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The Best Of 2020 Podcast | Part 1

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Woman in triangle pose on a yoga mat

About This Podcast

This is part one of our best of the year podcast. You will hear clips from every episode we recorded this past year, arranged by topic. This is a great opportunity to catch up and hear different perspectives on our favorite topics. Don’t forget to leave a review if you have been loving the Mindful Strength Podcast. All the speaker’s names and podcast links are included in the transcript.

 

Podcast Transcription

 

 [ep 142 Chris Bourke]

00:04:17

I have students coming into my class who are crying and having connections to their feelings and they tell me like “I cry in your class or I get emotional in your class”. They become aware of feelings that they may not have been able to articulate through words and through language or truthfully, as you probably learned in the polyvagal pocketbook, when I don’t feel safe and I feel like threatened, I can’t necessarily access my feelings.

00:04:50

Sometimes that’s been people’s experiences of traditional mental health treatment. This very evaluative sense of like “I’m going in and being diagnosed. There’s something wrong with me. I have to talk about it. I can’t find the words for it. It feels really stressful”. And so then there’s like a whole layer of coping that goes on that, like, disconnects me from feelings, because then it’s almost easier to not acknowledge that they exist. But then once I get into like a moment where I’m with my body and I sense that there’s like a tender part here in my heart or there’s this buzzing in my chest.

00:05:23

It’s like, wow, there’s something there and it arises. So I think that’s kind of what has fed this shift is there’s just been this experiential information that’s emerging. That people are doing certain practices and they’re coming to realize that stuff.

[ep 148 Brooke Thomas]

00:05:45

Because similar to your point just now, I can look around and notice like I’m safe right now. That’s why I’m having a conversation with you like there’s no direct threat that I need to fight or flee or freeze or fawn, which is pleasing and placating.

00:06:01

But what’s funny is that the absence of real present tense harm doesn’t translate directly and immediately into the feeling of being safe. So we know that there are obvious things that are around about in our culture a lot. Like people have a lot of anxiety and that’s very common.

00:06:22

That’s for sure one of the things that I’m talking about here. But I’m also talking about a lot of the strategies that we have to get a handle on our lives. So those can be other things, like constantly goal setting, constantly striving to achieve something, whether it’s an ideal mate or an ideal bank account, that there’s always this sort of reaching for that moment in the imaginary future when will finally be good is kind of what the unconscious mind is saying. And it translates to when I’ll finally be safe.

00:06:58

We have a lot of strategies. Goal setting, being likable is a huge one and women get conditioned in this a lot in particular, men do as well, just in a different way. But for women, it’s like be nice, smile, be sweet. For men, it’s like be important, be powerful, be strong, be on your game. If I demonstrate these things, I’ll be likable, then I’ll be safe.

00:07:23

Like so much of our material underneath the surface here is about coming from our survival brain. Because at the end of the day, we forget it all the time, but we’re mammals. We’re mammals, just like all the other mammals. We’re pretty interesting mammals. I think we’re the most interesting mammals. We’re certainly weird outliers in the animal kingdom here, but we’re operating with nervous systems whose primary orientation is “am I safe?”. And so there’s a lot of strategizing for getting that safety. But it keeps us from the experience of getting safe. It’s like the classic hamster wheel. We’re always running towards the experience of safety, whatever our individual strategies are for getting there.

[ep 176 Dr. Rima Thapar]

00:08:03

The most important thing that you can do for yourself while you’re going through any treatment is knowing who you are. If you know who you are, you can make decisions that are heart-centered, more in alignment with who you are versus just the intellectual, factual knowledge. Which is a very small part of how modern medicine works.

00:08:31

We’ve made modern medicine to be that this is the end-all and be-all. But it’s not. It’s just a fraction. We still don’t know a lot about how the body works. So the driving force of how you are going to do well in your health is ultimately you knowing yourself.

00:08:49

And I do this experiment like if I have to go to the hospital for anything, I don’t tell them I’m a physician. Because I want to see how they’re going to treat me. And it’s very different. They treat me one way when they know that I’m not a physician, and then they treat me another way when they know that I am a physician. It should be the same.

[ep 183 Rochelle Miller]

The more that we can give our students agency, the more that we can allow them to feel empowered within their own selves. This is what starts to break down the things of trauma. It’s feeling strong within my own body to say yes and to say no. Right.

00:09:29

And this tone of, and I’m going to use it again, infantilizing. It’s very similar to that model of charity. It’s very similar to that model of like “I’m here to help you. I have all of your answers”. That’s also very oppressive. Like, please, let’s talk to people like they’re people.

[ep 159 Dr. Rashmi Bismark]

00:09:56

I think there are so many beautiful ways to practice meditation and so many gateways in. Whether that is that sensory experience of the breath. Whether that is sort of using visualization. Whether it’s using mantra and sound as that gateway into an experience.

