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Why Yoga Is Better Than Wine with Tina Lanzoni

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You're Not Aging. You're Just Contracted. A conversation with somatic expert Tina Lanzoni

Tina Lanzoni sent out an email called Why Yoga is Better Than Wine and I had to have her on Sober Fit Life.

I've known Tina for years. She's a yoga therapist, somatic instructor, and meditation teacher with over 10,000 hours of teaching experience, and she also absolutely destroys me in SoulCycle every week. The woman contains multitudes.

When she came back from leading a retreat in Costa Rica and had a moment where she wanted to reach for wine after a hard day and didn't, she wrote about it. And everything she wrote is what I want every person who's ever navigated their way through a craving to hear.

Here's the thing Tina talks about that I don't think gets said enough: when we keep reaching outside of ourselves to manage discomfort, wine, scrolling, anything to take the edge off, we're not just numbing the feeling. We're teaching our nervous system that discomfort is a danger signal it needs to escape. And the more we do that, the more contracted we become. Tight. Reactive. Disconnected.

Tina calls it sensory motor amnesia. We lose touch with how to let go, and then we call it getting older.

What she teaches instead is embodiment. Getting out of your head and into your body. Feeling where stress actually lives, your throat, your chest, your jaw, and learning to sit with it long enough to realize it passes. That you can handle it. That you don't need to outsource it.

I shared something personal in this episode that I don't talk about much. Tina worked with me one-on-one twice, once when I was deep in grief over not having children, and once after I lost my dad. Both times, I was still drinking. And I can tell you from both sides of that: when you're drinking, being in your body is almost impossible. You can't get embodied when you're actively trying to disconnect from yourself. Now that I don't drink, the difference is enormous.

If you're someone who's been reaching for a glass of wine at the end of a hard day and wondering why nothing else seems to work, this episode is for you. And if you've been curious about somatics, Tina explains it in a way that actually makes sense — and she even does a live practice with me mid-episode that you can follow along with.

It's a good one. Promise.