Insight Mind Body Talk

Mindfulness: Healing Mind & Body (revisited)

• Jessica Warpula Schultz, LMFT • Season 1 • Episode 32

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The return of a classic. Jess and Jeanne, both licensed mental health professionals, talk about mindfulness, trauma, and body-brain healing.  As "recovering fitness professionals", they deep dive into evidence-based, trauma-informed approaches for difficulties with food, movement,  and stress management.  Listeners will also learn about mindfully healing the inner child, using mindful awareness to cultivate self-compassion, and simple strategies for starting a meditation practice.


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Produced by Jessica Warpula Schultz & Jeanne Kolker
Edited by Jessica Warpula Schultz
Music by Jason A. Schultz

Insight Mind Body Talk. Also, check out our e-courses!

[00:00:00] Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast. We're your hosts, Jessica Warpula Schultz and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you've tried everything to feel better and something is still missing or you've already discovered the wisdom of the body.  This podcast will encourage and support you in healing old wounds, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential- all by accessing the mind body connection.   

Please know, while we're excited to share and grow together. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for mental health treatment. It doesn't replace the one-on-one relationship you have with a qualified healthcare professional and is not considered psychotherapy. 

Thanks Jess. And thank you for listening. Now, let's begin a conversation about what happens when we take an integrative approach to improving our wellbeing.  

Today, we're exploring the topic of mindfulness, the concept itself, how mindfulness influences the mind brain and the body and how you can use mindful awareness to develop resources for coping with stress. Jeanne and I will also get into the impact of mindfulness on mental health and how she and I use mindfulness in trauma-informed yoga and fitness training

So, Jeanne let's begin with a quick explanation of what we mean by mindfulness.

Oh, wonderful. This is a huge topic, Jess. We could have an entire series of podcast series about mindfulness because it's such a simple thing, but there's just so much rich history to it. When we're talking about mindfulness today, we see it everywhere. We see it all over the place. There's so many books about it, there's just a whole industry around this thing.

That is, it's just very simple. I tend to go to, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who wrote a book called full catastrophe living. And he really started to, have this [00:02:00] conversation about mindfulness in the therapy realm, but it was also, it's also really accessible to just everybody. It's just paying attention to our experience in the present moment without judgment.

So just being aware of what's happening and in this place of what I like to think of as like equanimity. So, we're just. We're just here without judgment and think about how simple that is so simple and yet so complex. I know. I know. So yeah, we can talk about the roots. We can talk about where this comes from.

Of course, we're going to do that, but it really is just the simple act of being aware of your own experience as it's happening. Without judgment. With acceptance even, which is really complicated a lot there. So, you're asking a lot. Yeah, you're right. When I describe mindfulness, I think about just being present in the moment.

Internal awareness of what's happening, observing rather than interpreting and doing so with a sense of curiosity and non-judgment, and perhaps some friendliness and just studying the self in a way. Oh my gosh. There's so much to that. There's so much, it's one of the key tools used in sensorimotor psychotherapy, right? 

It's the idea of cultivating an awareness of. What's happening internally, what's happening with our internal sensations, our five senses micro-movements thoughts, feelings, and that with mindfulness, you can really study and learn more about how you organize your own experience.  yeah. Yeah. It seems so simple, but it's really complex.

And this is something, this concept has been handed down for centuries what we're talking about does originate in Eastern cultures. Of course, as a yoga therapist, I have to think about this in terms of the yoga [00:04:00] tradition. And in yoga, we have something called the Sutra as these threads.

It's, it's the text, one of the texts that we borrow from. And one of the sutras, we might've mentioned this in a previous episode, that yoga of routine or rota. Yeah. So that means yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness. That's mindfulness right there. the fluctuations of consciousness.

