Pure Possibilities - Align Your Heart, Mind, Energy & Soul
What if the life you desire isn’t as far away as it feels?
The Pure Possibilities Podcast is an invitation to pause, notice what’s happening within you, and get curious about what else might be possible.
Each week, Shannon Danielle explores the beliefs, patterns, relationships, nervous system responses, and everyday choices shaping how you experience your life. Through personal stories, meaningful conversations, practical tools, and occasional guests, you’ll deepen your awareness, build greater self-trust, and begin creating change that lasts beyond the moment.
This isn’t about being calm all the time, thinking more positively, or becoming someone new. It’s about learning to listen to yourself, move through life’s ups and downs with greater resilience, and create more coherence between your heart, mind, body, and soul.
Because when every part of you begins working together, what you know can become how you naturally live, and an entirely different life becomes possible.
New episodes every Tuesday.
Connect with Shannon on Instagram @pure_possibilities or visit purepossibilitiespodcast.com
We talk a lot about listening to our bodies, but listening is only one part of being in relationship with them.
In this episode, we're exploring how you actually relate to your body. How do you speak to it and about it? Do you appreciate it, criticize it, compare it, ignore it, or constantly feel like there's something you need to change?
Drawing from my years as a health coach, we also talk about the goals we attach to our bodies and the magical number we sometimes believe will finally make us feel confident, attractive, comfortable, or happy. What do you believe is waiting for you when you reach that number, size, or physical goal? And what happens if your body changes, but your relationship with it doesn't?
We also explore body image, aging and physical changes, respecting what your body is communicating, and why you don't have to love every single thing about your body to honor it, care for it, appreciate it, and treat it with love and respect.
✨Reflection Questions✨
When I think about my body, how do I usually speak to it and about it?
What have I decided needs to change about my body before I'm allowed to feel the way I want to feel?
What would it look like to respect and care for my body as it is today, even if there are things I would still like to change?
And next week, we'll continue this conversation by exploring how we care for our bodies, including our relationships with food, movement, rest, nourishment, comfort, soothing, numbing, and the behaviors we often label as simply “good” or “bad.”
What if your body doesn't need you to love every single thing about it in order for you to begin treating it with love, compassion, and respect?
✨ Overthinking a decision? When fear, guilt, shoulds, and other people's reactions get loud, The Possibility Pause™ helps you slow down, untangle what's influencing you, and explore your next step. A guided 10–15 minute experience for just $17.
🔎 How Is Life Trying to Get Your Attention? Are you noticing little nudges, recurring patterns, or something you've been putting off? Take my FREE QUIZ to explore the cues your body and life have been giving you and what they might be inviting you to notice.
💌 Want more Pure Possibilities in your week? Subscribe to PUREPOSSIBILITY WEEKLY for reflections, practices, podcast highlights, and a little more possibility delivered to your inbox each week.
Welcome or welcome back. You're listening to the Pure Possibilities podcast, and I'm your host, Shannon. We are now pretty deep into the relationship series, and it's gone a lot longer than I had anticipated, which is fine because as I have said over and over again, your relationship with yourself is the foundation of all of your relationships. And so as we continue to learn and navigate through identifying what these relationships are, because everything is a relationship, I've considered wrapping things up pretty soon. But I realized that there is a relationship we have talked about quite a bit, but we haven't actually talked about the relationship itself. And that's
the relationship with your body. Way back at the beginning of the series, I said that we were going to talk about our relationship with our bodies. And early in the series, we talked about listening to your body's signals, how your body talks to you. And we've talked about that throughout the series because learning how to listen to how your body is talking to you makes an incredible difference in how you move through your life and through your days. But listening to your body is just one part of being in relationship with it. Because how do you actually feel about your body? How do you speak to it? How do you speak about it? Do you appreciate it? Do you trust it? Do you criticize it? Compare it? Do you ignore your body until something goes wrong? Is your body something that you truly care for, or has it become something that you constantly feel like you need to manage, control, fix, change, or improve? And I think this is such an important conversation because we spend our entire lives in our bodies and in relationship with our bodies. Your body has literally been with you for every single experience that you've ever had: every heartbreak, every celebration, every laugh, every loss, every adventure, every hug, every moment of pleasure, every moment of grief, every time you've fallen down and pulled yourself back up, your body has changed with you. It's adapted with you, and it's carried you through every single chapter of your life. And yet, how often do we look at our body primarily through the lens of what we don't like about it? I spent several years working as a health coach before I expanded my coaching practice.
