Become the Provocation to Evolution.

Most of us try desperately to hide the truth of our experience. We do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like hiding at all! Especially because the world we live in rewards performance, busyness, and “niceness.”

How many of these do you identify with? Count, and let me know. That is information about how you learned to cope in your life. Once you email me, I’ll be happy to explore with you what it means.

1. Overachieving:
Always striving, always producing, always busy. It's a socially acceptable way to avoid the pain. If I'm constantly doing, I never have to feel. So I distract myself by being busy.

2. People-pleasing:
Becoming who others need or expect you to be. Performing "goodness" to avoid rejection, discomfort, or conflict. You know it’s not really you, but you don’t know who else to be so you become the chameleon that fits in everywhere.

3. Intellectualizing:
Always thinking. Analyzing everything, rationalizing away emotion, making meaning instead of being with the sensation. Generally, people who intellectualize live in deep and immense fear that they seek to control through their mind. It feels safe up there.

4. Humor / sarcasm:
Deflecting with jokes, lightness, or charm. It keeps things surface-level so the real stuff never has to be felt or said. It avoids telling the truth because the truth is uncomfortable.

5. Numbing:
Scrolling, drinking, eating, working, bingeing—whatever dulls the sharp edges of sensation or memory. It's not about indulgence. It’s about escape. It’s about not feeling.

6. Caretaking:
Focusing on everyone else’s needs while abandoning your own. You’re “so good” at supporting others, but secretly, you’re lost to yourself. You’re so lost that you don’t know who you are without others to take care of.

7. Spiritual bypassing:
Hiding behind love and light, bypassing rage, grief, or shame with affirmations, chants and mantras. It’s an avoidance strategy because, once again, the pain is too deep and you are afraid of what you’ll discover.

8. Over-explaining / over-talking:
Flooding with words. Talking at instead of revealing from within. Often masks a fear of being misunderstood, or of truly being seen, so you fill the emptiness with words, hoping that if you talk fast enough you will bypass any form of questioning.

9. Perfectionism:
Not starting until it’s perfect. Rewriting, tweaking, editing life to avoid the mess of being real. If you can control the image, maybe they won’t see the parts you shame. So you hide.

10. Disassociation / “floating”:
Intentionally checking out so you’re not present in the body. Feeling untethered, foggy, or numb. It’s a brilliant adaptation that once kept you safe— if you’re not here, then you don’t feel the pain. So you disappear.

11. Cynicism or jadedness:
Writing everything off as “bullshit.” Rolling your eyes at anything that gets too vulnerable or hopeful. It protects from disappointment… and connection. But inside you, you feel fear of not-belonging.

12. Silence / shrinking / being “low maintenance”:
Never asking for much. Not speaking the truth. Keeping things smooth on the surface so the boat doesn’t rock. It looks peaceful, but it’s exhausting.

13. Controlling / rigidity:
Trying to plan, fix, or orchestrate every detail to avoid uncertainty. You’re terrified of risking and creating a mess so you try to plan and manage every aspect of your life. Control is the name of the game.

14. Hyper-independence:
I don’t need anyone. I got it. Always. That’s the story, anyway. But behind that story is often a deep fear of letting someone in because if we do, we believe rejection is right around the corner.

The Intelligence of Survival

Despite what we have been taught to believe, these are not “bad” behaviors. In fact, they are intelligent survival adaptations. But because most of us still hide behind them long after the threat is gone, they stop protecting and start imprisoning us in our own skin.

The body keeps the score. We’ve all heard that. We know it to be true. Yet we keep deferring to the intellect to “figure it out”. We want to know the details, the story, the root of the cause! But knowing where it came from does not integrate it; digesting and metabolizing the wave of information in the body is the only thing that can integrate it.

Think about this – for you to formulate a complete thought into words takes a long time. You know the visceral sensation – you feel it. But the moment you try to tell a story, it takes you forever. That’s the same thing with healing. The body processes at an unfathomable speed to the intellect! The body just knows.

The body has been with you for every single breath you’ve ever taken. It has been with you for every single experience you’ve ever had. The memories live in the quantum-spaces of your body. They become an “achor” for how you move through life. They even get passed along intergenerationally (aka epigenetically – meaning, beyond genes).

The body knows exactly what happened, because it was always there. It did not detach, and it does not require a conscious awareness to remember. This is classic in scenarios where extreme violence is being imposed upon the body – the mind “floats” while the body “takes it”. So no wonder we don’t consciously remember – but the body does.