So, we've been talking about this for forever. Yoga is 5,000, some years old, and it's very applicable to our daily life now because our brains are, we've, we're wired for survival. Yes, we're wired to have fluctuations of our consciousness because we have to survive threat. Our brains job is to keep us alive. Definitely. And it's an act it's very active to, to be present with what's happening in the brain in the mind.

And that is mindfulness. Exactly. when you say active, I totally agree. It's this quality of, to be curious and to be compassionate is a very active process. It's it doesn't come by passively and it's really the choice or the process of engaging. With what we're experiencing. And sometimes, at least in regards to psychotherapy, we're observing and engaging in order to perhaps change how our system has previously adapted because of threat or because of our lived experiences.

 I've read earlier this great quote by Ron Kurtz. “You can't take the engine apart while it's running”, so true. Oh. Things down and start cultivating an awareness of what am I experiencing internally? What is happening? How am I relating to this? That's a really big question I asked.

A lot is all right, given this, how were you relating to it? What are the stories or [00:06:00] the beliefs underneath what's happening? And that takes a level of mindfulness. Yeah. We have to bring awareness to our own experience that, that single pointed awareness. And that's not something that, we can just command.

Ourselves or other people to do. We have to practice, so mindfulness is like a constant beginning, again, just beginning again, being aware of our experience. And you do that in sensorimotor psychotherapy. Yes. By tapping into the body. Yes. Every person experiences an event differently, depending on how their system organizes the information.

 And when I talk about organizing and experience, I'm referring to our five core organizers.  We're not just thinking thoughts and having feelings.

We're also making sense of our present moment. Okay. Through internal sensations. So, our heart rate, our, digestive system, muscle tension, things of that nature.  Our perception of our five senses, not as much our five senses, but how we perceive our five senses.

And then also movement. We make movements.  Other people make movements, micro movements, big movements. So, we're organizing with these five core organizers at all times. In sensorimotor, we look at how things can change. We grow, we change. But sometimes the system doesn't change the way it responds, the way those five core organizers make sense of things. So, we use mindfulness to bring awareness to how someone's creating their experience. And then if needed, we use mindfulness to help transform the system.

 What does that mean? Transform the system. What's our goal here?   The goal is, if we only depend on insight, and to changing our experience.

If we only depend on our thoughts and our feelings, we're limited by habitual filters by thinking patterns, by what we already know. [00:08:00] And so if we're just talking about the past, the goal is to look at what's happening in our body, in the present moment.  Mindfulness is that key to healing because.

  We have coping strategies. But those are located in the front of our brains are prefrontal cortex and threat and trauma can shift us as we've talked about in previous episodes, more into the midbrain or even the back of the brain.

And so, when we're flushed with these body memories or when we're feeling overwhelmed, relying just on insight, it isn't going to work. We want to resolve those body memories and to resolve that overwhelm that's happening in the system, rather than think our way through it. And mindfulness is one of the key tools we use because at the end of the day we want to create new meaning and new understanding of our past.

Cause that facilitates new understanding of ourselves. And that brings upon hope and empowerment. And along the way we actually learn. how to tolerate distress more so as well. Yeah. And, we want to tap into our true nature. We want to be able to experience joy to really let our light shine as a cliche, as cliche as that sounds, we want to like reach of course a transcendent state, which, we don't talk.

I got that a lot in psychotherapy. We talk about just like maybe being a little less miserable. Yeah. Like, I love Dan Harris. I don't know if you've ever read his stuff or listened to his stuff. He's the he's the news anchor who's written books about mindfulness and he, yeah he's really approachable, he wrote a book called 10% Happier. Yes, about meditation. I have that book. Yeah. I know this approach so much, like he had a panic attack on the air when he was delivering the news. Granted, he was, really in the throes of substance abuse and mental illness at the time.

And he found meditation in 10% Happier just means if you meditate, daily, if you pay attention to the present moment, if you practice mindfulness, you might be like 10% happier. Okay, what's wrong with that? That's good [00:10:00] enough, right? That's something we're also talking about, really reaching our true potential and living with more ease, but we have to practice this, moment by moment awareness in order to even understand what that means.

