I tend to be very parasympathetic dominant myself, which is that my default is towards slowness. My default is towards More of a universal awareness rather than a material world awareness I can very easily go into kind of Dissolution and dissipation and that has to do with 20 years of vegetarianism.

It has to do with my ancestry being from the north and just Needing to store fat and tissues more because of how my ancestors it has to do with some parts of my upbringing where it was just easier for me not to push against and just to kind of go along with and find another area to assert myself.

It has to do with. Being sexually assaulted as one of my first sexual experiences. So, that parasympathetic predisposition, like right now in this interview, I'm standing. Because for me to be standing just gives me access to more healthy sympathetic energy. 

And I'm still teaching this work and it's been since 2017. And every year I go, is it still apply? Yes, it's actually in some ways more relevant because the collective nervous system is so much more aggravated, and because people are so polarized, and nervous system Agitation yields to black and white thinking. That's when you hear people say always or never or you're either this or you're that and you can't think outside of just two choices 

and, 

my hope for this work has always been that we can maintain relationships with people who are different than us and we can even create repair in situations of harm and change.

Thanks. Often it could be possible that you could even repair with the person or the thing that harmed you. But that's become more distant of a wish. Well, the wish is the same, but more distant of a possibility in the last seven years. When I first started it, it still seemed more possible that that might happen, but now the conditions are even more extreme and there's even less of like common substance To work from when in discussion or communication with people that may think differently from you about One specific thing and then that specific thing for instance like voting for trump becomes the thing that's an insurmountable Difference that makes it so that you couldn't even possibly relate to this person 

anymore. So, Yeah, that's been my interest was first to help women because we are conditioned into the prey role of flight or freeze. And there's good reasons for that. And those are very functional responses. Every nervous system response that we've ever had has had a very good reason for happening. It's been extremely functional until the moment when we recognize that, wow, in this situation, everything about me knows that I am safe, except for my unconscious.

body that's responding in a way that doesn't relate to this 

situation, which is really what most women come to me with. It's like, I love this person, and now I'm in this situation that's so great, but my body is shut down in this or this way, or I'm having this repetitive illness, or I have an autoimmune condition.

And I just don't know what to do about 

Jennifer: Yeah. So beautiful. I have so many different threads, but what I'm picking up on is this concept of flexibility and this flexibility of being able to not get stuck in a dominant response. Your work and similar to my work is like our resilience and our resistance, whether it's to a sexual transgression, abuse, a situation of harm, we are so creatively responsive humans, all of us.

And so that if we can honor our responses, the habitual responses, and know that they're on behalf of protecting, creating safety, to try to create connection where we feel under threat is so normal and healthy, and yet what I hear you saying is like, how can we expand our , our ability to be with our nervous system, to trust our signals. 

How did you start to trust your signals, especially when your mind is saying one thing, your body saying another, how do you know which one is true and how do you guide people in developing that trust so that it becomes, a compass or it becomes the magnetic center from which they can discern right action?

Kimberley Anne: Well, first of all, you gotta give up perfection,

right? You gotta give up the idea that you can just do it right all the time. I'm a human, and then Aging female body that has a teenager living in the house. And I'm in situations all the time that I've never dealt with before.

And I've got a lot of, you know, I'm in sort of the peak of my career in some ways, but with the least physical capacity that I've ever had , besides postpartum. So, first of all, you just gotta know experimentation. Like, sometimes you don't know. Okay, so, my body's telling me I'm tired. Am I lethargic and not tired?

So do I need to get moving so that I can get more energy or do I need to lie down? Because I just actually need to rest and when I lie down am I actually lying down and resting or am I lying down? And scrolling and then am I actually in the environment that's most suited to those things And then you try something and then you find out and then hopefully the next time If you didn't try the thing that you thought was the best The best you try something else, you know that's a common example and actually it's one that I asked dr Claudia Welch about when she came on my podcast and she said that she practices the medicine of subtraction and in a time like this that medicine of subtraction which means just doing overall less and imagining that doing less might help.

But my work, the Jaguar work is actually helping women build activation and hold tolerance for activation. So of course there's rest, but most of the people that I work with, they need to move more, move more in the right ways, so that they build a capacity For more activation, and that's the thing that makes them feel less exhausted.