00:10:13

And so, part of even when I’m teaching adults, part of the way that I like to teach is that there is no right or wrong way. It’s really about pursuing what works for you. So having different sorts of experiences, finding what really you connect with and exploring that for a while, and then maybe trying something else and exploring that, too.

00:10:35

So there are so many similarities actually around that curiosity. So letting ourselves kind of get curious about exploring the different things. And even when we find something that’s comforting and soothing, letting ourselves get curious about the dimensions of that.

00:10:50

So maybe it is kind of really exploring the breath with a freshness of meeting each one, like with that child-like beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is one of my most favorite Zen concepts, you know, that it’s actually there in Indian philosophy as well. That idea of approaching things with that sort of freshness of a kid’s eyes, you know. And so when I’m working with children, I don’t teach children other than my own children, so when I’m working with them, this idea of curiosity and love really sits right at the center of it.

00:11:24

Allowing them to sort of trust into what they’re uncovering to get a little bit curious about that, whatever that is, and letting them kind of guide the experience rather than me necessarily being overly prescriptive about it.

[ep 163 Megan Spears]

00:11:42

It’s really important to, information-wise, load people like my clients, slowly. The same way that it’s important to let our bodies slowly gain strength.

00:11:50

It’s important to load with information over time. So it’s helped me slow down. It’s helped me appreciate the process of learning and the process of being a consistent student. On one hand, I’ve learned a lot about teaching, but I’ve also learned a lot about being a student. As a student in college classes, I’ve learned how I respond to being frustrated by learning. I’ve noticed how I experience when I’m thrilled about learning when I’m engaged in learning.

00:12:25

I have a better understanding of what it’s like to be in communication with my professors. There’s a level of professionalism and a very clear student-teacher relationship and a little bit of a mentorship kind of experience as well. So as I’m learning in my classes, I’m also viewing myself as a student and viewing my professors as teachers as well as I’m watching them teach me, watching myself be taught.

[ep 170 Melanie Camellia]

00:12:55

But that said, I think that we can do our absolute best to mitigate an imbalance of power within the context of our classes. To me, that looks like being very explicit about what you are offering and who you are in your marketing. Right.

00:13:09

So in your class description, in your bio, on your website, be as honest as possible about what you are equipped to offer and what perspective you’re coming from. Right.

00:13:21

Is this a physical practice for you? Is this a philosophical practice for you? Do you have training in trauma-informed techniques or did you take an accessible yoga training? And what are you anticipating the class looking like?

00:13:33

Is this a class where you are teaching a very specified formalized sequence that’s not to be diverted from? Or is this a class where you’re planning to offer as many options as there are people? Right. And I think it starts there like it starts before the class.

[ep 174 Susanna Barkataki]

00:13:53

And so anywhere there is harm being done, in my mind. A guru who abuses is no longer a guru. So whether or not they have this whole lineage, that’s not a valid teacher for me. And so I, for example, wouldn’t cite the name of that teacher, wouldn’t cite the name of that particular school or style.

00:14:17

I personally, when I’m talking about embracing the roots of yoga, would be like the practice of yoga that came from Shramana tradition, that came from yogis practicing in India or what is now called India by the Indus Valley in this valley, by the Sarasvati River. I’m referring back to the place that yoga came from, the place it was codified and developed, the people who did so, but not a specific abusive person or lineage path and I think that is an important distinction.

[ep 154 Robin Lacambra]

00:14:55

How can we share whatever resources we have by one, recognizing what those resources are and resources aren’t just like physical things or wealth. It’s also time, it’s attention, it’s having uncomfortable conversations with people in service of educating them and growing their awareness. Like there are so many things that fall under the category of resource.

00:15:16

So in this course, we talk about one, what systemic oppression is, and who is most impacted by it. Two, it destigmatizes the shame around privilege. Being like privilege is something that we shouldn’t deny or be ashamed of, but something that we should resource and stand atop of to share. Be like “yeah this is the privilege that I have. The privilege that I have doesn’t discredit the challenges I’ve had to overcome, but speaks to what resources I have and the amount of resources that I have to share”.

[ep 161 jamilah malika]

00:15:54

What do you think of when you think intention versus impact? Yeah, I mean, there’s a really great black woman named Rachel Ricketts and she does something called spiritual activism. And I feel like a lot of us folks who are involved in these conversations, especially in yoga studios, know people really want to feel better.

00:16:16

People really feel like yoga makes them a better person. They come, they do their practice. So they’re kind of confronted or affronted by this idea that, like, they messed up and they are just so resistant to just being wrong and being a person who made a mistake and being a person who was ignorant. So that whole attachment to being good and being right and like “I didn’t mean to”, it puts people further and further away from the work of dismantling the power.

[ep 180 jamilah malika]

00:16:56

We learn antidepression in our families in a really simple way when we’re really young. So like if you grow up in a family and you have siblings and one of your siblings is a boy, then you’ll learn about patriarchy. If you grow up and you’re starting to feel like, “oh my gosh, maybe I’m queer” and like expressing outside of your gender and the outside of the binary, then you start to learn about homophobia, queerphobia , transphobia. And if you like, have a sibling who’s fat, then you learn about fat phobia and you, like, understand how value is attributed to different people in your family differently.

00:17:37

You see the kind of power and the kind of respect that your dad gets and you see if you have a stay at home mom what that is like in terms of respect for other people.

[ep 179 Natalia Mehlman]

00:17:53

But when I talk about fitness, I’m talking about recreational exercise that is not necessarily for participation in any kind of elite competition or really any kind of organized athletic competition, as we would traditionally see it.

00:18:07

I’m interested in the way everyday people who have no aspiration to go to the Olympics or play for the NFL or even try out for their high school soccer team, I’m interested in why those people have increasingly in the United States made working out either a part of their daily life or the goal to work out a part of their daily life. And I think that’s an important distinction because it’s very clear that there’s this sense that one should exercise a lot, but that a lot of people are not doing what they think is the right amount.

00:18:39

And so I’m interested in how that cultural expectation came to be. And to me, that is really different than making the varsity football team or having athletic ambitions. Although, like I said, of course, there are overlaps.

[ep 169 V. Ophelia Rigault]

00:18:56

I look at it this way if you have two people walking like a twin, grief and joy walk together. Because the deepest grief that I’ve known is the death of my mother, but that helps me to understand what joy is and the deepest joy that I have in my life.

00:19:11

It is really propelled me and a lot of people find a way to understand their grief, accept it and bring meaning to their grief. Most of them have said, and I would say almost all of them that I’ve talked to, “I truly appreciate life now. I know what life means . I will live in gratitude”. For me, I really truly don’t sweat the small stuff because I’m all about appreciating the big stuff. But that grief is always in my heart and it’s always part of me. And that’s okay because I love this woman for 40 years.

[ep 167 Lizette Pompa]

00:19:49

Do you ever go back to that back Bikram practice just to see how it would feel? I actually started last year again. I own a yoga studio and we still have four Bikram classes a week and we have students that they just want to practice Bikram yoga. So we have a few classes for those. Part of my job is to take all the teacher’s classes in my studio.

00:20:09

So I have to go in class and see how they’re teaching. And I have been avoiding it for a long time because my body really refused to go into Bikram class. Suddenly one day I was like, “well, I’m ready”. And I started taking a Bikram class once a week. And it was mentally challenging for me because I knew the sequence so my mind was just like waiting to go through the postures.

00:20:30

I have to admit that after the class it felt just really nice in my body again, because I was not doing it, you know, like everybody was just like bringing it once a week for about five months. And it felt nice because then you get this time to get into the postures again that I haven’t practice for a long time either.

[ep 144 Anula Maiberg]

00:20:53

What are you doing with this practice that you’ve honed? Because what I’m challenging the students to consider is that it’s not that interesting to be good at Pilates. What’s interesting is what is Pilates getting you ready to do? And what I’m confronting the class with is like “I can teach you the order, right. Like all of the things that you already know and you’ve been practicing and you have in your body. What do you do with the skills that that got you ready for ?” Do you know what I mean? And that’s chaos.

00:21:24

Because if you are really good at balancing on one leg, let’s say you’re never going to balance on one leg, probably in an environment that is super organized, in temperature-controlled and like just so, and you warmed up just so… you’re going to have to balance on one leg and probably a chaotic situation where it matters that you can do this thing and maybe not fall or more importantly, fall well.

00:21:53

And my opinion is that Pilates is getting you ready like this organized like codified method is getting you ready for the chaotic, the unexpected outside of the Pilates studio. Otherwise, like, what’s the point?

[ep 150 James Crader]

00:22:10

What I came to realize, I think is that within the Pilates world, at least, there are cultural preservationists who are very interested in keeping the true work of Joseph Pilates alive. And that is true for probably every wellness and fitness modality and probably true in all professions where this thing has been created in the past and we need people to keep it alive. We need people to keep the history alive and sort of pass that on from generation to generation.

00:22:42

I’m not that. I’m an innovator. And so I live on the opposite side of the spectrum where I look at history and I’m well informed on that and abreast at what is currently happening culturally within the wellness and fitness world and outside of it. And how can I take the information I have and share my experience a little bit more and maybe introduce new conversations.

00:23:09

So that’s where I really realized that I live. And what I thought is that what I was running into was people misunderstanding my work, thinking that I wanted to change Pilates proper or whatever the case was. And so I chose with the new work to actually take the word Pilates totally out of my work.