So, it seems like sensorimotor psychotherapy has a really similar. Structure too. And I'm thinking about yoga that, it's moving through the senses to transcend, to overcome our patterns, to reach a state of what we would call healing or even just balance. Yeah. That's just it. Yeah.

And that's for yoga again, we're borrowing this tradition from Eastern culture, which, always considering that humility that That we want to honor this tradition, as some, as the psychology of mind that we are using very humbly in our practices today, but the eight limbs of yoga, which is what I practice, which is, what we do here in the, mostly in the Western world.

The actual physical movement of yoga is only one part of that. Like the actual, what we think of as yoga, we think of this, people contorting themselves and doing all these glamour poses. That's just one little part of it. The reason that yoga is did those movements was so that they could keep their bodies healthy, get their bodies out of the way so they could meditate.

So, it's truly all about this mindfulness, this meditation, that's the path of yoga, it's also part of the Buddhist teachings too. If for thinking about the psychology of mine, that is Buddhism it's the, one of the parts of that path is right in mindfulness that the Buddha has passed to us, so we use the body again, as that door, as that sensory experience to really tap into our awareness so that we can start to peel away the layers. Yeah. And reach [00:12:00] that, that bliss. Yes. Agreed, but it doesn't have to be bliss. It can just be like, 10% better to 10% better.

Or, I can go into that meeting now or I can get out of my car and, walk into work or walk into the house after a hard day, and it helps us. Relate to our experience, it's so easy right now to just react. Oh my gosh. There's so much input. There's so many things to be angry about and we should be.

Anger is productive and useful in some ways, but we need to be able to relate to that recognize like what we can do. And in order to do that, to be effective change makers, we need to actually be able to be mindful and be present so that we can see clearly how we're relating to things that upset us.

Exactly. I was actually, preparing for this episode, I pulled out one of my mindfulness folders and found an article I'd printed 11 years ago from Tara Brach. And it talked exactly about that, about injustices in the world. And mindfulness is not about passively sitting by.

It is about how are we internally managing the anger and the pain versus reacting to it.  Instead of blaming or having internal or external violence as the product of these injustices. Can we sit with an honor how hurt we are and how much pain there actually is?

And. Sit with the pain that other people are experiencing as well. And then act from a place of compassion. To create change to be the change that, you know as they say that we want to see in the world. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a big sign and say, that says be the change you wish to see. And we can't do that when we're reacting.

We can only do that [00:14:00] when we take that, magic quarter, second of slowing down and observing before reaction and that influences, I believe social change just as much as it influences change within ourselves and, relational change as well.

And we're talking about these really esoteric things about, being mindful in the present moment. Like it's just this easy thing. It's not, no, it takes practice so much practice, but we've, we can see now that this actually changes our brain. Yes, it is measurable. And a lot of that research is happening here in Madison.

It's pretty exciting. Richie Davidson at the Center for Healthy Minds, putting monks in, in long-term meditators, in MRI scanners to see what changes happen in the brain. And it's fascinating. We build gray matter. When I meditate regularly, you talked earlier about the prefrontal cortex. When we have a regular meditation practice, we can actually see changes there that we build up more gray matter.

We build up more wrinkles in the prefrontal cortex, which is good. And I want to remind, listeners, the prefrontal cortex is the front of our brain. That's where logic decision-making, are almost in a way our identity, who we are is located in the front of our brain. And it's an important place to have access to because we need to be in the front of our brain in order to, even pursue healing.

and you had touched on empathy before, too. We've seen, we can see in these brain scans and I'm talking about Dr. Sara Lazar had a study and she has a Ted talk, and it's really interesting on the changes that happen in the brain with regular meditation. Yes. More gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, more in the hippocampus, which isn't that center of the brain or memory maker.

