When the Body Leads: Liberation Beyond Conditioning

In this episode, Jin Hong shares grounded, practical ways to begin an embodiment journey without getting lost in theory or abstract language. We talk about what real body awareness actually looks like in everyday life.

Jin breaks down simple ways to move beyond conditioning and into self-knowing, including how to notice sensations, build trust with your felt experience, and make small daily shifts that bring clarity to desire and choice.

We also explore how somatic and tantric tools create intimacy with yourself first, and how that inner connection naturally changes your relationships and overall energy, without pushing or overwhelm.

Jin Hong is a Somatic Healing and Tantra coach. She supports people in cultivating an authentic, holistic connection with their body-mind, healing blocks to intimacy, and creating fulfilling, connected relationships.

Connect with Jin:

www.theladyjin.com

https://www.youtube.com/@coachingwithjin

https://www.instagram.com/coachingwithjin/

Get a complimentary consultation with Angela

https://www.somashift.org/

If this conversation resonated, share it with a friend who’s curious about somatic healing or feeling more at home in their body.​

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Most of us were taught a version of healing that doesn’t actually help us heal. We were told to dig, analyze, process, talk it through, and push harder. Yet so many women still feel stuck, overwhelmed, disconnected from pleasure, and trapped in old patterns that won’t budge.

In this episode, I break down why:

Trauma doesn’t resolve from insight alone. Your nervous system needs real, felt moments of safety, steadiness, and goodness to rewrite what it learned in survival. We explore why “fixing yourself” keeps you looping, how chronic symptoms often come from a lifetime of carrying too much without enough support, and why pleasure, connection, and resourcing are essential, not extra.

I talk about:
• Why pain gets all the attention and keeps you stuck
• How your nervous system learns safety through experience, not effort
• Pendulation, resourcing, and why they protect you from overwhelm
• Why so many women can name emotions but can’t feel them
• How chronic fight-or-flight shuts down joy, desire, and intimacy
• Why you aren’t broken—you’re wired for survival
• What actually helps your body shift from chronic struggle to chronic thriving

This episode is for women who are tired of analyzing themselves, tired of chasing healing, and ready for a different way. One that honors the body, honors your lived experience, and reconnects you with the parts of you that have been waiting underneath it all.

If you’re craving aliveness, connection, or the sense that you’re finally coming back to yourself (or discovering yourself for the first time), this one is for you.

FOR WOMEN WHO ARE TIRED OF TRYING SO HARD:
This episode is especially for you if you’ve tried the diets, the supplements, the breathwork, the mindset tricks, the holistic treatments, and still feel stuck in the same patterns. You’re not failing. Your body is asking for something different.

WORK WITH ME:
I support women with chronic symptoms, emotional overwhelm, intimacy struggles, and long-standing patterns that never seem to shift. My work blends Somatic Experiencing® (SE™), VITA™ training, relational repair, and body-led practices that help you feel met, supported, and understood.

I offer 1:1 sessions, group programs, support circles, in-person work, and retreats. If you’re looking for a space where you don’t have to perform, hustle, or be “the strong one,” you’ll find it here.

CONNECT:
Website: https://www.somashift.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theangelarivero/
Upcoming programs and groups available on my site.

Shame Is the Tax Women Have Been Forced to Pay for Pleasure. I Say: Stop Paying It.

Shame isn’t just an emotion; it’s a biological response. In this episode, we explore how shame triggers the brain and body’s threat systems, activating fight, flight, or freeze states, and how it keeps women chronically dysregulated.

We’ll dive into the neuroscience and physiology of shame, its effects on pleasure, desire, menstruation, aging, body changes, and rest, and share practical tools to release it. Using felt sense awareness, sensory grounding, and Havening techniques, this episode offers a roadmap to reclaim your nervous system, your body, and your pleasure.
What You’ll Learn:
How shame activates neural pathways associated with threat and physical danger
The physiological effects: cortisol spikes, heart rate changes, and defensive brain activation
How chronic shame keeps the nervous system in fight, flight, or freeze
How shame affects pleasure, desire, body sensations, and rest
Practical strategies to regulate the nervous system and de-shame the body
Tools & Practices:
Felt sense awareness: noticing the body’s signals of safety or threat
5-sense orientation to anchor into the present
Touch, taste, smell, and sight exercises for micro-moments of pleasure
Gentle Havening touch to lower threat response
Curiosity instead of self-criticism
For Listeners Who:
Feel disconnected from their body or pleasure
Struggle with anxiety, fatigue, pain, or other chronic symptoms
Want to reclaim regulation, presence, and sensory attunement
Call to Action:
Share this episode with someone who needs it
Join a women’s circle to explore de-shaming practices
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What if the very things you’ve been taught to hide, your desires, your shame, your shadow, are portals to your power?In this episode, Erotic Mystic and author Sharon Marie Scott joins me to talk about Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo into Erotic Medicine, her new book, and her life’s work exploring how the taboo holds medicine. We unpack what it means to find spiritual mastery through pleasure, how desire can become a compass for wholeness, and why true awakening asks us to meet every part of ourselves, even the ones we’ve judged.

You’ll walk away seeing your relationship with power, pleasure, and the sacred in a completely new light.

Forbidden Alchemy releases 11/11/25 — preorder it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1966346670

About Sharon Marie Scott

Sharon Marie Scott is an Erotic Mystic, High Alchemist, storyteller, and founder of Life Turned On, a living temple devoted to desire, devotion, and spiritual mastery. Her work bridges the erotic and the divine, guiding self-led high-achievers, edge-players, and spiritual adventurers to remember their pleasure as sacred and their sovereignty as power.

