Building Self Trust To Move From Doubt to Decisive
Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor. So I have a question for you. Do you trust yourself? It is kind of a big question. I used to call myself a poor decision maker but that wasn't the truth. I could effectively make decisions but what it came down to was that I didn't trust myself. After years of the restrict-binge cycle, I just didn't feel like I could trust my bodily signals and cues. It was like my body would say yes or no to something through contraction or relaxation and I would respond with, "Are you sure?" I've spoken previously that those who struggle with food often can have low interoception. Interoception is knowing the felt sense of your body. This is connected to making decisions and self trust. If you don't know how you feel or struggle to hear your body's feedback, it can feel frustrating and anxiety provoking to make a decision because you're not hearing your own cues for what would be best for you. If you have also called yourself a poor decision maker or feel like you struggle to trust your body, you can play with updating the inner dialogue to, "I can make decisions for myself and I can trust this body, I just need more time to grow in my ability to hear what my body has to say and how it responds to my different options in life." I chat about self trust today with Jay Moon Fields. Jay is a leading educator, coach and author. Nearly a million people have taken her courses featured on LinkedIn Learning, and her book Teaching People Not Poses is used by yoga teacher training programs globally. Her Hey, wait framework teaches people how to honor their emotional experiences and share them authentically, helping them to break free from the cycles of overthinking, people-pleasing, and self-doubt. For over twenty years, Jay has taught the principles and practices of embodied social and emotional intelligence to individuals and groups from Patagonia, Wieden + Kennedy, Apple, the UN, and Baker Tilly. She has been a guest on over 30 podcasts and was named one of the top 50 health and wellness bloggers making a difference in the world by Greatist.com. Jay has been a featured speaker at the GoPro Women’s Summit, The Fifteen Seconds Festival and the Omega Institute. She received her BA in Psychosocial Health and Human Movement from the College of William and Mary and her master's in Integral Transformative Education from Prescott College. We chat about self trust, self worth, decision making, embodiment of emotions, and the cycle of presence, guidance, service, and trust, and how these elements contribute to personal growth and emotional regulation. The first class of the Somatic Eating® Program happened this past Thursday, and you can still join in but only until the end of the day on Tuesday, November 4th. After that, doors will officially be closed and the next class will occur in May 2026. Go to somaticeating.com to sign up now and looking forward to spending the next three months with you building your self trust with yourself and your body. Now, welcome Jay! I am so excited to be reconnecting with you. I actually just shared our podcast episode on your podcast in my recent newsletter. So some individuals in this community have already gotten like, a little bit of a feel and taste for you. Now we're swapping and so I'm curious, for anyone who doesn't know you, though, if you can just let us know how you landed here today with the work that you're doing and the path that you've been taking?
Jay Moon Fields 04:26
Well, I am first off, thank you for having me back. Like you said, it's really fun to connect again, and I always love when there's this opportunity to switch chairs and see what happens. So thank you for having me and thanks to your listeners for being here. I am a somatic coach, so your listeners know what that means. I usually have to describe what that means, but I don't have to here. I got into that through originally being a yoga teacher, actually. So in my undergraduate degree, I went to the College of William and Mary, and I was really into rock climbing, and I was really into yoga, and I decided, you know what, I just want to be a rock climbing instructor and a yoga instructor like I don't need a college degree for that. And a really brilliant woman who worked at the College of William, Mary said to me, you know what, you are going to regret that if you leave school. So why don't you design the major that the best yoga instructor and the best rock climbing instructor would have, and if you get it approved, you have to stay and graduate. And if you don't get it approved, you can go and do that. And I thought that was one of the most pivotal moments in my life. I wish I remember this woman's name so I could thank her, because I really did. I remember leaving her office and going back to my dorm room and being like, well, what would I study then? Because this was 1999 and like, the mind body connection wasn't really a thing yet. Deepak Chopra was just out talking about that. I studied the program I came up with was called psychosocial health and human movement. And I studied kinesiology and psychology and anthropology and all of this kind of cross cultural understanding of what happens to our bodies under emotional stress, and how can we use our