The Real Foundation of Deconditioning: Basic Body Functions

If you struggle to connect with or trust your authority, start here.

We’ve all been conditioned since the day we were born. 

More specifically, we’ve been conditioned around our most basic body functions from Day 1:

• What and when we eat.

• When and where we sleep. 

• Whether our cries of discomfort were met with kindness and love, or we were left to “self-soothe” and just cry ourselves to sleep.

All of our most basic needs and the sensations that accompany them were conditioned from Day 1 by our caregivers. In a sense, they started grooming us to ignore or doubt our body sensations as soon as we showed up. 

Probably not maliciously.

Not because they were bad parents.

But because they were conditioned, too.

And then we start school, and there’s even more conditioning that pulls us away from our nature:

Sit still for hours.

Pay attention. Look here, not there.

Meals and play time are strictly scheduled.

Bathroom breaks are only allowed at these times and under these conditions.

We were effectively trained to ignore our most basic physical needs and urges:

• Being forced to eat things we don’t necessarily like.

• Eating and drinking on someone else’s schedule instead of when we’re hungry or thirsty.

• Learning to “hold it” instead of just going to the bathroom whenever we feel the urge.

And don’t even get me started on how we get conditioned around pleasure, emotionality, sexuality…my point is, our most basic body functions and the felt senses that accompany them - I need to pee, poop, I’m hungry, thirsty, tired - all of that stuff was subject to conditioning.

And then at some point, we stumble into a system like Human Design that tells us to “trust your gut” or “wait to respond” and we’ve all been so well-trained to ignore our body’s signals that we literally can’t connect with a felt sense of yes or no.

And then this is what I see in client sessions:

• Generators who have no idea that they’re “responding” from the mind.

• Manifestors stewing in hurt and anger that they’ve never fully expressed.

• Bitter-ass projectors who believe all their thoughts and can’t understand why nobody’s asking them for advice.

And I think a LOT of it’s because we don’t even know what we want to eat. 

We don’t know what mild thirst feels like.

We don’t notice that we “hold it” for minutes or even hours - because we don’t want to interrupt a conversation, or we’re in the middle of something “important,” or we don’t even notice that we have to pee until it’s so urgent that we might have an accident. I think this is actually a huge contributing factor to perimenopausal incontinence but I’m not even gonna get into that here.

We ignore the most basic prompts from our bodies, and then can’t figure out why it’s so hard to connect with our authority. 

We talk about deconditioning like it’s a formula. Strategy and authority, right? Just wait to respond, or trust your gut, or wait for clarity, or soundboard, and everything will start working better.

Wrong.

For most of us, there’s work to do before strategy and authority, and it’s easy to write these things off as not that important, but they’re actually super important, because these are the ways we build trust with our bodies, and honestly, you might be wasting your time with S+A if you haven’t even considered your relationship to these most basic bodily functions:

Do you…

Eat when you’re hungry?

Drink when you’re thirsty?

Pee as soon as you feel the urge?

Same for poop?

Sleep when you’re tired?

You might be thinking, “geez, K, obvious much?” And honestly, I’ve been avoiding writing about this for years because I thought, “maybe this is so obvious it’s not even worth mentioning.” But after meeting with hundreds of women who are profoundly disconnected from their bodies, I gotta say, maybe it’s not that obvious.

Because here’s the thing: little girls who learn to suppress and ignore these basic body sensations turn into grown women who have sex with men when we’re not really in the mood. We turn into moms who haven’t showered in days because we're too busy tending to everyone else’s needs. We get so lost in the sauce of people-pleasing that we can’t even tell that we’re fucking furious all the time, and then wonder how we developed an autoimmune disorder.

And it’s stuff like this. It starts with little, basic things like ignoring the urge to go to the bathroom, and it balloons into being an adult who’s lying to herself about whether she even likes her job or her best friend or her husband because she literally doesn’t know how to recognize what her body is telling her.

And our bodies are so good at telling us stuff. We have these amazing, specialized sensations that are literally designed to keep us healthy and safe, and we just ignore them until we can’t even recognize them anymore and find ourselves sick, tired, frustrated, bitter, angry and disappointed.

We often use the house analogy in Human Design - line one is the foundation, line 6 is the roof - and as far as deconditioning goes, I think of this basic body function framework like the sub-basement, or like the ingredients of the concrete we’re using for the foundation. If you’ve ever done a project that required concrete, you know that if you use the wrong sand, or the wrong amount of water, the concrete won’t set correctly and that foundation is gonna be garbage. And yes, it’s a very first line thing for me to be talking about foundations, but I gotta say, I think a lot of us have tried to build our “deconditioned” selves on flawed foundations because we never thought about the ingredients, you know?

The bedrock of deconditioning, the prerequisite to strategy and authority, whatever you wanna call it, this basic body stuff is absolutely necessary if you want to get any kind of results from this experiment. Otherwise, it’s just another performance.

The good news is, we can relearn all of it - all of the little ways our bodies are communicating with us - but we have to make sure the foundation is solid, and it starts with the simplest of ingredients:

Eat when you’re hungry.

Drink when you’re thirsty.

Pee as soon as you feel the urge.

Same for poop.

Sleep when you’re tired.