Saying What Matters 6 | The Body Knows Before the Mind DoesSaying What Matters 6 | The Body Knows Before the Mind Does
The Millennium Counseling Center Podcast
Oren Matteson and Rahsaan Nurullah talk about presence in therapy, the importance of emotional work, and how the body often signals truth before the mind. They share how their own healing journeys shape the way they create safety for clients to speak previously unspoken truths and embody real change.
13:10•6 Jul 2026
Saying What Matters: When the Body Speaks Before the Mind
Episode Overview
- Real change is more likely when people feel safe enough to voice things they’ve never said out loud.
- Focusing on emotions and relationships, rather than purely on thoughts, can support deeper, more sustainable change.
- Therapists benefit from noticing when they are trying to fix too much, using that as a cue for their own inner work.
- Embodiment—living and connecting to new patterns—is essential; if someone else does the work for you, the change may not stick.
- The body often signals the truth before the mind does, and ignoring those signals can create conflict and mistrust within oneself.
“The whole thing about change is embodiment. You got to live it. You got to be it. You got to connect to it.”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of emotional work in therapy. This Saying What Matters episode, "The Body Knows Before the Mind Does," centres on how genuine change happens when people feel safe enough to say what they've never said out loud. Therapists Oren Matteson and Rahsaan Nurullah chat candidly about their roles as helpers in mental health and addiction recovery, and why "trying too hard to fix" someone can actually get in the way.
Oren talks about working as an emotions- and relationship-based clinician, focusing less on thoughts and more on what it’s like to have feelings: "If I'm doing my job really well, you're saying things to me that you haven't really even been able to acknowledge to yourself." He describes moments when his own urge to solve things lets him know there’s more inner work he needs to do.
Rahsaan reflects on how his personal healing shapes the way he supports others, especially those who feel therapy hasn’t worked elsewhere. He shares the tension of wanting breakthroughs for clients while knowing his job is to hold space, ask the right questions, and mirror back patterns so people can embody their own change: "The whole thing about change is embodiment. You got to live it. You got to be it.
You got to connect to it." The conversation then shifts to the body-mind relationship. Rahsaan describes being taught to power through illness and ignore physical signals, and how this can turn into a "war" between mind and body. He argues that "the body knows everything" and stresses the importance of coming back to the body, breath, and sensation as key parts of recovery.
If you're curious about how therapists do their own work while supporting others, and how safety, presence, and the body play into healing, this episode might give you plenty to think about and feel into. What might your body be trying to say before your mind catches up?
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