bodies to be preventative in this form of mental health. So that was, you know, my my 20s were primarily being an outdoor education instructor and a yoga instructor, and then eventually, through the yoga world, I started coaching other teachers, because by the time I was 28 I'd already been teaching yoga for 10 years. So I had, I had written this book called Teaching People, Not Poses. All these other teachers started coming to me and saying, can you coach me? And I was like, really, you're gonna pay me to coach you? Okay. And then they would recommend their sister come see me, or their cousin or their co worker. And they weren't people who were yoga teachers. They were just people who wanted help being more authentic to themselves, having more tools to regulate their emotions. And that then evolved over the last 15 years or so into, you know, eventually I started doing more corporate work and going in and doing trainings around resilience. And then that led to LinkedIn Learning courses, where actually have this amazing worldwide platform to talk about nervous system regulation and emotional regulation at work. But in recent years, I've come back to just doing one on one clients and having a podcast, because I just feel like I feel like you and I have talked about this before. There's a difference between teaching and coaching and working on a one on one way, or in a small group, really allows for transformation in a way that sharing concepts until, I mean, this work is embodied, you have to get in there. You can't just think about it or understand it. So every time I say this, I say it a different way. So that's one way of me telling you how I got into what I'm doing.
Stephanie Mara 08:02
Yeah, I actually felt like even some tears kind of well up hearing your experience of having choice at such a young age to build something that really resonated with you, and to actually have to start asking the question really young like, who am I and who I want to be, and how do I want to spend my time, especially in my undergraduate studies. And I find that is such a unique gift, because so often by that time, we were so conditioned to, who am I supposed to be, and how am I supposed to navigate the world, and what am I supposed to do at college? And then so many people come out of that being like, do I even like this? Like, why did I even study that?
Jay Moon Fields 08:51
I'm so glad that you said that, because it really is something that still moves me to this day as well, that you know that was a time in my life where I didn't have a lot of self worth in my relationships, but I really got blessed with someone seeing me on that intellectual level. I remember what she said to me. She was like, You're a smart person and you're also a very adventurous person. And she said, I believe if you leave school, you'll never come back, and I think you'll regret it. So why don't you make this into something that you, it feeds you. And I then went from there, years later, six or seven years later, I did a graduate degree, and I would only go to graduate programs where you were allowed to design your own program, because I was like, there's no other way to learn. So my master's degree is actually in transformational education. My master's thesis was in how to use your body to tap into your own inner guidance to make decisions. And there was a time when I thought what I was going to do is to go into higher education and frickin change the system to be like, look, young people need to be given a path where, even if they don't know the answers yet, let them figure it out. Because that was one of the beautiful things about designing my own major. I picked all the classes that I was going to study based on what I didn't know. Like, I think I'm going to need to know that so. But then what would happen, kind of like a conversation we were just talking about, I would take a class, and I would go, oh, well, now I want to know this. I didn't know I didn't know that. Now I want to go learn that. And I would just change my whole major. I would just rewrite it and go in a different direction. So really, every semester, I changed everything about the next steps because I didn't know as a sophomore what I wanted to take as a senior, but I knew as a sophomore in the first quarter what I wanted to take as a sophomore in the second quarter based on what I would just open myself to. And I think that trust in myself in that one arena, really set the foundation for later me developing trust in my ability to make decisions that honor me in other arenas.
Stephanie Mara 11:09
Yeah, see, now I'm curious about what you discovered in your paper, because I find that, especially you know, we do talk a lot about somatics and nervous system and trauma here and its relationship with food, and that a lot of the times this can translate over to food in having difficulties deciding what to eat, when to eat, how to eat. More so about that strength and belief and trust in oneself has not been fostered based off of one's life experiences. To be able to feel like they can trust their body and trust its cues. And so just you bringing in the, you know, the topic of trust, and like, how do we learn how to make decisions in food or otherwise? And I think it is a process. So I'm curious what you discovered there.
Jay Moon Fields 11:58
Well, so in my paper, I developed this model. It was the stages where presence, guidance, service, trust. So presence was the very beginning of, just like all the different practices that you teach around embodied self awareness, can you get back in your body, whether it's shaking or whether it's tapping or whether it's, you know, feeling your feet on the ground, like practicing things that allow a person to feel their body, the guidance piece. And this is maybe where it's a little bit different from your work at the time, what I was really interested in was connecting to the part of you that is bigger than you. It's you, it's Jay, but it's also like the Jay that's tapped into some kind of universal wisdom, and it's interesting looking back now Stephanie, because I think I was like 28, 29 when I was doing this, and I really wasn't yet at a place where I had a sense of self trust. I needed a spiritual component to be a part of it, which I'm not saying is wrong in any way. And I'm still a very spiritual person, but I think there was a little bit of spiritual bypassing happening in that time in my life where I could very much easily, kind of, I felt more comfortable connected to spirit than I did connected to a human but anyway, in that time, I was really interested in how a person can get in touch with the part of them that feels like it is beyond their own knowing, but inclusive of their knowing. I don't know if you've ever heard of Eric Schiffman, the yoga teacher.
Stephanie Mara 13:28
Yeah.
Jay Moon Fields 13:28
So he was one of my influential teachers, and he used to talk about, like, tuning into guidance. And he would talk about it as like, if you were in your car driving down the highway and you hit traffic, it makes a lot more sense to turn on the radio and get the report from the helicopter that's above you that can see the traffic than it does to sit there and kind of like, try and crane your neck and look and see, like, well, should I stay on this road, or should I change? Or another metaphor he used a lot of times was the difference between using a computer hard drive and using the internet like, there's just a lot more information available, and that is your body. Like, connect, get online, connect in your body and the information that it's available to you, whether it's you decide it's from you or from spirit or wherever it is, there's just a feeling tone to it that's peaceful. And so the practice started to be like this is to your question of like, how do you start to make decisions? You start tuning into your body to make decisions on the little things that don't hold any weight, like what shirt to wear today. Should I buy green apples or red apples at the grocery store? Should I take my umbrella with me today? And you're tuning into your body to ask yourself, should I take my umbrella with me today? Not. Looking at the weather and just seeing what sensations happen in your body. And do you read that as a clean yes? Do you read that as a hard hardening? And that's a no. And then play with it so you get the answer to, should I take the umbrella with me today? And there's like an opening in your chest, and it feels spacious, and it feels like a yes. So you take it, and then it rains, and you're like, yeah, so it's like playing with am I getting these cues from this knowing in me that can't possibly consciously know that it's going to be raining. There it is. It happens. Does that make sense?
Stephanie Mara 15:41
Oh, absolutely. You know, I find that especially in the somatic world, there's kind of this misconception that's happening that you should just know that, like, oh, I should know the impulse that's coming up and know what impulse to follow. And what I have found, even in my own path is that, especially because I was so cut off from my body that there was no natural impulse, and I had to do something and then check out how doing that something felt, and that's what I hear in you describing that we need to actually have the experience of bringing the umbrella or not bringing the umbrella and then noticing how that feels and seeing what happens. And it's the same thing I feel like with anything else, of like, even with food, I have to try the food, notice how it feels and then learn from that of like, is this a food that resonates with my body or not.
Jay Moon Fields 16:37
Right. And that, you know, hearing you say that makes me think, and it's not even about like, take the umbrella and then it rains, and you get the affirmation, yes, I made the right choice. It's take the umbrella and realize that the whole day you didn't worry that you were going to ruin your hair or get wet, and it didn't rain. But the win is you realizing, oh, I did something that calmed me. It cost me nothing energetically, it cost me nothing. You know, emotionally, just to have the umbrella with me, it makes me feel safer. So it's those, I think that's the other thing that feels really important to me. As someone who me can be very black and white and very right and wrong that the experiments aren't was I right? The experiments are, what did I actually notice? Because those are very different questions, as you well know.
