What Your Body Has Been Trying to Tell You

There is a sentence I said at the top of this episode that I want you to sit with before you read another word.

“Many people have spent their lives being told what their body needs. A doctor tells them, a label tells them, an algorithm tells them. Nobody ever stops to ask, what is the body already saying?”

That is the whole episode. Everything Sky Bradshaw and I talked about for over an hour traces back to that single question. And if you have ever walked away from an appointment feeling more confused than when you walked in, or felt something was wrong before any test confirmed it, or pushed through a signal your body was sending because you did not have the framework to know what it meant, then this conversation was made for you.

Sky Bradshaw has spent thirty years doing what very few people in the wellness world can honestly claim to do. She listens. Not to your labs. Not to your history form. To you. To the energy you carry in before you say a word. To what your body is holding that your mouth has not yet found language for.

She is a Reiki master teacher, a certified life coach, a Mambo Asagwe within the Haitian Voodoo tradition since 2006, the founder of Love Church, and the host of the Be Your Soul podcast. She works at the intersection of energy medicine, ancestral wisdom, and practical personal transformation. And the most important thing I can tell you about her is this: she does not ask you to choose between your intuition and your intelligence. She insists you need both.

The conversation I did not know I needed

I have spent years in clinical practice. Labs, protocols, functional testing, nutrition. And I have also spent years working on myself, learning to trust what I feel in my body before any number confirms it. So when Sky and I sat down, I was not coming as a skeptic. I was coming as someone who has lived both sides of this, and has seen what happens when people only live one.

Sky said something early in our conversation that I have not stopped thinking about: “Efficiency is smart laziness.” She was talking about her approach to healing as a trilogy, the mind, the body, the energy, all three as one. Her point was that if you only address one plane, you will eventually have to come back and do the work on the others anyway. So why not do it all at once, in whatever way the person can access it?

That is the same premise I build every nutrition protocol on. The body is not a collection of isolated systems. It is one ecosystem in constant conversation with itself. When a face breakout shows up, it is the skin having a conversation with the liver, the gut, the hormones. When you feel tired after eating, it is the body giving you feedback about the food. When you feel anxious in a room full of people, that is not weakness. That is your nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do.

Your body cannot tell the difference

Sky gave us one of the best explanations I have heard for why so many people are stuck in fight or flight. She said, “It’s really hard for the physical body to know the difference between somebody hurting your feelings on the internet and a saber-toothed tiger. Because we have the same visceral physical reactions.”

And she is exactly right. The autonomic nervous system does not distinguish between a threatening email and a physical threat. It reads a signal of danger and responds accordingly: cortisol, adrenaline, elevated heart rate, constricted digestion. The problem is that we live in a world that generates that signal constantly, and most of us have never been taught how to come back down from it.

This is where Sky’s work and my work meet. I work from the clinical side: when your nervous system is chronically activated, your cortisol dysregulates, your gut microbiome suffers, your serotonin production drops, your body stops healing efficiently. Approximately ninety to ninety-five percent of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut. So when people ask me why they feel emotionally disconnected, flat, unable to trust their instincts, part of the answer is physiological. A dysregulated gut is a dysregulated mind. And a chronically stressed body is a body that cannot hear itself.

Symptoms are not the enemy

This is the part of the conversation I want every person who has ever been handed a pill to suppress a symptom to hear.

Your body is not punishing you. It is communicating with you. And when we treat symptoms as problems to silence rather than messages to decode, we do not fix anything. We delay the real conversation until the body has no choice but to get louder.

I said it plainly on the episode: “The whisper becomes a symptom. The symptom becomes a diagnosis.” In functional medicine, we call that the progression of dysfunction. The body moves from a subclinical imbalance to a measurable disease state when the signal is repeatedly suppressed rather than addressed.

