Combative Calm

This episode contains a gentle discussion of body image and eating disorders. If you are currently struggling, please reach out to the National Alliance for Eating Disorders at 1-866-662-1235.

This guided meditation does not ask you to love your body. It does not ask you to feel any particular way about what you find when you get in there. It just asks you to show up. To place your hands on the places you have struggled with the most and say something true to them. Not performed. Not forced. Just honest.
Sarai built this meditation around one simple reframe. What if you treated your body the way you treat someone you love deeply? Not when things are easier. Not when it looks different. Right now. As it is. Exactly as it is.
You will place your hands on your belly, your heart, your thighs, and your arms. You will breathe. And if words come, you will let them. And if they do not, just being there is the whole practice.
Come back to this one often. Your body has been waiting for you to come home to it.

This episode contains discussion of body image, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, sexual assault, and addiction. Please take care of yourself as you listen. If you are currently struggling with an eating disorder, please reach out to the National Alliance for Eating Disorders at 1-866-662-1235. 

Sarai gets completely honest in this one. About being sexually assaulted and what that did to her relationship with her body. About using an eating disorder and addiction to numb out and disconnect. About going to treatment and lying in restorative yoga and feeling the weight of her back on a bolster for the first time and thinking what the actual fuck. This is what it feels like to be in my body.
She also gets into what happened last year. Getting sick for a month with no answers. Losing her father in November. And fighting every day to not go back down the spiral she knows so well.
This episode also goes deep on the science. What the default mode network actually is and what brain imaging research shows about how it functions differently in people with eating disorders. What interoceptive awareness is and why it gets disrupted. And why understanding the neuroscience of this is not about fixing it. It is about stopping the self-blame long enough to get the right help.
The somatic tools in this episode are not a treatment for an eating disorder. They are what Sarai reaches for when the pulling starts. Small moments of contact with a body you have been running from. Nothing more and nothing less than that.

This episode contains discussion of body image, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders. If you are currently struggling, please reach out to the National Alliance for Eating Disorders at 1-866-662-1235. https://www.allianceforeatingdisorders.com/
Sarai has had an eating disorder for three and a half decades. She has been to treatment. She is still doing the work. And she is done pretending that what the culture is currently doing to women's bodies is anything other than what it actually is.
This episode is about where we are right now. The thin ideal making its comeback. The way social media and GLP ones have collided into something that is being sold as wellness and is anything but. And what is actually happening in your brain when you absorb that messaging every single day without the tools to push back against it.
We also get into why your therapist's suggestion to write positive body affirmations made you want to cry. And what to do instead when love feels too far away to reach, but you still need somewhere to start.
You will walk away understanding the neuroscience behind why your inner critic runs the loops it runs, why positive affirmations do not work when your relationship with your body is that broken, and what body-neutral affirmations actually are and how to use them.
This is not a body positivity episode. This is an honest one.

This is the most vulnerable episode Sarai has ever recorded. And she almost did not hit record.
In this episode, she gets completely honest about what perimenopause did to her mental health before she even knew what was happening. The intrusive thoughts that showed up quietly and stayed for six months. The trip to Barcelona, where she finally screamed her truth in a hotel room and got shut down for it. The panic attacks she had this week, not a year ago, this week, as a nervous system coach who teaches this stuff for a living.
She also gets into the science. What actually happens to estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and your GABA system during perimenopause, why almost a third of women develop panic attacks they have never had before, why women are two to five times more likely to develop a mood disorder during this transition, and why most of them are being handed antidepressants without anyone checking their hormones first.

This episode is for the woman who thinks she is losing her mind. The one who cannot explain what is happening in her body. The one who has been suffering quietly because she does not have the language for it yet.
Here it is.
If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please call or text 988.
If you're ready to do the work with a community of women & a blueprint to get you the fuck out of dysregulation, check out Capacity Club https://saraispeer.com/capacity-club

You have been abandoning yourself in two-second increments your whole life, and this episode is where that stops.
The tools, the body check, the energetic tab audit, the weird somatic resets you can do in a bathroom stall before a hard conversation, and the actual words to use when you are right at your capacity line and your brain goes completely blank.
We also talk about what it actually feels like the first few times you hold your line with someone who is used to you crossing it. Because nobody warns you about that part, and it catches everyone off guard.
This is where the work gets real.
Capacity Club doors close April 15th. First live call April 15th. https://saraispeer.com/capacity-club