Embodied responses

The high cost, internally and externally, of living just above our necks - A £50k cost in monetary terms!

Garry Turner

Dec 17, 2023

What does the title of this newsletter ‘embodied responses’ bring up for you?

In your mind, in your heart, and in your gut?

Source - https://thewellnessacademy.ca/wp-content/uploads/3-brains.png

I offer this invitation to reflect as for so many years, the first 36 of my life, I was so disembodied.

Any signals that came from my heart or gut were immediately ignored.

‘That brain of mine had all the answers and if it isn’t linear and logical, it must be worthless.’

That is what I told myself, that is what I had learned to tell myself over those 36 years, accelerated by a heavily colonised Western education.

That is thinking from which the majority of Western businesses and leadership thinking originates today in Dec 2023.

This combined with me being bullied repeatedly as a kid aged 12/13 sent my suppression of emotion and connected inner workings into shutdown for over two decades.

And guess what, that conditioned disembodiment is still present, I still caught out.

The painful house move

When I had testicular cancer back in early 2020, I was still living in Bournemouth on the south coast of the UK. Indeed, I was into year 3 of 4 living down there.

My wife Jackie and I intentionally kept separate homes for many years, to ensure that she could continue to have quality time with her 3 growing children, and I kept my peace as I got to know them.

However, after my cancer experience, and as the kids were all much older, we decided to make the step for me to move in with them, bit by bit, starting September 2020.

Making a conscious choice to step away from my relative freedom, no child nor canine accountability, into a space that was much more chaotic, much more alien, and full other peoples, people and pets, was daunting.

Can you remember a time when you stepped away from relative comfort into a space of known discomfort?
What did that look and feel like for you, and what did you learn about yourself from that journey?

However, what was more daunting, and painful, was the misstep that Jackie and I made when we didn’t trust our guts in early 2021.

After living together for several months and things generally working between us and her kids, we had shared a dream for some years of buying our forever home together.

However, on finding and planning to buy our first house together, Jackie had a sense in her body, in her gut, that this house wasn’t the one that we should be buying. I didn’t know about this for a few months.

It was gorgeous, spacious, had a lovely garden, it really was on paper perfection, and that was part of the problem aka illusion.

As we moved through the highly stressful house sale and purchase process, I and Jackie’s kids were super excited about the move and that swept Jackie along as well, as she continued to keep her bodily sensations to herself.

This was not a one-off pulse, this was Jackie’s intuition and internal sensing screaming at her from the inside-out, but she kept pushing it away. She didn’t want to be a blocker to everyone else’s excitement.

On getting the keys in April 2021, we had no idea that we would moving yet again in February 2022 after some repeat issues with the house, and its location.

What is as bad, is that whilst Jackie suppressed her inner knowing, I did the same!

On the run-up to buying this house, I had a range of inner sensing that the mortgage rates were going to go up significantly and that the economy was going to start getting much worse. I didn’t voice this to Jackie, I didn’t want to derail our dreams either!

This sensing was partly joining some dots around what I was witnessing in terms of COVID and the worsening supply chain situation globally both in and outside of my day job in chemicals, combined with increasingly right-wing authoritarian decision making by our UK government.

Neither of us were embodied enough in our head, heart, gut connection to trust ourselves to name how we felt, or to name what we thought that messaging may have meant.

The net result was 4 months of our dream life followed by 5 months of trauma, with a net loss of over £50k in the process through fees and other costs before we moved into our current home.

The inner and outer costs to not trusting our head heart, gut guidance system is clear to see.

Head, heart, and gut connection

I like to repeat this point often.

Our head is super amazing and important, that brain is one heck of a tool.

However, we are so much more than just that and I shared another piece very recently called “Trusting you matter, and that you are having impact” to remind us that we are already whole, we could and should trust ourselves more.

I am curious around the coalescing that is underway for me, and for all of us, as we see the systemic connections and interconnections, within us and around us, with more grace, clarity and ease.

Imagine adding to this increasingly embodied awareness, a decentring. A decentring of ourselves replaced with a centring of those communities and life more widely that is most harmed by our outdated, capitalistic, disembodied ways.

There is never any judgment, not anymore, in my words or thinking.

Just an invitation.

What could new worlds at home, work and afar look and feel like when we come from an embodies head, heart, gut place, more often, all over the globe?

An invitation to stop, to breathe, to connect head, heart, and gut and to experiment with seeing and sensing what may be possible on the other side of those courageous acts.

Whole new plural worlds are possible. See my good friend Sahana’s amazing work around this reimagining HERE.

I don’t just think it, I can feel it and sense it new ways.

Transformational truly systemic change is underway, and we won’t likely witness the impact in our lifetime, but it is not coming, it is here, and I and YOU are part of this important reckoning.

Are you allowing yourself to connect head, heart, and gut?
What guidance and decision making will you take from a more embodied place?

Would you value having someone at your side as you go on this inner remembering and sensing journey?

Shall we connect?

My name is Garry Turner and I guide the expansion of possibilities at the intersections of International Sales, People & Culture, Equity & Inclusion and Sustainability: