[00:00:00] Welcome to Move With Deb. I'm Deb your friendly neuroplastician. And this is a podcast that explores the relationship between the body and the mind from a health at every size, judgment, free perspective. I teach you how developing a new internal conversation based on curiosity, self friendship and simple neuro-plasticity techniques can rewire your bodymind out of pain and emotional overwhelm to help you build the rich full life that you want to live. Disclaimer, this is not a replacement for medical care.
[00:00:50] Hello, my feelers and healers. Welcome to move with Deb, the podcast. And today I'm gonna just share some of my thoughts about some recent experiences that I've had and my clients have had. I guess that's always what I'm sharing. So maybe I need to come up with a new line. This one is about proceeding with extreme kindness.
[00:01:14] So spring is sprung. Hibernating is shaking off and our bodies are in transition time, at least here in North America, and I want you to think about proceeding with extreme kindness and love.
[00:01:28] So we're very skilled at looking back at our old patterns and practices and habits that we would like to change and defining what we want to do more of by kinda shitting on and judging decisions we've made in the past and shaming ourselves.
[00:01:45] Does that make any sense? So we wanna feel better now and in the future. So to do that, let's dredge up all the ways we identify ourselves as failures/losers from yesterday. This logic error is one of the roots of my coaching work. Whether we're dealing with building new movement practices or moving through mind body pain recovery processes, or building healthier and happier relationships, or growing a business that you don't wanna leave, we look back with love and kindness. Because whatever you did is done, and if you're still alive, it worked. And there's always a positive benefit for everything we do that we label as negative. It's creating some desired effect, even if it's only in the short term. So when we look back with love and decide on purpose how your past actions served you, it means that we experience less shame, means that we create more self-kindness and self friendship.
[00:02:54] I had a client who was comparing herself to others during the pandemic. She didn't launch into new projects. She didn't grow her own sourdough and bake bread and do the whole cottage core thing.
[00:03:06] She was in a relationship evolution in her marriage, and she's identifying that now she's ready to start connecting and moving back into the world in a new way. So we labeled that time as her hibernation period. Because bears don't just hang out all winter outside freezing their butts off with no food. They have cycles to support their survival.
[00:03:30] What's important in that reframing was we released her from what she did or didn't do in the past, and focus her energy and attention on what she would enjoy experiencing now. It's normal for a brain to wander to the past and check and compare now versus then, but to be in now creation, we want to only use then as a touchstone and gently love that version of you and let them grow.
[00:04:01] Here's a little bit how we do this around movement. So for getting back into or desiring to add more and varied movement to your life, we need an essential element, or maybe two. I believe we need this psychoeducation piece of mind body science that understands pain as a complex mechanism of communication and learning, and not just an indicator of tissue damage.
[00:04:28] And we need to operate with kindness and curiosity because if we're gonna ask our body to adapt to a greater load of movement, intensity, stamina, or strength, we are going to feel stuff. It's so key to not let that discomfort cause us to spiral into catastrophic thinking. For instance, the other week I had an experience where I went on an urban hike with this new group called the Body Liberation Hiking Club, in New York City.
[00:04:58] And it was a great outing with a group of lovely humans who enjoy moving together in supportive collaboration. Overall that day I walked almost nine miles. When I got back home, I was hurting. And I knew that my mind could be telling me so many stories about my body, what it's capable or not capable of.
[00:05:19] I had various feelings arise of both triumph and sadness. I was worried about my plans for the next day, which was to walk around and watch the Easter parade. And because mind body work at the root of it is about, breaking up these habitual patterns, and not reinforcing the condition responses and pain behaviors that aren't serving us. I didn't want to decide ahead of time that my body didn't feel up to going to the Easter parade, so I just kind of tabled making any decisions about it till the next day. And I just decided that I was going to meet my feelings with compassion and kindness. I celebrated my feet of a very long walk. I put some of my attention on recovery, giving myself a self-massage, hydrating, eating protein, getting good sleep.