And one of the things that became really apparent to me during that time was how often we focus on the surface level part of our relationship with our body. For example, someone wants to lose weight, they have a number in their mind, and that number becomes the goal. When I get to this weight, then I'll feel good. When I lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds, whatever the number is, then I'll feel confident. Then I can put that sexy swimsuit on. Then I'll allow people to take pictures of me. Then I'll buy the clothes that I actually want to wear. Then I'll feel attractive. And then I'll finally be happy with my body. And so as I continued health coaching, I used to invite my clients to focus less on the number on the scale and more about how they wanted to feel. Because what happens when you reach that magical number? What do you believe is going to change? And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with wanting to lose weight, gain weight, build muscle, become stronger, change the way your body looks, or have those physical goals for yourself. What I want to get curious about is what we've attached to those things. What have you decided that that number means about you? What have you decided that your body needs to look like before you're going to allow yourself to feel confident in it? What are you waiting to give yourself until your body changes? And what happens if you reach that number and discover that the relationship you have with your body hasn't actually changed? Because we can change the body without necessarily changing how we relate to it. We can focus on weight and then find something else to criticize about ourselves. We can get stronger and then decide that we're still not strong enough. And we can change one thing that we spent years wanting to change and immediately move our attention to the next thing that's supposedly wrong rather than appreciating the journey that we've been on or where we are right now. I
think it's important to talk about the fact that you don't have to be madly in love with every single thing about your body in order to have a loving relationship with it. Sometimes even the message of self-love and love your body can become another expectation. Like, am I supposed to stand naked in front of the mirror and think every single part of me is fucking fabulous every single day? And if I don't, apparently I'm doing body positivity wrong too. What if that's not a requirement? What if that's not an expectation that you set for yourself? There can be things about your body that you would prefer were different. Absolutely. There can be changes that you choose to make. You can have days where you look in the mirror and you don't particularly love what you see. You can experience your body changing as you get older through pregnancy, illness, injury, hormones, stress, surgeries that happen, medications, life. And you are absolutely entitled to have feelings about those changes. None of that means you can't also have respect for your body. You can honor it, you can care for it, you can appreciate what it does for you and what it has done for you. You can choose to speak about it differently. And I think that distinction is something that doesn't get talked about enough because your relationship with your body isn't determined by whether you love the way it looks every single day. Think about every other loving relationship in your life. You don't have to love everything about another person every minute of every day in order to love them, to respect them, to care about them, to listen to them and to treat them well. So why would our relationship with our body require some impossible standard of unconditional adoration? And
then there's the way we actually see our bodies. Our perception is fascinating because we don't necessarily see ourselves neutrally. We see ourselves through years of experiences, comments people have made, cultural messages, comparison, photographs, mirrors, social media, beliefs about what our body is supposed to look like. And sometimes our perception of our body can feel very different to what someone else sees. And for some people, that experience can become much more significant and distressing, including body dysmorphia or body dysmorphic order. For example, it's not uncommon for someone to lose an excessive amount of weight and still not be able to see the way they actually look. They still continue to see the former version of themselves. But that's a conversation that deserves appropriate professional support and isn't something that I'm gonna try to unpack and diagnose on the podcast. But I do think all of us can get curious about the lens through which we're looking at our bodies. What do you notice first when you look in the mirror? Where does your attention immediately go? Do you see your entire body or do your eyes immediately find the part of you that you've decided that you don't like? And where did you learn to look at yourself that way? A while ago, I don't remember when it was, maybe last year or the year before, I did yoga naked. And I actually did an episode about it. I don't know if you listened to it or not, but that experience was very eye-opening for me, and it allowed me to, I did it in my home. But that experience allowed me to really connect with myself and appreciate my body. And I don't want to say it forced me to look at myself, but it kind of did. I mean, you can't be doing a downward dog and not looking at your entire body when you're doing naked yoga, but it was a very impactful practice, very impactful for me when I did that.
