How to Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Body with Natalie Griffie

You Can Do All the Affirmations and Still Feel Stuck. Here's What Actually Changes Things.

Fire Fam, I need to tell you about a conversation that left me feeling lighter — the kind of lighter you feel in your chest when someone says out loud the thing you've been quietly living.

It's the first guest episode of 2026, and I brought on my friend Natalie Griffie, a confidence and embodiment coach who helps women trust themselves deeply, express themselves fully, and make the impact they're here to make.

Natalie and I met a few years back inside an embodied entrepreneur group, both of us right in the thick of our own messy, beautiful transitions. And what came out of this episode is one of the most honest conversations I've had on the podcast about what it actually takes to change — not the surface-level "just think positive" version, but the real one.

Because here's the truth I keep coming back to: you can eat perfectly, say all the affirmations, read all the books, and still feel like something's off. If that's you, this one's for you.

We're All on the Same Board

Let me start with something Natalie said that I haven't been able to shake.

When we met, from the outside she looked like she had it all together — supportive relationship, clear direction, that glowy put-together energy.

And me? I was in my own transition, quietly convinced everyone in the room was light-years ahead of me. (If you've ever felt like a lost puppy running around while everyone else has it figured out — hi, I see you.)

Here's the reframe that set us both free: life is a game of chutes and ladders. 

We're all on the same board. Some of us are up in one spot, down in another, climbing, sliding — but we're never actually behind.

We're just doing the same human things at different times. Comparison steals your joy from exactly where you're meant to be right now.

My favorite mantra still holds: You are exactly where you need to be.

Why Getting Out of Your Head Matters (and What "Embodiment" Actually Means)

So many of us live our entire lives in our heads — overanalyzing, overthinking, rationalizing. We forget we have a body at all. We forget to ask, what do I feel in my belly right now? What are my feet doing? What's happening in my chest?

Embodiment work is simply getting out of your head and into your body.

And this matters more than it sounds, because here's the piece most of us miss: your emotions don't only live in your mind. They live in your body too.

So when we try to heal purely from the neck up — through talk therapy alone, through affirmations, through venting to a friend — we're only addressing half of it. The other half is stored in the body, waiting.

Natalie put it perfectly: "Feeling is healing." There's no way around it. You have to go through the emotion, not around it.

For years, she pushed everything down. 

Stay positive.

Be strong.

Keep going.

Be there for everyone else. 

That suppressed grief, fear, and anger didn't disappear — it bubbled up as anxiety. It wasn't until she dropped into her body and actually let herself feel that things started to shift.

All the affirmations in the world couldn't do what letting herself feel one honest emotion did.

You Can't Feel It If You Don't Feel Safe

Now, here's the part I really want you to hear, because I lived this one too.

When you've spent years brushing your feelings under the rug and suddenly the floodgates open, it can feel messy. Chaotic. Like too much.

(I basically exploded onto my friends with a decade of unexpressed feelings, and they were like, "I didn't even know you had opinions about this.")

If that's where you are right now, you are not broken. You just never had a safe space to feel.

Awareness is always the first step — you can't work with what you can't see. But before awareness can even happen, your nervous system has to feel safe. That's why breathwork, meditation, and gentle nervous system regulation are so powerful: they calm your body enough to let the deeper stuff surface.

And can we talk about anger for a second? Natalie and I both see this constantly with the women we work with. So many of us will say, "I don't really get angry" — because we were trained to be pleasant, to keep the peace, to please. A woman's anger gets labeled as bad or wrong, so we don't even let ourselves feel it.

But anger is a human emotion, and you have every right to it. The judgment we place on our emotions is the very thing that blocks them.

Sometimes the doorway is the inner child — that younger version of you carrying pain that was never resolved. So much of what we're hauling around in adulthood started way back then.

We Were All Born Confident

Here's a belief of Natalie's that I love: we were all born confident.

Think about a toddler. They say what they want, wear what they want, fall down, get back up. They don't crawl into a corner in shame. Confidence is our natural state — and then life layers on the people-pleasing, the perfectionism, the overthinking, the shame, until our confidence gets masked.

