Embodiment Series Week 7: Stop Running, Just Be

Welcome back to Week 7 of my new Spring-Summer series, Embodiment as Sacred Force for Change!  In today’s episode, we name a hard truth: you can’t hold real space for healing if you are running from your truth.  You can’t be in right-relationship with others if you’re not in right- relationship with yourself.   

We unpack my personal cycle of disembodiment as an example of what not to do, and how it played out over Taurus and Gemini seasons.  I’m sorry I disappeared for a while, and I’m committing to getting more real with myself, my body’s needs, and you so that I can continue to hold space here, and To Dare, Together.  This is decolonized healing in practice, and it’s a daily decision to be just a little bit more embodied today than yesterday. Shall we?

 We acknowledge how dismantling supremacy systems and healing the colonial soul wound requires us to confront our own cycles of disembodiment - what’s yours?

We also bring in the power of our Moon Signs as an embodiment tool, especially as a nervous system regulation pattern and an inherited emotional blueprint. You’ll hear reflections on Taurus moon themes, emotional safety, and why grounding through the earth can be so stabilizing. We close with a look at Chiron moving into Taurus on June 19, 2026, and what it may invite around healing the body, safety, and the material world.

We shift into our embodiment practice, which is simple ~ Stop, sit, and just be with your experience.   Ask your body, “how are you?” To Keep Silent is a practice from the Witch's Pyramid, where real wisdom comes from returning to the cave of stillness so you can greet what you have been running from.   

Check out the links below to connect with the brilliant people and their work mentioned in today's episode:

https://farstellar.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web

“Your Moon Is Not Just Your Feelings (It Is Your Nervous System's Regulation Language)” The Lunar Series, Part 1: Elements FarStellar Mar 11, 2026

https://farstellar.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web

“Your Moon Sign Is the Hunger Your Childhood Could Not Name” The Lunar Series, Part 2: Moon in the Signs FarStellar Mar 18, 2026

https://www.embodiedastrology.com

https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com/dtft

https://www.chani.com/chart (Free Natal Chart)

Transcript

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Welcome And Decolonized Healing

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Hello, friend. Welcome. My name is Erin O'Brien, and I'm daring to create and hold space for decolonized healing, transformation, and collective liberation. I'm a licensed psychotherapist for over 20 plus years, a relationship counselor, a spiritual intuitive, shadow worker, and witch. And I believe that true therapeutic practice calls for right action and remembers all the ways of well-being. This is a place that will remember the old truths and reconnect them to their land and to their people. Together, we will unite the relational, social, spiritual, psychological, ancestral, scientific, environmental, political, and magical. Because it is most powerful when working as a sacred whole. As are we. 2026 is a time to dare to create the world that we've been dreaming of, to dare to be the dream we have been waiting for. Let's do it.

The Cost Of Avoiding Your Body

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Okay, I'm gonna start this episode with a hard truth. But to do these episodes on embodiment, I have to be embodied. And for the past month, I have been doing everything in my power to not be with the experiences that were swirling around in my body. Tara season hit me hard. And there was a lot that happened since my last episode. And Uranus entered Gemini, which is the disruptor, and I had a wonderful time at the Florence and the Machine concert that I had talked about in my last episode. And then I recorded on the full moon in Scorpio on May 1st. And I may still try to piece together something related to what I created there. I don't know how that will what I'll do with that. But unfortunately, as life would have it, a series of experiences happened. And one of which was my mom came for a visit here on Turtle Island in the United States. We have Mother's Day, and it was the weekend of May 8th, 9th, and 10th. And I had gotten behind in my editing, of course, on the full moon episode. And I, you know, fair. I had family visiting, staying inside our home for a full week. And we were busy. And still, I noticed that I felt enormously impacted energetically, emotionally, physically. I felt this exhaustion. And what I did with that information was I kept moving. I was very busy in compulsory caregiving, in nonstop chore doing and sensory seeking. And the way that I do that is my neurotype, being a neuroqueer human, I dive into all the learning realms, the things that are piquing my interest in a very intense, fixated way. And I can just travel down that path and want to learn all the things. And what I'm understanding now is that I am filling myself up with content, with information, with busyness, right? I'm moving and moving and moving. And I'm not slowing down enough to tune into my body and listen to what is going on inside me. And this is a very familiar cycle that I can experience. And so what I will happen is that I will notice that I am unable to meet the commitments that I have agreed to. But the part of the cycle that is so challenging is that I make these commitments from a place of enthusiasm, but also from a place of disembodiment because I'm not I'm not slowing down enough to really tune into my capacity, my time, the reality of my life. And then I feel just I sort of reach my threshold, really, really, you know, takes me by surprise every time. I don't really know why it would. I should know by now the signs and signals, but I am a human who continues to learn these lessons. Uh, anyway. So I start to feel a lot of shame and avoidance around the very commitments that I was and am enthusiastic about and and wanting to do. But there are also things that I agreed to do because in part I am the optics are I'm running toward these things that I'm passionate about and want to learn about and want to create and do. And but I kind of am actually running away from myself and the grief and the pain that I need to stop, sit, and be with. So that is your embodiment practice. I know it's been, I don't know, four or five weeks, and I was not able to meet that promise, that intention of putting out these weekly embodiment experiences that I really wanted to be able to do. And I realized that what doing this work means for me to do it and do it in right relationship with the truth and be present with it as I'm speaking these words and sharing this energy, is that I'm not gonna be able to go into the place that I need to be, to be the channel that I want to be, if I'm not uh holding space for myself, and I'm uh uh using the way I hold space for others as a mechanism to uh leave me, to not be with my tumultuous waters.

