Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
The most grounding force for our mind-body system is routine. Being consistent, having routine can help the nervous system know what to expect and start bringing us back into balance.
Today we’re talking today with Kelly Gardner. She’s a licensed mental health therapist, certified yoga therapist, yoga health coach, and Certified Daring Way facilitator. She specializes in trauma focused yoga therapy in clinical settings and private sessions as well as mindset and lifestyle coaching. She is certified to lead the three-course curriculum created by Brene Brown and combines that work with Ayurvedic lifestyle habits to create lasting change. Kelly lives in Memphis, Tennessee with her husband and two dogs.
Welcome Kelly. What is Ayurveda?
Ayurveda is often referred to as a sister science to yoga. It is an ancient lifestyle that has the aim of setting us up to feel our best. It’s kind of a preventative lifestyle. If we break down the word, Ayur means life and veda means the study of or the knowledge of.
In the west, we sometimes neglect to teach young folks about how to be in their bodies, to self-regulate, to honor what their bodies are asking for. That’s what Ayurveda is all about. It aligns with how nature functions and tends toward a thriving state.
We are white female Western people with some privilege and want to acknowledge our teachers. This knowledge has been passed down for many thousands of years, from India and Southeast Asia. It is amazing to consider how applicable these concepts are to us today as Westerners, not only to help us in our physical bodies, but in our mental health as well. I often take teachings from yoga and Ayurveda into clinical settings to support everything else that’s being done there.
My understanding is that it’s based on the elements.
You’re absolutely right. It is very much like yoga in that it is broad, and it is deep but when we get down to the fundamental teachings of Ayurveda, it is very much based on the five elements that exist in nature.
Many people are familiar with four of the five elements; earth, water, fire, and air. In Ayurveda, we teach a fifth element, ether, sometimes called space. It literally holds the space for the other elements to show up and be seen. It’s not noticed as much, but it’s supremely important. They all have their time and place. They all show up in our bodies and minds.
We have all five elements within us. They are a way for us to get in tune with the natural world, our connection to nature, and to explore just the unique ways that that’s manifested in our lives. It’s also a way to connect with other people. In this way, we are the same. Many messages we receive can point out how we’re different, so it’s also a connecting science.
Ayurveda the theory, the belief, the teaching is that we’re conceived with our own perfect balance. Upon conception, your perfect balance of the elements was established. Then, as we go through development in utero, are born, and move through life, the circumstances that we’re in, the people that were around, the foods that we eat, everything has an impact on that balance. How we live our lives tends to pull us out of balance. Ayurveda often will say that the practice of the lifestyle of Ayurveda is all about remembering who we are and coming back into our own perfect balance. Rediscovering our true nature.
That sounds a lot like the work that we do as therapists, through introspection and self-exploration. This is another lens to look through. Absolutely.
My understanding is that there are certain constitutions or combinations of elements. Let’s talk a little bit about that.
Ayurveda, like yoga, was originally shared in the Sanskrit language. It’s very much a language based on experience, vibration, and emotion. A feeling language. Because of that, translations can be dependent on the person who’s translating.
We are born with certain dominant elements. Your baseline may fall into a category, constitution, or dosha.
The translation of dosha that is helpful for me, is fault line. This is the place where you can most easily be pushed out of balance.
There are three categories, doshas, energies. We have all three doshas within us. Those doshas are made up of a combination of all of the five elements.
Our constitution, or Prakriti, is our perfect balance. It is a combination of these energies established upon conception. It is your baseline, the perfect balance that you may be working to get closer to with your habits and shifts that you make. Prakriti is balanced. Any imbalance is called Vikruti.
The Sanskrit names for these three categories, or doshas, are Vata, Pitta and Kafa.
Vata is made up of ether, or space, and air. Air is the main element here. Ether is more subtle, the secondary element. If you think about air and ether, they’re invisible. We know that they’re there, but they’re also subtle. They’re all around, but we don’t discuss them.
We can look at how Vata shows up in the physical body, in patterns of the mind, mood, emotional patterns, habits and tendencies, and our gifts or what we have to offer to the world.
Vata, in balance, is very creative. It frequently receives inspiration. It is fun, loving, spontaneous, fly by the seat of my pants energy.
Out of balance, when there’s too much of that happening, we may see a presentation of anxiety, excessive worry, panic, panic attacks, rumination, racing thoughts. When there’s too much of it, it’s really overstimulation.