[00:06:14] And each time I stood up and felt that soreness, I said, yes, that's right. It is normal to feel sore, and I noticed when the soreness lessened. Usually when I relaxed, so I did a little bit of attention training. What is everything I'm not noticing when I'm noticing this? And when I was in bed, there were many times I thought about canceling my next day's plan, but I didn't.
[00:06:42] I wanted to see what it would feel like to have a gentle movement day after a hard one. And it was fine. In fact, it was so fine that I then went to the gym, that night for strength training and then again on Tuesday morning. And none of that was with this experience of pushing through. So that's really important.
[00:07:04] None of the movement that I did was about pushing through. Maybe on the, like the last little bit of getting home from my, um, my very long walk was pushing through, but like, You know that kind of pushing through. You're like, I just gotta get into the house, right? I just have to get off the ferry and like walk the five blocks to my house, because otherwise you're like, I live in the ferry terminal now and you know, it's actually outside. It's not that comfortable. If I walked five blocks, I would be home.
[00:07:33] That's a little bit of pushing through, but like the next day was not about pushing through. Going to the gym was not about pushing through, but it was about adaptation, emotional and physical adaptation to increased musculoskeletal load, increased emotional load, which are like the thoughts, the feelings, and the beliefs that were triggered with the experience of this walk.
[00:08:00] Then the next week I was able to take a walk with a friend that was like six or so miles, according to my Fitbit watch. So I don't really care that much about numbers, but I do think it's kind of helpful in these moments when you're trying to like get better at something. And it felt mostly good, sometimes hard, but I could tell that I felt stronger and more sure on my feet.
[00:08:23] And I also knew that it was a distance that I could do, and there were times where I asked my friend to slow down or for us to stop and sit for a little bit, bringing in all of that gentle awareness, encouragement, and asking for help, which is a part of my embodiment and enjoyment process, and including my friend into the experience with me, created more feelings of support, intimacy and care.
[00:08:50] I didn't feel like I needed to override my body to follow somebody else's pace. Plus I noticed the distraction of the conversation had my brain's attention elsewhere. So moving actually felt easier when not keeping a close protective eye on myself. It was fun to lose myself in the moment and the beauty of a spring day and warm, friendly conversation.
[00:09:17] This past week, we went on a walk in Greenwood Cemetery and that was really fun too. Um, and we. My friends who were with me, they were on a time sensitive part of the day. So we ended up kind of cutting out early and yeah. All, all in all like yes, it was hard. Yes, my knees felt a little sore, yes, I felt a little bit stiff after doing such a kind of a long walk on varied terrain. And I also really, Trusted that my body could experience all of that and recover well. And you know, as I am increasing my movement and feeling better, moving more, I am also proceeding with this extreme kindness reentering, world of being around a lot of people.
[00:10:15] Right. If we've been very sheltered and self-protective, um, by necessity during covid, you know, moving into being around groups of people, even if it's outside, even if cognitively, you understand that you feel more safe or you're less worried about getting covid or you feel really like locked into your masking protocol, it may bring up thoughts and feelings and fears and strong emotions and all of that makes sense and nothing has gone wrong.
[00:10:51] So I really want you to bring in this lens of kindness and love of being, caring and curious and starting to create opportunities with intention to lean into these exposure experiences, doing more of what you want to be doing, and even if it's something that you used to do with ease in the past, just noticing the thoughts and feelings that arise when you are doing things in the present.
[00:11:24] Are there thoughts of shame? Are there thoughts of, this used to be easier, are there thoughts of I should be different? And just holding that with some gentleness and really recognizing that when we look back, We don't have to stay there with our attention. We actually have a lot of capability to train our attention to notice what is working, to notice what beauty there is around us, to notice how our bodies can shift into feeling relaxed and strong and confident, even if it is for a moment.
