EP41 From Skeptic to Practitioner: What Is BodyTalk
Ever tried explaining BodyTalk and felt like you were babbling about nonsense? Same. In this episode, Heather does her best to explain what BodyTalk actually is — without the jargon, the woo-woo overwhelm, or the “trust me, it works” hand-waving.
You’ll hear how she went from skeptical engineer (“what even was that session?”) to longtime practitioner, and why BodyTalk remains one of the most powerful tools she uses with clients today.
She digs into:
Why BodyTalk feels weird (spoiler—>its because it is)
The “boxes in a dark room” analogy that helps explain it
How BodyTalk helps you hear what your body’s been trying to tell you
Why curiosity is still the key to it all
If you’ve ever wondered what BodyTalk is or why you'd even want to try it, this episode hopes to address that in a way that actually makes sense.
Sometimes you just want to read, so here’s a transcript:
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Hello and welcome back to this week's episode of the Wellness Ninja Podcast. I am delighted to be back in your ear holes. I am your host Heather Lindholm.
And I like to get in your ear holes and get some new information to you. And this comes out on Friday, but whatever day of the week that you listen to, I hope that it helps you in the week ahead. I have just finished up the four part mini series on the vibe method that I use with my coaching clients.
And today we're going to kind of dive deeper into one little aspect of it. And that is try to answer the question that I am asked all the time. And I give terrible answers, which is Heather, what is body talk? And I think I struggle with the answer to this for a few reasons, which I think will become clear in the episode today.
Let's start at the beginning. No, like I didn't start out going like, hey, little girl, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be a body talk practitioner. That wasn't a thing, right? For those of you that knows me, my background is actually in engineering.
And I worked as a professional engineer for over a decade. And I discovered body talk as like a person who got body talk. I went to a practitioner and received sessions.
And if you've ever heard me tell my story before, you know that it always starts with, I thought that the woman who did it was kind of a quack. I walked out of my first session going, what the fuck was that? That was weird. She said some things that made no sense.
She said some things that made a lot of sense. And I was like, how did you know that? And I sort of patted myself on the back and was like, oh, good for you, Heather, for trying new things to improve your health and wellness. And, you know, that was something different.
So good for you. And then I started to feel better. And I was like, this is confusing.
I haven't really actually changed anything in my diet or my lifestyle. I feel just as, you know, like my lifestyle stresses are still exactly the same, but I am starting to feel better. And this was sort of like in the early days of being a parent.
And it was a little bit of a cliche moment of, I didn't realize that I'd sort of been living my life in the gray and just sort of getting through my day. After a few body talk sessions, I was like, oh, it feels as if the world is becoming more colorful and less gray. And I'm more present in my life in a positive way.
These were not the things that I went to get help with for body talk. I went for like digestive issues and fatigue issues. And while it did help with those things, eventually, the first things I noticed was more of my mental health improving, my energetic health improving, although at the time I don't think I could have told you that it was my energetic health because I didn't really have a full understanding of that.
And, you know, I experienced these benefits, but then people would ask me, like, what is body talk? And I'd be like, I don't know. I just go. This lady like taps on me.
She does different things. She says different things. And then I, you know, eventually you start feeling better.
And that drove my engineering brain absolutely freaking bananas. And I was sort of not obsessed. I hate that word.
I'm so obsessed. But I became really fixated on learning body talk. Had absolutely no intention of making that my career.
I had a career. Remember, you guys, like I was an engineer. It's a good, good career to have.
I recommend it for anyone who's interested in that. I was not looking to switch careers. I just love learning.
I love learning in the health area. And I wanted to understand this system that I was getting such good benefits from. And so when my second daughter was still a baby and I was on that leave, I went to my first body shop course.
And to say I got hooked is an understatement. I mean, I eventually became certified, left my engineering career, and now do this work as my, I guess, second phase of life career. The interesting part about it, though, is that after doing body talk for a decade, being a practitioner of it, I still actually have difficulty explaining what it is.
I think that that's because there's enough science in it for me to like really get behind it. But there's enough not science in it yet, like science hasn't cut up to a lot of the ideas of it, that it makes it a little tricky to explain to somebody. I'm going to do my darndest today to give you the explanation, or at least give you the explanation that I give to somebody who's first coming in for their first body talk session.
Now, I do want you to remember that I started out as an engineer, then I became a body talk practitioner, and then I added in health and life coaching. And I did that because what I was finding was people were coming to get body talk sessions, and then they were getting back into their regular life, and they were like, I don't know what to do in my regular life to support these changes. And they would end up sort of backsliding.
And also, while I love body talk, a lot of people treat it like a, hey, practitioner, come and fix me. And that's not really what it's supposed to be about. It's supposed to be a collaborative healing and really trusting in your own body's wisdom and ability for healing.