The second dosha, Pitta. The elements that make up Pitta are mainly fire and a little bit of water. Pitta is the only category that has heat in it. Fire is the only of the five elements that’s hot. Water brings a little balance to Pitta, a little bit of grounding.
In balance, because it is driven by the fire element, Pitta shows up as drive and motivation. Very organized, task oriented, but also very fair. It also represents very justice-minded and fair leadership.
Out of balance, Pitta can show up as, too task oriented, workaholism, never taking a break. It can also show up as a lot of competition and comparison, and a lot of judgment. This is where perfectionistic mindset may show up. In moods, we might see irritability, frustration, anger, and rage.
The third dosha is Kafa. This is the combination of water and earth.
Both of those elements are heavy and very stable.
In balance we see Kafa show up as calm, laid back, stable, go with the flow. Water is the cohesive force in our bodies, it’s what holds our body together. It feels good to be around someone who is very high in Kafa nature. You kind of want to stick with them. They’re stable. It feels good.
When there’s too much of that stability, it can show up as stuckness, low motivation, low drive, low ability to act. If you mix together water and earth, you get mud. You can envision trying to move through the mud within yourself. This can also show up as a holding on to physical objects; collecting things or having lots of clutter or holding on in our minds; holding grudges or more often, or a romantic idea of how it used to be. Too much Kata can display as depression, feeling really down, hopelessness or helpless. Feeling like I don’t know what to do or that I’ve tried, and it didn’t work so I give up.
Your perfect balance does not mean that all three of these doshas are equal within you. I am high in Pitta, almost as high in Vata and very low in Kafa. That’s my perfect balance.
You’re not necessarily born in your perfect balance. If my mom was frequently stressed out or anxious, I could be born with a Vata imbalance, because I was experiencing that imbalance in her in utero. What mom eats and how much she sleeps would impact that balance.
To start to look at our natural tendencies and find our baselines, we often go back to childhood because kids don’t hold back. Until they’re trained to be concerned with what other people think, kids will honor what their bodies need, and will act in whatever way feels good for them in the moment. That’s a great way to find your baseline.
Then, if I look at where I am right now, I feel very anxious or have a short temper, I can start to see what’s out of balance.
I mentioned that I’m highest in Pitta, secondarily, Vata, and lowest in Kafa. Because Pitta is the highest dosha within my constitution, if I have just a tiny bit more Pitta, it’s easy for me to get out of balance, because there’s already the most of that within me. It would take a lot more for me to be out of balance in Kafa because I’m very in Kafa.
What would it look like to add more Pitta to your life?
These energies show up in our minds and bodies, and also show up in nature.
We can see the different qualities of the elements show up in different seasons.
I live in Memphis, Tennessee. In summer it is hot and humid. That adds more heat into my body. Typically, at the end of a season, we see signs that we’re holding on to some of that season’s energy. For example, at the end of summer, I’ll have people asking about acid reflux, acne, rashes, these kind of inflamed presentations in the body. We look at how we can calm that down.
At any point, we can build up an imbalance within us. How we live our lives and our daily habits have a significant impact on that.
To come back into balance in Ayurveda, we want to calm down what is out of control. We would work to pacify Pitta. Often, we do that by giving Vata and Kafa more attention or, looking at the hot qualities of Pitta, doing things that are cooling. It’s usually about adding in the opposite of what we’re experiencing.
Like increases like, so if you’re hot and your Pitta is in overdrive, we wouldn’t recommend that you eat a bunch of jalapeno poppers.
It’s not uncommon to have someone who’s really high in Pitta love hot and spicy foods, put hot sauce on everything, or go to really hot workouts. We can get in a groove of, this is what I am, this is what I know, and this is what feels good to me. We are drawn to that which we are so we may not even recognize that we’re exacerbating the issue.
In the movie Inside Out, there are three characters that perfectly represent the three Doshas. There’s a character that’s fear. He’s very lanky and thin. He’s running around worried creating reports on what could go wrong. Very much representing Vata out of balance. Pitta is Anger. That Louis Black character who’s yelling all the time and his hair’s on fire. Then, sadness represents a Kafa imbalance. She lays down and is like, I just can’t do it. Joy’s dragging her by the foot. Those characters very much represent what we’re talking about.
In nature, we’re constantly in pulsation between two poles, two extremes. The term for that in Ayurveda is Spanda. It’s the root word for spandex. We can move one way and then come back the other way. Stretchy. We want to be nice and stretchy. When we’re in a healthy state, we are able to go from one side to the other.
