Ep 44. Insight vs. Intellect

Do you understand all the concepts intellectually but still struggle to sleep?

Are you wondering what you’re missing?

Do you feel like you just need that one magical piece of information that’s going to make it all click?

Then this episode is for YOU.

Not only do I share my own personal story of how the honeybees RADICALLY changed my life. But I also break down why recovery isn't just about intellect — it's about insight.

It's about seeing things differently.

Tune in to learn:

• The difference between intellectual understanding and embodied wisdom
• What nature can teach us about sleep
• How the left and right hemispheres of the brain influence recovery
• Why letting go of overthinking opens the door to sleep

And so much more. 

This episode was a lot of fun to record — I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed creating it 🧡

Mentioned Resources:

Jill Bolte Taylor TED talk
Episode 1: Redefining Insomnia
Episode 18: Insomnia and the Perceived Danger Connection
Episode 35: Sleep Efforts and Why They Matter

Connect with Beth Kendall:

 👉  Instagram 

Work with Beth Kendall:

👉   Start the Free Insomnia Course

👉   Learn About the Mentorship


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About Beth Kendall MA, FNTP: 

For decades, Beth struggled with the relentless grip of insomnia. After finally understanding insomnia from a mind-body perspective, she changed her relationship with sleep, and completely recovered. Liberated from the constant worry of not sleeping, she’s on a mission to help others recover as well. Her transformative program Mind. Body. Sleep.® has been a beacon of light for hundreds of others seeking solace from sleepless nights. 

© 2023 - 2024 Beth Kendall

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Breaking Free from the Information Trap

 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. If you’re new here, extra warm welcome—I’m so glad you’re tuning in. My name is Beth, I’m a holistic sleep coach. And I help people get free from insomnia so they can live the life they actually want to live without having to worry about sleep all the time. 

 

Understanding the Gap Between Head and Heart

 

So, today’s episode is kind of a deep one. If it’s your first time tuning in and you’re going: What is she even talking about? I’d recommend following up with some of the more foundational episodes which would be Episodes 1 and 18th. But I’ve been rolling this concept around in my mind for a while because one thing I often hear from people as they enter into this paradigm of insomnia recovery is that they understand it all from an intellectual level, but it hasn’t translated into sleep yet. Or, they understand it all in their head, but it hasn’t moved down to their heart. 

 

So, if you’re someone who is feeling like you’re not getting it, or you’ve watched a million videos or podcasts, but what you understand intellectually isn’t feeling embodied yet. Or you feel like you could almost be a sleep coach yourself because you could recite the teachings verbatim but your body just isn’t really following along, this is going to be the podcast for you. And I want to give a shout out to Amy, who is one of my amazing MBS students because she was the inspiration for a lot of what I’m going to share with you today. 

 

Now, a lot of what I’m going to talk about today may not make sense. And I’m okay with that because I’m not looking for it to make sense as much as I am for it to touch something within you. So notice how you feel as you’re listening because that’s going to be the bigger clue into what is meant for you than just information itself. 

 

Nature, Lyme, and Transformation

 

So, to start things off, I’d like to share a story about my relationship with nature which prior to my late 40’s was pretty much non-existent. As a mind-body coach, I now very much view the human species as an extension of nature. Or not even an extension but a part OF the natural world okay, like we’re all just one giant ecosystem. But this definitely was not always the case. 

 

Prior to getting sick with Lyme disease, I viewed nature as something you did in your “off” time. I was a city girl through and through and I never really enjoyed doing nature anything. Camping sounded like pure hell to me and I just didn’t get it. Like I didn’t see the allure of it at all and I think I was just so disconnected from myself and the world, that I was like, nope, not into it, what time is happy hour. And then along comes a tick that changes my life forever, and I am down for the count for over five years on disability. And boy, if I didn’t like nature before, I really didn’t like it after that tick bite. So I wont’ go into all the things I did during my lengthy recovery process, but let’s just say that I did pretty much everything that I possibly could. I did everything the conventional model had for me.  I was on multiple antibiotics for years, I was on IV antibiotics for 9.5 months, so I was living alongside an IV pole. I did every alternative option I stumbled on, it just went on and on. But the needle wasn’t moving. I wasn’t getting better. And that’s what led to that deep moment of surrender I often talk where I realized that the way I was approaching my situation wasn’t changing the game. And I’m not talking about all the “things” I did as much as all the fight that was underneath the things I did. Because I really was at war with Lyme disease. 

 

So after that major surrender moment, things just sort of started falling into place. And the very first thing that came on my radar was a phone call from a dear friend who was also going through Lyme disease. So she called me up and she said, “Beth, have you ever heard of something called Bee Venom Therapy?” And yes, I’m talking about using the venom of live honeybees medicinally. And I hadn’t heard of anything called BVT and honestly if had it been ANY other person asking me this question, I probably would have brushed it off right away. 

 

Because at this point I had already done so many things that I would have just chalked it up to another false hope cure. But my friend Lauren is a really smart person, so I knew that if she was interested in it enough to call and tell me about it , then there might be something to it. So she gave some information and told me to do my own due diligence on the compounds of the venom which is exactly what I did. And I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there was quite a bit of research on BVT, far more than there was Lyme disease at the time. And this therapy had been used for decades for people with MS and other rheumatic conditions.  And pharma was holding a bunch of patents on it. So what did I do? Well, I did what any desperate person would do, I ordered myself some bees. And this, my friends, was the beginning of my first step out of Lyme disease. 

 

Wisdom Within: Lessons from Nature and Bees

 

Now, I know this isn’t a Lyme podcast or a Bee Venom podcast, but the bees have a place in this story because stinging myself with that first bee changed my life in the opposite direction that the tick did. When I stung myself with that first bee, I felt an intelligence in the venom. LIke it somehow knew exactly where to go in my body. And I had never felt anything like this before. Because remember, I was the anti-nature girl, right? So this was one of those mind-bending moments where you realize that something within you has shifted and you’re never going back. 

