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I just have recently discovered in my journey of body love, and self-love that there are three separate components to my health right now. My food, my exercise, and the metrics of my health (age, size,  chemical makeup, hormones, skin, energy levels). By separating these three things, I could see that I have a different relationship with each of these parts of me and it helps me feel less overwhelmed by an overall concept of: I’d like to take better care of myself. 

The metrics of my body are separate from but totally connected to my food and exercise. But I notice that if I can look at my body like a scientist and just see where I’m at, I can make a choice about where I’d like to be. I can see how my body is doing from a more objective level and see if there are ways of shifting those measures towards more beneficial states. An example is looking at my energy levels through just the lens of the metrics. I can collect data on what things might affect my energy: caffeine, sleep, exercise, the foods I eat, and stress levels. With research, we can see data on how our energy can be in our control on some levels and there are things to be curious about. What’s realistic for me? What are low-hanging fruits that I can try in terms of increasing my energy? This might help me think about my sleep habits or more exercise or less sugar just from that scientific angle. I feel curious, not attached or emotional about it. I wonder what might be possible for me and what’s not realistic, what I could think about more later. 

Another metric that I’ve been curious about is joint pain. For example, when I exercise, my joints feel amazing. Specifically, when I bike, my knee pain is reduced to almost 0 from a pain level of 5 or 6 somedays. This is highly motivating for me to get on the bike and enjoy a ride because I enjoy the experience of pain-free knees so much. There’s no drama, it feels like an objective metric of how my body supports itself in healing, lubricating my joints, circulation, etc. I can support that process and meet my body in optimizing it’s own process. 

Exercise has been something of a journey for me in my life. I grew up as an athlete and as an adult I have grappled, like so many of us, to find the time, focus, and dedication to my body feeling fit, healthy, and excited to move. This process of taking the metrics of my body and my relationship with food OUT of the equation helps me to look at exercise more cleanly. What do I like to do? What can my body do right now? What can I fit into my days and weeks so that I can enjoy my body and show up for how great it feels to take care of myself in this way? 

The alternative for me was to remember how fit I used to be playing soccer four nights a week in my 20’s and lament over my lack of time, mobility or speed, and skill that I have today. What a losing game that line of thinking is! I can just feel my body shut down and quit as soon as I start thinking that way. As we age, we get to learn to come to terms with where we are at right now. There might be some grief, loss, or frustration involved. But what else is there but to adjust and see what we CAN do right now? There are so many amazing and fun alternatives to movement, being outdoors, playing and loving our bodies. If we can create some distance from any angst we feel along the way, we can still show up to the smallest amounts of exercise and movement that help us create habits and baselines that feel actually fun. Notice how good it feels to move and you’ll find yourself showing up more and more. Mini habits and taking the pressure off. A walk a day can feel life-altering! 

Food. Oh, food! What a deeply fraught topic this is, for all of us! If you feel peace in this area of your life, I celebrate you! I have a relationship with food that is ever-evolving and I am happy to do the work to separate my relationship with food from exercise and the metrics of my body. While they are deeply intertwined, I like to see food for just food whenever I can. I practice looking at my food choices and habits from the perspective of mindfulness, noticing hunger, wondering what will be the best fuel for my body, and being as aware as possible. I am not going to go into any ins and outs here with food habits but I will say that it really, really helps me to allow my food choices not to overly influence my feelings or thoughts about exercise or my health metrics. I feel calmer and steadier and happier.  When food is food, exercise is exercise and my size/body/health/pain is just what it is, I feel less overwhelmed and more optimistic. I have less black and white thinking. I know that am doing my best and I can still carry on with my habits in other areas that serve me best today! It doesn’t matter to my workout plan that I just ate a bowl of ice cream, I can still hop on the bike and do my thing. 

This is something that helps me stay clear on my goals and know there are so many ways that I AM supporting my body and that I can celebrate all that I AM doing to have a healthy body today and every day. 

Let’s practice being so kind to ourselves! Take it easy and do the next baby step towards what feels good for you. 

Along with all of the fascinating lessons and changes that life continually brings, I wanted to share with you some of the deep peace I have felt in the gift of travel after so long. 

The sights and smells and sounds… the richness of being in a totally new place. The colors! 

I wish I could feel this wonder in my every day.
I long to cultivate a practice to hear my own songbirds with the same new ears of delight and wonder that a tropical beach could bring. 