Looking at the nervous system, a healthy nervous system is able to move into a stimulated state, and able to come back down to a calm state. If we get stuck at one end of the spectrum, we add in qualities and practices from the opposite end of the spectrum to start bringing us back to the center, back into balance.
We are products of the natural world. When we start to recognize the qualities within us during different times of the day, times of the year, times in our lives, we can take advantage of it to feel our best. This is often referred to as the Ayurvedic clock, the Dosha clock. This is where we see the three energies show up within and around us.
We go through periods of life where one of the energies is dominant within us.
From birth through early twenties, we’re in our Kafa stage. Kafa is earth and water. It has a cohesive nature. It’s anabolic. It’s building in nature. We’re in development during those years. We’re learning, we’re growing, and we’re fluid in our tissues. You can see the water element really overpowering everything else.
As we get into the years of determining what we’re going to do for school, for work and lean into having a family, we’re transition to the Pitta stage. This is where we tap into the ability to use our motivation and drive, to get things done, pay the bills, and take care of the family.
Then, as we get into older age, we move into the Vata period of our lives. This is air and ether. They’re both dry. They’re both cool. They’re both subtle. In the physical body, we can see things starting to dry out. We, in our physical bodies, are becoming more subtle. As we age, our bones can become more porous, so the element of space is even in our skeleton.
When we recognize this, we can come into lifestyle practices to help support the process.
These three energies also have a period of time throughout the year that they rule. They have their season, literally.
Fall and early Winter are Vata season. It’s really windy. Things are drying out. You see leaves turning brown and falling off the trees. We’re moving into a cool dry season. It has an impact on our bodies as well. We may find that our skin starts to dry out. We need to lean into hydration and things like that. It can also have an impact on your mind. We’re in those elements all the time. We may feel more spacey or anxious. A little more ungrounded. When we recognize that, there are things we can do to bring ourselves back into balance.
In late Winter and Spring, we move into Kafa. We see a lot of moisture. We have new growth. You get up in the morning, the grass is wet, the new buds are wet. It’s baby season in nature. Almost a rebirth. We can also see allergies come up, congestion, mucusy liquid, build up.
In Summer, we’re in Pitta season. The hot, humid, action phase in nature. Everything’s in full bloom. Everything’s green. Everything’s turned all the way on in nature.
Throughout the year we experience the alternation of the energies.
Moving from macro to micro, we also experience this every 24-hours. In a 24-hour period, each of the three energies comes into power in our minds and bodies twice.
As I explain this, I’ll refer to specific timeframes, but these are guidelines because it’s really based on sunrise and sunset so the timeframes are a little bit different depending on the time of year and where you live.
Between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM is the hottest time of the day in nature and also within us. This is when Pitta rules. This is when our digestive fire is strongest. This is when we are most able to use the fire within us to solve problems. The power of Pitta is transformation. During this time of day, we’re best able to break down things and turn them into other things. For instance, we can break down the problem and turn it into a plan of action. We can break down the food and turn it into nutrients, assimilated into our tissues. The power of Pitta is the ability to break down, digest, or process in some way.
Moving to the afternoon, the 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM period of time. This is when Vata comes into power. Vata is air and ether. If you think about wind, it can move in any direction. Typically, the energy of Vata is up and out in all directions. It has no container; it goes wherever it wants. This is a time of quick reflexes, quick thinking, high creativity. It is a great time to create the to-do list for the next day or tackle creative projects.
Moving into the evening time, 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM is when Kafa comes into to rule. It’s earth and water. It’s a heavy, downward flowing energy. What we want to do is honor the downward flow of energy. Typically, somewhere early in the evening at the end of Vata or the very beginning of Kafa, we’re eating a light meal, the last meal of the day, and then we’re going to honor the downward flow of energy and begin to wind down. That’s when we get our comfy pants on to settle into the couch.
Ideally, this is a time of connection and cohesion. Connection with ourselves, maybe some self-care practices. Connecting with the people that we live with, doing something fun, light, playing a game, or watching a movie.
In the 10:00 PM to 2:00 AM timeframe, we start cycling back through the Doshas. Back into Pitta, an upward flowing energy. There’s a magic window of time that where, if you can fall asleep during the magic window, you’ll sleep more deeply and experience more regeneration. We recommend going to sleep around 10:00 PM so that we beat that upward flow of energy. If we stay up too late, we see a second wind. All of a sudden I’m energized. My brain is clicked on. I can stay up for three more hours. We want to beat that upward flow of energy by going to sleep before it turns on. If we do, then the fire energy works within us as the night shift cleaning house. This is where our minds take everything we’ve learned throughout the day, process and organize it.
