The Work IN to move out of stress, tension & anxiety

We are rarely who we think we are. Or are we? Manomaya kosha is the mental illusion over our true self. Our Work IN today we’re discussing our mind, its monkey aspects, squirrelish behavior and how to untangle the truth of who we are. Welcome back to our series on the koshas. We've discussed Annamaya, our physical body layer, last week we talked about pranamaya kosha our energetic/breath laye...

Without breath, we cease to exist and yet we spend very little of our time or attention understanding its healing power. Unless we’re in a yoga class. That’s our Work IN today, exploring pranamaya kosha, our energetic self, through the breath as a communication pathway between the body and the mind for stress and trauma healing. And practical ways to incorporate this understanding of our energetic...

Annamaya Kosha Your physical self Welcome to our series on the koshas. The Koshas are the 5 layers of self, set one within the other from the physical body to the Bliss body. Today is all about Annamaya Kosha. Anna meaning food and maya meaning illusion. This is our physical body. The self that is made up of food.   Most of us listening today identify ourselves by their physical body. I would gues...

Stress and trauma is overwhelming because it permeates every layer of our being. Having a deeper understanding of what those layers are can help us start the healing process toward post traumatic growth. Today our work IN is an introduction to  a series of episodes on the koshas that can guide us along that path to resilience. In yoga we talk a lot about the chakras, the breath, the yamas and niya...

Welcome back this is part 2 of our hysterical history. Today we shift into examples of medical misogyny in modern medicine. Our work IN today is a mix of healthcare history and a rebellious call to action for women everywhere to stand up, challenge the establishment and raise the standards of care for themselves and our daughters.  I hate to believe that any of these things are done with purposefu...

There is to this day a pattern of dismissal that is compounded by a lack of value placed on the female patient's lived experience and a distinct bias and inequality when it comes to research and precision guidelines for women.  This is not a hysterical statement. The heartbreaking statistics don’t lie. Our work IN today is a mix of healthcare history and a rebellious call to action for women...

One of the most powerful tools we have to build resilience and overcome chronic stress and trauma is connection. It’s the first thing that is sacrificed in the face of stress injury and yet it is the number one thing we need if we’re going to heal. In health and wellness, connection has become an overused meaningless word. Just like the words wellness and health. Our work IN today is a deep dive i...

Ep 189  Hard things: Good hard sleep Sleep is a hard thing. Good sleep is even harder. The complexity of our network of systems makes it even harder to isolate the keys to getting a great night’s sleep when literally anything and everything can disturb our sleep. While occasional sleep disturbances can be normal for sure, long term sleep disruption is not. Our work IN this week is changing the way...

Eating “right” is a hard thing but not because it’s actually hard to do. Experts keep changing their minds, making unsupported nutrition recommendations that are riddled with conflicts of interest and have resulted in the exact opposite of health in the real world. That’s confusing and annoying and challenging but that’s not really what makes it hard either. Eating right is hard because we have ou...

Goldilocks got it wrong. At least when it comes to exercise. Hard is sexy. Hard is effective. Hard makes everything easier. Hard exercise is required to maintain and build the kind of muscle that supports health span not just life span. That’s our Work IN today. 3 necessary components in any health plan to find ease in the kind of hard effort that’s required for longevity while still supporting ou...

They say yoga poses don’t begin until you want to quit. That is true for everything in health and wellness. If we want to be strong, healthy and well beyond the false sense of security that comes with mainstream medical health markers we need to do hard things. We need to ask our body for more and stop quitting on ourselves before we get there. Today on the Work IN we’re looking at how to leverage...

I’m killing the dream of a full time fitness career today on The Work IN. Working full time as a fitness instructor or coach and making a living is not realistic.  At least not the way we traditionally think of full time in other careers. But there are ways to make your wellness work work for you no matter what kind of fit pro you are. It’s time to stop working out and start working IN. You found...