So the coaching aspect, which I'm going to talk in another episode, became very important to really holistically support people and kind of get us out of these stuck ruts that pull us away from the healing that we start in the body talk session. Okay, so let's get into this. So I got body talk as just a person who wanted to improve their health.
I got benefits. Then I became obsessed with learning it. Then I became a certified practitioner, and then I've been doing it for over 10 years now.
And the interesting thing about body talk is it's a methodology that pulls in a bunch of methodologies. And it is a continuously growing learning system. It's not like, oh, here's a system and now you're done.
There's literally parts built into it for new information, new understanding and new techniques to be introduced at any time. And I find that to be one of my favorite things about it, because it doesn't make sense to me that we would be like this ABC works and then that's it. And we do that forever when like human consciousness and understanding of things is constantly evolving and changing.
And so I feel that our methods in which we support ourselves have to change and grow with that understanding. So I enjoy a system that allows for growth and change and new understanding. And certainly the practitioner I am today is not the same practitioner I was three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, because my own understanding and knowledge has changed.
Some for the better, some for the worst in the parabenopause age, but mostly for the better. And what body talk did was introduce me to the idea of symbolism in the body, that where and how we feel things is not random and that it's full of information for us. And we can start take that information and start to not just understand things better, which in itself is really helpful, but it also allows us to address things differently.
In the body talk world, it's often referred to as like the consciousness of the body mind. It's often referred to as consciousness medicine. I find that a bit of a confusing word for a lot of people.
So I usually simplify it and it is simplifying it to using the word symbolism, because I think we generally speaking, we have a better understanding of that word than the word consciousness. In today's discussion, I do, I always have to have like a, you know, like not a warning, but like a hey, please remember that it's never my intention to make light of serious illness, serious injury, any sort of like serious health or life issue that you're having. And sometimes the messaging of body talk can be confused as where it's about blame, it's all about your fault and that's not what it is.
It's about gaining more understanding and being able to address things different ways. But I do understand that when we start talking about like the way we feel things has meaning behind it and there's messaging there, we can start to feel like, oh, I'm feeling this because I'm thinking that, or I have this problem because I did something like that's not what I'm talking about. And I just want to make that really clear because we're all, I genuinely believe that we're all doing the best that we can with the information that we have and that it can be very overwhelming to work our way through the different layers of health.
So that's always my caveat to anything, especially in a podcast where I'm speaking to like the general masses. I'm not speaking to an individual, an individual's problems. Everybody's life is, you know, so unique to them.
It's another reason why I like body talk because we're treating people as an individual, a unique individual, and we're not giving prescriptive, oh, X, Y, Z symptoms. Okay, well, then it's this. We really take a very unique personalized approach.
Same with this as in with coaching. While I do have my vibe method that uses the body talk system, those are just tools and how I use those tools and the combination thereof is unique for every person. Okay, so I always just want to preference things with that.
When people ask me what body talk is and how it works, like I said, I still struggle to answer that even over it after a decade of this work. So let's address the elephant in the room first. Body talk is fucking weird, guys.
It just is. If you go to a practitioner or you even do it through like a Zoom call online, they're doing muscle feedback. You're tapping on your head.
You're tapping on different parts of your body. You're holding different parts of your body. Different things are being said.
It's just weird. It's unusual. It feels strange.
That's the truth of it. That's part of why I walked out of that first session going, well, that lady was a quack. She wasn't a quack.
She was a very skilled practitioner and she still does it to this day. And she's awesome. I just want that like on the table.
I know it's weird, but there's a lot of things that are weird, guys, and they work. That's also just reality and truth. I think it feels even more strange again, like I said earlier, because there's enough science to it for a lot of it to make sense.
But there's also a lot that science hasn't kind of come up, like caught up to, to have like sort of scientific proof. And also because it is pulling from all different philosophies. And so there's different concepts and ideas.
So my best answer is that it's a system that helps you start to actually hear the messages of your body. It's a collection of techniques that pull from a lot of different backgrounds, including Chinese medicine, all the way to modern understanding of biology and psychology, and everything in between. We live in a world that has encouraged us to ignore our body's messages.
Like tired? Have some caffeine. Headache? Take a pill. Can't sleep? Take a different pill.
We just want to take the way we feel. If we feel a way we don't want to, we try to find the quickest solution to not feel that. That's not a terrible thing.
Honestly, sometimes band-aids are needed, but it's not getting at the root cause. You're literally just putting a band-aid on things so that you don't have to feel in that moment. A harder but more effective method is to start diving into what are these messages.
The body cannot send you an email. It would be really great if it could. It can only give you feedback.