From 2:00 AM to 6:00 AM, we get back into Vata. Again, up and out and all over. Quick thinking, quick reflexes. If you wake up between 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM and your mind goes, click I’m on. I can be more difficult to go back to sleep. It’s that Vata energy. Often people who are writers get up very early in the morning to harness that creative, inspiring energy of Vata.
In Ayurveda, we recommend that you do get up before the sun, just to be able to take a moment to tune in. Even if you just sit for a few moments and breathe, it’s opening ourselves to inspiration that can guide us through the day. This may be the time that we practice meditation. It may be the time that we journal or read something inspiring. Now we’re setting ourselves up to be able to respond to our day rather than react to it.
From 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM, Kafa is back. A downward flow of energy. If you sleep in and get up at around 9:00 AM and think, I slept too much, I’m so groggy. You’re trying to wake up in the downward flow of energy. We want to drink water, to rehydrate. We want to honor that downward flow of energy and hopefully let go of the things we don’t need from yesterday. Then we can start on that to-do list. This Kafa period of time is perfect to check things off the list, and really get things done. We have sustainable energy to follow through.
What can we do as Westerners to help balance our energies for improved mental?
The number one most grounding force for our mind-body system is going to be routine. When we recognize that it would make sense for me to do that thing at that time of day, we can set our schedules up in a way that feels better in our system. Also, being consistent can help the nervous system know what to expect, which can help to bring us back into balance. It may be something like going to bed at the same time every night.
Also, starting to notice. Notice how easily you fall asleep or don’t fall asleep, how you feel after you eat, when you eat, if your body needs more movement throughout the day. Really tuning in and recognizing that our bodies can’t lie to us. Our minds have the capacity to lie to us, but our bodies don’t have that capability. They are sending signals and sensations all the time saying, hey, this is what I need.
If we don’t honor our own rhythm, don’t listen, don’t set up routine to help our body be in rhythm, we start to see a buildup of what an Ayurveda we would call Ama, or undigested gunk.
This doesn’t requires a lot of money. We don’t have to buy supplements and oils. It’s really about tuning in, something as simple as increasing your relationship with your mind and body. No matter what you’re working with, you can establish a routine that soothes your body.
Routine is the foundation to bring our minds and our bodies into rhythm. That has an impact on our minds and our moods. It allows us to respond to our lives rather than the inflammation we may be living in, that pushes us to react.
My website is yourradiantsoul.com. I would love to help in any way and encourage people to continue to be curious about this.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today’s episode is part of an ongoing pursuit of dismantling the diet industry and freeing people of the unrealistic and often harmful expectations that we can and should be perfect.
My guest today is Janice Antoniewicz-Werner. Janice is a registered dietician nutritionist. She’s passionate about helping clients make peace with food. Janice specializes in assisting those struggling with disordered eating and individuals recovering from diet culture. She specializes in intuitive eating and is a Certified Intuitive Counselor and promotes a health at every size philosophy. Janice believes eating should be enjoyable and flexible and not result in fear or guilt. Her goal is to help her clients achieve a sane and peaceful relationship with food.
Janice has over 35 years of experience in the field of treating eating disorders. She has extensive training in intuitive and mindful eating. Her education includes a Bachelor of Science Degree in Dietetics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a Master of Arts Degree in Counseling from Oakland University. She is a certified eating disorder registered dietician.
Janice, welcome. I am so glad you’re here with us today.
Thank you for having me. I am passionate about this topic. This is the season where food is available, and people feel guilty about eating but want to enjoy it, so they talk about new year’s resolutions. The weight loss and exercise industries that makes money off of that are really in the mix this time of year. You’ll be starting to see ads for weight loss programs and exercise programs.
If a person wants to do a reset and the relationship with food and exercise, this could be a really good time to start.
We both come from the eating disorder support network here in Madison. You are a strong part of that network. We talk often about the messages that people are getting about what we’re supposed to be, what we’re supposed to look like, how we get our power, and how we’re acceptable. The messages that so many people are getting are false and often lead to a disordered relationship with food, a disordered relationship with exercise, with ourselves.
For someone who’s never heard the phrase diet culture, how would you explain that?