[00:12:03] So how we train our brain to pay attention is at the heart of any kind of building new habits, creating new neural pathways, like increasing neural connections that we want to be experiencing more, and also adapting the mind and body for more of what we'd like to be experiencing. So I hope that, that this is helpful and it gives you some guidelines.
[00:12:33] And yeah, it actually takes effort. I noticed that when we have come from a place where sometimes we just do things with ease, that maybe we have a shame story about having to use effort to get the same results or the same experience, and I don't know where that comes from. But I wanna invite you to just reframe that . That like we have no higher or greater gift to ourselves than intentionally investing our time and energy on cultivating beliefs that support the lives that we want to be living more of.
[00:13:16] The other day with my client, I kind of came up with this idea that a belief is like a combo pack, right? So if you're at McDonald's and you're like, I want the number one breakfast combo, right? And you get the Egg McMuffin and the Hash brown and the coffee, beliefs are like a combo pack between thoughts and feelings.
[00:13:36] Right. So a belief is something, it's not just an idea, it's not just like a cognitive, it's not just a thought, but it's a deeply felt experience and that's why beliefs can be so powerful. And so I'd like to imagine that our belief is just like the combo pack that feels really good. We want to believe something about what's possible for our bodies.
[00:14:01] If we don't believe that being able to do X, y, or Z thing is possible today, can we believe that change is possible? Can we believe that feeling better? Whatever that looks like is possible. Knowing that life is 50 50, we can't only have positive feelings all the time. So also just caveat, caveat, we're never not human, right? So, but when we're increasing our ability to feel things, we want to remind ourselves that feeling things on purpose is how we change our emotional and physiological experience through this neuroplasticity lens.
[00:14:40] So I'm really having so much fun going out, taking walks, taking these longer walks, kind of pushing and challenging myself, not pushing, pushing is the wrong word, really going and challenging myself, but in a way where I am fully present, loving and self connected, and that takes effort.
[00:15:03] Now that is my, like fu to diet culture. That is my pushback on the narrative that like, some people are just really good at things. You know, the ways that I have in the past and in my childhood gotten smaller emotionally, like got self protected and cared for myself was often by not doing.
[00:15:26] Because doing things and being bad at something and feeling body shame was incredibly difficult experience to go through. And so it made more sense at that time to do less, to want less. And now I want to do more and I want to feel more, and I want to believe that more is possible for me.
[00:15:51] I experienced that climbing Kilimanjaro. I experienced that with my friends hiking in Iceland last year. Like, were they all like perfect, you know, experiences? No, not at all. But they really taught me some powerful things about myself as well as, brought me into experiences with people who I love and care about and had so much fun.
[00:16:17] And so those things I want more of and I want my body to feel safe in exerting itself, in feeling strong, in building muscle, in all of the ways that I want movement to feel free and easy for myself. And I know that that is on the other side of this adaptation work. I'm excited that I am efforting in this way, that I am efforting and caring for this me.
[00:16:48] That then means this is easier for me to do both today and tomorrow. If any of this work sounds interesting to you, if you feel stuck in circling the drain of fitness culture and diet culture, if you want to be moving more and moving better and feeling more free in your ability to move in whatever ways are perfect for you, please book a consult call and if you are experiencing chronic pain, and especially if you have some knowledge about neuroplastic pain, please, let's have a conversation. I would love to help you. Um, these are, these are just some of the joys, the, the most joyful experiences I have with clients.
[00:17:38] When we go from feeling, you know, when we go work through that, like pain and fear and catastrophizing into freedom, feeling free and empowered in our bodies, I can't think of a better use of time and energy than that. Whatever. I can think of a lot of other ones that are equally as good. So there we go. No hierarchy. But, I do just believe that our own personal embodiment is really important, and especially when you have a body that is often targeted for shame, targeted for bullying or negativity. It takes some work to create a sense of positive self connection. I'm happy to be a part of that journey with you.
[00:18:27] So thank you for listening. I look forward to connecting and sharing more with you. Okay, have a great day. Bye.