Yeah. Emotional regulation makes sense. And also, she saw more gray matter in the [00:16:00] temporal parietal junction. We don't need to really dig into what that means. But that is where we could experience empathy and perspective taking. So, we're actually. Strengthening our muscle for empathy and our ability to put ourselves in other people's shoes.

When we meditate, when we practice mindfulness and another really important thing we talked about this last time. Remember when we talked about the amygdala. Yes. Yes. That's our little smoke detector. It's what gets like super over-active. When we have trauma, it's highly sensitized looking for threat. Yup.

Long-term meditators. They have reduced. Activity in the amygdala. So, I'll have that written down. Yes. It's so important. The medial prefrontal cortex, when you meditate, it decreases activation in our amygdala. It changes how we react to it, our environment, it's so important. It helps us to actually pause and respond.

To threats from a place of balance, rather than just reacting and running wild and letting our survival system just hijack us, which again is a natural thing. But we're talking about, if we think about the brain actually changing, it's neuroplastic, neuroplasticity. It's a pretty new thing that we've talked about in the last few decades.

The yogis 5,000 years ago, they didn't have the. That terminology but they knew that meditation was so important. That they built this entire system around it to keep ourselves healthy, to live and in appropriate ways so that we could have this wiring in our brain that now we really understand on that.

Really specific, scientific level. So cool. So cool. And to speak to what you're saying earlier, that it is challenging. I've experienced this as well as I hear it is so hard for me to sit and be. Present in the moment, like my brain can't stop and something I affirm over and over [00:18:00] again.

One, there's no such thing as a bad meditation because you're working on it in that moment. There's some present moment experiencing, no matter what, if you daydream for four out of the five minutes. But you come back one time, we're building stronger neural pathways for teaching the brain. How to focus attention on the present moment, because job is to wander into the future and try and resolve it any possible threats that will probably never happen.

And its job in a way is to reflect on the past and think about what we could do differently. Those are all survival strategies. And yet the present moment is where we actually have control. And when we meditate, we bring blood flow to those areas of the brain we're acceptance lies or happiness or just wellbeing.

As long as you come back to that present moment, either in your breath or the sounds you hear, or your body or whatever anchor you choose coming back can really start strengthening those neural pathways to have a different reaction when under stress, right?

We don't have to, pour a glass of wine or, numb out or, yell   We can come into the present moment and observe, and then choose something that's more regulating and that happens by practicing. That's why it's called the meditation practice, right?

Yeah. We, it's not perfection, we don't just, we don't just sit on the cushion and just start levitating. It's that's not how it works. So, it's something that can be a formal practice, like you said, or it can just be like, I'm sensing the soles of your feet on the ground.

If you're standing or sitting, just really taking a moment to be mindful of your experience. We can do it while we're eating. I do a lot of mindful eating exercises with clients where, we just pay attention to the sensory experience of nourishing ourselves. It's very mindful. How often do you sit down and just oops, there goes a bag of [00:20:00] Cheetos?

I didn't even notice didn't even save her, those delicious Cheetos, and that's where we can really do. Those informal practices, but what about a formal practice? What about you, Jess? Do you have a formal practice? What does that look like? I would say for me, formal practice includes right now I do a lot of formal.

Mindfulness in physical therapy. So that's where I've channeled this formal practice. I get a twofer, but really, I'm learning in a lot of ways, the issues in my literal muscles, or the tissues or the tightness of my back mindfulness is what is resolving them in so many ways.

A lot of my mindfulness practice comes for example, Just a couple of days ago, my physical therapist, Autumn. She's amazing. She's going to be on here. So yeah, she's a Yogi physical therapist. Yeah. I love her. Everyone loves her. So yeah. She taught me to stack two yoga blocks because I'm working on a probable labral hip tear and sitting and sitting cross-legged is not possible for me for like last year and a half. So, she's got me sitting on two yoga blocks, stacked on top of a yoga blanket so that my ankles are also supported and just.