Diet culture is the message that we get that thin is always better. If you are thin, be fearful about gaining weight. There are right and wrong ways to eat. The purpose of exercise is to control your body. It’s one size fits all and you’ll never measure up. The underlying message is, you’re not good enough. It’s an external control. We’ll tell you how to do it and make a lot of money off of it.
Once you’re aware, you can see how pervasive diet culture is and challenge those messages with your own internal dialogue. A peaceful relationship with food is controlled internally. You use your own hunger and fullness, how food feels in your body, how moving feels in your body. That’s an internal job.
Diet culture tells you it’s external, that thinness equates to health and well-being. Some behaviors that diet culture supports are utilizing a scale to know if you’re healthy or not, that how many times a week you’re exercising equates to health, and so does what size your pants are. We’ve been culturally conditioned into thinking that that’s what health is. Now there’s even starting to be issues with overexercising and eating too healthily or being too focused on health.
Part of diet culture is that there’s good food and bad food, which is not true either. It suggests that there’s a perfect way to eat and exercise. Really, there is no such thing. It’s ideally driven by the individual. What works for you? What feels good in your body? Include all foods that you want to eat because food tastes good.
The idea that if you enjoy eating, you should feel guilty is part of diet culture. One of the foundational pieces of intuitive eating is unconditional permission to eat. You allow yourself to eat what you want when you want in an amount that’s satisfying without fear or guilt. To get there, you have to focus on your own internal guidance. The challenge is to block out everything else.
Diet culture and specific diets can seem science-based, but the science of nutrition is in its infancy. There is still a lot to be learned and things are changing all the time. So, if someone says this is a perfect way to eat, it’s not true. It’s much more important to know what your body needs because you’ve listened and can tell when you’re hungry or when you’re full and what foods your body’s craving.
Some of these behaviors are important for health and wellbeing, for example, knowing if you’re eating enough protein, but then the diet and the fitness industry take it so far, so that they can make money off of us. Eating enough protein is needed for muscles and hair and nails and keeping your organs repaired.
I’ve noticed that when people get to the other side, they feel betrayed. They’ve been sold these things as the way to fix their lives. Often, they’re angry about it because it takes joy from your life to feel like you’re not good enough, or to constantly be worried about what you eat or how you move your body.
Many of my clients have discussed how hard it is to be in the place of knowing that counterculture, because so many people don’t understand what we’re talking about. Once you are on the other side and you realize how dysfunctional and harmful this is, it’s challenging to have this understanding when the rest of the world still really supports diet culture or weight loss or good and bad foods and things of that nature.
There’s the internal work of coming to terms with it and being okay while you’re surrounded by it every day. It can feel a little lonely and vulnerable to be on the other side. You’re not part of that cult that everybody else is doing.
This time of year, in particular, is hard. You’ll hear people socially saying, I shouldn’t eat this or I was really bad, or I didn’t eat all day so I could eat whatever I want. That makes me sad because I know those people are trapped in that cult. Then you have to decide, am I going to tackle this? I often silently just wish them well.
The point is that most of our culture is immersed in diet culture, and it can feel lonely to be on the other side. Later, we’ll talk about ways of viewing it to help fight against loneliness and feel more connected to other people who understand this as well.
Let’s talk about the health industry.
How is the diet culture linked with the health industry?
It’s all about money. They’ve gotten savvy over the years, like changing the names of diets so they sound more like health. It’s important to stay on top of what is being said so that you can pick out the diet culture pieces. Diet culture masqueraded as health, leads to a more distorted relationship with food and a distorted relationship with exercise.
We could have another episode about the medical industry. Many of my clients are traumatized or re-traumatized by medical professionals telling them weight loss is the only path to X, Y, or Z. Pick any illness or condition you see your doctor for, and they weigh you and tell you that your size is the problem. People in larger bodies are treated differently.
The industry promotes it as wellness, but the goal is still weight loss. When people are trying to make changes, they can feel like they broke the rules and now have to punish themselves by exercising or eating healthy foods. This is all part of a deprivation scheme, so now, people start believing healthy behaviors are punishments. Healing requires establishing a different relationship with those foods or with moving your body to get on a more neutral or positive plane.
The idea that you can have it all is confounding because it breaks a lot of those rules. When people find a balance that works for them, they feel good. When people move their bodies in a way that they enjoy, they feel good. That’s the goal. Diet culture totally ignores how you feel inside. That’s an important distinction. We want to get to eating foods that are good for you because they make your body feel good and gives you nutrients, not because they’re low-calorie.
