For those learning to choose from self-truth rather than expectation, to act from alignment instead of conditioning.
Many high-achieving professionals feel caught between obligation and self-truth, especially during times of burnout, caregiving, or cultural and family pressure. Dr. Shirley Ley explores how reconnecting with the body’s core can support a sense of inner freedom, grounding, and the capacity to choose from alignment rather than expectation. This reflection may be especially meaningful for high-achieving professionals, including many Asian and Asian diaspora individuals, who feel weighed down by responsibility and are curious about somatic practices that support self-trust, choice, and emotional steadiness.
Why the Body Holds Onto Stress
I discovered something recently that deepened my understanding of how to stay in contact with myself when stress arises. Like many people, I can find it hard to detach from stressors. They have a way of clinging, lingering in the body long after the moment has passed, showing up in racing thoughts, tension, or fatigue.
A Somatic Practice for Reconnecting with Your Core
One somatic practice that has been especially helpful involves connecting to the core, both physically and symbolically. The core represents what we care about most, our values, intentions, and what we are working toward. For me, it represents personal emancipation and freedom—the capacity to act from greater personal choice rather than obligation, to move from what feels right instead of what I was taught to do.
The Practice
Try this the next time obligation or stress feels like it’s taking over:
- Place both hands below the belly button. Feel the warmth and contact of your hands against your body.
- Breathe into this space. Imagine that your breath travels directly to the center of your being.
- Visualize your stressors, the thoughts, worries, or pressures that tend to overtake you, approaching from a distance.
- As they come toward you, imagine them falling into a moat or cascading down a waterfall that surrounds you. They may still exist, but they no longer enter or possess you.
- Keep your attention on your core, the place that anchors you to your own values and freedom.
Adjusting the Distance Over Time
You can also play with distance in this exercise. At first, keep the moat or waterfall at a safe distance, far enough that you can sense your own boundaries clearly. As you become more skilled at finding your core and feeling grounded in strength and confidence, allow the moat to move closer. This can mirror the gradual process of bringing life’s stressors nearer without being overtaken by them.
Making This a Regular Practice
This is not a one-time technique but a practice, a way of strengthening inner muscle memory, much like building physical resilience through repetition. Each time you return to it, you are training the body and mind to remember that no matter what is happening around you, there is always a center within that remains steady, rooted, and responsive.
Who This Practice Is For
This practice tends to resonate most with high-achieving professionals, including many Asian and Asian American clients, working through burnout, rage, and soul fatigue or the weight of cultural and internalized pressure—the lifelong expectation to care for others, achieve, and perform before attending to their own needs. If this reflects your own experience, you’re welcome to learn more about my approach.