Mindfully breathing in and out and watching from inside out being with, my pelvic floor moving up and down as I breathe my diaphragm moving up and down as I breathe. And that sort of embodiment with meditation has been really transformative for me because things are softening and connecting in that map I have of my body is really expanding through mindfulness.

That's wonderful. You're fine. We find it in ways that work for us, and that's where I think, it's great to have, a formal practice where, you're sitting on a cushion every day, but it doesn't have to be that in my home, we meditate. Quite often as well, just with guided meditation, things like that. And there's so many resources. What do you do? I'm curious. [00:22:00] Yeah, I tend to need to move my body a little bit. I have to burn off a little bit of the energy before I can really sit. So, I typically I practice yoga as regularly as possible.

Life gets in the way sometimes, but I do try to get on the mat daily and then. Either it's a Shavasana that relaxation at the end of practice where we're really just, exploring body sensations and being aware. But I also do like to, you know,I have a fancy little cushion and I like to sit and listen to guided meditations, but I often get really distracted by those.

So, I tend to just enjoy kind of ambient noise. I like to have something I like to have some chanting in the background or some music but it is always a group effort. My cats want to participate. Yes. Yeah. It's I cannot go 10 minutes without having some visitors, but that becomes part of the practice then too.

Petting the cat while they're on the lap. And purring is also a very mindful activity. Of course, I get a little. Little frustrated, like, why can't you leave me alone for 10 minutes, but then that becomes part of the practice too, relating to that wow, this is, this is an opportunity for me.

This is a distraction, which is a wonderful teacher for us. We were talking earlier about. How we lead clients through meditation and how we, how we try to have, we want to have these wonderfully tranquil environments, but that's not life. My office at insight is at the corner of a very busy intersection and.

When I'm leading people through a meditation, the bus stops right outside my window. So, I hear the air brakes. I hear the people getting on and off. I hear people yelling at each other. Ambulance goes by its life in the city. And that is a wonderful teacher when we can. Just let those experiences roll off us and come back to our breath.

Then that is the practice. It does not have to be this, sitting on a [00:24:00] mountain top in this glorious, natural setting with the mind, completely clear, no way. That's not how life happens. And I think that's one of the big myths. Of meditation. People re people, resist people, resist mindfulness because I can't clear my thoughts.

I can't clear my head. It's not going to happen. Yeah, of course not. Why can't you clear your thoughts, Jess? Just like we said, like the brain's job is to keep going. There's some default modes that it has and they'll always click on. So, our job when we meditate or the point isn't to reject.

Or to try to change things, right? It’s asking yourself, what am I actually experiencing right now? What is happening in this present moment? Am I being curious? Am I accepting or investigating? Or am I. It didn't my frustrated, for example, I'm, let's say I'm meditating and I'm noticing some pain in my shoulder, and then I'm off on a story about how my shoulder is never going to get better.

And then I can feel my heart rate start picking up, that's okay. Perhaps then I notice it and they bring compassion, maybe even, wow, this is really hard. I am scared that I won't. Have the degree of functioning I had before. I don't like not knowing and that's okay. That's okay. And you're going to be okay in offering that wise and kind attention to ourselves.

I think that's part of the healing process that mindfulness can bring. Oh, that's a huge part of it. Compassion is. Is crucial when we're talking about mindfulness, mindful self-compassion is one of the approaches that I really enjoy using for myself and for my clients, that just approaching our experience with some loving kindness treating ourselves the way that we would treat a loved [00:26:00] one and recognizing, like you said, we all suffer.

We all experience pain. There's a common humanity in that. And these are the tenants of mindful. Self-compassion, kindness, common humanity, mindfulness, and it's the way that we relate to ourselves with that, that loving attention that we can only really get to when we're observing for being mindful.

