Subscribe to the Intentional Self-Care newsletter and join a community of women ready to reclaim their well-being. Expect inspiring insights, actionable tips, affirmations, and transformative self-care wisdom designed to uplift, empower, and nurture your heart and soul each day.
Share
Self Care Newsletter Vol#86 Week #3 "Your body is a temple, but only if you treat it as one." Astrid Alauda
Published about 10 hours ago • 11 min read
Rejuvenate & Thrive
NURTURE YOUR ESSENCE
Focus:
"Listening to What Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You"
"The body never lies."
Martha Graham
Your Weekly
Intentional & Sustainable Self-Care Newsletter
Volume #86
"Listening to What Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You"
"It's easy to say "when you know better, you do better," but knowing isn't the same as choosing. I knew what my body required. I just didn't have the will to heed the warning—so I kept pushing straight past my capacity.
A few years ago, my own physical vessel was completely stuck in overdrive. I would lay down to sleep and feel a racing heartbeat and a surge of adrenaline, yet I kept pushing past my own boundaries and staying up later than my cutoff. I turned to my breathwork practice, and it would bring relief for about thirty minutes. Then the anxiety would rush right back in.
Months before my solar return, my body was exhausted, loudly signaling me to slow down and rest. And what did I do? I ignored it, just like I had done so many times before. That choice cost me six long months before my body was finally restored, rejuvenated, regulated, and I could feel at home inside of myself again. What became my saving grace? A previous breathwork teacher was recording practices and reached out to ask my former classmates and me to participate. That class pulled me back from the edge.
Here is what I learned the hard way: our body speaks to us all the time. It does not have to take a severe crisis or a total breakdown before we finally pause to acknowledge the vessel that has carried us from the womb to this exact moment. We treat physical tension, chronic exhaustion, sudden restlessness, and quiet discomfort like inconveniences to be silenced with caffeine, painkillers, or distractions. We push past our physical limits as if our bodies are servants rather than sacred partners.
As your strategist, I'm here to shift that paradigm entirely. Your body doesn't break down to betray you; it breaks down to speak to you. Physical tension is just unexpressed truth trying to get your attention. Stillness is not another task to complete on your endless to-do list; it is the quiet listening post where you finally decode the language of your own biology.
When your car's check engine light comes on, you don't cover it up with a piece of tape and keep driving 80 miles an hour. Yet when our bodies give us a check engine light—a tight jaw, a heavy chest, persistent exhaustion, or unsettled restlessness—we pop a pill, drink an extra cup of coffee, and push through. We treat our symptoms like enemies. Today, we change the translation. We are learning to view our physical discomfort not as a flaw, but as a translation of truth."
Chakra Activation: Root (Muladhara) Bodily Grounding To listen to your body, you must first inhabit it completely. The Root Chakra, located at the base of the spine, is your connection to physical reality, grounding, and cellular memory.
The Physical Anchor: Sit back comfortably in your seat. Close your eyes, drop your shoulders, and bring your awareness entirely down into the soles of your feet and the base of your spine.
The Visualization: Imagine a warm, glowing ruby-red light moving slowly down through your torso, sweeping through every muscle, joint, and cell, illuminating where you've been holding tension.
The Breath: Inhale deeply for four counts, drawing breath directly into the tightest spot in your body. Exhale slowly for six counts, imagining that tension melting away like ice.
The Affirmation: Whisper or think: "My body speaks my truth. I am listening."
The Seal: Wiggle your fingers and toes gently, anchoring your awareness firmly in your physical form.
The Strategist's View: As a strategist, I look at physical symptoms as quarterly performance reports. Strategic shifts for this beautiful rising:
The Translation of Discomfort:
Tension is often unexpressed boundaries—what are you holding onto that you need to put down?
Exhaustion is soul-level depletion—where are you giving away energy you don't have?
Restlessness is trapped energy or misaligned direction—where is your spirit trying to move that your routine is blocking?
Stillness as Presence, Not Performance: Remember, stillness is not another task to complete. You aren't scanning your body to fix it or get a grade; you are simply showing up as a compassionate witness to your own physical experience.
The Cost of Ignoring the Message: If you ignore a whisper from your body, it turns into a shout. If you ignore the shout, it turns into a breakdown. Listening now is your ultimate strategy for sustainability.
The "Body Decoding" Protocol:
The Body Scan: Close your eyes for 30 seconds and scan from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes. Where is the most noticeable friction, pain, or tiredness?
The Interview: Ask that specific body part: "What are you trying to tell me? What have I been carrying that you are trying to process?"
The Translation: Write down the very first word, emotion, or situation that pops into your mind (e.g., "My tight shoulders are saying: I am carrying too much financial stress for my family").
The Commitment: Write: "I will honor my body's signals instead of overriding them."
The Integration Protocol: True bodily transformation requires deep listening before movement. Before you attempt to act on a physical realization or change your routine, integrate the message through these three phases:
Tap into Awareness: Bring your focus completely into your physical body right now. Notice the places where you hold tension, guarding, or fatigue. Acknowledge them without frustration or judgment.