Sky put it another way. She talked about the messages Spirit sends: a butterfly, then a baseball, then a battery, then a brick wall. Her massage therapist told her something was happening with her hip three months before she had any pain. She acknowledged it and moved on. The body kept talking. Eventually it got loud enough that she had to listen.

We all do this. I have done it. You have probably done it. And the answer is not shame. The answer is education. We do not know what we do not know until we know it. But once we do, we have a choice.

The frameworks that will actually help you

Sky brought two tools into this conversation that I want you to write down.

The first is pause, reflect, reconnect. When your body sends a signal, instead of immediately going into fight or flight mode, you pause. You reflect: what is this actually telling me? Is this danger or is this discomfort? Is this a saber-toothed tiger or is this a difficult email? And then you reconnect: what do I do with this information? Sky was clear that trust in the body is built over time. If you have spent decades overriding your instincts, you will not reclaim that trust overnight. You build it back, slowly, one honest moment at a time.

The second is four questions she uses as a filter for the thinking mind, for the people who shut down the moment someone says “I feel.” When a thought comes in, ask: Is it real? Is it true? Is it kind? Is it mine? That last one is where it gets interesting. Because sometimes what you are feeling in a room is not yours. You walked in and picked it up. And knowing that changes everything about how you respond to it.

What I have lived that I know is true

I told Sky something on this episode that I do not always say out loud. For probably decades, I suppressed what my body was telling me. I was trying to be nice. I was wondering if I was overreacting. And every time, my instincts were correct. Every single time.

I also talked about what happens when we ignore the body long enough. I had fibroids. I have yet to see a single case of fibroids where there was not an emotional or traumatic element sitting alongside the physical one. That is not a theory. That is thirty years of clinical and personal evidence. Our emotional state, when suppressed and unaddressed, does not stay invisible. It takes root physically in the body. That is not woo. That is biology.

The combination of proper nutrition and getting my energy into alignment resolved that for me. Not a surgery. Not a suppression. Root cause work. That is what this show is built on, and that is what every conversation here is designed to help you do.

The fig leaves and the deeper lesson

We closed the interview and moved into our herbal spotlight and food segment, and the herb for this episode was fig leaves. Sky grew her fig trees from literal sticks she carried from New Orleans. They are six years old and producing ten pounds of figs a day. Every arborist who sees them thinks they are decades old.

Fig leaves are not just beautiful. They have been used for thousands of years across West African, Ayurvedic, and Middle Eastern traditions for blood sugar regulation, liver support, anti-inflammatory action, and skin health. There is even a double-blind randomized trial showing improvement in inflammatory markers in skin tissue from fig leaf application. Real medicine. Traditional medicine. The kind that does not require a prescription.

We made stuffed fig leaf dolmas, a plant-based take on the classic, filled with a rice and lentil mixture with dried figs, blueberries, fresh herbs, cumin, and cinnamon, and finished with a fig balsamic reduction. It met the PF³ Framework completely: protein from the lentils, fat from the olive oil, fiber from the leaves and the rice, and flavor from every herb in that filling. And Sky tried it on camera, having never tasted it before. Her verdict: “No mind being messy about that.”

Sky’s informed choice for you this week

At the end of every episode, I ask my guest one question. If you could tell the listeners to make one informed choice this week, what would it be?

Sky’s answer was this: “Notice how many times you get out of present moment awareness.”

Because the physical body is always present. The energy body, when we are in awareness, is in alignment. The emotional body, when we stay in the present, is not dragging us into regret about the past or anxiety about the future. The present moment is where the body can actually be heard.

She said something that stopped me completely: “When I stay very present, it feels like I have so much time. I’m not borrowing from the future or paying back the past. I have an infinite amount of moments.”

I am someone who is always thinking ahead. Always focused on the next goal, the next thing, the next milestone. I admitted on this episode that I have traditionally not celebrated or acknowledged what I have already done, because I am already looking at what’s next. Sky called me on it, gently and precisely. And I needed to hear it.

If you needed to hear it too, this episode is for you.