Next Level Greatness - Holistic Wellness & Success Podcast · Dr. Barbie Kalev - Holistic Success & Embodiment Coach

#117 ~ How Somatic Practices Help Driven Women Release Stress and Reclaim Their Power

·31 min·1 clip

The high-achiever's reckoning: how outrunning poverty nearly destroyed the body that carried her there.

This solo episode features host Dr. Adi, a former Beachbody coach with a PhD, sharing her personal journey with chronic stress and somatic healing. She addresses her audience of driven women, explaining her shift from traditional wellness to somatic practices. Dr. Adi's authority stems from her academic background and lived experience with burnout. At age 33, she experienced significant hair loss after completing her PhD, moving cities, getting divorced, and losing her father. She references childhood trauma, including a six-month separation from her mother while living in South America. Despite success with Beachbody and maintaining healthy habits, she developed vertigo, deep fatigue, and brain fog that hindered daily tasks like cleaning. She is married to functional medicine practitioner Sagi Kalev and tried therapy, supplements, and outsourcing tasks, yet felt a key piece was missing. Dr. Adi explains the nervous system's sympathetic "on" mode for action and the parasympathetic "rest and digest" mode. She argues modern stressors, especially for high-achieving women, cause the sympathetic system to stay chronically activated. This dysregulation manifests as anxiety, insomnia, and digestive issues, eventually impacting performance. She discovered Vedic meditation, which transformed her, but sought more accessible tools to teach others. A core insight is that trauma and stress are stored as physical sensations in the body and nervous system, not just as cognitive memories. Somatic exercises use gentle, repetitive movements, like rocking or pointing toes, to signal safety to the nervous system. These practices can trigger releases like laughter, yawning, or crying, which she likens to "taking out the trash." She demonstrates a simple exercise involving lying down and slowly rocking, noting her own belly grumbling as a sign of entering "rest and digest" mode. Dr. Adi emphasizes that somatic work allows the body to release tension at its own pace, and forcing it isn't effective. She connects these physical practices to broader life skills like setting boundaries and expressing emotions authentically. Her new program, "Unclenched," focuses on these somatic movements and nervous system education for $88. The episode is conversational, intimate, and instructional, blending personal storytelling with a live demonstration. Dr. Adi's tone is vulnerable and passionate, often speaking unscripted directly to her audience. Driven female entrepreneurs and high-achievers feeling chronically stressed or physically burnt out will find this episode highly relatable and practical. Listeners seeking structured, clinical psychology or those skeptical of alternative body-based therapies might prefer to skip it.

As heard by us

A plainspoken reset for anyone who has been running on adrenaline too long.

This episode follows a high-drive speaker trying to make sense of a body that stays locked on. She connects divorce, grief, finishing a PhD, moving to Dallas, and stress-related hair loss to somatics and nervous system regulation.

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Why you'd press play

If your body is done with hustle, this is your reset button.

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