So like, in the, in the situation with my daughter, part of the reason that I was exhausted was because I wasn't exerting any boundaries. Because it felt too tiring to have more boundaries. But having more boundaries was the thing that gave me energy, so that I wasn't exhausted. And you need support for that, too.

In support, I don't mean like you need a therapist, although maybe you do, but, You need to talk to somebody and tell your friend, you know, I mean some of the best things is just like telling my friend Like i'm just like messing up right now. Like i'm just like not doing a good job I'm, just not like I I hear what i'm saying and I just don't even like what i'm saying But I don't have anything else to say, you know, or like my daughter is yelling at me And I'm like laying down and I know that I should be on my feet, but I'm just like I can't, this is all I got right now, this is like the chops that I have.

So, know, the, the under,

the underlying thing of all of it is, is forgiveness and self compassion and and also nervous system work for me has allowed me to have what maybe someone else called it this, and I don't know who did, but as a platform of okay ness. 

So for me, all of it exists, and like, it's okay.

Like, my vagina is, you know, itching and smells weird. And it's okay. Like, and I don't want sex right now. And that's okay. And knowing that, like, especially in a female body, that it's always an evolution. But one response to your question is also that a lot of people that I work with, they just don't really want to change anything.

All they, they want their body to change. Because their body, they feel, is the thing that's not trustworthy and is limiting them and hindering them and making everything hard. But the body is telling them something. And You know, sometimes it's giving us quote unquote erroneous signals, like it's signaling pain because it's responding to a past situation.

But, I don't know a lot of women that would say, like, Of course our mind wants the body to be able to do more, because the mind just wants more all the time. 

It's just like, And it's more of good things. It's not more like it's just like, oh, I want to be able to whatever, write more books or Go out more nights of the week and still feel good afterwards and I mean I have one of these systems where like I drink like one sip of beer and i'm already just like oh brother Okay, not today.

it's just like so annoying like god It would be so nice if I could just eat junk food and once in a while. And then there's definitely times when you just override it because you go, You know what? This thing that's happening is gonna happen no matter what I do.

So I'm just gonna jump over it and do this other thing for a while and see if that doesn't shift it. In retrospect, but yes, you do need skills. I sort of take it for granted because I just had so many years of somatic practice. I did yoga like hours and hours and hours and hours a day for like 12 years.

It's all I did. It's all I wanted to do. And and it gave me some really good skills, but it also, you know, Deactivated some skills that I had to relearn, like, to have a preference for pleasure. I always just was like, people would be like, well, but do you like that? And it's like, what do you mean, do I like it?

Like, it's just there. Like, I'm just noticing it, you know? Oh, do you like this pose? Or, no, I don't have a preference. I used to, when people would say like, how was your practice? I would just be like, I don't know, it was a practice. I, am I supposed to think practices are good or bad? Like, I just did it, and I wanted to do it, and it was enjoyable, but I had, anesthetized myself out of preference because of the philosophy, and it's just very important to have a relationship to pleasure, a relationship to joy, a relationship to tactile contact in order to be able to do this work, and I think You know, so disengaging perfectionism, being willing to experiment having a long life view, right?

Like, being able to zoom out and not just think about this moment, but think about, the longer view. 

Jennifer: I think your point about, and, and why I was so inspired to reach out because a post of yours really landed for me in this, the idea that, you know, nervous system regulation equals calmness. And that you were myth busting that and as I hear around the experimentation, and this piece around, sometimes what we need is not rest, I mean, sometimes it is, but sometimes we need to activate.

So, break down this myth for us because I think, especially when we are so overwhelmed with the state of the world, there's part of us, as socially conscious beings that wants to turtle and self protect, right? Maybe that's the freeze response, 

Kimberley Anne: Well, turtling is definitely a parasympathetic response, right? It's like that shape would go with that. It could be dorsal and it could be ventral. It could be that I don't want to stand out because if I stand out, I'm going to. Get taken down or I just want to be 

in the cave. 

Jennifer: So this myth that a regulated nervous system equals calmness. Can you debunk that for us? As I feel like that's so critical, especially for women.

Kimberley Anne: There's just so much to say about it because it also has to do with our ideas of what is spiritual What is spirituality look like in our idea of spirituality is somebody who's like calm and has a lot of really kind of a frozen affect and speaks in a monotone, right? Like when you take yoga and it's like yoga voice.

And it's one, one reason why people like me, cause I have a personality and I carefully choose my words, but I'm also not afraid of everything that's coming out of my mouth. And I'm also okay to make a mistake.

