We talk a lot about emotions in this Podcast I did with Hanna Hembree Bell called Not Saving it For Later!

The more I think about Leigh Ankrum’s lecture, the more I find myself curious about one idea in particular. Birth may be the first way the body learns stress. Long before we have words, beliefs, or stories about ourselves, we have an experience. Pressure.Change.Uncertainty.Movement. For the first time, the environment we’ve known begins to shift. Something is ending, and something new is beginning. Leigh invited us to consider the possibility that birth is more than a physical event. It may also be our first experience of navigating challenge and transition. What caught my attention is how closely this mirrors something I’ve been exploring in emotional surfing. We spend so much of our lives trying to understand our experiences. We analyze them, explain them, and create stories about them. Understanding has value, but it often comes later. Experience comes first. Before we understand stress, we experience it. Before we understand fear, we experience it. Before we understand change, uncertainty, loss, or pressure, we experience them. The body experiences long before the mind understands. It made me wonder. When pressure shows up in my life today, am I experiencing it or am I immediately trying to understand it? Am I feeling what is actually happening, or am I racing ahead to explain it? I’m not suggesting that birth determines our future. Life is far more complex than that. But I am fascinated by the possibility that the body may learn something in those earliest moments that echoes throughout a lifetime. Maybe some of our responses to stress aren’t decisions at all. Maybe they’re patterns. And maybe awareness gives us the opportunity to notice those patterns and respond differently. This was only one small piece of a much larger lecture, and I’ll be sharing a few more ideas that caught my attention over the coming days. Because shining was never about having all the answers. Maybe it begins when we become willing to experience life before rushing to understand it.

Duration: 00:36:06 Shareable link: https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/Rhu-X5tb69XRMhg8nKfwetBUTOL0zIYMkWyCEsK-aSSwOuzPbjVHCdcRvionB6R3.AWId8DaEQaeKCd3w Passcode: 78gijn=^

For those of you in the first wave, our call is today at 11:00 central time. I emailed you the link so let me know if you did not get it. The Tuesday call is my monthly call inside of Alive that I share in here, We will be discussing the Wait What Watch module that you did in section 1.