151: Liz Tenuto: Your Body Is Holding Stress Your Mind Can't Release and Somatic Healing Is the Missing Link
Broads: The Bold & Badass Fitness Podcast for WomenShow Notes
Most women have been told to manage stress with mindset work, talk therapy, meditation and breathwork, or just pushing through. And those things can help… but none of them address what the body is actually holding — the tension that has been living in your muscles for years. And the stress patterns your nervous system built to protect you are still running in the background long after the original stressor is gone.
That is what somatic healing addresses. And most women have never heard of it.
Liz Tenuto spent ten years living with chronic pain and insomnia that started at fourteen. She saw every specialist, tried every modality — acupuncture, yoga, massage, meditation, craniosacral therapy. Nothing lasted more than a few days. It was not until a ballet teacher pulled her into a somatics class that something finally shifted. She cried in the bathroom after the first session — not from pain, but because it was the first time she had ever stopped being hard on her body. Her insomnia was almost gone within four lessons.
Liz Tenuto is the creator of The Workout Witch, a somatic movement educator with a background in psychology and ballet, and the author of When the Body Speaks: How Somatic Healing Sets You Free. She teaches zero-equipment somatic exercises — tiny micro-movements that release habitual tension, dissolve stress-holding patterns in the muscles, and regulate the nervous system — to nearly four million followers across Instagram and TikTok.
What's Discussed:
What somatic exercises actually are — and the hip rocking exercise you can try tonight that uses the same bilateral stimulation technique found in EMDR therapy
Ten years of chronic pain, every modality, and nothing lasting — and the one class that changed everything within four sessions
How Liz's background in psychology and ballet led her to build something that bridges the two in a way neither field had done before
Top-down vs. bottom-up healing — what talk therapy does, what somatics does, and why somatics is often the missing link for women who have plateaued in their healing journey
Why there is no separation between emotions and movement — and what that means for women who are already training hard
The forehead swipe exercise: one minute, no equipment, stimulates a cranial nerve that calms your fight-or-flight response — you can do it in a meeting and nobody will notice
EFT tapping vs. somatic exercises — what the difference is and how to know which one is right for you
When the Body Speaks — the book, the three sections, and who it is actually for
Check out more from Liz Tenuto:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theworkoutwitch/
TikTok: @theworkoutwitch
App and Courses: https://www.theworkoutwitch.com
Book — When the Body Speaks: How Somatic Healing Sets You Free: https://www.theworkoutwitch.com/book
Free resource from Liz: DM "release" on Instagram @theworkoutwitch and she will send you a one-minute hip rocking video to get started.
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Check out more from Tara LaFerrara: https://www.taralaferrara.com/ https://www.instagram.com/taralaferrara/ YouTube: @TaraLaferrara TikTok: @taralaferrara
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