Stephanie Mara 17:30
Yes, I love that I've been trying to reframe that even somatic practices are not with the intention of trying to make things better. Can they anyway? Yes, but that the intention is, what is my human experience like right now? And can I connect with this in this intensity and ride this wave for as long as I can to be in my body of like I am having a human experience right now, whether that is riding the wave of excitement or contentment or joy or happiness, or riding the wave of anger or sadness or depression or despair or anxiety, that it's all part of what you can experience in this body, and not to try to just get rid of it. So I love what you're bringing in here.
Jay Moon Fields 18:21
I am so with you on that I have been talking recently a lot about not optimizing the shit out of everything. You and I both been in this world for a really long time, and, you know, been in a coaching world, helping world, and it's like really easy to slip into we're here to make this better. It's really easy to have a client come and like, can you make me better at this? And I really am not into that, and I'm with you that this is about, can you be with yourself? Can you have a good experience of yourself, regardless of what is happening, so that you stay I mean to me, that's what it's about. Because when I find myself as an individual slipping into can I make this better? That doesn't help my nervous system, and I noticed it too, when I was sitting with a client yesterday, and she's a new client, and it was our first session, and she was giving me the whole story. And when I get the whole story, like, there's this part of me that's like, okay, so I gotta, I gotta check this. I gotta make this better. I gotta make this better. I see like, and I can feel it speeding up in me. And I caught myself at one point. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Fields, like, you don't have to fix any of these things. It's a strange thing to be paid, grown up money by someone who wants you to fix something and be like, actually, no, that's not my job to fix it.
Stephanie Mara 19:46
Yeah. I mean, what I have found is it's we are increasing capacity to be with all of life and that that does make things feel easier to be here and to to navigate being a human being that feels big things sometimes, and I know that we were talking about even earlier around self worth. And I'm curious how this ties in for you, of like, you know, sometimes it's we have to have that piece of trust and know that our worth is not dependent also on being the most optimized version of ourselves, and that, like our worth is inherent simply because we are alive here at this timeline, at this moment, and like our worth is already here, simply because we made it here.
Jay Moon Fields 20:38
Exactly. This might seem a little bit of a sideways answer to that. But when you were saying that, I was thinking back to my embodied, living cycle. So it was presence, guidance. The next piece was service. And what I proposed in my thesis was that the definition of service is you acting on guidance. Period. So we have this idea again, all of this work comes out of my own wounding and my own trying to understand and find wholeness. But, you know, I grew up in an area right outside of Washington, DC, with the top public schools in the country very driven by education and how smart you are and how performative you can be. And so I really did go into adulthood kind of feeling like there is a right answer and a wrong answer to how and who I can be in order to get validation that my self worth is going to come from the type of job I get, the sort of person I marry, the place I live. And I would get so overwhelmed by decisions, because I'd be like, well, is this the right decision? Is this the decision that's going to take me on that path? And so when I did that study of people finding their own inner knowing and following it, I said, you know, service, your purpose, your active engagement with the world doesn't come from the shoulds. It comes from the thing inside of you that when you listen, it's quiet. So if that says, move to Tulsa, you know, and you think you have to live in New York City to be anybody, then you move to Tulsa. This is where it comes back into the more spiritual aspect of things, where it's like, if I really believe that my worth comes from the inside out. I get to make choices based on what feels peaceful to me, not based on what I think is going to check boxes for other people. And I think that practice of basically, I for years, I had a practice where I would wake up and the first thing I would say in my head to myself is, today, I'm going to make as many decisions as I possibly can by following my inner guidance, because that's how I started to trust that my decisions were valuable for me.
Stephanie Mara 22:58
Yeah, yeah. What I hear in that is being so led by your internal world, rather than all the message we get externally. And that is, I just want to name like so hard to do when from a very young age, sometimes we aren't taught that we can trust ourselves or listen to ourselves like I know it took me a really long time, and I will be honest, I am still working on my decision making processes, because it is an ongoing practice to have to identify in my own body that went through trauma and knows dissociation very well. Of like, is this fear or is this intuition? And I'm still trying to learn the difference between the two in my own system. I think it is an ongoing journey, and that I just want to, like normalize that for anyone who's listening of it's so powerful to commit to listening to yourself, and it's also so dang hard.