I would love to imagine my feet in my shoes in the rain to be just as intriguing as the feeling of walking on soft white sand. 

We have this one precious life and all of these experiences and choices to make.
I wonder what will call my soul to come to explore and dive in and dance next?

I want to keep my heart open to the possibilities of wonder, of colors and textures and possibilities. 

In this type of renewal, I can feel brand new like a beginner at this life, while deeply grounding in the knowledge that I am whole and me, I am me! 

And from this place, the world around me richer, my heart is so much more open to everyone and everything around me. This feels like living whole-heartedly. 

YES!

So much change. After living alone with just my son and I, my partner and his kiddos moved in. Such a wonderful soup of blending, merging, snuggles, and compromise. We have discovered so much sweetness alongside so many adjustments! 

The overwhelm of change has fleshed out in mysterious and fascinating ways. 

I think that with any change, no matter the quality or desire and willingness to evolve,  there is also loss. I am a person who has adapted well to having many long nights on my own, puttering, self-caring in ways that unfold naturally. Lots of space have I had over these years of widowhood and solo-mama hood. Lots of natural healing time, alongside the loneliness that can bring. Yet, it’s how I’ve been in most of my motherhood. 

What I have realized since this big merge, is that I am in desperate need of sacred space, rituals, and routines that connect me to me. In a two-bedroom home with three boys, two adults, and a dog, I have found myself delighted to be locked in the bathroom with my morning coffee and my journal a few times. Ha! I am a creative soul. I’ll get my quiet where I can. 

I began to read Mark Nepo’s teachings this year and his commitment to cultivating that deep relationship with your soul self has really stuck with me. How important it is to befriend yourself, what that looks like only you can know. But you must create the intention and willingness to go there to discover it. Whether it’s going to nature or just sitting to be in silence. I feel there is nothing as important as knowing yourself so that your life can unfold with the intentions that you deeply long for in life: peace, happiness, resilience, open-heartedness, compassion, whatever those things are for you. Whatever helps you feel truly YOU, your spark within, that deep inner candle that flickers and sometimes holds steady, so strong. That deep knowing. 

When we are connected to that, we can be more at peace in our human lives. It’s beautiful really because alongside that flame can live our deepest sorrows but also our deepest joy. I have felt this profoundly in my grief healing journey and creating the space to hold myself wherever I am at is crucial for me. I crave it and long for it. 

So I knew I would need to find my space in this new dynamic of my life. 

As the seasons changed and my massage hut in my backyard no longer felt viable weather-wise this year, there was my solution for a space for me to rest, read, meditate and hold my morning routine. I am committed to a morning ritual that is an evolving set of things that fuel my mental, physical and spiritual health. I have been delighted to work on tiny habits like just getting my journal out and seeing what happens or just stepping on a yoga mat to stretch and see how my body feels like moving. No presh, I’m learning to just show up. 

When I hold this morning space for myself, I am more at ease in my life, centered, grounded. I have more capacity to take on the day with joy and self-awareness. 

It feels so beautiful to be here. A gift to myself each day.

“Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or so—just walk out from under the webs we’ve spun, the tasks we’ve assumed, the problems we have to solve. They’ll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.”

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

I was given the gift of a retreat to Harmony Hills Retreat Center on Hood Canal. I cannot even fathom how I have gone so long without this kind of a break in my life with how fast our life feels at time. Now to be still, to reflect, be cooked for, be around beautiful strangers who shared from their hearts… magic! I highly recommend trying a retreat of any kind for your body, mind and heart to recover whenever you need. It can be an overnight to an airbnb by yourself as one of my clients is doing. It can be simple. Maybe it’s just a whole day of quiet set aside for you. This kind of condensed healing time allows one to honor and return to the preciousness of what’s important. Letting the world fall away for a while, you can see from another lens, a look back at your life that gives it new light. 

“Just as life is made up of day and night, and song is made up of music and silence, friendships, because they are of this world, are also made up of times of being in touch and spaces in-between.

Being human, we sometimes fill these spaces with worry, or we imagine the silence is some form of punishment, or we internalize the time we are not in touch with a loved one as some unexpressed change of heart.