 I really think so, too.  Also, where I see mindfulness coming more into play in psychotherapy often is when our younger parts maybe are showing up in our life. And for example, if somebody let's say. Out of nowhere is feeling really overwhelmed and they're having the shift and you're not quite sure where it's coming from.

And yet it's really distressing, it's, almost panic inducing often I'll use mindfulness as one of the paths to exploring it as a younger part. 

Right. And what is this younger part, perhaps trying to say when we slow down and we go inward into that internal experience and we check in with what's underneath that body experience, is there a younger part that needs compassion or needs us to be, that presence that maybe we didn't have in those moments when we were younger or at any point in our life that maybe that's the opportunity where we pursue healing in regards to noticing what that inner child needs and then attending to and caring for that part. And mindfulness is a key component because often we're just going along. We don't even notice what's underneath perhaps that arousal or that overwhelm or that panic, but maybe when we slow down and investigate.

And we sit with that inner child and even place a hand on our heart or a hand on her arm [00:28:00] and just lovingly be present and investigate that younger PIR often tells us what it needs and what do most children need? Love? To be told it's okay to know they're safe and mindfulness can really help us shift and do that inner child work.

It's that loving kindness toward ourselves, which means all parts of ourself. That means really holding gently that inner child and healing. I love inner child work.  

I think when we can really approach all those parts of ourselves with loving kindness, that's when we can start to integrate and heal. One of my favorite resources for that is Thich Nhat Hanh. He wrote a book called Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child, and there's of course, a huge component of mindfulness to this.

We have to have this practice of tapping into our experience so that we can tap into those wounded parts of ourselves that maybe we're not even aware of, that maybe were wounded in childhood, we can't go back and give people a better childhood, unfortunately, but we can work to repair some of the damage that's been done in a very loving, mindful way.

Yes, Janina Fisher, still reading her book, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors.  She talks about without mindful awareness, we're unable to observe these younger parts and we actually can really. Almost over, identify with them, be blended with them where we think it's something that's happening in our present moment. And what does “blended” mean by the way? It's the “I'm upset” instead of “here’s being upset” or even deeper, “I'm unlovable” versus, “my little me felt really unloved when you left the room earlier”. mindfulness gives us the capability of creating relationships with these younger parts and supporting them in their healing.

[00:30:00] We actually have an episode coming up.  In a couple of months about the inner child specific and you're going to lead us through somebody, but I'm excited for this. So, body-based strategy she's for working with your inner child. And that's the thing we could, this could be such a long conversation. It, this could be a series and we're going to revisit mindfulness and pretty much every topic that we talk about because we have to really do that work of being aware of our experience with fresh eyes. We observe our own experience with fresh eyes, anytime that we're able to be mindful.  It can be. Formal or informal, and we are, we're going to give our listeners some formal practices, right? Jess, we're going to put some meditations on our way website. 

I'm super excited about this.  So, it's: www.insightmadison.com/podcast. And you'll find some meditations Jeanne and I are both going to individually lead and put online so you yourself can perhaps start practicing mindfulness.

Yeah. I'm excited that, yeah. And it's just a different a different voice, a different approach. If you already have a mindful practice. No, please continue. Just do it. Do what works for you. And if you don't, this is definitely an Avenue to explore. I really encourage, I don't know if you're the same Jess, but when I work with a client meditation's usually the first piece of homework.

Let's start with just, try to do maybe five minutes a day four, or even, two to three days a week, just start to bring some awareness to your experience so that we can do some work. Yeah, it's key,  it interweaves in the work I do, for example, as a.

Personal trainer and the body, or the gym, can be really threatening. I work with people who perhaps self-identify as [00:32:00] lacking motivation or have narratives like “I'm lazy” or “I'm a quitter”.  In a lot of ways, the fitness industry, it doesn't offer mindful awareness approaches that go beyond “build power, build strength”, especially not ones that challenged the cultural norms of “thinner is better” or “more muscle means I'm more disciplined than you are”. The thing is, people are not lazy. And it's not just that some people don't care, it's trauma, it's systemic. There's just multiple industries that profit and big ways about getting us to believe that there's something wrong with us. And that creates shame, self-hate, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, things of that nature.