00:23:32

So I left the Pilates world. I’m no longer a “Pilates teacher” and I adopted the term movement coach and created a whole framework in which to look at movement. So it’s self-organization strategizing and there’s a movement component and a resiliency component to it. And that is what jamescrader.com is. It sort of just takes a look at what my work is and frames it in the larger scope and it’s out there in the world for everyone to kind of go and look at now.

[ep 162 Jenn Pilloti]

00:24:05

Because the thing with interception is some people have a lot of interoceptive sensitivity. Hypermobility, for instance, people who are hypermobile, they tend to be very, very, very in tune to their internal state. Their perception of what’s happening isn’t always accurate. And this can be true of people who aren’t hypermobile as well.

00:24:27

So, for instance, if they feel discomfort in an area, there might be this assumption that, “oh no, I’m really injured” and that might cause anxiety. Or “oh, I feel my heart beating fast. Something must be wrong”. So if you can say to yourself, “oh look, my heart’s beating a tiny bit faster than normal, but it’s not that big a deal. If I breathe a couple of times, it’ll quiet down”. If you can start to be a little more in tune with why your body is responding the way it is and what it actually means, that can make a big difference.

[ep 151 Jules Mitchell]

00:25:03

Because it oftentimes does come with flexibility, yoga tends to attract more people with hypermobility for a lot of different reasons. Partially they appear good at it. But secondly, people with hypermobility tend to feel tight a lot because they’re trying to protect and guard a joint that doesn’t feel stable to them. And so they like the stretching feelings that come with activities like yoga.

00:25:30

So they’ve drawn to that as well because it makes them feel… it’s our cultural narrative that we think tight is a cause of something that can be remedied with stretching. But that’s actually not the way it works. So it’s just part of our belief system. And so we see a lot of it in yoga and now people are getting diagnosed with it. It’s like this explosion.

00:25:48

So it goes both ways. It’s great that we know more about it. But at the same time, because we know more about it, we’re doing like what you said when you asked me this, the beginning of this long question, which is we’re kind of like flinging hypermobility diagnoses casually around each other and at ourselves because we know more about it.

00:26:08

And I don’t know that that’s a good thing either. So you can’t just look at someone who’s flexible and say you have hypermobility. Right. And it’s not our job either. Here’s the thing is, if they do have hypermobility, be careful with those types of statements because if you understand all the other symptoms around hypermobility, chronic pain, and anxiety and you labeling someone with hypermobility like you could be spiraling them even more into a hypermobile like experience.

[ep 149 Clare Kelley]

00:26:44

Just to be very clear, coronavirus or covid-19, covid-19 is really the name of the sickness that comes from the virus. So just to be clear about that terminology and so in public health, we’re working to help the spread of disease at a community level.

00:27:00

Whether that is the chronic illness, whether that is infectious disease. And so we’re always thinking about it in terms of how can we take a population of people and work with health at that level.

00:27:13

So we think less about necessarily individual health decisions and more towards health behaviors that contribute to how a disease might spread or occur in the population. We’re counting diseases in epidemiology. In the area of research that I was looking at was more qualitative research, looking at how cultural norms affect threat of disease. So that’s the large difference right there. And so that’s really important right now because we’re not talking about people’s individual health.

00:27:43

All of the decisions that we’re making for this outbreak are for the health of the community, for people who need our protection, because there’s no really other way for them to have agency to make their own health decisions. There’s also a couple of other reasons why we’re really concerned about this. But that’s a longer answer to your fairly short question on the difference between public health and medicine at an individual level.

[ep 173 Matthew Remski]

00:28:15

This contrast between the wellness / messianic influencer who can spend their entire time emoting and because they spend their entire time emoting, they don’t have to deliver any facts. And what the public health official has to do, which is to convey basic, provisional and careful information in a way that’s just not appealing. Nobody re-tweets the NHS. and I’m realizing that I have never re-shared the public health Ontario posts that I get on my Facebook feed.

00:28:49

I probably should start doing that because it’s like, they’re not coming from personalities. But that’s the best information that we have been able to pool together through the notion of a common good in our province. So why am I not supporting that ? Facts are just not as attractive as emotions. So it’s a real problem.

[ep 181 Diane Bruni]

00:29:13

I guess when I realized that death was imminent when that really sunk in for me, I realized, “oh yeah, OK, this is it. I’m actually confronting death right now”. And going through the stages and phases, which I’m still going through, of course. But the beginning ones are different than the later ones.

00:29:38

I guess gradually there’s like this acceptance that begins to sink in and become real and that feels empowering in some way. Not empowering, but it feels like I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my thinking and I’m becoming more OK with talking about dying and death.

00:30:03

There’s a tendency to want to just actually not go there, thinking you can just keep fighting. But when I started to realize that I didn’t and shouldn’t and couldn’t fight anymore, then I began to actually feel more peaceful.