Our minds work very hard to make something out of nothing. We can perceive silence as rejection in an instant, and then build a cold castle on that tiny imagined brick. The only release from the tensions we weave around nothing is to remain a creature of the heart. By giving voice to the river of feelings as they flow through and through, we can stay clear and open.

In daily terms, we call this checking in with each other, though most of us reduce this to a grocery list:
How are you today?
Do you need any milk? Eggs? Juice? Toilet paper?

Though we can help each other survive with such outer kindnesses, we help each other thrive when the checking in with each other comes from a list of inner kindnesses:
How are you today?
Do you need any affirmation?
Clarity?
Support?
Understanding?

When we ask these deeper questions directly, we wipe the mind clean of its misperceptions. Just as we must dust our belongings from time to time, we must wipe away what covers us when we are apart.”

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

I have been pondering ways to laugh more, to lighten up, to feel a little more playful and free: 

Here’s an invitation to join Dalya as she offers zom and in-person dance classes in West Seattle’s HIIT LAB: 

I have been studying Somatic Experience work in this last year and a half since the start of COVID.  Somatic Experience helps people “build awareness, coherence, and self-regulation. The result is a deeper understanding of the body/mind connection with an improved ability to release and regulate emotions. It also helps manage stress, resolve issues related to trauma, heal from and navigate life transitions, relationships and build resilience.” 

An idea developed by Dr. Peter Levine, he believed that humans (like animals in the wild)  possess the same ability to release physical energy from stress but often thwart it by “keeping it together” following trauma. We all probably have direct experience “keeping it together” through a difficult experience. Our ability to override what is an innate mechanism for self-care is for many of us what sets the stage for PTSD. By stopping this natural cycle of release, the energy becomes stuck, in effect keeping us in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight so that we are unable to return to our relaxed, balanced state. https://therapy-mn.com/blog/somatic-experiencing-ptsd/

Some ideas to ponder in the relationship of trauma and how we store this in our bodies: What is happening in my body when I feel overwhelmed or when I feel anxiety, or another familiar emotion that tends to come on to you powerfully. By beginning to get curious about what’s happening in our body, we can start to noice if there is a thought or meaning we are making of how we feel, an emotion we can name, an image we can bring up of the sensation, any senses like a smell, texture or color to this feeling. We can look at the way our body is responding and wanting to move. 

For example, when I feel anxiety, I often get overwhelmed by my thoughts and emotions often something like this: “Oh gosh, I don’t know if I’ve thought this all the way through, what if I’m missing something or what if I make the wrong decision?” Then I’ll tend to feel scared and that puts me thinking similar thoughts and basically, that continues on a loop. Super fun! 

I start to work with this by first recognizing that this loop is happening and put words to that, “Oh, here I am doing that thing, I’m looping from fear into thoughts that focus me on more fear. I’m feeling really anxious.” 

Then I’ll begin to bring in a body sensation to this, I’ll notice where I’m feeling the anxiety or fear in my body. It might be a tightness in my chest. 

Then I’ll look for any other sensations, images, any extra sensory information I can bring in here. I might think: Aha, I’m noticing with that tightness in my chest, there’s actually a little vibration and some warmth there. It feels like a red ball of energy right there in my chest. 

Then I can see if my body is trying to do any type of movement or some physical form I’m adopting. I’ll notice maybe my jaw is clenched or maybe my hands are tight or I might be curling my body in towards a protective slump. 

By bringing these different elements into the experience I’m having, it’s like I’m opening the loop up, expanding it, and making it a richer, brighter experience that I can really see from a new perspective. It might not be less uncomfortable at first but instead of staying stuck in the loop from my emotions to my thoughts and back and forth… it gives me greater context. The feeling is one of slight relief and a bit of integration into the rest of my body. It’s like a feeling of wholeness, a bit more resiliency. It feels very relieving and empowering to find tools like this. 

After my husband passed, I was working with my long-time therapist and the Somatic Experience work we did together around my grief was life-saving and transformative. It gave me context to emotional states that were completely overwhelming in that deep trauma of loss. It gave me a way of contextualizing pain, anxiety, sadness. I lean on these tools all the time and am so excited to be bringing this work into my bodywork with clients, deepening my ability to hold space for your deepest things that you bring with you in your body. Life is a beautiful mystery and our bodies are holding our stories inside. As we learn to be with our bodies in a safe and loving way, we can bring more and more compassion and presence into our every day, showing up whole with our whole hearts. 

