Landy Peek (00:35)
Welcome back to the Landy Peak Podcast. This is your friend and host, Landy
There's a kind of unraveling that no one talks about. The kind that happens quietly. Incapable, brilliant, loving women. It doesn't look like a crisis. It looks like holding it all together.
It looks like being the one everyone else leans on, but inside you're tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. You're craving space that feels just out of reach. You're wondering without saying it out loud, when is it my turn to feel held? If that's you keep listening because this conversation, it might name something you've never had words for, but you've probably felt for years.
You can look like you've got it all together and still feel like something's unraveling inside. You can be calm on the outside and completely braced on the inside. High-achieving women know this secret all too well. Burnout, emotional overload, or overwhelm doesn't always look like a breakdown. Sometimes it looks like performance, perfection.
or even success, and nobody sees it, but your body feels it. If you've been feeling off, overwhelmed, or like you're always on, but never fully present, you're not broken, and you're not weak. You're just carrying more than your nervous system was designed to hold alone.
Landy Peek (02:22)
Let me take you back for a second. Before I was guiding women through nervous system healing, embodiment and soul-led leadership, before Magnetic Her ever existed, I had already spent years helping people come home to their bodies.
I started to work with kids with disabilities at the age of 15. I continued working with families with kiddos with disabilities all the way through high school and college. I then supported families and children navigating systems that often overlooked what they needed most to feel safe, seen, and soothed. Eventually I became a therapeutic course back writing instructor and later a pediatric occupational therapist.
I worked with kids in classrooms, in clinics, in sensory gyms, and in their homes, helping them regulate, express, and move their emotions through instead of just around. I worked with kiddos who were labeled as too much, too reactive, too sensitive, too angry, too rigid. But what I saw were not problems. I saw nervous systems trying to survive.
in a world that felt too fast, too loud, too unpredictable. And I quickly learned, before a child can thrive, they have to feel safe in their body. And that's true for you too. You can have the perfect schedule, the gratitude journal, eating all the right things, and still feel off. Why? Because no one ever taught you how to regulate your nervous system.
No one ever showed you what it feels like to live without being braced all the time. You've done a great job at training yourself to keep going, but you've never been taught how to come home to your own body, how to feel safe in your own body. In therapy, I gave kids what you never got, safe expression.
sensory input that soothed their systems. Movement and play as healing, not as rewards. A regulated presence that said, you're not too much. Kids would cry, laugh, shake, collapse, scream, throw tantrums, and then return to their center. They processed what their body was holding. And you, you were taught to sit still.
to smile even when you didn't feel like it, to be nice, to keep going. Play isn't a reward. It's actually how we integrate. What looks like procrastination, zoning out, or people pleasing, that's your nervous system doing its best to keep you safe. And the hardest part, you've blamed yourself for it. When really your body has been whispering,
I need something different.
Behind every dysregulated child that I supported was a mother sitting there with me. And she was doing everything right, managing schedules, holding the emotional weight of the entire household, being the calm one. But it wasn't until I became a mom that I could actually see it, the tension in her shoulders, the way she held her breath, the way she said, I'm fine.
with a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. She wasn't fine. She was over-functioning and no one was helping her regulate. And here's the vulnerable truth. I wasn't regulating myself either. There was a season where I looked like I had it all together. Clients, kids, credentials. But underneath, my nervous system was shot and no one noticed.
Not even me. Because high functioning survival looks like success until your body starts to scream, I can't do it anymore. Now, it was my turning point. After having my own kiddos, something shifted in me. And my body taught me what no training ever could. I became a pelvic health therapist, not just by profession, but by necessity.
And slowly, my focus and my practice moved from working with kiddos to supporting their mothers. And what I witnessed again and again was this. When the mother began to regulate, when the mother healed around her trauma, everything began to change. The kids settled.
The home softened, the entire family system began to breathe differently. We talk so much about supporting kids, but no one talks about the nervous system of the women raising them. A regulated mom doesn't just change her own life. She changes the emotional climate for everyone around her. And I gotta tell you, I have felt this in such a deep visceral.
way. As I personally became more regulated, the things that used to kind of send me over the edge, I noticed I had a higher capacity for holding. I was also better at tuning into my own system and recognizing when I needed something different and being able to advocate for myself to get those needs.
