Denise Schonwald spent 20 years working in the ICU. Long hours, life-or-death decisions, and patients who were fighting hard just to make it through the night. She loved the work. But she also knew she couldn’t do it forever.

So she went back to school. She got her degree in mental health counseling. And then something unexpected happened.

She started noticing patterns. The same emotional struggles kept showing up alongside the same physical symptoms. Clients with anxiety had stomach problems. Clients carrying unprocessed guilt had intestinal issues. It wasn’t random. It was a map.

Denise eventually went deep into studying the chakra system, which is an ancient energy-based framework that maps different emotions to different areas of the body. And after 30 years of either doing medicine or psychology, she told me: it has never not fit together.

That conversation is the one I keep thinking about.

One of the most grounding things Denise said is this: trust is felt in the stomach. Guilt is processed in the intestines. Fear lives in the chest. And when we spend years holding onto emotions we haven’t dealt with, the body absorbs the weight of that.

This isn’t a metaphor but physiology.

When the mind perceives a threat, whether real or imagined, the body responds. Cortisol goes up. Adrenaline kicks in. The nervous system shifts into protection mode. And if that cycle never gets to complete? The body holds it.

Denise described watching clients whose unprocessed emotional patterns were showing up as high blood pressure, thyroid problems, chronic stomach issues, and more. She said she can often meet someone, hear one or two things about their physical health, and already understand what emotional territory they’re likely carrying.

That’s not magic. That’s pattern recognition built from decades of paying attention to the whole person, not just their symptoms.

One of my favorite moments in the conversation came when Denise talked about the language we use to describe our problems.

She helps clients swap out words that activate the nervous system for words that settle it. Simple shifts. High impact.

"I have to confront this person" becomes "I want to address my concerns." "My biggest fear" becomes "my concern." And here’s the thing: your body responds to those words before your brain even finishes processing them.

When Denise said "confront," I felt my shoulders tighten. When she offered "address," something in me exhaled. That’s not a small thing. That’s your nervous system receiving a completely different signal from the exact same situation.

She also talked about what she calls “dark thinking.” The mind spinning forward into worst-case scenarios that haven’t happened. And the body responds to those imagined futures as if they’re real. Because to the nervous system, a thought is a thought.

This is where the conversation got really good.

A lot of people confuse the voice of their intuition with the voice of their anxious mind. They think they’re listening inward when they’re actually just listening to fear. Denise made the distinction clearly. The mind is fearful. It is loud, urgent, and reactive. It wants something now. It doesn’t want to wait or sit with discomfort. It spins.

The inner knowing is quieter. It comes from a higher frequency. She described it as love-like. Compassionate. Forgiving. More like what she called “godly love” than the clanging alarm of the ego.

I say it this way to my clients: your intuition does not scream. The thing that is screaming is your ego, your fear, your history. Your intuition is the soft voice underneath all of that. And you can only hear it when you slow down enough to listen.

That takes practice. And it often takes nervous system regulation first. You cannot access your inner knowing when your body is stuck in a threat response.

We also got into something I think about a lot, which is how self-care can become just another item on the to-do list.

Denise said she can always tell when someone is operating from chronic stress because they have no hobbies. No free time. No play. They’ve organized their entire life around the stress, and anything that isn’t productive feels wrong.

But what I see a lot is the other version of this. The person who has all the self-care rituals. The yoga. The meditation. The gratitude journal. And who is still exhausted. Because the energy behind it is “I should be doing this” or “I have to check this box.” And that kind of obligation creates more hypervigilance, not less.

Real self-care brings capacity. It creates room. It feels like relief, not performance. And when you have more capacity, you can actually catch yourself before you spiral. You can notice the buildup before the explosion.

Denise said something near the end of our conversation that I want to sit with for a while. She said, the lessons the universe is trying to teach us will keep coming back until we learn them. And that learning happens through discomfort.

She has learned to ask herself, what is this trying to teach me? And to hold the discomfort without interpreting it as danger.

That is a nervous system skill. And it is one of the most important ones there is.

Discomfort does not always mean something is wrong. Sometimes it means something is shifting. And when we can hold that, we stop fighting our own growth.

Denise ended our conversation with something I think everyone needs to hear.

We don’t hesitate to go to the doctor when we have physical pain. We take that seriously. We make time for it.

But anxiety? Depression? Shame? Anger? We try to push through. Or we tell ourselves we should be over it by now. Or we’ve just gotten so used to living with it that we don’t even notice it anymore.

These are warning signs. Just like physical symptoms are warning signs. The nervous system is out of balance and asking for help.

You deserve to take that as seriously as you take anything else.

You can listen to the full episode of The Spiritually Curious Therapist wherever you get your podcasts.