Embodied decision making: How I learnt to trust my body's yes & no - for high-functioning women

Do you know your body’s yes and no? Or are you making decisions from your mind while overriding what your body is telling you? In this episode, I share my experience with embodied decision-making and why so many high-functioning women disconnect from their desires and boundaries. If you’ve been stuck in people-pleasing, overgiving, or “good girl” patterns, this episode will help you reconnect with your body and make aligned, self-trusting decisions.

Podcast Episode

You are functioning, but you are not feeling…

You hold it all together - your life, career, motherhood, relationships. You keep pushing, managing, and people pleasing. A life on autopilot. Underneath all of it, you ask yourself: is this really it?
Your mind rarely stops, you move from one thing to another, rest makes you uncomfortable. Your sleep is broken, your digestion is off, and your mood is unpredictable.
Your nervous system is stuck in a survival state. Your body has forgotten how to feel safe, how to soften, to receive, and how to feel good.

What is missing isn't more effort. What is missing is pleasure.
Somatic pleasure is your next level nervous system regulation and healing.

I’m Patricia. I guide high-functioning women to reconnect with their bodies and expand their capacity for pleasure, so they become the Pleasurelit Woman: radiant, regulated and deliciously turned on to life. I’m a mother, E D & D V survivor, former nurse, pleasure explorer, and an award-winning educator in tantra and somatic pleasure embodiment. I’m the founder of Pleasurelit®, bestselling author of The Pleasurelit Way, and host of the top 5% podcast Pleasurelit with Patricia.

Pleasurelit is a trauma informed somatic pleasure approach using nervous system healing, tantra, breathwork, yoga, somatic movement, meditation, and pleasure embodiment to guide high-functioning women from survival into feeling - in life, business, motherhood and relationships.

You deserve to be and live Pleasurelit.

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YouTube Video

Have you ever met someone and something in your body just felt off? And yet, you still went along with it. Another date, or another meet up, telling yourself to give it a chance. I have done that.

Or saying yes to an opportunity that looked good on paper, but didn’t actually feel like me. And later, sitting there thinking: I knew it. My body told me. Why didn’t I listen?

When you are a high-functioning woman, you have likely been praised for being capable, independent and reliable. The one who holds everything together. But what often sits underneath that is a pattern of overriding yourself. You became the good girl, the caretaker, the one who adapted. You learnt to read what’s needed, what’s expected and you and met that. And somewhere in that process, your own needs, your own desires, your own NO got quieter. Because it didn’t always feel safe to listen to them or honour them.

Learning My Body’s Yes and No

There was a point in my life where I didn’t actually know what I wanted. I was so used to saying yes, adjusting, and accommodating, that when I was finally on my own again, I had this moment of: Who am I actually? What do I want? What is my no?

And I didn’t have clear answers, because I had spent years disconnected from my body. But then, even when I started to explore my body’s yes and no, I didn’t suddenly got it all right. I still said yes when I meant no. Especially in dating or work. I would feel that subtle tension in my body, that sense of… something’s not right. But I didn’t fully trust it yet. So I went along with it. And then later realised: That was my no. That’s how I learned. By noticing what happens when I override myself.

For me, a yes feels like warmth. A soft opening. A pull towards something. There’s a sense of curiosity and expansion.

A no feels different. It can be tight. Heavy. A slight shutdown. Sometimes it’s in my throat, or in my gut or it’s just a quiet “this isn’t it.”

Why Nervous System Regulation Matters

If your nervous system doesn’t feel safe, you won’t trust your body. You will go back into your mind, into logic, what makes sense, and into what looks good. Because that’s what you have learnt to rely on. For high-achieving women, that’s often where we live. But your body’s yes and no doesn’t come from your mind. It comes from feeling. And feeling requires safety.

When I finally started saying no, to people, opportunities, and things that didn’t feel aligned, something shifted. I started building trust with myself. Because I was finally listening.

You Build Self-Trust Through Experience

Self-trust isn’t something you decide to have. You build it. Through moments where you listen to your body… and act on it - again and again. That’s how your nervous system starts to feel safe and that’s how you reconnect.

How to start? Just notice where are you saying yes, when something in you is actually a no. You don’t have to change it all at once. Just start listening. That’s where embodied decision making begins.

Your Invitation

This is the work we go into inside The Pleasurelit Woman. We create safety in your body, rebuild your self-trust and you learn your inner yes and your no.

So your decisions don’t come from pressure, but from connection - from within your body.

Please support the podcast: Follow/Subscribe to the show, rate it with 5 stars (on Spotify) and share the episodes with others, so we can spread more pleasure into this world. You can also tag me and the guest speaker, so we can re-share your love.

Thank you. With love & pleasure, Patricia

For educational and informative purposes only

We would love to hear from you:

• What resonated with your from this conversation?

• What has been your experience with embodied decision making?

• How do your body’s yes and no feel like?

• What do you feel called to share?