A Mirror On Emotional Overflow

SPEAKER_00 8:34

And at the end of April, I had a meeting with some coven mates, and a wise coven mate and friend mirrored back some truth that I knew and have known and and needed to hear again. And so she noticed that I have a tumultuous relationship with my water, and that sometimes my emotion spills over and out in ways that can seem like they take me by surprise or that I'm not fully in choice around, maybe in terms of the time or place. And at first I noticed when I received that message, I felt complexity around it. I was checking in with myself, is that true? And it stayed with me. And I sat with it and didn't want to acknowledge that it was true, and it absolutely is. And

Moon Signs As Nervous System Maps

SPEAKER_00 9:46

part of what I'm thinking about right now and where we are, we're officially in Gemini season and it's pride season, and I'm tuned into the celestial planets and placements and luminaries in my natal chart, and I'm learning more about that. And I have a Taurus moon. And what I'm learning about our moon sign is that it is actually your nervous system regulation pattern, and it is intergenerational, it's inherited, and your moon sign helps you work with these very deep emotional, nervous system embodied experiences and working with the physical body. And so I'm learning about how for someone who has a moon in Taurus, probably also in the 12th house, and also with Chiron right there alongside, and I'll talk about Chiron in just a minute. What the article that I am gonna quote a little bit from here, and that was shared with me through Embodied Astrology, the Heart of Conflict workshop that I've mentioned and am a part of. It's by Farstellar. Their name is Emmy and they're on Substack, but the article they wrote, they did a lunar series, and this was your moon sign is the hunger your childhood could not name. And I'll just say a couple things here about this. So it goes into review of moon signs, and it says the four elements uh describe the how of our emotional life. So fire moons are those who must move to feel, earth moons are those who must build to breathe, air moons are those who must understand to settle, and water moons are those who must feel to exist. And how these are emotional operating systems that are installed before you had words. They're the survival blueprint encoded at the cellular level. So it's not just about your feelings, it's literally about your nervous system, which is very aligned with all of the information we've been talking about. It looks at the need, the compulsion, the shadow, and the homecoming. That the moon holds your emotional temperament, and it describes the way you are wired to feel, to need, to respond to the world before the conscious mind has time to intervene. And it's not a wound, though wounds live inside it. It's not a flaw, though it can contain our most persistent vulnerabilities. It's the particular shape of our emotional life, what you hunger for, how you seek safety, and what happens inside your body when that safety is absent. And then it goes into the temperament aspect and how the first thing is your emotional perception, and then your caregiver relationships or communal relationships when you were a child, uh, how your needs were responded to. And it then goes into the emotional inheritance that predates biography, the emotional DNA of your lineage. So this is the unprocessed grief, the survival strategies, the relationship with safety and vulnerability that traveled through your family system long before you were born. Really, really powerful information. If you did not know that about your moon sign, that is what resides in that part of your natal chart. And I can link the Substack article in the notes so you can check it