Let’s face it, the fitness and wellness industry attracts all kinds of people and there are all kinds of ways to succeed in it. The assumption is that people who work in wellness, from instructors and trainers to studio and gym owners, are well. That these folks have already done their work and they are grounded, compassionate entrepreneurs who have their ego in check and the best interest of thei...

What makes trauma release yoga different from every other kind of yoga? They say comparison is the thief of joy but it can also be an excellent guide post. Today we’re going to take a deep dive into the differences between traditional yoga and trauma release yoga. Our work IN today will hopefully empower you on your own real world resilience journey. It’s time to stop working out and start working...

Grief and stress are part of the human condition. We don’t need to live very long before we experience either one. What’s interesting is the recovery process for each can be remarkably similar. Chronic long term stress can feel remarkably like grief. Our Work IN today is a look at how we can use the 5 stages of grief as a framework to better understand and conquer chronic stress for long term resi...

Yoga retreats sound so nice. Full disclosure, I’ve never been on a retreat per say and I have all the excuses to prove it. I’ve done yoga teacher training that lasted a week but I’ve never had the time to take away from my family, my job for anything like that that didn’t have some purpose to it. Shoot I can barely bring myself to take time off on holidays with my family. But I understand the appe...

When you live long enough, you’re going to accumulate trauma. Sometimes it’s big T trauma and sometimes it’s little t. The big T is stuff like assault, abuse, or car accidents, or combat, or witnessing a horrific event of some kind. Little t (the way I understand it) are the things that we wouldn’t normally consider traumatic on the surface but when you take them all together they add up over a li...

Until about the age of 7 we don’t have the ability to reject any ideas or beliefs that we’re exposed to. Our baby brains haven’t developed that kind of filtering yet. So our early years are marinating in the beliefs of our caregivers about who we are and what we’re capable of in this world, what we should and shouldn’t do. By the age of 7 are well and truly programmed with all kinds of micro cultu...

178 Hypervigilance: A recipe for socially acceptable addiction  Hypervigilance is a common stress and trauma response where it feels like you’re always on high alert. Even when you’re exhausted you can’t fall asleep, you have racing thoughts, ruminating, exaggerated startle responses maybe, irritable, emotionally dysregulated, reactive. Because it leads to insomnia and other sleep disorders it can...

Safe self regulation. The holy grail of trauma recovery. Safe self regulation is the ability to rise to any challenge, any threat from outside or inside the body and then return back to our “normal” socially engaged baseline.  In trauma relief circles we toss that word “safety” around a lot. In the media we hear it all the time in every area of life and especially in politically correct spaces eve...

What do you believe about your health? Who makes and keeps you healthy? Who is the expert in your physical, mental and emotional health? Today on the Work IN we’re going to talk about how our health beliefs and fear programming can make us and keep us sick, how big pharma and big food in collusion with the media and big government make that happen, and how you can take back your power. It’s funny...

Welcome back to our last episode in our menopause metamorphosis series. Today we are talking about sleep. For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about how menopause and perimenopause affects our bones, our muscles,our pelvic floor, our gut, our brain, our metabolism and more and perhaps you’ve already noticed some of the connections between all of these areas. Sleep is one of those integral con...

Welcome back to our series on all the changes in menopause that go beyond hot flashes. Today we’re talking about the gut and gut health. We have discussed the importance of the gut microbiome in previous podcasts but never in relation to perimenopause and menopause. And that’s because no one really knew that was a thing until very recently. But it makes sense though since our gut and the biodivers...

Menopause brain…We say it like it’s a bad thing. We laugh it off as if it’s a joke when deep down we wonder if we’re losing our mind. It’s not a joke. And it’s not a loss either. It’s actually an update. During perimenopause and menopause every system in our body gets a giant hormonal update over the course of a decade or so.  And just like when we update our computers or our phones, it takes time...

Have you heard? 50 is the new 30. It’s true you’re as old as you believe you are. But the body ages from the inside out. Our bones are the architecture of our body and we take it for granted for the first half of our lives. Then we start to feel random things from mystery weight gain to general pain and inflammation as we  start to lose the protection of estrogen and that’s when things start to ge...