In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Ann Saffi Biasetti — transpersonal psychologist, somatic psychotherapist, certified yoga therapist, mindfulness teacher, and author of Befriending Your Body. Ann has spent more than 35 years in clinical practice walking people through disordered eating recovery, and her forthcoming book, Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm (releasing July 21, 2026), distills two decades of thinking into a framework that quietly challenges much of how the field still operates.

What makes this conversation rare isn’t the credentials — though the list is long. It’s that Ann speaks with the steadiness of someone who has watched, year after year, what actually moves people from disconnection to genuine healing. She doesn’t argue against traditional eating disorder care so much as point at what it keeps missing: the body itself. Not the body as a problem to be managed. Not the body as a vehicle to be controlled. The body as a partner that, in her words, never wanted any of this either.

Here’s what we explore in this episode:

The sensitive kid who was told her sensitivity was the problem

Ann’s story doesn’t start in clinical practice. It starts in childhood, where she was what we’d now call a highly sensory-sensitive child — uncomfortable with socks rolled the wrong way, with certain textures, with particular temperatures. In her generation, none of this was named or honored. It was treated as a nuisance, something to push past. She learned, like so many sensitive children do, to move away from her own sensory experience and to treat it as something wrong.

She walked into helping work early — human services degree, social work minor, knew from high school that she wanted to be a therapist — but the somatic education came sideways, through a yoga class in her Catholic high school. She remembers the first time she came into shoulder stand and felt something she didn’t have a word for yet: her body, available to her, on her own terms, with no judgment attached. That memory stayed.

How autoimmune illness sent her back to her body — and changed her clinical work forever

At 30, after the birth of her twin sons, Ann developed her first autoimmune condition. The medical pathway gave her partial answers but no real relief. What did give her relief — repeatedly, measurably — was getting on the mat. Not because yoga removed the illness, but because it gave her a way to be with her body that the rest of her life had never offered.

She describes the moment plainly: leaving a class one afternoon and realizing, as a trained therapist, that no therapy she had ever done had taught her what that hour just had. None of it had taught her how to be in her body. None of it had taught her how to separate the predicting, terrified mind from the actual sensation of the present moment. That gap — between what therapy named and what the body needed — became the project of the rest of her career.

Why she stopped teaching active yoga classes

Ann began as a 200-hour vinyasa teacher and taught active classes for almost two decades. Eventually she let them go. The reason is the through-line of her work: real somatic healing needs slowness. Flow practices, beautiful as they are, don’t give people enough time to actually settle into a sensation, watch it shift, and learn what their body is communicating. She now teaches restorative yoga, yin, and myofascial release — the kind of practices that ask the nervous system to drop a gear, not pick one up.

This is one of those points that sounds small until you realize how much of modern wellness culture is built on the opposite assumption — that more movement, more intensity, more doing equals more healing. Ann’s experience says otherwise. The body opens when it’s allowed to slow down, not when it’s pushed.

Mind forgiveness vs. body forgiveness — the distinction that reframes everything

This is the conceptual heart of the conversation, and the spine of her new book. Most people, when they try to forgive themselves around eating disorder behaviors, are doing what Ann calls mind forgiveness — a cognitive exoneration, a “I did something wrong, let me release it.” That kind of forgiveness still treats the body as a separate entity that the self has either harmed or been harmed by.

Body forgiveness is a different move entirely. It’s the moment a person stops viewing their body as an object — something done to, something to be controlled or apologized to — and starts recognizing it as a participant. The reflective question Ann returns to with clients is disarmingly simple: Have you ever considered that your body never wanted any of this either?

That question levels the playing field. It dissolves the adversarial framing that quietly powers so much of eating disorder thinking — me vs. my body, my will vs. my hunger, my mind vs. my appetite — and replaces it with something closer to grief, and closer to partnership.

The autoimmune diagnosis she got while writing the book — and the shame that came with it

While writing Your Body Never Meant You Any Harm, Ann developed a second autoimmune condition. This one was harder to trace. She describes being dismissed by top specialists in New York City, leaving an office with her husband asking if she felt better and answering honestly: no, because she knew her body, and she knew something was wrong. Eventually, through atypical bloodwork her primary care doctor had never even heard of, the condition was identified.

What’s striking about the way she tells this story is the part most clinicians wouldn’t admit out loud — the shame. The quiet question of aren’t I supposed to be the one who knows this stuff? Is it reflecting poorly on me that my body is doing this? Anyone who works in health, fitness, or recovery and has had their own body go off-script will recognize this. Ann names it. And then she describes the difference self-compassion makes — not in removing the diagnosis, but in changing what she does with it. No spiral into striving. No frantic search for the cure. Instead, a kind of ah, now I can put the puzzle pieces together, and a quieter, steadier turning toward her own body as the one thing that’s been trying to tell her the truth all along.

Why self-compassion isn’t a soft add-on — it’s the load-bearing wall

There’s a tendency in the eating disorder space to treat self-compassion as a nice-to-have. A bonus practice. Something you add once the real work is done.

Ann’s position is the opposite. Self-compassion is the only thing that keeps the critical mind from dragging a person back into disembodiment. Without it, every attempt to get close to the body gets sabotaged by the same internal voice that drove the disconnection in the first place — it will always be like this, this is your fault, you did this to yourself. Self-compassion is what allows someone to stay with a sensation long enough to learn from it, instead of fleeing it.

You can’t be embodied and self-critical at the same time, she says. The critical mind will take you straight back into separation, every time.

Separating the mind’s reactivity from the body’s actual sensation

One of the most useful frames in the conversation is Ann’s description of what’s actually happening when someone has a body-based reaction. The mind layers in memory (what this sensation has meant before), association (what this kind of moment usually leads to), and prediction (what’s coming next). All of that lands on top of the actual sensation. Most people, most of the time, are responding not to what their body is doing in the present moment but to the story their mind is telling about it.

Teaching someone to separate those layers — to recognize the sensation as the sensation, and the narrative as the narrative — is, in her view, one of the hardest and most essential skills in recovery. It’s also one that almost no traditional therapy teaches directly.

The “muddy water regrets” of chronic illness

There’s a section of the conversation that lands particularly hard for anyone navigating long-term health challenges. Ann talks about the temptation, in chronic illness, to spiral into maybe if I’d done this, maybe if I hadn’t done that — what she calls the muddy water regrets. The honest answer is usually: maybe, maybe not. We don’t know.

The embodied path, she says, doesn’t bypass that grief. It allows it. There are days she has to cry on her drive home from work. There are days the management of a body with autoimmune conditions feels like running a high-end business — constant attentiveness, constant adjustment. And there are other days where it’s quieter. The point isn’t to escape the difficulty. It’s to be with it without abandoning yourself in the process.

The infrastructure around the work

Like any practitioner who has lived inside her own framework long enough to test it, Ann has a stack of practices that hold the rest of it up. Sensory-based restorative yoga. Myofascial release. Mindful self-compassion. Attention to what supplements she takes (and what’s in them). Awareness of which foods and drinks consistently flare her system. None of it is prescriptive. She makes a point of saying that, for her, fluidity matters more than perfection — joy and equanimity are both nervous system regulators, and a recovery that doesn’t make room for them isn’t a recovery she’s interested in.

Recovery doesn’t always look the way we’re told it will. Sometimes the missing piece is a behavior change. Sometimes it’s a mindset shift. And sometimes — as Ann’s work suggests — it’s the quiet, unglamorous practice of turning toward the body you’ve spent years turning away from, and finally letting it know you’re not its enemy.

Watch the full episode on the Beyond Binge Eating YouTube channel.