Like it's okay to. Mess up, you know, it's okay to say something and then later say, I am not sure that that was true. Or, or I reconsidered it or, know, yeah. I said it in that moment, or, yeah, that's that was probably Ill considered, you know. But specifically this, calm thing is. Well, being calm and appearing calm are just two radically different things. So, when I was super in my I was gonna say intellectual phase, but that's such a weird thing to say. 

But, 

yeah, so pendulation is a, principle of the nervous system. And I pendulated really far to intellect, and partially because I identified a lot with my dad. So, yeah. My mom seemed a little wild and out of control, and my mom's a very smart woman, she also is a very Aphrodite y kind of a person, so she's very oriented to making things beautiful, and to, and family ritual, more kind of a stereotype, typical homemaker.

And my dad seemed a little more reliable and stable, and I, I look a little more like my dad, and I had this intellect, so it was like we connected there, and then I pendulated way away from that, like, okay, now I'm going only embodiment, and only yoga, and of course I applied my intellect, I mean, I love Sanskrit, the language came easily to me, and, and I was a good teacher because I could learn the text and all those things.

But it was really sort of like a pendulation away from academia and the outer world and like what other people think is important, and sort of disarming myself from the things that came very easily to me. 

I applied myself a lot. I had a lot of discipline, and I pendulated way to this other side, and now I'm trying to come back to the middle, and partially Jenkinson has been about, realigning those things. Not that I, you know, I don't know if I stopped reading or anything, but there was actually a period of time when I was just like, I can't read another book.

I was force fed so much literature and information for so long, like, I just want to have experience. I don't want to have the other framework anymore. But so, you know, calm and stillness. easily goes towards flatness. It goes towards rationality. It goes towards you know can, I have a witness from a distance.

I'm an observer. I'm not a participator. And then I can judge from a distance that the things that are happening. So I'm not exactly in the world. I am a little above the world. I, I can see things that everybody else who's participating doesn't see kind of thing. You know, you, said that you were perceiving, like, changing of directions, and I learned this from Moshe Feldenkrais, a healthy nervous system it's not complicated, it's like, you can sleep when you're tired, you can get aroused when you're having sex, you can digest your food, right? Those are very basic things but these mammalian functions are very challenging for humans right now. Birth is very difficult, more than it's ever been for females. Getting pregnant is more difficult. So many people have insomnia and difficulty sleeping and need sleep hygiene, and they're tired but they're wired, right?

Those are all criss crosses. So yeah, being able to fluidly move between states so that we're not stuck in one or we're not just running the same groove. And, you know, everybody wants that, but they think, oh, once my nervous system is regulated, They think that's gonna make them happy,

What I would say is I felt like a lot of my life I was kind of underwater and I'd pop my head up every once in a while, and then there was a time when there was a flip, and I'm above water most of the time and underwater some of the time. But in a female system, there's gonna be so many pendulations. So right now we're hearing so much about rage, right?

There's rage in the postpartum time, female rage, which Ten years ago, no one would say those words together now is like a, common thing to talk about. Well, rage is an expression of the sympathetic nervous system under threat. We pendulate from if you felt like you were under threat parasympathetically, so you collapsed or you froze, and you've been submissive, or you've been internalizing anger to be kind, nice, or sad, Then there's these threshold moments menarche, premenstrually, postpartum, menopause, where those thresholds are like all of our coping mechanisms or ways that we learn to be in the world shift a lot, and in that shift, we pendulate to those stronger emotions, and different families have different of dealing with that.

But to me, every single day we're going through every nervous system state. We're going through social under threat and social in safety, sympathetic and threatened safety, parasympathetic. And we need to be. And also we're having inhales and exhales. And so we're occupying all the states all the time.

It's just, we all have a default mode and we all have a place. Probably that we would rather be because society loves it when we're pleasing and keeping the group together and, you know, Oh, I'll just swallow that because I don't want to deal with, the conflict that's going to come if I really say how I think about this.

And, you know, it's famous that once the estrogen starts to wane, that we, as females, just have a lot less sex. tolerance for things that are not 

Jennifer: and, so what I hear from what you're saying, and I, and I believe where you're leading people, which feels like wisdom, and it feels like in the Messy Middle. This podcast has been exploring this season, this piece around, what is wisdom? How can we know with more of us and how can we orient to the messy middle of our own lives, but also this cultural moment with more authenticity and more flexibility in becoming just who we are in the moment.