Jay Moon Fields 23:54
It's so hard. And I, you know, when I taught yoga classes, I would usually end the class by saying, you know, once everybody that that magic moment when the whole class is fairly regulated because they've just done a, you know, and they've come out of shavasana, and they're sitting there and it's like, oh my god. I wish every room full of people felt like this. I would usually ask people, before you go back into the rest of your day, ask your body right now, is there anything that you need to know or hear? And then I would let it be quiet for a moment. And then I would say, if you got an answer, practice believing it. Practice receiving it. And if you didn't get an answer, please don't stress about it. But do know that the very asking is the most important thing you can do, and you will keep asking and keep practicing the asking and keep listening for the answers, because I think that is it right, like it's not easy, but knowing that asking is the important part, right? Because I've gone through periods in my life where I'm like, it's so hard for me to discern whether this is fear or knowing that I just stop asking and I just go on autopilot, and I guarantfuckingtee you, when I'm on autopilot, it's fear, like it just it veers into fear, and then it just stays on that track until I ask again.
Stephanie Mara 25:22
I'm so appreciative that you're bringing this in right now. Because what it brings in is that the practice is not trying to get an answer. The practice is asking the question and being in the unknown of I don't know yet, and I find that you know, one of the somatic classes I have gone to, it teaches, and I teach this to now to almost everybody that I work with is on the importance of maybe, you know, so often we're looking for a yes or a no, but also just the healing nature of maybe that, I don't have enough information yet, and you can practice that in anything. I'm going to give an example of food, but if you're like, I don't know, should I eat right now? And you like, can't get a message. You don't know if you're hungry, you don't know if you're full, you don't know if you need food or what else you need. And just even asking the question, and being like, maybe, maybe I need food, maybe I don't need food. I don't know. And I even noticed, like, a settling happen in my own body, just saying, like it's allowed to be a maybe.
Jay Moon Fields 26:24
I absolutely love that I also feel a settling, a quietness. It feels like the meeting yourself in the not knowing, just letting it have space. One of the things that I teach all the time that it reminds me of it in a physical sensation. The two words are, of course, as in, when you come up with an emotion in your body or feeling, you go, of course, I feel this way, and that comes from Sarah Payton's work. But every time I say it to myself, every time I introduce it to someone that I'm working with, they're like, oh god. Just feels so good, because it's like, whether it's I'm angry, whether it's I'm scared, whether it's I'm hungry, whether it's I'm pissed, especially if you don't want to feel that way, to simply say to yourself, of course, is like a okay, here I am. I just met myself in the same way that you saying maybe feels just like a whole other room in the house where you're like, oh, I get to have this too. And both of those things, of course, and maybe are just another tool to stay, just to stay with yourself.
Stephanie Mara 27:33
Yeah. And then what have you found be supportive in that practice of staying? Because I find that once a lot of individuals get to that point, they're like, okay, but then what's next? What do I do when I stay? How long am I supposed to stay? Like, there's all these rapid questions that start to come up of what staying even means. So I'm curious what your experience of that has been like.
Jay Moon Fields 27:59
Well, so the first thing that came up that helps me stay is gratitude, if I can actually feel myself in my body, and then I choose to bring to mind something that I'm just grateful for, I stay longer, because for so many years, the very first thing I did when I got present was ask a question, what do I need to do here? What's the right answer? What should I eat? Can I eat? Like, all those questions. And there's a way that that already invites in interference, to the presence, to the staying so I find that if I can find the sense of like, I'm at least a little bit here, and I just start naming things that either one I am grateful for, or two, and I learned this from someone I interviewed on my podcast, Myra Holtzman, joy spotting. If I can go back in my mind and spot something recently that brought me joy and remember it, I'll stay longer. And it's like it softens, softens my body. It makes my body a safer, more gentle place to want to hang out. And then once I do that, I find that I often don't even need to ask the question next that I thought I needed to ask when I got present, because I already just feel better. So gratitude, joy spotting, and then I would also say going in nature, even if it's in my backyard, it just to like, if I'm having a hard time getting to myself, or I'm having a hard time staying, if I just go even walk around my yard, or yesterday, a very common thing for me to just go lay out on the patio in the sun with my cat like feel sunshine, smell fresh air. I'm a lot more likely to stay if I'm outside.