200 Hour Teacher Training Promotion

The Best Of 2020 Podcast | Part 1

To learn more about Kathryn and Carly’s 300-hour training Click Here.

Building Resilience 30-Day Practice Progression | Try Day 1 For FREE!

The Mindful Strength Membership | Click Here

Experience 4 FREE Online Membership Classes: Click Here 

 

Woman in triangle pose on a yoga mat

Podcast Transcription

 

 ep 142 Chris Bourke

00:04:17

I have students coming into my class who are crying and having connections to their feelings and they tell me like “I cry in your class or I get emotional in your class”. They become aware of feelings that they may not have been able to articulate through words and through language or truthfully, as you probably learned in the polyvagal pocketbook, when I don’t feel safe and I feel like threatened, I can’t necessarily access my feelings.

00:04:50

Sometimes that’s been people’s experiences of traditional mental health treatment. This very evaluative sense of like “I’m going in and being diagnosed. There’s something wrong with me. I have to talk about it. I can’t find the words for it. It feels really stressful”. And so then there’s like a whole layer of coping that goes on that, like, disconnects me from feelings, because then it’s almost easier to not acknowledge that they exist. But then once I get into like a moment where I’m with my body and I sense that there’s like a tender part here in my heart or there’s this buzzing in my chest.

00:05:23

It’s like, wow, there’s something there and it arises. So I think that’s kind of what has fed this shift is there’s just been this experiential information that’s emerging. That people are doing certain practices and they’re coming to realize that stuff.

ep 148 Brooke Thomas

00:05:45

Because similar to your point just now, I can look around and notice like I’m safe right now. That’s why I’m having a conversation with you like there’s no direct threat that I need to fight or flee or freeze or fawn, which is pleasing and placating.

00:06:01

But what’s funny is that the absence of real present tense harm doesn’t translate directly and immediately into the feeling of being safe. So we know that there are obvious things that are around about in our culture a lot. Like people have a lot of anxiety and that’s very common.

00:06:22

That’s for sure one of the things that I’m talking about here. But I’m also talking about a lot of the strategies that we have to get a handle on our lives. So those can be other things, like constantly goal setting, constantly striving to achieve something, whether it’s an ideal mate or an ideal bank account, that there’s always this sort of reaching for that moment in the imaginary future when will finally be good is kind of what the unconscious mind is saying. And it translates to when I’ll finally be safe.

00:06:58

We have a lot of strategies. Goal setting, being likable is a huge one and women get conditioned in this a lot in particular, men do as well, just in a different way. But for women, it’s like be nice, smile, be sweet. For men, it’s like be important, be powerful, be strong, be on your game. If I demonstrate these things, I’ll be likable, then I’ll be safe.

00:07:23

Like so much of our material underneath the surface here is about coming from our survival brain. Because at the end of the day, we forget it all the time, but we’re mammals. We’re mammals, just like all the other mammals. We’re pretty interesting mammals. I think we’re the most interesting mammals. We’re certainly weird outliers in the animal kingdom here, but we’re operating with nervous systems whose primary orientation is “am I safe?”. And so there’s a lot of strategizing for getting that safety. But it keeps us from the experience of getting safe. It’s like the classic hamster wheel. We’re always running towards the experience of safety, whatever our individual strategies are for getting there.

ep 176 Dr. Rima Thapar

00:08:03

The most important thing that you can do for yourself while you’re going through any treatment is knowing who you are. If you know who you are, you can make decisions that are heart-centered, more in alignment with who you are versus just the intellectual, factual knowledge. Which is a very small part of how modern medicine works.

00:08:31

We’ve made modern medicine to be that this is the end-all and be-all. But it’s not. It’s just a fraction. We still don’t know a lot about how the body works. So the driving force of how you are going to do well in your health is ultimately you knowing yourself.

00:08:49

And I do this experiment like if I have to go to the hospital for anything, I don’t tell them I’m a physician. Because I want to see how they’re going to treat me. And it’s very different. They treat me one way when they know that I’m not a physician, and then they treat me another way when they know that I am a physician. It should be the same.

ep 183 Rochelle Miller:

The more that we can give our students agency, the more that we can allow them to feel empowered within their own selves. This is what starts to break down the things of trauma. It’s feeling strong within my own body to say yes and to say no. Right.

00:09:29

nd this tone of, and I’m going to use it again, infantilizing. It’s very similar to that model of charity. It’s very similar to that model of like “I’m here to help you. I have all of your answers”. That’s also very oppressive. Like, please, let’s talk to people like they’re people.

ep 159 Rashmi Bismark

00:09:56

I think there are so many beautiful ways to practice meditation and so many gateways in. Whether that is that sensory experience of the breath. Whether that is sort of using visualization. Whether it’s using mantra and sound as that gateway into an experience.