This began the true shift in how I work with humans because I realized the most powerful thing we can offer the next generation is a woman who feels safe enough in her own body to lead from presence, not survival. This was huge. I was able to sit with my tantruming kids because I was leading my family from a presence.
not from survival. I was no longer being reactive all of the time, not to say it still doesn't happen every once in a while, but it's less. The stresses of life that hit, I'm able to flow and flex and not just react. Through my training in somatic experiencing trauma therapy, I learned what was really happening inside these women and inside me. Peter Levine teaches.
Trauma isn't what happens to you. It's what happens inside of you when your body doesn't complete the survival cycle. So this was an aha moment because I'd always looped in trauma was the event, but trauma isn't the event. It's why you and I could experience the exact same thing and I might walk away feeling traumatized and you might be okay.
In the wild, when an animal experiences a threat, it moves through flight, fight, or freeze. So if there's a bunny that gets chased by a fox, if it survives and gets away, it shakes, literally, physically shakes. It breathes heavily. It discharges the stress. And then...
Completing the cycle, it returns to safety, to connection, to grazing, finding food, and focusing on daily life. That rabbit does not spend the next hour, day, week, year, or years looking over its shoulder for the fox. It doesn't even think about the fox until the next time it sees a fox.
That shaking, that movement, it completes the trauma cycle. But humans, we override. We perform. We parent through it. We push through the meeting. We carry it. We suppress it.
We don't ever give ourselves the opportunity to discharge it, to metabolize it. And that's how the trauma stays. Not because we're weak, but because we were never taught how to complete what was never safe to feel.
Trauma, our own stories, experiences are stored in the body, in our tissues. And this doesn't always look like traditional trauma. Sometimes trauma looks like smiling through an emotional meltdown, being praised for your calm while your body feels like it's in chaos, feeling like rest is unsafe, undeserved or unproductive.
That's not dysfunction. That's unprocessed survival energy. So if you've ever been one where you're trying to, you're home alone, right? I used to do this, be home alone, and I would read a book or binge watch TV. And the minute my partner, I could hear him walking through the door, I jump up and act productive.
I was doing this. It's because I had unprocessed survival energy. Rest felt undeserved. Being unproductive didn't feel safe.
High functioning burnout, emotional exhaustion is really sneaky. It's slow. It's deeply praised by the world around you. It looks like always being on time. This was a huge one for me. Being late felt so unsafe. I would lose it on my kids, yelling at them to get out the door because I couldn't allow them to be late for school.
It dysregulated the entire household.
Here's the next one, always being the one to hold it together. Have you ever noticed the rest of the world seems to be falling apart, but you're still there making sure everyone's okay.
Have you ever gone to bed exhausted, but you're unable to rest? What about getting more done than most people? Well, feeling more alone than ever. It's not collapse. It's existing in a constant state of low-grade hypervigilance. It's the inability to relax, even when you should be able to. And the truth is...
You've adapted brilliantly, but adaptation isn't the same thing as healing. You were never meant to live in a permanent performance mode. I want to say this clearly, calm is not the end goal. It is the gateway. Because what we're really building is a flexible nervous system. A nervous system that knows how to mobilize you
when you need it. If there is an actual threat
that you can react in a crisis situation in the way that is needed. You can fight if you need to fight. You can run if you need to run. You could freeze if you need to freeze. But when we're living with trauma that hasn't been fully processed, we haven't finished the cycle, our nervous system has glitches. And those glitches
take out the ability to be flexible in the way that you need. So say that the best chance of survival for you is to run from something. Say there's a fire. You need to run. Get out of the building. But instead you freeze. Because of the glitch, you didn't have access to run when you needed it. A nervous system that is flexible
knows how to rest when it is safe. Going back to the bunny. When you're out and you're okay, you can downshift. You can relax. You can rest. You also have the ability to feel all of the emotions. We need a full range of emotions. To be able to feel joy, to be able to feel grief, to be able to feel anger.
to be able to feel pleasure without going numb. A flexible system doesn't stay stuck in survival. It returns to center. It rebounds. It adapts without collapsing. That's regulation. That's resilience. That's what we're doing. That's what we want for you. We're not chasing a moment of peace. We're creating the capacity to stay with life.