I am convinced that life in a physical body is meant to be an ecstatic experience- Shakti Gawain

I have been taking a beautiful course and journey with my teacher, Amba Gale called Crossing Thresholds. We reach these moments in our life, these thresholds that we encounter where we get to choose to cross over and see what lies on the other side for us. What’s on the other side of possibility and surrender? We reach these forks in the road and we can also choose to stay safe and reside in the familiar, which is totally okay as well. But for me, I have been called to cross this threshold and am fascinated by the spiritual process that is unfolding. 

For me, I am choosing to cross thresholds on so many levels right now and I want to do so with my heart feeling alive, expansive, and full of hope.  My partner is moving into our home with his two wonderful little kiddos and doggie with my son and I. There are so many changes mixed into this that I can choose to stay in anxiety and worry about things or I can choose to see the deeper unfolding, the leaning into love and possibility. To allow the gifts to expand. In this shifting, I am able to begin to let go of so many things about solo motherhood and widowhood. It is a really powerful change happening in my life in the context of a new school year in another year of COVID and just so many things. I am choosing to see what’s on the other side of my fear. 

In these moments, we can envision ourselves in our new role, new surroundings,  choosing to fully cross over and allow things to be new within ourselves. What parts of me are truly fixed and what parts of me can be fluid? Can I fully surrender, to allow myself to stand fully here and just be aware in this present moment? We get to decide what comes with us and what stays. Who am I willing to become on the other side of this? What parts of me do I want to nurture and hold close and what am I ready to leave behind? A big part of this work turns out to be the closure of things from our past that no longer serve us or that we are ready to honor and leave behind. 

What does it mean to forgive and give closure? I heard someone say that forgiveness is giving up hope for a better past. It is a powerful thing. There is a beautiful traditional Hawaiian prayer the ho’ oponopono prayer that is simply: 

“I’M SORRY, PLEASE FORGIVE ME, THANK YOU, I LOVE YOU”

Take stock of the things that might keep you from moving forward in your life and consider finding closure, saying goodbye, clearing your energy to come forward with you by letting go, and allowing the past to rest. Perhaps there is some forgiveness needed, some closure, some willingness to let go. 

Choose to believe that all shall be well! Thoughts that serve me in crossing through anxiety into a new realm. What does this mean in our bodies? 

Big hugs,
Katy

It’s time to think of sustainability for our bodies. It starts with self-care.

Hi! If you’re like most of my clients, you’ve been just trying to make it through for a WHILE now.

I had a client come in last week who basically in five minutes summarized the entire last pandemic year in for all of us:

so many changes

so many unknowns to navigate

unresolved anxiety and trauma

lots of family hurts and feelings to manage

a big job shift

unsure of how to move forward socially

in a really bad place with their body

Can we just pause on this? This is such a collective experience happening right now and I want you to know that you are heard! You are seen! The world and our hearts are with you. It’s collective and it’s so human and understood that this has been a rough go in our journeys through humanhood. What a time.

I hear that some of us might feel like: it hasn’t been that bad. I fared pretty well in all of this. And I’m so glad to hear, that is so good to take stock and what if you’ve done all right? Sigh, so good. Take a breath. That IS wonderful.

And… it’s okay to find those spaces where you can just let it not be “okay”. It’s okay that it’s not all okay. In the sense that there is a knocking on that deeper cosmic door and are you listening? What is your body telling you? Is there anything that you need right now?

I hope that you can start with self-compassion. If we all started with an ABUNDANCE of self-love in all that we did, I feel there could be such an incredible shift towards peace, both inside and out. Let us be so kind and gentle with ourselves.

Really listen to your inner voice and imagine talking with an eager four-year-old who wants a hug. Awww. I hear you, it’s been hard. So rough, your body is hurting. Yes, this is difficult.

AND. There are baby steps towards feeling better. What could they be for you? It can be the tiniest steps. This last I have had the honor of working with a number of clients who had never had a massage before ever. YES! I feel so excited that people are reaching out for nurturing healing, for spaces they can rest into, to heal, to feel themselves in a new way.

What are you willing to try? Excited even?

What are your baby steps, the tiniest movements, the one degree shifts towards your own inner light?

We are here for you, to help you create that space to listen, to go within and to find those small, quiet shifts that can make all the difference.

Be well with love,

Katy