This is not a motivational poem. It is a somatic provocation. Eight questions. Each one takes the language of hustle culture — optimize, grind, hack, hustle, invest, scale, dominate, launch — and turns it toward the most neglected territory in your life: your inner world, your body, your emotional depth, and your presence.
In this episode, Ana Mael — somatic trauma therapist, war survivor, and founder of the Somatic Trauma Recovery Center — reads an original poem that stops you before your mind catches up.
It asks what happens when the same relentless energy you give to your career, your productivity, and your financial portfolio is finally — deliberately, even aggressively — turned toward gentleness, rest, kindness, and wonder.
For trauma survivors who are high-functioning on the outside and running on empty on the inside. For healers and helpers who give everything outward and have forgotten the stranger living within them. For anyone whose body has been enduring rather than being truly inhabited.
Ana reads the poem in full. Then she sits inside each question with you — not to explain it, but to let it land where explanation cannot reach.
This is Episode 104 of Exiled & Rising: Trauma Recovery and Somatic Healing.
If this episode finds you at the right moment, it will find you exactly where you are.
Somatic Trauma Recovery Center
https://www.somatictraumarecoverycenter.com/
Read Ana book: https://amzn.to/41SjKKL
❤️ Support the podcast: https://exiledandrising.castos.com/donate
Chapters
- (00:00:00) - Can You Build a Loving Home for Your Soul?
- (00:01:29) - The Need to Optimize Our Human Being
- (00:17:47) - Be Gentle With Yourself