The body stores immense amounts of information and it speaks to us in its own language. So it is important to learn how to speak the language of the body so you deCODE its messages and know what to do in the moments where you feel you are being overtaken with pain. In those moments of deep trauma coming to the surface, in the therapy model we are taught to brace against it until we can form a story that makes sense. After all, the goal of therapy is to “find out” the root of the problem.

The problem is … the body doesn’t care about the root of the problem; the body cares that it frees the information into the larger system so that it integrates it, and moves on. But we have been conditioned to be terrified of the movement in our own bodies! In those critical moments of movement, we have been taught to silence the body and defer to the mind. “Use your words!”, comes to mind.

What our parents didn’t teach us, because they didn’t know how, is that while our intellect is great at solving problems, it is unable to make sense of the consciously forgotten, the illogical and the paradoxical. Only the body knows how to do that. All we have to do is listen to the language of the body differently.

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Be yourself, tell the truth.

The most empowering discovery I have made in the last seven years of working within the WEL-Systems® paradigm, is that we are each a profoundly powerful presence when we speak from the impulses that move in our body. When we communicate the truth of the moment we are in without seeking to control or avoid a predetermined outcome. When we be ourselves and tell the unfiltered truth of our experience.

When we own that and no longer question it, we are alchemy itself. We trust what moves through our body, and we engage from the truth of that. Not from the content of our intellect – meaning long held belief systems, values, and attitudes internalized as real a long long loooooong time ago – but from the innate, inescapable wisdom of the body.

The bottom line is this: if you don’t learn how to make peace with the information that moves through your body, you will continue to be in pain. You may take medication, and it will work – for a while. But the body always seeks homeostasis. So no matter what you do, if you do not learn how to trust the body to digest energy and information in flow (including emotions your intellect has judgements about) like it does a banana, well, you will experience toxicity in the body.

Toxicity in the body will manifest differently for different people – but, let’s explore a few options.

If you’re feeling unsafe because you’re holding historical grudges that do not allow you to move forward in your life, you may experience symptoms labeled “edema” in the medical model.

If you’ve experienced intense early childhood trauma or sexual assault, you may have symptoms that result in a diagnosis of “endometriosis”.

If you feel powerless in creating the life you want but you keep pushing anyway while you lack joy in life, you may be diagnosed with “diabetes”.

If you live a life committed to constantly cleaning up after everyone and getting no thanks for it, you might find yourself with arthritis of the fingers or on the brink of heart attacks.

If you know you have so much to say but constantly swallow your tongue, you might become diagnosed with “thyroid” issues or you might experience “locked jaw” type symptoms.

If the life you are living does not map to the life you know you belong in, you might find yourself constantly reaching for the Advil to soothe the migraines.

If you know your truth differs from that which everyone around you seems to be living and you feel like you don’t belong, you may reach for another glass of wine to soothe the unexplainable yet excruciating pain.

Reclaiming Power Through the Body

Now, if you took these and reversed the formula, you begin to notice that what you label “disease” holds intelligent information for you to pay attention to. Once you do, you invite and allow the wave to move and you be with it in a Quantum TLC™ moment of deep and profound integration. Once the wave has been digested and metabolized, you will see more clearly, and you will make more congruent choices, and your life will become the reflection of your healed internal state.

From where I stand, to know how to deCODE the messages of your body is to reclaim your personal power. To know how to be in the moment of discomfort and trust the intelligence of what’s presenting without judging it (Quantum TLC), is to live from the truth.

The truth is, CODE Model Coaching™ is different from everything else out there. It’s different because of its presuppositions, including:

All meaning is context dependent.
The body never lies.
The body is a perceptual filter designed to receive, process, create and transmit signals. The intellect is intended to allow us to choose, once this processing is complete.
All learning, all behaviour, all change is driven by and reflected in the body as the instrument of expression.
Every response (impulse) in the body is an intelligent response. Beyond our judgements and habits, genius is to be found.
Change requires Space (Intention), Movement (Attention) and Flow (Invitation).
There are no accidents in the universe. Everything is unfolding as it should.
There are no exceptions.

Take a moment and sit with each of these and see what comes up for you. I’m quite certain that these presuppositions will create movement in your body. That’s a good thing! It’s a sign of Life!

We spend a whole five days unpacking these presuppositions in the Decloaking and Living Authentically intensive. If you’re curious about that, either start listening to the audio files here or book a free coaching call with me. You never know where that simple choice will lead you!

Message Sparking the Sacred

Hi, I’m Stela. I work with women who feel too much, think too deeply, and carry a silent ache that something’s missing. Through a body-led, science-backed process that’s been tried and tested for over 30 years, we turn toward the places culture taught you to avoid—so you can remember who you are and reclaim how you live.