And what I hear you saying is just this word flexibility, but also a regulation of a nervous system means being responsive. It means being able to respond with the appropriate energetics with the appropriate words or lessons. And I love that you say, yeah, we're going to mess up that this is all one giant experiment, but you're breaking open a binary that either, you have full on rage or you're checked out that there is a zillion responses in between.

And I think that's where, you know, I was just, I was on Instagram the other day and I just thought, Oh my God, what? place in the world can you be kind of scrolling through, you know, blacked out videos of what's happening in Rafa, which is horrific. So you have a guttural visceral response. And the next one is like, make a million dollars.

And like, here's how we sell this program. And then you scroll to the next one. And it's like a dead body of a child like nowhere else. And so it's interesting to me, It's almost social media and the way the news works is like coming at you with such vastly kind of differentiated extremes and that the nervous system, you almost don't know how to respond 

it's like the Rolodex of difference. It's so easy to check out and yet this piece around activation in order to figure out right response is, is the wise move and to allow ourselves to feel as messy as it is within us. 

Kimberley Anne: So there's a 

that.

I learned in black feminist theory that's called the oppositional gaze. And so the oppositional gaze is if you're a female, then you look out in the world and the images that you see of females, you don't take those to mean that's what it means to be a woman, right? You decide on your own terms and you also, the opposition part is.

This is most likely coming from the male gaze. And so this is a male gaze defining what female, feminine, and woman is. And so I shouldn't take that hook, line, and sinker. I have to have, that's the human part of things, which is like, Okay, I actually have a front brain, and I don't have to just consume this thing that's being fed to me.

And so, that would be completely applicable here. The social media algorithm is designed for groupthink, and it's designed for moral outrage. So, if you think that's just your own response, it's like expecting that doctors have your best interest in mind. Doctors don't have malicious interests, whereas I think that the forces at B that are controlling the social media and AI world is a different story.

But you can assume, first of all, that doctors have the information that you need for your health as a woman. It's very likely that they don't have full pictures of what holistic health looks like. So you have to have an oppositional gaze. Now that doesn't mean you are a militant person, unless you want to be, but that you probably won't get good care from a doctor if that's the case.

In their domain, but it means that you are a mature human being that understands that there are many other forces at work rather than just your personal physiological good. Because our physiological good is an inside game. So if you're scrolling and everyone's telling you don't look away and You know, you need to stay engaged. Well, first of all, that's coming from a sympathetic drive and nobody can tell you what your nervous system should be doing and nobody else's nervous system Like, you can be okay when other people are not okay.

That's part of a regulated system. Everybody can't be dysregulated at the same time. But that's starting to be what's happening. It's just like everybody can't be crazy at the same time. There always has to be a percentage of people that are like holding it down so that some people who are in extreme circumstances can go to the underworld and we can help them.

Come back from it. But you know, I mean my social media feed is like it's insanity It's like every other thing is like a baby crowning I'm like just what in the world like I mean and i've been in a birth room a lot of times and seen that in real life on a daily that's not the kind of thing that you need to see on a daily basis Now other people would really disagree like no because women need to see that and it needs to be normalized But that's not how we normalize things.

And anyways, normalizing birth isn't gonna take us closer to healthy physiological birth. That's not what it's gonna take. If that's what it took, we'd already be there. 

Jennifer: And So what's coming up for me is, and I don't know how you play with this distinction, but there's something around being able to be with the complexity of life, with all the ups and downs in our own nervous system and the social sphere, but without the inflammation, like without the unnecessary inflammation. I don't know if that, if that's just coming to me as you speak around, how do we, how Like, sameness, connection, relaxes our nervous system, and then there's difference, which kicks in the sympathetic nervous system. That's how I understand a little bit around 

how 

those, 

Kimberley Anne: it can, but hopefully we build our capacity so that it 

doesn't. 

Jennifer: Tell me 

more. 

Kimberley Anne: shouldn't require sameness for 

safety. That's how xenophobia 

begins. 

Because someone's different, we can't stand it, and they need to be 

in the outgroup. 

Jennifer: Absolutely.

Kimberley Anne: So, of course there's situations where ostracism is necessary, but I would say that's probably in the 1 percent or less category.