So often what I do in my work is when we slow down and we go inward into that internal experience and we check in with that body experience, let’s really help. Make this feel safe. And then once people are starting to feel safe, we start doing things with movement and fitness training that just really support this idea of tolerating distress and being mindful in the moment and learning how strong our bodies are.

And. How we can be present in a new way. And I think that's really empowering. I've found it very empowering. I agree. I agree. And it's a big leap for people to, to try to sit and just be still. That's why we talk a lot about body centered approaches, because we do need to tap into that awareness of the body.

But we do need to also practice mindfulness. And when we've had that trauma, or when we have things happening in the brain that are causing us to have symptoms like depression, anxiety, all those things you mentioned, sometimes it's just. Impossible to just sit and stillness, that scares people.

That's the one, one of the big things I [00:34:00] hear is I can't do that. It's Nope, I can't do it as well. Yeah. Yeah. And that's when there's. That trauma wiring in the brain. We need the brain to stay active. And so, we can give it we can give it that attention and not just clear out the mind.

Yeah. Offer guided meditations. We can do very mindful. Like you said, personal training. Exercise of course yoga is, that's why we do the poses. We can be in our bodies so that we can tap into that mindful state. So, it's. It can be somewhat intimidating. I think this whole thing of meditation, but we can also demystify it.

It can be just as simple as, paying attention to five breaths. Just watching your breath, just sad breaths, five inhales and exhales. Then that's your mindful exercise for today? Good job. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I think having support during this process, we talk about how insight provides trauma, informed yoga therapy, which Nikki if you've listened, Nikki was on a few weeks ago discussing that and there’s other people besides me, other local friends, Forest Coaching. They're going to be on the podcast on June 7th. So, they take an emotional, mindful, neurological approach to fitness training. And in October, Trauma Informed Weightlifting, and organization over in Minnesota, is going to be on as well. And yeah, they're so great. Both of those. So, I know force coaching and trauma-informed weightlifting. They have great social media presence. So, if you're looking for more resources about how to. Bring mindfulness into movement, check out our Instagram, check out theirs there's so many ways to begin and we'll always go back to what's most important is that you feel safe. You feel safe during this process. It's key.  I love walking meditation I'll just give one quick little tip.

So, take that on again, love that guy. He's just written some wonderful resources on meditation. His walking [00:36:00] meditation is just so powerful. He will just have you walk, just being aware of each step. And his mantra is breathing in. I call my body breathing out. I smile. And it's impossible not to smile when you're doing that by the way.

And we know that when we change our physiology, when we smile, we actually change what's happening in our bodies. We shift, we can shift our mood state with something as simple as that is a smile. Yeah. Take that and try it out today. If you're listening, get outside, say it one more time. Breathing in. I call my body breathing out.

I smile. Yeah, you can't help. But smile

conversation does, has this, has folks were happy to have shared what we've learned about mindfulness and how it can be a healing and empowering tool on your journey of health and wellbeing next week.  Our guests, Kelly Kendricks will be here to discuss the psychology of supporting student athletes before becoming a therapist.

Kelly was a teacher for 20 years and a high school athletic coach for 30. I'm excited to bring his insight into sports parenting and helping student athletes choose the best path for their development. Sounds great. I know it's going to be a cool episode. 

All right. Thank you, Jeanne. I always appreciate learning from you during these conversations. I am so curious about your approach too Jess. I think it's just fascinating and I can't wait to continue learning.  Thank you as listeners for being here today and we look forward to talking to you next week. 

 hank you again for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-centered mental health podcast. We hope today's episode was empowering and supported you in strengthening your mind-body connection [00:38:00] We're your hosts Jeanne and Jess. Please join us again next week as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing. Until then, take care.