Sense It and Sit With It: Do not try to stretch it away, fix it instantly, or distract yourself from the physical sensation. Sit right in the middle of it. Let your nervous system experience what it feels like to acknowledge your body's reality without trying to change it immediately.
Allowing and Receiving: Stop forcing your body to perform. Open your hands, drop your shoulders, and simply allow your physical vessel to communicate its complete truth to you. Receive the deep guidance hidden within your tension, exhaustion, or restlessness before you ever try to give birth to a new action, a new habit, or a new step forward.
Food for Thought: If your physical body could send you a formal invoice or a heartfelt letter summarizing how well you've treated it over the past month, what would it thank you for, and what would it beg you to change?
Wisdom Insight: Your body is not a machine that owes you output; it is the temple that houses your soul. This day, stop overriding your physical limits and start honoring the messages your body has been whispering all along.
Be Blissful,
Dr. MoJo: Self-Care Strategist
Join Ignite Your Inner YOU Community where it starts and ends with you BECOMING Intentionally YOU! It's time to start BETTING ON YOU!
Pricing Options:
Monthly: $20/month
Quarterly: $60/quarter
Annually: $240/year
Call-to-Action: "Don’t wait to start your journey. Click below to join Ignite Your Inner You Community!!!
"Your Healthy MoJo~Self-Care Strategist: The Chakra Series."
This essential collection, created by Dr. MoJo, guides you through a profound journey of self-discovery and energetic alignment, spanning from the grounding Earth Star and Root to the divine connection of the Crown Chakra.
Each of the eight energy centers (Earth Star, Root, Sacral, Solar Plexus, Heart, Throat, Third Eye, and Crown) is addressed with its own dedicated, transformative recording paired with an in-depth eBook to solidify your understanding and practice.
Individually, each Chakra recording and eBook bundle is available for $25.00, offering a powerful, focused self-care strategy. However, when you purchase two or more Chakra bundles, the price drops to just $20.00 each. Start your personalized healing journey today and feel the difference of a balanced, vibrant self.
A Sacred Welcome: "Your Body Has Never Stopped Speaking"
Wholeness, Beautiful Soul✨!
Your body has been talking to you this entire time. Through the tightness that settles between your shoulder blades when you take on more than you can carry. Through the exhaustion that no amount of sleep seems to fully resolve. Through the restlessness that visits you at two in the rising when the stillness makes it harder to outrun what the daylight kept you too busy to feel. Through the headache that arrives every Sunday evening like clockwork. Through the knot in your stomach before a conversation you have been dreading. Through the deep, bone-level fatigue that is nothing like ordinary tiredness—that is the fatigue of a woman who has been running on empty for so long that empty has started to feel like normal.
Your body has been communicating all of this—clearly, consistently, with remarkable patience—and the question this week’s volume is asking is not whether your body has been speaking. The question is whether you have been listening.
For many women, the honest answer is: not really. Not because we are careless or neglectful, but because we were taught, in a hundred ways both subtle and explicit, that the body’s signals are inconveniences rather than intelligence. That pushing past physical discomfort is strength. That exhaustion is the price of a full life. That restlessness is something to be managed rather than understood. That the tension and the ache and the depletion are simply the cost of doing business as a woman in the world.
This week, we stop paying that cost without examining the invoice. This week, we listen.
Your body is not your obstacle.
It is your oracle.
And it has been speaking your truth longer than you have been
willing to hear it.
Food For Thought:
Nourishment for Your Soul:
"Listening to What Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You"
Let’s talk about four of the body’s most common and most consistently overlooked forms of communication: tension, exhaustion, restlessness, and discomfort. These are not problems to be solved as quickly as possible. They are signals—specific, meaningful, and worth understanding before you reach for the ibuprofen, the third cup of coffee, the distraction, or the determination to push through.
Tension is one of the body’s most honest languages. The jaw that is perpetually clenched is not just a dental issue—it is often the physical expression of words that have been swallowed, anger that has not been given room, or the chronic effort of holding yourself together in environments where falling apart feels too costly.
Exhaustion—deep, chronic, nothing-fixes-it exhaustion—is one of the most misunderstood signals a woman’s body sends. We treat it as a scheduling problem: if we could just get more sleep, better sleep, a more efficient rising routine, an earlier bedtime, we would fix it.
Restlessness—the inability to settle, the 2 AM wakefulness, the sense of agitation that no external activity quite resolves—is the body’s signal that something is unprocessed.
Discomfort—the generalized sense that something is not right, the physical unease that shows up in the gut or the throat or the chest before the mind has caught up with what the body already knows—is perhaps the most direct form of bodily intelligence available to us.
This week, practice treating each of these signals—tension, exhaustion, restlessness, and discomfort—not as problems to be managed or suppressed, but as communications deserving your genuine, curious, compassionate attention.
A Reflection to Carry with You
Sit quietly and bring your awareness to your body right now. Without judgment, without the need to immediately fix anything, ask: Where am I holding tension, exhaustion, restlessness, or discomfort that I have been managing rather than listening to? And what might that place in my body be trying to say?
Let whatever surfaces be welcome. The body does not speak to punish you. It speaks because it loves you, because it is yours, and because it has been trying—with more faithfulness than you may know—to help you find your way back to wholeness.