00:10:13

And so, part of even when I’m teaching adults, part of the way that I like to teach is that there is no right or wrong way. It’s really about pursuing what works for you. So having different sorts of experiences, finding what really you connect with and exploring that for a while, and then maybe trying something else and exploring that, too.

00:10:35

So there are so many similarities actually around that curiosity. So letting ourselves kind of get curious about exploring the different things. And even when we find something that’s comforting and soothing, letting ourselves get curious about the dimensions of that.

00:10:50

So maybe it is kind of really exploring the breath with a freshness of meeting each one, like with that child-like beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is one of my most favorite Zen concepts, you know, that it’s actually there in Indian philosophy as well. That idea of approaching things with that sort of freshness of a kid’s eyes, you know. And so when I’m working with children, I don’t teach children other than my own children, so when I’m working with them, this idea of curiosity and love really sits right at the center of it.

00:11:24

Allowing them to sort of trust into what they’re uncovering to get a little bit curious about that, whatever that is, and letting them kind of guide the experience rather than me necessarily being overly prescriptive about it.

ep 163 Megan Spears

00:11:42

It’s really important to, information-wise, load people like my clients, slowly. The same way that it’s important to let our bodies slowly gain strength.

00:11:50

It’s important to load with information over time. So it’s helped me slow down. It’s helped me appreciate the process of learning and the process of being a consistent student. On one hand, I’ve learned a lot about teaching, but I’ve also learned a lot about being a student. As a student in college classes, I’ve learned how I respond to being frustrated by learning. I’ve noticed how I experience when I’m thrilled about learning when I’m engaged in learning.

00:12:25

I have a better understanding of what it’s like to be in communication with my professors. There’s a level of professionalism and a very clear student-teacher relationship and a little bit of a mentorship kind of experience as well. So as I’m learning in my classes, I’m also viewing myself as a student and viewing my professors as teachers as well as I’m watching them teach me, watching myself be taught.

ep 170 Melanie Camellia

00:12:55

But that said, I think that we can do our absolute best to mitigate an imbalance of power within the context of our classes. To me, that looks like being very explicit about what you are offering and who you are in your marketing. Right.

00:13:09

So in your class description, in your bio, on your website, be as honest as possible about what you are equipped to offer and what perspective you’re coming from. Right.

00:13:21

Is this a physical practice for you? Is this a philosophical practice for you? Do you have training in trauma-informed techniques or did you take an accessible yoga training? And what are you anticipating the class looking like?

00:13:33

Is this a class where you are teaching a very specified formalized sequence that’s not to be diverted from? Or is this a class where you’re planning to offer as many options as there are people? Right. And I think it starts there like it starts before the class.

ep 174 Susanna Barkataki

00:13:53

And so anywhere there is harm being done, in my mind. A guru who abuses is no longer a guru. So whether or not they have this whole lineage, that’s not a valid teacher for me. And so I, for example, wouldn’t cite the name of that teacher, wouldn’t cite the name of that particular school or style.

00:14:17

I personally, when I’m talking about embracing the roots of yoga, would be like the practice of yoga that came from Shramana tradition, that came from yogis practicing in India or what is now called India by the Indus Valley in this valley, by the Sarasvati River. I’m referring back to the place that yoga came from, the place it was codified and developed, the people who did so, but not a specific abusive person or lineage path and I think that is an important distinction.

ep 154 Robin Lacambra

00:14:55

How can we share whatever resources we have by one, recognizing what those resources are and resources aren’t just like physical things or wealth. It’s also time, it’s attention, it’s having uncomfortable conversations with people in service of educating them and growing their awareness. Like there are so many things that fall under the category of resource.

00:15:16

So in this course, we talk about one, what systemic oppression is, and who is most impacted by it. Two, it destigmatizes the shame around privilege. Being like privilege is something that we shouldn’t deny or be ashamed of, but something that we should resource and stand atop of to share. Be like “yeah this is the privilege that I have. The privilege that I have doesn’t discredit the challenges I’ve had to overcome, but speaks to what resources I have and the amount of resources that I have to share”.

ep 161 jamilah malika

00:15:54

What do you think of when you think intention versus impact? Yeah, I mean, there’s a really great black woman named Rachel Ricketts and she does something called spiritual activism. And I feel like a lot of us folks who are involved in these conversations, especially in yoga studios, know people really want to feel better.