Family Trauma And Energetic Exhaustion

SPEAKER_00 14:05

out. And tar season for me was really, really intense. There was a lot of downloads that were going on for me, and especially in the visit where I was holding space for my mom, and she was staying literally in our home space, and she was processing a lot and sharing a lot, and in particular, uh sharing some aspects of her experience that I had not known. And so as she was sharing some of these things with me, I was simultaneously receiving these downloads that were additional information that was sort of the the part of the story that she was keeping hidden, probably because it was hidden from her consciousness. But I was I was receiving the communication, I was uh understanding the the fuller story of what she was sharing, and it really I I believe that it destabilized me in a way that I was not attuned to, and I kept myself very busy once she left, and I legitimately had a lot going on. I had a annual retreat with my coven and tradition the weekend after she was here, and then there was, you know, the long weekend and doing all the things with family and friends and my practice and holding space for all the beloveds that I work with was also very busy. And so I know that it is real that I didn't have the kind of time to really slow down and keep silent, which is the when you think about the witch's pyramid, which I'll go into at some point, not at this moment, but the north holds the earth element to keep silent. And that's being able to go into the depths of the cave and the darkness and be with your experience. And so I have been avoiding making this episode because I knew that I had to be honest about why I hadn't made any in the way that I said I would. And I want to be in right relationship with with all my relationships. That includes the relationship here. And you can't be in right relationship anywhere if you're not in right relationship with yourself. And I'm holding that I was really overwhelmed with hearing about some of the unprocessed trauma that my mom shared, and in the way that it got shared, and in the impact and what it meant for my understanding of myself and experiences that I had had as a very, very tiny human in her body. So I'm still integrating all that and letting myself be with the truth of that, and trying to hold a lot of space for just being in the real, and that means sometimes you can't do what you say you're gonna do, and that's because you learn something, something happens, you need to process something. Your body needs time and space, and so the things we agree to we might not have capacity to do because when we made the commitment, we maybe weren't as tuned in to the reality of who we are. I mean, that's another thing I'm really freaking humbled by right now, and just feeling like I really wasn't practicing what I preach. And then I think maybe the contradiction of that was somewhere in my consciousness, and so I like couldn't bring myself to sit down and like put something together that I wasn't really living and not wholly and not entirely, and it's a practice, right? Coming back to your body is a practice, especially when there is ancestral, intergenerational, familial trauma, all of it, right? When it's just it's always there, and so I'm in this moment of wanting to get maybe more real with myself as I'm dismantling all the supremacy systems and the systems that become the norm, become the default, that we just kind of unconsciously go along with, that we don't ever really slow down and examine critically and have more critical consciousness around and more sincere embodiment. And those systems right now seem all connected, and another aspect of pain and grief and experience that I'm confronting is the parts of my life that are not aligned with my evolving paradigm shifts and my evolving beliefs. And how do you reconcile that when your heart, your spirit, your mind is moving in a different direction and your body's terrified about what that might mean, and you you don't quite know how to put it into words because you're still sort of connecting it all and slowing it down and trying to be with it, but you're also running from it because to be with it is really overwhelming and brings up grief. And here's the thing: as humans, we don't have a lot of cultural support around being with grief and knowing how to hold space for grief and pain and loss and longing. And I want I want that for all of us, and I want that for me.

The Inner Healer Asks A Hard Question

SPEAKER_00 21:23

And I participated in a healer's guild. It's a group that one of my dear friends, Chris, started, and it's for different practitioners in my tradition that are interested in the healing arts. And I attended this, and this was, you know, I don't know, May 2nd or 3. And they guided us through a pathworking where we met and were confronted, in my case, by our inner healer. And my Was at first I wasn't quite sure whether it was my higher self or a deity, and as time went on, I continued to process the experience. I believe that it was the spirit of the land of Ireland and was very direct with me and met me in this beautiful like waterfall and had a real loving and important question for me. And it was why do you run from your own healing? You cannot heal others if you never hold space to heal yourself. Something like that. I could get my journal out and say specifically, but you get the gist. And I again it was like two days after my coven mate had mirrored to me, you have a tumultuous relationship with your water. And water, as you know, is connected to emotional and intuitive and healing and and is deep and slow and all the things. So I yeah, I I feel like this episode has turned into a bit of a example, maybe calling myself in around I've been pretty disembodied and not slowing down and letting myself be with what's happening. And I learned from it, and I know that Taurus season for other Taurus moons and Taurus placements was a lot and really kind of was uh involved a lot of things, and I'll say some more that on June 19th, Chiron the wounded healer, is going to be moving into Taurus and it will be in Taurus for let me pull this up June 2026 until May 2034.