How you feel is feedback in terms of physical sensations, mental thoughts, mental sensations, emotional sensations. That's feedback from your body. That's why it's complicated.
Our understanding of it might not be there. Our skill set in actually fully feeling the way that we feel might not be there, especially if we've lived in a world or a family or a circumstance that has really needed us to shut down those feelings for survival. It makes it tricky to find that root cause for things.
That's where I have found that the Body Talk system really starts diving into... I've been using that phrase a lot. It starts to say, Hey, here's a thing that's coming up as a piece of information. Here's some meaning behind it, some symbolism.
Let's take that and start working with things. Here's another piece of information. Here's how they're working together or not working together.
We just start investigating. I've talked a lot about how curiosity, I think, is the single most important thing when it comes to our health and life wellness. Having genuine curiosity and letting that curiosity kind of lead the way.
Curiosity comes without judgment. If we can drop judgment, we can really start to hear the messages of our body a whole lot better. Honestly, the hardest part about becoming a good practitioner, and I will pat myself on the back and say I am a good practitioner now.
I didn't used to be when I first started. The hardest part of becoming a good practitioner was learning how to let go of my own opinion of what was happening and allow the client's own wisdom to be given a voice. That's really what we're doing in a Body Talk session.
We're letting your body have its moment, its voice, and really learning how to hear it. I can't do Body Talk on my own family because I come in with so many preconceived ideas of what their quote-unquote real problem is and how they can fix it. If they just did and they just did that, I'm not capable of being unbiased with my own family.
They have to go get treatments from somebody else, not me. I have developed the ability to do that with clients. It took a while because I'm a fixer of personality.
Tell me some problems and I'll start trying to give you fixing answers. I've had to learn to be a better listener during Body Talk sessions so that I can help other people start to listen to their bodies. When we're doing a Body Talk session, we're tapping into that inner wisdom, that inner knowing of your body.
It knows how to heal itself. It's just life got in the way, other factors got in the way, there's environmental factors, there's a lot of different factors that get in the way of this sort of internal knowing and healing that happens. When we use a methodology like Body Talk, or there's lots of other good ones out there, I just happen to like Body Talk the best.
It allows us to start finding out what's actually getting in our way. We've talked about this in terms of the conscious stuff that you're aware of. In the vibe message, we're identifying blocks, that's what the I is.
When we use Body Talks, we're identifying blocks that we're not consciously aware of. Or if we are consciously aware of them, we're struggling to get at them from the right angle or to really understand what might be going on there. With the Body Talk system, we're taking my personal opinion out, we're taking your conscious opinion out, and we're just genuinely asking the body.
It uses muscle feedback, which is a kinesiology technique. It's really a technique based strongly on what is called structured intuition. It's this way of using your intuition in a very structured way and not having it just be like willingly pull things out of a hat.
It does have some structure to it. The most common analogy that I use when talking about Body Talk is the following, okay? Bear with me here. Imagine you're in a room and all the windows and doors are closed, and this room is full of stacks of boxes.
And in those boxes are things contributing to different ways that you feel, and you can start to improve the way that you feel physically, mentally, emotionally if you could unpack those boxes and start putting the stuff away. Okay, simple enough. Simple enough.
Let's start unpacking some boxes and put things away, and then you'll start to feel better. But then life, in its many ways and forms, reaches a hand in the room and turns the light switch off. So now you're in this room full of piles of boxes, and it is pitch black, and you cannot see.
So you know they're there, but now you don't know where the box piles are. You're not sure which pile you should start with. You can't even see what's in the boxes or how high the boxes go.
And then if you did get a box open, where are you going to put it? You can't see. It's black. So it's not that you're ignoring the problem.
It's not that you don't know. It's that it's black in there, and you can't see. The lights are out.
When we're doing a body talk session, we do a few things. We do muscle feedback to find information. This is sort of like what's in the boxes.
We do tapping techniques. We tap on the head, heart, and the gut, and I describe it like this. It's like when we're tapping on the head, it's like we turned a light on in the room.
Not the whole room, because that's overwhelming. If we turn the light on in the whole room, we don't know where to start. What we do is we turn a spotlight on a specific pile of boxes.
Your body has identified that if we start unpacking that today, that's going to make the biggest impact, or that's the thing that's the most important thing. That's the pile of boxes that's teetering, ready to fall on you. We shine the light on that.
We tap on the heart, because we need to keep that light on until we're done dealing with it. Also, we need all the other systems to get in line here and pay attention to this, because we're a system of connected systems. We're not individual parts.
You can't piecemeal the human experience into its individual parts, although modern medicine tries real hard, but every part affects other parts. Then we tap on the gut, because it's this tapping into that gut knowing of, oh, this is how I open a box. I see what's in this box.
I know what to do with this now. You just tap into that knowing, that knowledge. Oh, this is a box of towels.