You know, I've said that so much about the Me Too movement, like, of all humans, there's probably 5 percent maximally that are like really on the edge, that are just Serial predators or something. But the way that the pre predator thing, or even the rapist label just gets thrown around, it doesn't leave any space for the gray area where most of these interactions are happening. And it doesn't mean that there aren't transgressions, but our starting point has to be. I cross boundaries and I get my boundaries crossed too. Because I'm a human being and I make mistakes. And have I had mine crossed more than I've crossed? Probably but do I have anything I could do about that?

And, yes, I could have a political position on it, and I do, in many circumstances. And, I saw 800 women in three years in my office. And, almost all of them were like, can you talk to my partner? Will you talk to my husband? I wish you would tell him what you're telling me, and I would say, maybe.

But if you occupy your voice, And you communicate what it is that you want, without blame, without shame, you stand in your center and you say what it is that you want and you communicate with that. Most people's partners change as a result of that. It was very unusual that someone would come back and say, oh, like my husband just scoffed at me or, you know, it's, it's, women take that as like, oh God, it's emotional labor and it's like more work I have to do.

I take that as that's being an adult.

You say what it is that your reality is, and you learn more about yourself. And it is the female body that has more constraints. It just is. We're the reproductive apparatus that holds a child for ten months if it does that. Like, there's no way, shape, or form to even that out.

That just is, there is more physical demand on our body. We are more of a sentinel species. Our reproductive anatomy is what's connecting, and it's also representative of what's happening in the environment. And you can take that as like, some kind of punishment, or you can take it as like, an incredible 

gift. And what I see is that the victim is such a popular place to be. There's so much social credibility for victimhood. It becomes unquestioned. That then, instead of seeing like, wow, like right now, instead of me saying like, the fact that all these symptoms are happening, which are very many, I mean a lot, considering how healthy I consider myself to be, it's like, kind of shocking.

Instead of me saying, I shouldn't feel this way, this is not fair, if men were feeling this way, there'd be a cure for menopause.



Kimberley Anne: Instead I say, oh, wow, I bet there's some learning here for 

me. I bet that there's While something is being deconstructed, there must be something else that's getting developed.

And what's getting developed probably is not valued by anyone, and I might not even know until years from now what it is. I trust enough that I particularly believe that there's not too far of a gap between physiological design and divine design. And so maybe there's some learning here for me.

And I particularly think that's a blessing.

Jennifer: What I love about this is I hear you inviting us into radical responsibility for our own lives and to use the experiences that we have as a place of growth as a place of expansion, rather than constricting into a particular narrow identity or into a sort of a polarized politics Of power, because if everything's reduced to a power differential based on identity, I mean, that's one part of the story, but we miss the invitation for becoming more fully human and becoming more fully embodied In the gifted body that we have.

Kimberley Anne: Let's suppose, just suppose, that hormones are gods and that they come in in storms in different ways and they're not just rough gods and we proceed it as if that were true. Then how might we live? How might we speak? What might we do? It was natalie roy stephens wife that said to me hormones are gods and I Really, there's, I could, I mean, there's so much that I could say about that because I've been prescribed hormones, and there's a lot to say about, you know, so many things that are part of the narrative of women should never suffer, and that taking away suffering is the thing that gives us more freedom and that freedom is something that we know what to do with, and that, you know, is always inherently Good.

And what I see is a lot of uninitiated people talking about ayahuasca and talking about rites of passage But what if the rites of passage is that's happening right 

now? 

Jennifer: God of The God 

of 

Kimberley Anne: This is it. It's here Like that we this is why women have blood mysteries and have blood rites This menopause is its own initiation.

I used to do Wim Hof breathing and ice immersion and I would heat my body up on demand. Now my body does it on its own and at first I was like, oh, I'll be able to control this because I've got a good practice and And what is it to lose control? Because a real rite of passage is that's what it is, you're losing control, and you don't know who you are anymore, and you've got to find something else, and in the interim, we ideally would be surrounded by other people who've been through that passage before, and who On the other side of it, 

and so it's up to me to say, I'm going to respect this time as if it is a rite of passage and of course I'm, as human as the next person. My business is a lot online so far. And, you know, I get fed all these ads about, like, how your face shape changes from a reverse triangle to a square in menopause, and then, you know I live in San Diego where everybody preventatively Botoxes, so, and that's the whole thing also about expressing anger, because anger and worry get expressed through your eyebrows, so then you just anesthetize it so you don't even have the facial expression of rage or anger or depression, and Yeah, I've had to change a lot, and so I'm listening. And I'm listening to both of those things on a deep level. And for me, my body has usually been the thing that gives me big pieces of information when I need to need to shift something.

