Most people think nervous system regulation looks like stillness. A meditation cushion. Slow breathing. A quiet room. And for some people, that's exactly right.

But for others, the path back to the body runs straight through a barbell.

That's the premise at the heart of Laura Khoudari's work, and it's what makes her conversation on The Spiritually Curious Therapist one of the most grounding and practically useful episodes I've recorded. Laura is a trauma-informed wellness expert and the author of Lifting Heavy Things: Healing Trauma One Rep at a Time, a book that has been featured in The New York Times and NPR's Health Shots, and which has found a wide readership among people who love to move but have struggled to connect their physical practice to their emotional and nervous system healing.

Her work sits at the intersection of trauma, somatic approaches, embodiment, and body literacy. And in our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, including what it actually means to develop a relationship with yourself, how movement can be both a doorway in and an escape hatch, and what your body is already trying to tell you if you slow down enough to listen.

Laura didn't start her career in wellness. Her path, like most meaningful ones, was nonlinear. She found strength training in her late twenties, originally to manage chronic back pain, and quickly fell in love with it. She found her voice in the gym. She found agency. She found a version of herself she hadn't known before.

Then, in 2014, she experienced an acute trauma and developed PTSD. She kept training. In fact, she trained more, harder, across three different disciplines simultaneously. At her peak she was working out ten times a week. From the outside it looked like dedication. From the inside, it was her nervous system doing the only thing it knew how to do: work harder to create control.

Her body eventually broke down. And that breakdown became the turning point. She began studying somatic experiencing. She became a personal trainer. She started asking: what would it look like to combine what I know about the nervous system with what I know about the gym? What would it look like to use strength training not to escape the body, but to return to it?

That question became the foundation of trauma-informed strength training, and eventually, the book.

This is the distinction that sits at the heart of Laura's work, and honestly, it's one I think about constantly in my own clinical practice. Exercise is not inherently regulating. Movement can absolutely support nervous system healing. But it can also function as a very sophisticated way of staying one step ahead of your feelings.

Laura put it clearly in our conversation: it's not about what you're doing. It's about how you're doing it.

She described working with clients who come in saying they're stressed and want to flip a tire. Her instinct isn't to redirect them. It's to ask: what if we slowed the flip down a little? What if we noticed what comes up when we don't rush through it? That's a fundamentally different relationship to movement. And it's one that builds something the override approach never can: the capacity to be present with intensity.

Exercise mimics a lot of the physical sensations that come up with big emotions. The elevated heart rate, the muscle activation, the breathlessness. When we slow movement down, when we practice staying with those sensations rather than pushing past them, we're essentially rehearsing for the emotional version of the same thing. We're building what Laura calls the capacity to stay present with ourselves under stress.

One of the threads that ran all the way through our conversation was this: nervous system regulation is something you keep doing. Not something you achieve.

I've been saying for years that this work is like brushing your teeth. You can't do it once and be done. You can't do it intensively once a month and expect results. It requires regular, consistent, imperfect return.

Laura embodies this in her own life. She trained for years, then took a break. She did Pilates. She got injured. She came back. Now she does yoga, strength training, belly dancing, mobility work. The form of the practice keeps shifting. The commitment to being in her body doesn't.

She was clear about something I think we often forget:
"Practice doesn't mean you're nailing it all the time. That's why you're practicing."

Imperfect practice still counts. A session where you feel disconnected still builds something. Showing up on a hard day still matters. The nervous system learns from repetition, not from perfection.

Laura talks about the body as having its own language. A vocabulary of sensation that, once you start learning it, becomes a reliable source of information about what's happening inside you, what you want, what you don't want, where your edges are, and when something is a yes or a no.

She described her own body vocabulary simply and clearly. A lifted chest and engaged smile muscles mean something good is happening. Heaviness in the chest and lungs means grief is present. She knows this not because it's written in a textbook, but because she has spent years practicing paying attention.

That practice, she said, started in the gym. Strength training was where she first learned to track what was happening inside her body while she was under stress. And that skill, that capacity for interoception, carried over everywhere else. It carried over into therapy. It carried over into her relationships. It carried over into her eating disorder recovery, where learning to feel her body's yes and no around food turned out to be far more complex than it sounds, but also the most important thing.

Some of the most interesting territory in our conversation was around desire. What it means to actually know what you want. How disconnected many of us are from that. And how the same skills that help you feel your no in the gym, or in a hug from a stranger, can help you locate your yes in a restaurant, in a relationship, in your own life.

Laura shared something from her own recovery that I found striking. She had rules around food for most of her life. Taking the rules away didn't immediately reveal a clear intuitive relationship to eating. It revealed how long she had been overriding her own signals.

She had to practice. She had to sit with uncertainty. She had to give herself the same quality of attention she had been giving her body in the weight room and learn to apply it at the dinner table. That's body literacy in action. It's not a concept. It's a lived practice of turning toward yourself with curiosity instead of control.

And it's accessible. That's what Laura's work keeps coming back to. You don't have to start with the hardest thing. You don't have to sit with your most charged emotions on day one. You can start by noticing what comes up when someone suggests squatting today. You can start by feeling the difference between a hug you want and one you don't. You can start with small, safe sensation and build from there.

If you're a therapist, healer, or helping professional, there is a lot in this episode that's clinically useful. The idea that embodiment practices need to match the nervous system's actual state, not just its ideal state, is something that will change how you approach movement with clients who are in sympathetic activation. The boundary exercise Laura walks through is something you can use in your own practice tomorrow.

If you're someone on your own healing journey, the permission here is that your path back to yourself doesn't have to look like anyone else's. Some people need the cushion. Some people need the barbell. Some people need the belly dancing class. The modality matters less than the quality of attention you bring to it.

And if you're someone who exercises a lot but feels disconnected from your body, or anxious when you miss a session, or like you need the intensity to feel okay, this episode might be worth sitting with, not as a criticism, but as an invitation.

Your body has been trying to talk to you. Laura's work is about learning to listen.