The towels go in the linen closet. That's where I put it, now that I can see that that's what it is. That's how I describe body talk.
When we're doing a session, we're just doing a pile at a time, seeing what's coming up. Then your body will say, okay, that's enough right now. We have some unpacking here to do, some things to work out and move.
Then we move on to the next pile and the next pile. The thing that I think some people forget is that you will never empty the room of piles of boxes. This is that whole health is a direction, not a destination.
You're never going to arrive at operation room is empty of boxes. Why? Because you are still living your life. The door is being opened and new piles of boxes are being thrown in all the time.
Sometimes the pile that we thought was important is now no longer important, because there's another pile that's starting to wobble and get a little bit out of control. We need to focus on that one next, because something has happened. That is my simplest, maybe too simple, but I find that a very helpful way of describing it, because all we're doing is we're just putting the light on, unpacking the boxes, acknowledging our body's wisdom that it knows how to unpack the boxes.
It always did. It just maybe didn't have the right support to do it. Sometimes that's in just bringing to awareness.
A lot of body talk sessions are about bringing these boxes of things to awareness, so that they can be unpacked. Sometimes you need to add in some supports to help with that. So that might be like actual medical supports that you are doing in your life, because you're getting help from your doctor or from whatever practitioner, and that is contributing to helping you out.
Sometimes that's nutritional changes that you need to make. Sometimes that's lifestyle changes that you need to make. Those are all things that help support the unpacking of these boxes, because while a lot of body talk is this idea of like it's happening already, and you don't need to do anything, also you do need to do things, because you do need to support yourself.
You do need to support the changes that you're trying to make. If in a session we're sort of implementing these changes of unpacking these boxes, but then in your life, your lifestyle choices are just throwing more shit back in those same boxes, that's not going to work so great for you. Okay.
I hope that that gives a very general broad sense of what we're working with in a body talk session. I find this is the question I get asked the most is what is body talk, and I just talked about it for 23 minutes, so I'm sure you can imagine like I don't have a nice packed like one to two sentence blurb about what it is, but really what it is is just a set of tools that help us communicate with the body and gives voice to what's going on and what maybe needs some extra support, and it can make a lot of sense when you're getting the session. You're like, oh yeah, that makes sense, or sometimes it's like, I don't really get that, but okay, that's okay.
This isn't meant to be like giant epiphany moments. Oh my God, that changes my life. I mean, we do have some of those sometimes because, right? I've talked about a perspective change can change everything, and it takes one second to change a perspective, so that does happen, but for the most part, it's just like, okay, that makes sense, and we're starting to create the changes in the body, and then we develop a plan through the coaching of how to best support those changes.
That's how I like to describe body talk. Thanks for giving me the time in your ears, your ear holes for that today. If you have more questions about this or like specific things, send me an email, send me a DM, whatever you want to do, like ask all the questions because I've been doing this for so long that sometimes I forget what the questions are because like I'm so right in it, and I forget sometimes that some things are not as clear to other people.
Ask me questions. I love talking about this. I love questions are like the best, right? That's curiosity at its core is asking questions with genuine curiosity and no judgment and just like an actual want to learn and see things differently.
That's what I encourage you to do, and I think that's what keeps driving me back and back and back again to the body talk system because it allows that sort of curiosity and that non-judgmental like, hey, here's some here's some symbolism of why you keep getting that knee pain. Yeah, there's something going on with the knee, and yeah, you definitely should see a doctor and get an x-ray and get physio and all those things. Absolutely.
And also my favorite word is and look at why the knee why that knee why in that particular way? Does it hurt and when it hurts? Let's look at some of the symbolism there because lots of people I don't know like fall but they don't always hurt their knee and some yes, there's the physical aspect of it. I'm not discounting that but also there is other aspects to it that can really help you speed up the healing process get deeper understanding of yourself and deeper understanding of your whole body and systems. So that's what I'm going to leave you with today.
I hope that was helpful and that you're having a really wonderful week and I'm excited to continue to share my thoughts and this work with you on the Wellness Ninja podcast. Every listen every share every review is so so so appreciated. If you really like today's episode, please go leave a great review.
It helps other people find the podcast. If you did not like it, you don't have to but you can you are welcome to keep that opinion to yourself. You don't need to share that you can just stop listening.
Nobody's making you listen. Alright guys, I will be in your ear holes next week again. I'm going to talk a little bit about the coaching aspect of my work and like what that actually looks like what it means how it complements the body talk work because much like body talk health and life coaching is something that people are like like I kind of get that but like not really what is it? So hopefully I can answer that question as well.
You guys have a great week and I will be in your ear holes. Delightedly in your ear holes next week on the Wellness Ninja podcast.