Stephanie Mara 29:55
It's interesting hearing you describe that because I didn't realize that some of those pieces I was already doing of sometimes when something feels so intense in my body, I wouldn't have described it as gratitude, but it is where I feel very grateful, where sometimes I'm saying internally like I am glad that I'm here to be able to experience this intensity, because I would rather be here, alive in this body, feeling this than not be here. And that is gratitude. I feel grateful to be experiencing what is happening in my body, regardless of how intense or sad or angry or whatever it is, because that is an experience that I get to have in this body that is alive, and I'm still alive to be here to experience it. And so, yeah, I agree with you that sometimes, whether it's gratitude for something in our lives or just having the experience we're having, it does start to shift things where it's like, I don't have to become attached to this experience, because it's not what I'm going to be experiencing forever, certainly, but it is a moment that I'm having right now, and gratitude can sometimes lighten the load a little bit.
Jay Moon Fields 31:11
Absolutely. And what you said there just makes me feel it's it really is at the core, it's gratitude that I'm here. Again, what you said to me, I don't know that I would have named it that way, but recently, I've been having some health issues come up, and I've started to do the thing where I'm like, oh, when I get present in my body, I'm really grateful that I feel okay today. And that's one of those things where it's like, it's so easy to take for granted not being in pain or not having fatigue or that sort of thing. But it is also a really lovely place to start from in terms of gratitude. Of like, you know, I might be in a lot of pain in this way, or I might be in a lot of fear or uncertainty in this but man, am I just grateful that I can actually feel my feet underneath me today. I can hear the birds. And it sounds like such a trope, but it hell of it doesn't work if you let it.
Stephanie Mara 32:11
Yeah. And the other thing that I resonated with that you were mentioning of like getting out in nature, what I also heard in that is like go someplace else, like, sometimes I find I'm having intensity where it's in the exact same location. It's like standing in my office. It's like standing in front of my computer, and like the sympathetic activation is just growing and growing and growing. And it's like, sometimes we just have to remove ourselves from the environment that we often get stressed in even if it's like you said, like sometimes I will literally just open the door and stick my head outside. Okay, what's it like in this environment right now?
Jay Moon Fields 32:49
I have to tell you, in my household, there is a joke that my husband will not get the mail because it is one of my regulating activities to know that in the middle of the day, I can leave my freaking office, walk outside 50 feet, get something that comes from another part of the world. It's not just going outside. It's like, oh, here are these missives that have come from I don't care if they're bills, I just care that it's not what I've been staring at on my computer. And so there are days when I am not home, I've been gone all day, and then, you know it's we're getting into bed at night, and I say to my husband, did you get the mail? And he's like, no, that's your thing. I was like, but I wasn't here today. And he goes, I won't take your joy from you. So that's how important that act is, because it is like, get me out of the house, let me put my hands on something that didn't come from anywhere, anything I've been looking at already today. Because I really do get stuck by my surroundings.
Stephanie Mara 33:57
Yeah, and just even taking in different environment, different textures of touching mail, like going through our senses, does kind of shift what's happening in our body. So I'm curious if you just finish your cycle here, because I'm like, oh, that would feel kind of incomplete if we didn't, like, finish it of we, you know, went into service, and what was after that?
Jay Moon Fields 34:19
Trust. Yeah, it lands at trust. It's a, you know, forever loop here that if you get present, you find guidance, you allow yourself to act on that you build a sense of trust. And I would also add self worth, that sense of as I become trustworthy to myself, I also grow in my sense of my own value and my own inherent value outside of external validation. And the idea is that over time, this is like the Holy Grail. If you imagine those four presence, guidance, service, trust as being in a circle, like a bead, you know, four beads around a big circle. Eventually they all start to move together and together and together and together, until there's just one, which is I exist in a place where I am present with myself. I can know my guidance. I can act on it, and I trust myself. And I do believe that, I mean that in a forever state is enlightenment in my book. But like I do believe that happens where you get the sense of having a presence and a trust in yourself that is not a practice, but an actual embodiment that you look back and go, oh, wow. I really just, for the last few hours, was here, and I really was in flow, and I really was not ruminating and in self doubt and constantly cutting myself down, or any like I actually was just here. And I think it starts as a practice, but it becomes a state that we have access to more readily.