Because my friend, you can already manage the calm through the chaos. And then you might fall apart. But you've got already the ability to smile when you don't feel like smiling. That's not what we're talking about. I want the flexibility so that you can feel the range of emotions and react in just the right way when you need it.
All of this came together to create Magnetic Her. Because I saw that there was a need for a space where high achieving women no longer have to perform. Because as I talked to clients, as I talked to friends, as I really tuned into myself, I realized there wasn't a space where we could just be okay. There wasn't a space where we could be not okay. There wasn't a space where you get to breathe, where get to feel.
where can return to yourself because the world expected us to be okay, to be on, to show how you could survive, how you could do hard things.
even when you don't need to.
So I took all of this and created a space that focused on nervous system healing because the first thing you need is to feel safe in your body. If you can't tap into safety in your body, how can you create a life where you feel like you can thrive? How can you create wealth? Because honestly, feeling safe in your body is the key to creating and having money.
and be able to use it and manage it well. How can you create a safe space in your home for your kiddos if you don't feel safe yourself?
I created a space that took into account all of the work around our pelvis and the power and creativity that it holds and being able to embody that space. I took into account all of the work around the different parts that we have, looking at our feminine leadership and how it is rooted in our truth because we don't perform for power.
We return to power. You don't have to do more to be more. You're gonna burn out eventually. Your body's not the problem. It's actually the signal and it's the portal.
Yes, I'm a trauma therapist. And in Magnetic Her, I'm very clear, I'm not your therapist. I'm actually your mirror. Because I think this is the biggest, most pivotal thing that women are craving. You already have so much knowledge.
but you haven't embodied that knowledge. So I get to be your guide, your mentor, your mirror. This isn't about diagnosing you, it's about returning you to you. And the difference in I'm not acting as your therapist because a therapist asks why.
therapist focuses on the trauma that you've experienced and really processing that experience. In Magnetic Her, I'm asking, what's next? What do you need now? This isn't insight only, this is integration. This is the ability to take all of the knowledge that you've already learned and truly embody it.
Because my guess is you've been living a lot in your head. You have a ton of knowledge that is in there that you know what to do, but you can't get yourself to do it. Right? You're great at telling others how to solve the problem, what things they can do. You might even be like me and be a therapist where you're walking people through how to heal, going, ⁓ my gosh, I wish I just had me to be able to help me.
because we're not designed to heal ourselves. And there's a difference in that knowledge versus the embodiment. I look back at some of the advice that I have given parents to the kiddos that I worked with.
before I was a parent. And I look at that advice and it came from a textbook, it came from a course, it came from cognitive knowledge. And I look at it and I think, my gosh, that was such crap advice because I wasn't a parent. I have a friend who doesn't have any kiddos and she's like, I wanna write a parenting book for parents from the perspective of somebody who's not a parent.
And she's like, but nobody wants that. I'm like, no, because you don't get it. Because you can look on the outside and totally give judgment. It's easy to judge and that's what she's doing. But unless you've lived it, breathed it, experienced the fricking exhaustion and having your heart literally walk outside of your body and want to protect them in the biggest, worst way and also realizing
If you're gonna have space and time for yourself, if you're ever gonna live your own life, you have to let them live theirs. You have to let them live theirs and you cannot protect your kids no matter how badly you want to.
Unless I have sat with that level of understanding, of embodying that existence, the advice I gave was crap.
because I didn't fully understand. And I think that's one of the key things around me leading Magnetic Her right now is that I have lived this. I have crashed and burned in the whole biggest fricking way. And I had to step back from life. And what I want is to catch women before they crash and burn, where we can see the smoke.
and we know it's going down, but we can pull up. We can get you support before you have to take a year off because you just can't do it anymore. And that's literally where I hit. I held it together. I had so much stress going on. I kept showing up. Every time the phone rang, anytime anybody needed me, anytime I could push myself out there, I was showing up with a smile on my face.
Was I okay? No. Did I tell anybody? No. Not a single soul. Not my best friend because you know what? She had burdens of her own. Her life was stressful too. She was going through a lot. Did I answer the phone calls? Absolutely. Did I share? No, not till she called me out on it.