00:16:16

People really feel like yoga makes them a better person. They come, they do their practice. So they’re kind of confronted or affronted by this idea that, like, they messed up and they are just so resistant to just being wrong and being a person who made a mistake and being a person who was ignorant. So that whole attachment to being good and being right and like “I didn’t mean to”, it puts people further and further away from the work of dismantling the power.

ep 180 jamilah malika

00:16:56

We learn antidepression in our families in a really simple way when we’re really young. So like if you grow up in a family and you have siblings and one of your siblings is a boy, then you’ll learn about patriarchy. If you grow up and you’re starting to feel like, “oh my gosh, maybe I’m queer” and like expressing outside of your gender and the outside of the binary, then you start to learn about homophobia, queerphobia , transphobia. And if you like, have a sibling who’s fat, then you learn about fat phobia and you, like, understand how value is attributed to different people in your family differently.

00:17:37

You see the kind of power and the kind of respect that your dad gets and you see if you have a stay at home mom what that is like in terms of respect for other people.

ep 179 Natalia Mehlman

00:17:53

But when I talk about fitness, I’m talking about recreational exercise that is not necessarily for participation in any kind of elite competition or really any kind of organized athletic competition, as we would traditionally see it.

00:18:07

I’m interested in the way everyday people who have no aspiration to go to the Olympics or play for the NFL or even try out for their high school soccer team, I’m interested in why those people have increasingly in the United States made working out either a part of their daily life or the goal to work out a part of their daily life. And I think that’s an important distinction because it’s very clear that there’s this sense that one should exercise a lot, but that a lot of people are not doing what they think is the right amount.

00:18:39

And so I’m interested in how that cultural expectation came to be. And to me, that is really different than making the varsity football team or having athletic ambitions. Although, like I said, of course, there are overlaps.

ep 169 V. Ophelia Rigault

00:18:56

I look at it this way if you have two people walking like a twin, grief and joy walk together. Because the deepest grief that I’ve known is the death of my mother, but that helps me to understand what joy is and the deepest joy that I have in my life.

00:19:11

It is really propelled me and a lot of people find a way to understand their grief, accept it and bring meaning to their grief. Most of them have said, and I would say almost all of them that I’ve talked to, “I truly appreciate life now. I know what life means . I will live in gratitude”. For me, I really truly don’t sweat the small stuff because I’m all about appreciating the big stuff. But that grief is always in my heart and it’s always part of me. And that’s okay because I love this woman for 40 years.

ep 167 Lizette Pompa

00:19:49

Do you ever go back to that back Bikram practice just to see how it would feel? I actually started last year again. I own a yoga studio and we still have four Bikram classes a week and we have students that they just want to practice Bikram yoga. So we have a few classes for those. Part of my job is to take all the teacher’s classes in my studio.

00:20:09

So I have to go in class and see how they’re teaching. And I have been avoiding it for a long time because my body really refused to go into Bikram class. Suddenly one day I was like, “well, I’m ready”. And I started taking a Bikram class once a week. And it was mentally challenging for me because I knew the sequence so my mind was just like waiting to go through the postures.

00:20:30

I have to admit that after the class it felt just really nice in my body again, because I was not doing it, you know, like everybody was just like bringing it once a week for about five months. And it felt nice because then you get this time to get into the postures again that I haven’t practice for a long time either.

ep 144 Anula Maiberg

00:20:53

What are you doing with this practice that you’ve honed? Because what I’m challenging the students to consider is that it’s not that interesting to be good at Pilates. What’s interesting is what is Pilates getting you ready to do? And what I’m confronting the class with is like “I can teach you the order, right. Like all of the things that you already know and you’ve been practicing and you have in your body. What do you do with the skills that that got you ready for ?” Do you know what I mean? And that’s chaos.

00:21:24

Because if you are really good at balancing on one leg, let’s say you’re never going to balance on one leg, probably in an environment that is super organized, in temperature-controlled and like just so, and you warmed up just so… you’re going to have to balance on one leg and probably a chaotic situation where it matters that you can do this thing and maybe not fall or more importantly, fall well.

00:21:53

And my opinion is that Pilates is getting you ready like this organized like codified method is getting you ready for the chaotic, the unexpected outside of the Pilates studio. Otherwise, like, what’s the point?

ep 150 James Crader

00:22:10

What I came to realize, I think is that within the Pilates world, at least, there are cultural preservationists who are very interested in keeping the true work of Joseph Pilates alive. And that is true for probably every wellness and fitness modality and probably true in all professions where this thing has been created in the past and we need people to keep it alive. We need people to keep the history alive and sort of pass that on from generation to generation.

00:22:42

I’m not that. I’m an innovator. And so I live on the opposite side of the spectrum where I look at history and I’m well informed on that and abreast at what is currently happening culturally within the wellness and fitness world and outside of it. And how can I take the information I have and share my experience a little bit more and maybe introduce new conversations.

00:23:09

So that’s where I really realized that I live. And what I thought is that what I was running into was people misunderstanding my work, thinking that I wanted to change Pilates proper or whatever the case was. And so I chose with the new work to actually take the word Pilates totally out of my work.