"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work."
Mary Oliver
"The body can break to get the mind's attention."
Unknown
WISDOM FROM SPIRITUAL MOTHERS & FATHERS
Louise Hay:
"I listen with love to my body’s messages. Every cell in my body is intelligent and knows what to do. I trust my body’s wisdom."
Queen Afua:
"Your body is your first home. When you learn to listen to it, to honor it, to feed it with love and truth, it will show you the way back to yourself and your healing.
"Iyanla Vanzant:
"The body will tell you what the mind is afraid to admit. When you are too busy to listen, it will find a way to make you stop. Listen now, while you still have the choice."
Closing: Heart-to-Heart
Dearest one, your body has not been working against you. It has been working for you—tirelessly, faithfully, with more patience and more wisdom than it has perhaps ever been given credit for. The tension, the exhaustion, the restlessness, the discomfort—none of it is punishment. All of it is love, expressed in the only language the body has: sensation, signal, and the persistent, compassionate insistence on being heard.
This week, you gave your body something it may not have received in a very long time: your genuine, unhurried, non-judgmental attention. That is not a small thing. That is the beginning of a different kind of relationship—one built on listening, on trust, on the deep and abiding respect that your body has always deserved and that only you can offer it.
You are exactly where you need to be, and your body—wise, faithful, and always speaking—is the most honest guide you will ever have.
With deep reverence for the sacred body you inhabit,
Your Self-Care Strategist 💕
P.S. Sweet soul, if this week’s practice stirred something tender—if listening to your body brought up grief, anger, longing, or the quiet ache of recognizing how long you have been pushing past what you truly felt—please know that is not a breakdown. That is a breakthrough. The body does not surface what it surfaces to overwhelm you. It surfaces it because you are finally ready to receive it, to tend to it, and to let it move through you toward the healing it has been asking for. Be gentle with yourself in the days ahead. Rest more than you think you should. Drink more water. Say no to one thing that your body has been telling you it cannot afford. And trust that every moment of genuine listening you offered your body this week was an act of the deepest, most sustainable self-care there is.
“The body is a sacred garment. It’s your first and last garment; it is what you enter life in and what you depart life with, and it should be treated with honor.”
Martha Graham
Join Ignite Your Inner YOU Community where it starts and ends with you BECOMING Intentionally YOU! It's time to start BETTING ON YOU!
Pricing Options:
Monthly: $20/month
Quarterly: $60/quarter
Annually: $240/year
Call-to-Action: "Don’t wait to start your journey. Click below to join Ignite Your Inner You Community!!!
"Your Healthy MoJo~Self-Care Strategist: The Chakra Series."This essential collection, created by Dr. MoJo, guides you through a profound journey of self-discovery and energetic alignment, spanning from the grounding Earth Star and Root to the divine connection of the Crown Chakra.
Each of the eight energy centers (Earth Star, Root, Sacral, Solar Plexus, Heart, Throat, Third Eye, and Crown) is addressed with its own dedicated, transformative recording paired with an in-depth eBook to solidify your understanding and practice. Individually, each Chakra recording and eBook bundle is available for $25.00, offering a powerful, focused self-care strategy.
However, when you purchase two or more Chakra bundles, the price drops to just $20.00 each. Start your personalized healing journey today and feel the difference of a balanced, vibrant self.
Subscribe to the Intentional Self-Care newsletter and join a community of women ready to reclaim their well-being. Expect inspiring insights, actionable tips, affirmations, and transformative self-care wisdom designed to uplift, empower, and nurture your heart and soul each day.
Read more from Your Healthy MoJo Spiritual Cheerleader
Rejuvenate & Thrive NURTURE YOUR ESSENCE Focus: Stop Asking “What Should I Do?” "Intuition is the whisper of the soul." Jiddu Krishnamurti Your Weekly Intentional & Sustainable Self-Care Newsletter Volume #85 Stop Asking “What Should I Do?” "Who do you consult about your concerns? Your partner, best friend, a counselor, or self-help material? The word "should" is powerful—it pushes you to seek answers outside yourself before looking within. But you never actually check your own first...
Rejuvenate & Thrive NURTURE YOUR ESSENCE Focus: The Sacred Pause: Where Sustainable Self-Care Begins "In the rush and noise of life, as you have intervals, step home within yourselves and be still." William Penn Your Weekly Intentional & Sustainable Self-Care Newsletter Volume #84 The Sacred Pause: Where Sustainable Self-Care Begins "I know we've all heard the phrase "pause for the cause." But do you truly understand how a brief pause can prevent chaos, regret, and protect your own peace?...
Rejuvenate & Thrive NURTURE YOUR ESSENCE Focus: Creating Inner Safety: Giving Yourself Permission to Pause "Nowhere can woman find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in her own soul." Marcus Aurelius (adapted) Your Weekly Intentional & Sustainable Self-Care Newsletter Volume #83 Creating Inner Safety: Giving Yourself Permission to Pause "In the midst of life happening, can you pause? Being the doer. On autopilot. The busy bee. The fixer. The helper. Where do you have time to create...
