Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Mascara, and in today's episode we are going to talk about working with rumination.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay. settle in together with the sound of the bells. So in the last episode titled

The Body, we talked about what can happen when you disconnect

from the body, the different reasons why we may disconnect from the body, and some pathways

to getting reconnected back to the body.

If you haven't listened to that one yet, I do recommend it.

I wouldn't say it's a prerequisite to this episode, but it is relevant to what we're going to be talking about today, which is rumination.

But Corey, doesn't rumination have to do with the mind? How is that related to the body? Good question. Many people do think rumination is something they have to fix mentally. I just need to think more positively. I need to learn how to focus. I need to be better at controlling my thoughts.

These are often the refrains that I hear from people struggling with rumination. And what I can

almost guarantee you is that if you do approach working with rumination through that lens, you are most likely going

to be quite frustrated and stuck in the same mental loops. You may temporarily be able to

force and will yourself to different thinking patterns, but it will take a lot of energy. It'll burn you out. And as soon as you

lose that willpower, which is not sustainable, you will fall back to the same patterns. Because you

haven't gotten to the root. And that root, is what's happening in the body, specifically an unwillingness to feel

what is happening in the body. So if you've come to any of my courses, you sometimes see that I

carry around a squeeze toy, Panic Pete, to be specific.

Panic Pete is that toy that's pink, it has two blue ears, two red eyes,

and when you squeeze it, its eyes and ears pop out.

I don't think it was originally created as a teaching tool for rumination, but I find it to be a

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