So the work isn't about building confidence from scratch. It's about identifying what's covering it up. You start with the behavior you can see (maybe you can't stay consistent, maybe you shrink when it's time to be seen), then go deeper into the thought behind it, then the belief, then the fear underneath that — until you reach the root.

And overthinking? That chronic loop so many of us run? Overthinking is fear in disguise. We think and think and think, trying to prepare for every possible outcome, because underneath we're afraid we'll fail or that we're not enough.

The fastest interruption is dropping into your senses — feel your feet, feel your breath, what do you smell, what do you taste— but the lasting fix is meeting the fear itself.

Self-Acceptance and Ambition Are Not Enemies

One of the biggest blocks I see in my nutrition and coaching work is this fear: If I accept myself as I am right now, doesn't that mean I'll never change?

No, love. You can accept yourself for exactly who you are today AND still have big aspirations. Both are true at the same time. 

Gratitude for how far you've come and a hunger for more are not in conflict. In fact, if you tap into "I'm not enough" and refuse to accept where you are, that's precisely what keeps you stuck.

There's no moving forward without acceptance first.

Something I remind my clients: everything you are right now is the summation of past choices made by a past version of you — a version who did the best she could with what she knew. You don't get to blame present-you for past-you. You get to forgive her, and then choose differently from a more empowered, more aware place.

Natalie shared something so vulnerable here. Even she had a part that didn't want to heal from her autoimmune diagnosis — because she'd built an identity around being the "warrior," and she was afraid of who she'd be without it. Two truths, fighting each other: I want to heal and I don't know who I am if I heal. 

That internal tug-of-war is what keeps us frozen. The work is getting both sides on the same team — because both of them, even the resistant one, are trying to protect you.

The Simple Practice That Changed Everything for Me

Want to know how I finally uncovered what was actually keeping me stuck?

Journaling. One full page, every single day, for 30 days straight — no prompt, no agenda, just whatever wanted to come out.

Some days I'd write, "I actually feel excited today," and realize I needed to spend more time on the things lighting me up. Other days I'd write "I feel blah" and finally ask why. And through that daily practice, I uncovered something I'd been carrying for years without knowing it: what I'd been calling "confusion about my direction" was never confusion at all. It was self-doubt. 

I knew what I wanted. I just didn't believe I was capable of it. And I never would've found that if I hadn't created the space to let it surface.

That's the thing — the answers aren't far away from you. They're right there, asking to be seen. But we fill every quiet moment with a phone, a show, a snack, another task — anything to avoid the discomfort of sitting with ourselves. If you just blocked off ten honest minutes, things would come up.

Journaling is one doorway. For you it might be movement, dance, running, a massage — the moments where you bypass the overthinking mind and let the body finally speak. (Ever cried unexpectedly in savasana? That's your body releasing what your mind was blocking all day. Emotions are energy in motion.)

This Is Exactly Why I Do the Work I Do

Fire Fam, here's where this ties into everything I stand for.

You can have the "perfect" meal plan and still feel disconnected from your body. You can hit every macro and still be at war with yourself.

Because real, lasting transformation was never only about the food. It's about the nervous system underneath it.

The emotions you've never let yourself feel.

The self-acceptance that has to come before the change, not after it.

That's the whole heart of my signature 1:1 program, Body and Soul Freedom — where we bridge evidence-based nutrition with somatic healing, nervous system regulation, and the deeper embodiment work that actually makes change stick.

If this episode stirred something in you and you're ready to stop white-knuckling your way through and start feeling at home in your body, I'd love to talk. You can schedule your free consultation here — no pressure, just a real conversation about where you are and where you want to go.

And if you're not ready for the deep dive but you want a gentle, doable place to start, my Food Freedom Reset is a four-day program for just $27. It's the perfect on-ramp — a little space to begin coming home to yourself.

Before I let you go, I'll leave you with Natalie's parting word, because it's perfect: play. 

After all these big thoughts and feelings, there's no work you have to do right this second.

Go dance, make art, look for four-leaf clovers, roll around on a blanket in the grass. Be a kid again. That's one of the easiest ways to reconnect with what's alive and true in you.

Release the pressure. Come home to your body. And remember — you're exactly where you're meant to be.

🔥 With love, Shanon