 

And I learned later in the research that we don’t yet know why the venom attacks cancer cells but leaves healthy cells alone. We don’t yet know why the venom from a live bee is so much more effective than the venom put into an injection. But this was definitely a turning point in my life where I saw my place in the world in a much different way. 

 

And I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the bees for so many things I can’t even express. But mostly because they brought me back into this state of remembrance. This sort of the wake-up call to the wisdom we all have inside us. And this is the SAME wisdom that knows exactly how to sleep. 

 

The Information Rabbit Hole

 

Okay, so going back to the place where you’re on this journey of recovery and you’re learning about what’s behind insomnia and why it happens and it all makes a lot of sense. But what you understand logically isn’t necessarily coming through in the shape of sleep yet, which by the way is very normal and very common. 

 

So, what happens is we start to feel a lot doubt about that, or we wonder what’s wrong with us, or we wonder what we’re missing. So we continue on the quest for more and more information. We watch more videos, we listen to more podcasts, we listen to them again. We’re looking desperately for what we missed. Or we’re looking for that exact piece of information that’s going to give us back our sleep. And this becomes the rabbit hole of information-seeking where we try to intellect our way out of insomnia. 

 

True Change Comes From Insight vs. Intellect

 

Now, my honest appraisal of this recovery process is that it doesn’t come through intellect alone. It comes through insight. It comes through realizations. It comes in the moments when you’re not necessarily looking for it. Because once you have the information you need to understand insomnia, your subconscious is going to put it together with all your other life experiences and customize just the right insights for you. But it doesn’t happen through force — it happens through flow. 

 

And these insights are likely going to show up  in pretty unexpected ways. 

 

So, let’s go a little deeper on this thread…

 

Two Modes of Being

 

When I think of the human, I consider two aspects of our being.  And these two aspects correspond with different hemispheres of the brain. 

 

So there’s the aspect of us that is born into life and we’re like a blank slate, right? We’re pure consciousness. And this consciousness is the part of us that is connected to all things. It’s our wisdom or knowingness. It’s the part of us that knows how to heal. It’s the part of us that knows how to sleep. That knows intuitively who we really are. And this is the aspect of us that I associate with the RIGHT side of the brain. 

 

Then, as we move through life, we start to create identities and belief systems based on our surroundings and caregivers. We become the daughter, the son, the athlete, the sleep coach, the parent. Whatever our programming is throughout the course of life becomes the state of mind we try to figure out life from. And this conditioning is often tied to the left side of the brain. So, this is where our ego and our stories and our narratives live. 

 

And it’s not important to know which side of the brain is what, I just find it really interesting. And the way I always remember the two sides is that the left hemisphere is associated with logic, so the two L’s. And the right hemisphere is associated with feeling right with the world — so this is our higher mind or higher consciousness.  

 

I think I got this memory jogger from Jill Bolte Taylor. And if you haven’t seen her TedTalk, I highly, highly recommend it. And I’ll link that up in the show notes as well. I think that will coalesce nicely with this podcast.  

 

So, we move through life, and we experience something like insomnia. So naturally, we start to tackle that from the survival patterns we’ve learned along the way. And these patterns usually rely heavily on logic and intellect. 

 

So, ironically, we try to solve the problem of insomnia from the same level of mind that creates it. And this really keeps us spinning our wheels because we’re applying logic and intellect to a process that responds paradoxically to these things. But since we’re told literally everywhere that we need to worry about our sleep or we’ll die a horrible death, we just keep doing the things we do for all of life’s other problems. 

 

Meanwhile the right side of the brain is going, “What on earth are you doing, Beth?” “Come back over here, I’ve got you.”

 

But going back to the nature piece that I talked about earlier, if you think about nature in all its glory and wisdom, it doesn’t need information to be Nature. A bee doesn’t need to figure out how to be a bee, it just knows.  

 

A maple tree doesn’t go to “maple school” to learn how to grow and be magnificent. It already knows. 

 

In much the same way — I’m not teaching anyone how to sleep because your body already knows. 

 

I’m helping you address what’s standing in the way of sleep, which is typically the very thing that sets us apart from nature. It’s our unique ability to analyze and problem-solve something that doesn’t require much help at all. Remember, the wisdom within the bee and the wisdom within the maple is the same wisdom within you. 

 

We just get really knocked out of it with insomnia.


Okay, so how to wrap this up… Because this podcast is really about insight vs. intellect.

Trusting the Natural Flow of Life

The first thing I want to say is that if you feel like you’re not quite understanding things yet, it’s okay. I think it was the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies who said: The eyes can only see what the mind can comprehend. But I feel pretty solid saying there’s a part of you that already knows everything that I’m saying. It's just over there on the right side of your brain waiting very patiently for the left side to catch up.

The next thing I want to offer is not to take any of this too seriously. Bringing some wonder and curiosity into the equation can be so helpful because those are the orientations that bring the most magical insights.

And the last thing I’ll share is one way I can tell when I’m really in intellect mode, or figuring it out mode in a not so helpful way is by the way I feel. If I feel sort of closed and collapsed and inward then I know I’m thinking in a framework that’s separate from the world.

But then when I move into a more trusting and expansive place, I feel less restricted and more in the flow of life. And this is what allows those insights to naturally emerge.

 

You Already Know 🧡

Remember, none of this is about getting it right or forcing yourself to understand. You’re always in a state of perfection no matter what’s going on. 

 

Thanks for listening. I’m Beth Kendall and this is the Mind. Body. Sleep. Podcast, bye for now…