Chiron In Taurus And Grounding

SPEAKER_00 24:31

So that's about eight years, and Chiron in Taurus is really going to provide support and energy to address the wounds in the body and in the material world and related to safety. And of course, this is all about feeling safe enough to be in our bodies just a little bit more than we were yesterday. And so maybe that's enough. And maybe it can be a practice of titration. Maybe you can sit with yourself and ground yourself. And what what I'm learning about an earth element moon to help with the nervous system regulation related to earth signs and Taurus in particular, it's really essential to ground into the earth. So take your shoes off, get on grass or sand or soil or rock and let your feet steady yourself. And if you can't get outside, you can put your hands on a wooden surface and kind of push in and breathe. And this is about grounding and rooting and the way that we can use the wisdom of our luminaries and the moon in particular, and what sign your moon is in. And if you don't know your natal chart, I'll link something that you can do a quick calculation and figure it out. So it's useful for our embodiment awareness and consciousness to know that part of our blueprint.

Capacity Honesty And A New Pace

SPEAKER_00 26:47

And before we wrap up, I I wanna I want to apologize here. And I also want to be compassionate to myself and trust that if you are new to me and you were like enjoying some of the things that I was trying to put out there, and then you were like, what happened? What is this person doing? Are they trustworthy? Are they, you know, flaky? Can I count on them? Like, where'd they go? Um I'm gonna I'm gonna commit to really try to be more real about my capacity with myself before I make really big commitments. And like, come on, I should have known really like 14 weekly episodes. Um and then I also decided to sign up for three trainings that are happening on a weekly basis. And I'm, you know, just it's I I kind of like I think that another thing that's really humbling, and I'll, and then I'll leave it here, is my the way that I when I commit to something, and I think this has to do with some of my Taurus moon also, and probably also my Scorpio sun, and maybe just who I am, right? Like the celestial influences and also all the contextual colonial influences. There's a way that when I commit to something and I start to have this vision about a thing and the way I want it to go, I can, as it's clearly the reality of it is not unfolding the way I intended because I don't have capacity, or life happens and I learn about a overwhelming experience that happened or a trauma, right? Like I'm I might need to create some time and space for myself to hold space for myself, right? So I might not be able to do all the things I commit to, right? We're human, that's a part of decolonizing our psyche and our spirit and our body, is to honor our body. And when our body is saying, Hey, I need time, you gotta slow down, I can't do this, or I got some stuff that I'm overwhelmed by, and you can't just keep piling on more articles and trainings and books and things to try to like drown out the thing that's underneath. You know, you gotta just like be with the thing. Yeah, I am going to say that I'm not sure if this is gonna be a weekly series, but I can say I'm going to continue to do embodiment focused episodes, and I am going to extend the series past the summer solstice because I do have a lot of things that I was not able to put together. And I had in my mind, right, I was like gonna do four on vocalization and sound, and then four on body work and dance and movement, and then four on mindfulness and meditation for Gemini season, right? Like I had this whole vision. And then as I was clearly watching myself week one go by, week two, and I'm like getting behind, and I'm like, oh shit, I'm so far behind. What am I gonna do? I'm am I gonna just like record all of them at once and pretend like I'm recording them weekly and then just release all four at once, and clearly they're like not aligned with the actual time. Am I gonna like just not acknowledge what's going on with me and that I have been so fucking running from myself, and that's why I can't sit down and be the channel I want to be, because I'm like literally not able to be inside my body, go like what? I think you get the point, and I hope that you be with yourself, just be silent, just ask your body what's going on, how are you? What do you need? What are you feeling? You know, and slow yourself down because the subtle cues you will miss if you're moving too fast. Okay. I hope that you have a beautiful rest of your week, and I will be with you again soon. All right. As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul. Bye for now.