Stephanie Mara 36:10
I love that you are reframing that worth can be a state, rather than like something that we receive so often. It's like we either put worth in something or that we have to prove our worth as something that we receive from others. But even just reframing that this could be a state of being, that I am in a state of worthiness, just like we are in a state of safety, like we talk a lot about here, of like it is just a way of being, not something that we have to try to prove or get somehow, but it already lives within you. And how do we shift ourselves into that state of being.
Jay Moon Fields 36:53
So good. Yeah, because I do feel like this is the promise of somatics. This is the promise of embodiment work. It's not about faking it till you make it. It's about embodying it until you are it. Let me say this this way to the person listening. If I say to you, what does dignity feel like in your body? For most people, they would stand or sit taller, they would get broader, or there would be like a solidifying kind of aspect to it, like you can like that, I watched it in you, you know.
Stephanie Mara 37:26
Yeah, when you said, what does it feel like? I immediately wanted to lengthen my neck.
Jay Moon Fields 37:31
Hell, yeah, you did. So you can pick a word, like dignity or value or worth, and say, what do I know that about that? What does that feel like? And then you put your body in that shape and that expression, and you make a choice or take an action. From there, you are inherently giving yourself that state to act from. I really do believe in the same you know, I I have people all the time in my practice, we do what I call the comparison practice, and it's like, if you are someone who really implodes on yourself when it comes to thinking about what to make for dinner, right? And you just get tight and, you know? And I'll have them like, really go into that, like, curl in on yourself, feel everything imploding. How do you breathe? What do you think about what do you think about yourself? What do you think about food there? And then go to the place where you can feel open, expansive, curious, notice what that feels like in your body, and breathe there. What do you think about yourself? What do you think about food? What do you think about the world? And then go back and forth and have them. I'll have them hold it like 20 seconds each, three or four times. And one of the things is to just compare them, but the other thing is to notice you can move from one to the other simply by making a choice. And I'll ask them, What did you have to do to go from that imploded to go to that open place. Part of it is mental. You have to make a choice. Part of it is physical. There's so many aspects to what you have to do, but like, notice you just changed the channel because you chose to. Your behavior from those two places will be different. So go let your body, you know, look and be like now that you've done those comparisons in your daily life, you can catch like, oh, that's that imploding feeling. I know what I'm doing here. I need to find dignity. I need to lengthen my neck. I need to open my chest. It's not the whole answer, but it'll get you a good portion of the way to something that feels more aligned.
Stephanie Mara 39:48
Thank you so much for bringing in this experience of choice, because I find that it's also like when we're talking about embodiment, and even like staying with yourself, what I find is there's also this misconception that we have to stay with the thing that feels the most intense until it's completion, and that you have choice every step of the way of I can feel this, and then I can shift into something else, and then I can feel it again, and then I can shift into something else. And you have choice every step of the way in being with something that it makes me think of, like, you know, some things that are taught in, like polyvagal theory and like vagus nerve work, of like imagining a dial, or something like that. And if your vagus nerve is kind of like turned up high, and your sympathetic nervous system is on and like, we need to turn the volume down, it's like, you can imagine, literally turning down a knob, and you can feel that in your body that you don't have to stay at the highest intensity for as long as you possibly can. That just might be more activating, and you might not even have the capacity to stay with that. So I just love that you're bringing in also, there is choice in this, that you can be in it and then move away from it and come back to it and learn what is my felt sense experience like when I'm not feeling worthy, when I'm not feeling dignity, and then if I actually choose to feel dignity and worth right now, what also is that felt sense like, and I find that that's also really powerful, because it does give the experience of that anything you are experiencing in one moment, it will change. You just had an experience where you changed your own internal world that quickly.