What I learned was I needed more. And what I've seen is that, holy hell, shit has hit the fan in the last year of my life. But I was able to react in a different way. I had the capacity to hold what I needed to hold. I had the capacity to reach out for support and help. I had the capacity to slow down.
I had the capacity to be able to recognize the signals in my own body and make different choices. Because it isn't about making life easier. It isn't about not ever having stress in your life. It isn't about being calm all the time. No, it's about knowing when to throw the fricking tantrum. I remember my kids laughing at me because I, we were dealing with a lot.
at that point in life. And I had a lot of anger in my system. And I didn't yell at my kids and I didn't yell at my husband and he didn't snap at the dog and I didn't do any of that. I threw a fricking tantrum and I stood in the middle of the room and I shook my fist and I stomped my feet so hard. My husband's like, I thought you were going to break the floor. I let it out in a controlled way, in a safe way.
in a way where I could explain to my kids, I just need to get a lot of emotions moving.
It's what I get to teach my kids too. I get to be the model. I get to have the ability and the capacity to say every feeling emotion is welcome here. Behaviors are different. You can feel angry. You may not hit somebody. That's the difference. But I'm not overwhelmed by the feelings. I'm allowed to let myself process what I need to process.
And it all starts with safety in my body because I know I'm safe. In the situations that I go through in life, I know I'm safe. I'm a safe person. I'm safe inside my body.
And one of the biggest things that I think women really need to embody is that
Having power, being brave is really about trusting that you have the capacity to handle what comes up, that you might get knocked down, but you're gonna be okay.
And a lot of women are walking through the world and they don't truly know that in their bodies. They don't know that they're gonna be okay. They don't know that whatever is gonna come up is not going to completely ruin them.
If this resonates, if there's a breath that you didn't know you were holding that you exhaled.
If there was a lump in your throat, tears in your eyes.
That's a good thing because that's your nervous system recognizing this, This is what I was unable to name, but I've been feeling forever.
I want to tell you, you are not too much. You're not lazy. You're not broken. You're brilliant. And you're brave.
and you just need to be recognized, to be held, because we're not an island meant to survive on our own. There's room for all of the parts of you here with me.
because I want you to see how your leadership changes as your nervous system softens. The ability to hold and express and experience joy changes when your inside landscape changes. Your ability to love and your ability to expand into the life that you want is really held within you. And when your body finally
feels safe enough to receive.
The world opens because we're so focused on doing, but it's really receiving and feeling safe that is the key that you're looking for. Calm isn't the end goal. It's just part of it.
I would love to invite you into Magnetic Her to give you the space to be held, to give you the space to be seen, to give you the space to fall apart and know it's gonna be okay. Because I guarantee, as I've sat with hundreds of women,
You won't fall apart forever. It really is an emotional release. And then you rediscover yourself. And when you rediscover yourself, you redefine what's possible for you.
So we invite you to reclaim that woman inside who's always been there. The more you've looked for that outside guru, the more you've looked for the outside fix, the more you've looked outside, you've just turned down her light. But she's there and she always has been. She's just waiting for you to turn inward, inside, and remember who she is.
If it resonates.
Click on the link below and check out Magnetic Her. I would love, love, love to see you on the inside. And because I think it is so important and powerful, you are smart and creative and brave and wonderful and adventurous and loving and fun. And I'm so glad that you are in my life. And I really do appreciate it.
Every time you download, every time you listen to a podcast episode, I feel being helped and I really appreciate it.
I love you and I like you and I wish you all the happiness that today can bring. We'll talk to you on the next episode.
Landy Peek (30:58)
Hey, before you go, just a little bit of legal. This podcast is designed for educational purposes only. It is not to replace any expert advice from your doctors, therapists, coaches, or any other professional that you would work with. It's just a chat with a friend, me, where we get curious about ideas, thoughts, and things that are going on in our lives. And as we're talking about friends, if you know someone who would benefit from the conversation today, please share.
Because I think the more that we open up these conversations, the more benefit we all get. So until next time, give yourself a big hug from me and stay curious because that's the fun in this world.