Jennifer: And what I hear you saying is that hormones as gods, our bodies are both inside us and beyond us. And if we can return to this principle that the rite of passage of any kind of transition and our own learning and our insight is sourced from this soul, bigger body soul, that all the wisdom we need is there.

What's coming to me as I sit with you is just your capacity to interrogate with so much energy, these concepts or frames that we take for granted and for your own curiosity that. has so much tenderness and fierceness wrapped together.

I can feel that from you is just such a gift for this possibility of what it means to be human and to meet our lives as fully as possible and with so much gratitude for the hard stuff as well as, the joy and the pleasure. So just want to just deep bow to you and your work and for receiving that call to be the Jaguar, you know, beginning with that jungle advice with your own daughter.

Kimberley Anne: Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the questions. Yeah, it's, it's hard to have an hour conversation and, cover all the bases and in the age of soundbites and talking points, having a conversation that's not the script is always my preference. And also leaves a lot of room for if anyone wants to poke holes as if it's an argument, but we're not having a debate, we're having a conversation.

A mutual wondering because like I started out with, like, it's not an exercise in perfection or getting the right answer. It's a openness to possibilities of what might be, what might be, if we listened a little bit more, what might be, if we fully inhabited the reality that we were given each one of us, which is, It's so different, really.

And so there's not going to be one right recipe, that's, that's ours to discover. It's ours to apprentice. It's ours to bow to.

Jennifer: Beautiful. Ours to bow to. Our messy human lives. Ours to bow to. Thank you so much, Kimberly. 

So, here's the essence of what I'm taking from my conversation with Kimberly, the liberation that we're longing for requires a more integrated holistic way of working with our vast intelligence.

We can't make change and create new possibilities with mindset alone. The way of liberation requires that we settle and work with our wild bodies. Kimberly helps me understand how we've been conditioned into so many default patterns that show up in our nervous system.

How we respond with anger or a retraction shame or where we shut down. But for me, This invitation to come to know our nervous systems, and including the realm of other biological mysteries like our hormones, means that we can learn to embrace and work with them.

And for me, the essence of all of this is flexibility. The flexibility of a response and this idea that while we may tend to more activation or receptivity in our nervous systems, we need both. Liberation means we can access both of these poles. To do that, it means we need to trust our body signals and Kimberly reminds us, that unto itself requires a willingness to listen and experiment.

I love that she busted a couple of myths that having a quote unquote regulated nervous system means that you are super calm all the time and you have a yoga voice like this, sorry yoga friends, but you have a capacity to be flexible and to flex a musculature, a response that sometimes requires activation and rigor, and sometimes more receptivity and surrender.

I so appreciate how the bodies of animals throughout this whole conversation, her story about the jaguar and how she decided to change some ways that she was parenting, and that the bodies of the animals that she and I were both tracking in two different places, remember us back to our own bodies and the aliveness and eros that are available when we do.

Our bodies are mysterious. And I love this so much our bodies are the rites of passage that we need . It's right here, right now, whether we're in the thick of adolescence, parenting adolescence, menstruation, pregnancy, birth, menopause, aging , and even death. And to me, that's the essence of what Kimberley is inviting us into.

Our bodies, Our somatic rites of passage into greater freedom, greater relationality and connectedness with ourselves and the collective that needs us as awake as possible. Thank you so much for being here on the Tension of Emergence. To learn more about Kimberly's work, books, podcast, you can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes. And if you know someone who would appreciate this conversation, share this episode. We're weaving a wholehearted web based on kinship, not kingship, at the speed of one heart opening conversation at a time. 

To stay in touch with me, Jennifer, and receive practices, radical encouragement, and unique offerings to support your creative emergence as you lead and live, come sign up for my newsletter today at jenglund. substack. com. And if you're new here, I want to let you know that after each Deeper Dive released Tuesdays, I offer a bonus episode on Fridays.

And these are brief, less than six minutes, and are designed to help you apply what you've learned today into the field of your own life.

That's all for now, my friend. Be sure to tune in to Friday's brief episode for a practice. And I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for being here.

I'm Jennifer England. Talk to you next week.