Jay Moon Fields 41:36
Right. In an instant, yeah. And I like with the piece with choice too, around finding dignity or founding worth. The other thing that I do is I ask myself, this was my practice for a long time. What would someone who had dignity do here? What would someone who values themselves do here? Because I tell you what Stephanie I always knew the answer. It's not what I would have done. I feel like I can see in other people. Oh, that person has dignity, and that person would never say yes to this, because they would know how to set a boundary. If I could see it in my mind's eye, in someone else, and I could feel the state of dignity in my body. I could dare to do it differently. And I think that combination of, there's choice in my body, and I know a different answer, because I can see it in someone else. What if I tried it?
Stephanie Mara 42:34
Yeah, I find that those practices are so powerful, because as soon as we take ourselves out of ourselves. Like, how would I respond to a friend in this moment? Or, how would I respond to a child? Or, you know, what would my future self want me to do here? Like, as soon as we get out of our present day experience that feels maybe a little bit too activated to be in sometimes, that clarity comes forth a lot clear of like, oh, well, if I'm being super hard on myself and I was interacting with a friend that was being super hard on them, this is how I would show up for them, because that sense of compassion and curiosity and connection that we want to have with other people comes forth so easily and so quickly as our inherent human nature that it's like, okay, so what if I practice that on myself now.
Jay Moon Fields 43:24
Yeah, when you just unbeknownst to you, added to the cycle in my from years and years ago, 15 years ago, in my graduate work, because now I can see where guidance isn't just information from you, it can be information from how would I say this to a child? What would I say to a friend? What would someone else who already knows self worth do like those are all places that we can gather knowing from that are so then easily embodied in ourselves. So thank you for adding an amendment to how I would describe guidance.
Stephanie Mara 44:03
I'm just going off of what you're bringing, and it's all really, really great. And, you know, usually I like to wrap up with a little baby step, and I know we've explored so many things today, but I'm wondering, for someone who is maybe on the path of trying to create more self trust, to have the decision making process come easier, to feel more self worth. What is maybe a baby step that you would offer on this journey?
Jay Moon Fields 44:29
Gosh, I know you have so many of these that are so good, but based on what we were just saying, I would just come back to asking yourself the question, What would someone who trusted themselves do? Be able to find in your body, if I knew what self trust felt like, what would it feel like? You don't even have to know the answers like, if I knew, what would I know about what self trust felt like? And what would someone who trusted themselves do here and then dare yourself to do that. Because that's how you become that person who has self trust. And like you said, know that there's no right or wrong choice. There's just the next choice and the next choice and the next choice.
Stephanie Mara 45:12
I love that because it is we have to start to imagine who we want to be and how that person would respond to start to become that person. So we have to start practicing now, and even probably inviting doubt along the way, as you're practicing, you know, asking these questions that like doubt is going to show up too, and even what's it like to show up for yourself in doubt of what is coming in. So I just appreciate everything that you have said today, and I feel like I could talk to you for, like, so many more hours, but I'm wondering...
Jay Moon Fields 45:50
Well, I was gonna say, I feel like everything I said today was great because of your questioning, and just we have such a lovely energy to riff in with you always.
Stephanie Mara 46:01
I completely agree. It's just wonderful to be connected with you. And how can others also stay in touch with you and the work that you're doing?
Jay Moon Fields 46:08
Yeah, the easiest way is my website, because it's inclusive of all the things. And that's Jaymoonfields.com J, A, Y, and on that, you can learn about my podcast, which is, Hey, Wait. I have a book coming out. By the time we do this, it'll be out. That's Less Lost. You can get that, all the socials, all the things, my course, Yours Truly, all that. So Jaymoonfields.com is the place to learn about it all.
Stephanie Mara 46:09
Wonderful. And I will put all of those links in the show notes and just thank you so much again for your time today.
Jay Moon Fields 46:09
Absolute pleasure.
Stephanie Mara 46:30
Yeah, well, to everyone listening as always, if you have any questions, support@stephaniemara.com, reach out anytime, and I hope you all have a safety producing and satiating rest of the day. Bye!
Keep in touch with Jay here:
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