For more than a decade, Sharon has immersed herself in alternative lifestyles and sacred erotic practices—exploring kink, BDSM, tantra, open relating, sex-positive communities, and queerness as living laboratories for transformation. She is the author of Forbidden Alchemy: Transmuting Taboo Into Erotic Medicine (HarperCollins, 2025), the first of six books in her Hieros Codex series.

Connect with Sharon:
Website: www.sharonmariescott.com
Instagram: @sharonlifeturnedon
YouTube: @lifeturnedon
Substack: @sharonmariescott

Listen + Subscribe:
The Everyday Intimacy Podcast with Angela Rivero
It’s not about doing more. It’s about listening differently.

Have you ever done years of inner work and still felt like something’s missing?

You understand yourself better. You can name your patterns. But somehow, you still end up in the same place, stuck in self-criticism, overthinking, or trying to “get it right.”

In this episode of Everyday Intimacy, we uncover the missing piece in so much of the work we do on ourselves: why insight and effort alone often aren’t enough, and how tending to the body and nervous system can unlock real change.We talk about:

• Why self-compassion isn’t soft—it’s the most radical form of inner leadership.

• How your inner critic and protective patterns are actually trying to help you.

• Why healing requires the body, not just the mind.

• What happens when we stop fixing ourselves and start listening instead.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re doing all the right things and still can’t find ease, this conversation might be the missing piece.

Soulla Demetriou is a Self-Compassion Expert. With over a decade of experience at the intersection of mind, body, emotion, and spirit, she helps people transform their lives by changing the way they relate to themselves.

Through her signature Soulshine Way™ Method—a blend of self-compassion, mindfulness, nervous system work, and Internal Family Systems. Soulla empowers people to break free from old patterns and reconnect with their authentic Self. Her debut book, You Have Always Been Enough: A Healing Guide to Self-Love and Inner Freedom, will be published by HarperCollins in April 2026.

Connect with Soulla:

Website: www.soulshineretreats.com
Instagram: @soulshine_soulla

Connect with Angela:

Website: www.somashift.org
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theangelarivero/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/angela.riv.1/

There’s more to chronic illness than meets the eye; your body knows the story.

In this episode of Everyday Intimacy, I sit down with Veronique Mead, a former physician who left traditional medicine to study the deeper origins of chronic illness. Veronique shares how early life experiences, emotional neglect, and long-term stress can shape the body, why your symptoms are not your fault, and what it truly means to listen to your body’s signals.

If you’ve ever felt dismissed, unseen, or lost in your symptoms, this conversation offers a new perspective you may have never heard before.

• Veronique Mead is a former Board-Certified family physician and Dartmouth-affiliated assistant professor of family medicine who left medicine to explore the deeper roots of chronic illness. She went on to earn her Master’s in somatic psychotherapy from Naropa University, with specialty training in trauma.

• Through her platform, Chronic Illness Trauma Studies, Veronique shares research showing how trauma, especially early relational and developmental trauma, is an underestimated risk factor for autoimmune and other chronic illnesses. Her work helps people see their symptoms through the lens of survival, not fault, offering a compassionate and science-backed understanding of why healing takes time.

  • Website: chronicillnesstraumastudies.com

  • Instagram: @veroniquemead

  • Facebook: Chronic Illness Trauma Studies

  • YouTube: Veronique Mead Channel

  • LinkedIn: Veronique Mead

  • Free ebook: 16 Trauma-Informed Tools for Healing Chronic Illness

• Angela's Links.

• • Instagram: @theangelarivero

  • Work with Angela: somashift.org/work-with-me

Nancy Parker ON: The Heart Yes: Medicine for Empaths. What if real change didn’t have to come through suffering or big breakthroughs? In this episode, we explore how transformation happens in small, steady doses that give your nervous system space to reorganize. Movement and pleasure act as medicine, a catalyst for healing. And when resistance shows up, play becomes the access point that opens the door to deeper connection, intimacy, and alignment for empaths and sensitive souls.

Tash Doherty ON: Shamelessly Sexy Writing, Desire & Becoming Unapologetically You

Today’s guest is Tash Doherty, a British-Irish-American author, creator of the blog and podcast Misseducated, and writer of the debut spicy, coming-of-age novel These Perfectly Careless Things. Tash left the corporate world behind after Wharton to fully embrace her passion for writing, living boldly, and helping others explore sexuality through story and self-expression.

In this episode, we explore: What it really means to be shamelessly sexy, and why it’s about so much more than appearance or performance How writing can be a tool for exploring desire, intimacy, and self-knowing The three fundamentals of becoming shamelessly sexy: knowing what you want, believing you deserve it, and asking for it Tash’s creative journey, from corporate to creative, and what it takes to step into your unapologetic self

This conversation is equal parts playful and profound—an invitation to embrace creativity, desire, and self-expression as pathways to intimacy and liberation.

Connect with Tash: Instagram: ⁠@misseducated_⁠ | ⁠@tashdoherty_⁠ TikTok: ⁠@misseducated_⁠ Twitter/X: ⁠@misseducated__⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠here

⁠Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/misseducated.bsky.social

https://www.facebook.com/tash.dokerty/

Check out her debut novel These Perfectly Careless Things and keep an eye out for her upcoming Sex Journal (Fall 2025).

⁠https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556510103080⁠

⁠https://www.somashift.org/