I just think that our relationship with our body can become really visible when our body doesn't do what we want it to do, when we're tired and we think we shouldn't be, when something hurts, when we can't move quite the way we used to, when our body changes, especially as we age, when we're recovering from something and our mind has decided that we should be farther along by now, when our body needs rest and our mind says, we don't have time for that. What happens then? Do we listen? Do we get frustrated? Do we judge ourselves? Do we just push through? Do we treat our bodies like it's an inconvenience? Because I think there's a really interesting difference between saying, I'm listening to my body, and actually being willing to respect what you're hearing, what it's saying to you. And this is why I don't want to end this relationship series having only talked about your body signals, because your body isn't simply a messenger that gives you information so your mind can decide what to do with it. You're living an entire relationship with it for your whole life. And like every other relationship we've talked about through the series, awareness allows us an opportunity to notice what the relationship actually looks like right now without immediately shaming and berating ourselves for it. It's possible that you've spent years criticizing your body or ignoring it or constantly being at war with your body. You might possibly have a beautiful relationship with your body now, but that wasn't always the case. Or you could be somewhere in between. We're not trying to force ourselves into some perfect relationship with our bodies by the end of the episode. We're getting curious and noticing what is that relationship that you have with your body? All right. Before
we get into the reflection questions, I'm gonna pull a card from the Magic of What If Card deck and see what wants to come through for us today. I'm gonna pull from deck two today. What if I prioritize my own value? What if I prioritize my own value? You are worthy and valuable regardless of your age, your size, what the scale says, you're worthy and you are valuable and truly loved. I hope as we've moved through this relationship series that you're using this as an opportunity to get curious about all of these different relationships. And when I say that your relationship with yourself is the foundation, that is coming from a place of love and not judgment. It's coming from a place of wanting you to feel empowered that all of those relationships are not out of your control. That when you take a look at each of those relationships, that you recognize that you are not powerless, that you have the ability to shift those. I wouldn't necessarily sit down and make an entire list of all of these different relationships in one sitting and try to figure out how to shift all of those relationships. It really truly does start with noticing, because I don't want you to approach this from a place of guilt, shame, and judgment. I want it to be more of a space of empowerment, compassion, love, and respect for yourself because you are valuable. Even if you didn't change any of these things, none of this amplifies or reduces your value because you are valuable exactly as you are. I just want you to live a happier, more peaceful life. Okay, so let's move into this week's reflection questions. As always, they will be posted in the show description if you don't have the time or space in this moment for them. I do hope you choose to return when you do have the time. Question number one: when I think about my body, how do I usually speak to it and about it? Not how you're supposed to speak to it. What do you actually say? What do you actually say to yourself when you look in the mirror? What do you actually say to yourself when you step on the scale? Number two, what have I decided needs to change about my body before I'm allowed to feel the way I want to feel? And really sit with that one. If there's a number, a size, a level of strength, or some destination that you're trying to reach, what do you believe is waiting for you there? What do you believe is on the other side of that? And finally, what would it look like to respect and care for my body as it is today? Even if there are things that I would still like to change. We're not pretending or forcing you to love something that you don't, just asking what respect, appreciation, and care might look like for you today. As I
was putting this episode together, I realized that there's another part of this conversation that I don't want to squeeze into the last five minutes of this episode. I do want to keep the episodes on the shorter side because I feel like they're a little bit easier to access that way. Because how we feel about our bodies is one thing, and how we care for them is another. Our relationship with food, with movement, rest, nourishment, comfort, soothing, numbing, pushing ourselves. And all of the behaviors that we so quickly label as good or bad deserve a conversation of their own. Because sometimes what looks like a problem on the surface is actually doing something for us underneath that. There's some internal reward or payoff that is on the other side. So that's where we're gonna go next week. Until then, I invite you to simply notice your relationship with your body, not to fix it, not to judge it, just notice and get curious about it. And maybe this is never something you've even considered, and to acknowledge that as well. What if your body doesn't need you to love every single thing about it in order for you to begin treating it with love, compassion, and respect? And if someone came to your mind while listening, please share this episode with them. I would truly appreciate it. Thank you so much for being here. Have a beautiful, beautiful day and an amazing week. Much love.