00:23:32

So I left the Pilates world. I’m no longer a “Pilates teacher” and I adopted the term movement coach and created a whole framework in which to look at movement. So it’s self-organization strategizing and there’s a movement component and a resiliency component to it. And that is what jamescrader.com is. It sort of just takes a look at what my work is and frames it in the larger scope and it’s out there in the world for everyone to kind of go and look at now.

ep 162 Jenn Pillloti

00:24:05

Because the thing with interception is some people have a lot of interoceptive sensitivity. Hypermobility, for instance, people who are hypermobile, they tend to be very, very, very in tune to their internal state. Their perception of what’s happening isn’t always accurate. And this can be true of people who aren’t hypermobile as well.

00:24:27

So, for instance, if they feel discomfort in an area, there might be this assumption that, “oh no, I’m really injured” and that might cause anxiety. Or “oh, I feel my heart beating fast. Something must be wrong”. So if you can say to yourself, “oh look, my heart’s beating a tiny bit faster than normal, but it’s not that big a deal. If I breathe a couple of times, it’ll quiet down”. If you can start to be a little more in tune with why your body is responding the way it is and what it actually means, that can make a big difference.

ep 151 Jules Mitchell

00:25:03

Because it oftentimes does come with flexibility, yoga tends to attract more people with hypermobility for a lot of different reasons. Partially they appear good at it. But secondly, people with hypermobility tend to feel tight a lot because they’re trying to protect and guard a joint that doesn’t feel stable to them. And so they like the stretching feelings that come with activities like yoga.

00:25:30

So they’ve drawn to that as well because it makes them feel… it’s our cultural narrative that we think tight is a cause of something that can be remedied with stretching. But that’s actually not the way it works. So it’s just part of our belief system. And so we see a lot of it in yoga and now people are getting diagnosed with it. It’s like this explosion.

00:25:48

So it goes both ways. It’s great that we know more about it. But at the same time, because we know more about it, we’re doing like what you said when you asked me this, the beginning of this long question, which is we’re kind of like flinging hypermobility diagnoses casually around each other and at ourselves because we know more about it.

00:26:08

And I don’t know that that’s a good thing either. So you can’t just look at someone who’s flexible and say you have hypermobility. Right. And it’s not our job either. Here’s the thing is, if they do have hypermobility, be careful with those types of statements because if you understand all the other symptoms around hypermobility, chronic pain, and anxiety and you labeling someone with hypermobility like you could be spiraling them even more into a hypermobile like experience.

ep 149 Clare Kelly

00:26:44

Just to be very clear, coronavirus or covid-19, covid-19 is really the name of the sickness that comes from the virus. So just to be clear about that terminology and so in public health, we’re working to help the spread of disease at a community level.

00:27:00

Whether that is the chronic illness, whether that is infectious disease. And so we’re always thinking about it in terms of how can we take a population of people and work with health at that level.

00:27:13

So we think less about necessarily individual health decisions and more towards health behaviors that contribute to how a disease might spread or occur in the population. We’re counting diseases in epidemiology. In the area of research that I was looking at was more qualitative research, looking at how cultural norms affect threat of disease. So that’s the large difference right there. And so that’s really important right now because we’re not talking about people’s individual health.

00:27:43

All of the decisions that we’re making for this outbreak are for the health of the community, for people who need our protection, because there’s no really other way for them to have agency to make their own health decisions. There’s also a couple of other reasons why we’re really concerned about this. But that’s a longer answer to your fairly short question on the difference between public health and medicine at an individual level.

ep 173 Matthew Remski

00:28:15

This contrast between the wellness / messianic influencer who can spend their entire time emoting and because they spend their entire time emoting, they don’t have to deliver any facts. And what the public health official has to do, which is to convey basic, provisional and careful information in a way that’s just not appealing. Nobody re-tweets the NHS. and I’m realizing that I have never re-shared the public health Ontario posts that I get on my Facebook feed.

00:28:49

I probably should start doing that because it’s like, they’re not coming from personalities. But that’s the best information that we have been able to pool together through the notion of a common good in our province. So why am I not supporting that ? Facts are just not as attractive as emotions. So it’s a real problem.

ep 181 Diane Bruni

00:29:13

I guess when I realized that death was imminent when that really sunk in for me, I realized, “oh yeah, OK, this is it. I’m actually confronting death right now”. And going through the stages and phases, which I’m still going through, of course. But the beginning ones are different than the later ones.

00:29:38

I guess gradually there’s like this acceptance that begins to sink in and become real and that feels empowering in some way. Not empowering, but it feels like I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my thinking and I’m becoming more OK with talking about dying and death.

00:30:03

There’s a tendency to want to just actually not go there, thinking you can just keep fighting. But when I started to realize that I didn’t and shouldn’t and couldn’t fight anymore, then I began to actually feel more peaceful.

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