I’m a non-traditional trainer in that I’ll ask, what would you enjoy doing? You should only do movement you enjoy. You didn’t want to move last week? So many people say, ‘I was bad’ and I say, no, you just had other things going on, your bandwidth was full. It’s okay to move when you want to and focus on other overall health behaviors when those are more important.
Dr. Kelly McGonigal has a book called the Joy of Movement and she traces how different cultures move for joy and how alive and connected they feel. If we can harness moving our bodies in a ways that helps us feel more alive, that’s the path we should pick, not movement to punish or lose weight or get back on track. If the intention is to experience more joy, you’re going to orient yourself to different things than you would if the intention was to lose weight.
I also like the idea of eating and moving as self-care. When you’re choosing what you’re putting into your body, which includes all foods. If there is delicious food that you eat and enjoy, that is self-care.
The same thing with exercise. The notion that for exercise to count it has to be for a certain duration and you need to sweat, or it doesn’t count. That eliminates a lot of movement for people. Instead of what feels good and if you need to take a break because you’re tired this week, that’s good self-care. It isn’t good self-care to push yourself to do something.
I think about the brain. When we are forcing ourselves to do 45 minutes, but at 30 minutes we start to feel shut down or tired or irritable and it’s no longer fun, in our nervous system that’s a threat. What does it do with anything threatening? It’s not going to pursue that again.
Diet culture takes food and movement and makes them threats. I see so many people get overwhelmed trying to take on all of these expectations that aren’t coming from within. Their systems feel threatened and they avoid it. It becomes a negative story that there’s something wrong with them, they are not good enough or they’re lazy. Really, their brain and body are responding appropriately to something that is not enjoyable and feels threatening.
You’ve talked about thinking about intentions and goals in a new way. Can you talk more about that?
The foundation of any change is your intention.
If your intention is to feel better or to have a more peaceful relationship with food, it can be as basic as, how do you want to eat? When are you getting hungry? When you choose to eat, how does it feel in your body? It becomes a pattern, but it’s totally internally driven. Diet culture takes away from us as trusting your own body. The comparison I often use is, would you follow somebody else’s schedule on when to urinate? No.
Diet culture teaches us that hunger is bad. I think it’s really empowering to look at hunger as a positive. Hunger helps. That’s your body working perfectly. That connection can feel really empowering.
This isn’t about perfection. Your body will help you get it right if you’re paying attention to it. It is wonderful at telling you what it needs. If you make a mistake, you eat too little or too much, your body helps you. If you under eat, you’ll get hungry sooner. If you eat a larger meal, it will take longer to get hungry. You can trust your body.
It might take a while because we’re generally not used to using our bodies in that way. A perfect first step is paying attention to hunger and fullness and how they feel.
People often use the word hunger when they want to eat, whether it’s physical hunger or another reason to eat. Pay attention to that too. It’s helpful to distinguish using food for non-hunger reasons, as a coping strategy for instance. You may want to investigate other coping strategies, so you have less of a reliance on food, if it doesn’t feel good to you.
It’s a very personal thing and an ongoing process, but trusting your body is going to feel much better than trying to follow a bunch of rules that don’t work for you and lead to people blaming themselves.
There are some subtleties to intuitive eating. If a person gets sick, we don’t rely on hunger as much, but still need to eat. Often when people are stressed, they lose their appetite, but your body still needs food. The more you pay attention, the more you learn about how your own body works and how you use food. Then, you can decide if that works for you or if you’d like it to be different.
Internal trust and listening to the body can be really scary for people. What do you mean, I just listen to my body? What if I mess up or what if it’s wrong? What if something bad happens? It’s kind of an experiment. We take it slow.
Lindo Bacon talks about, that your body will take care of you. This isn’t a concept we talk very much about in our culture. The body will heal. The body will show you what it needs if you slow down and listen. That’s a foreign concept in diet culture, because it doesn’t sell anything. If you are using your own body and intuition, you don’t need to buy products online. You’re deciding what works for you.
I encourage people to be curious. Take the stress out of eating as much as possible. Ideally, eating is relaxed. It’s a natural thing. We literally do it from the moment we’re born. It’s always been there. We’re going back to something that was once very natural. That can be reassuring.
One of the first things we do when an infant cries, is pick them up and give them food. Often, it feels good, and they stop crying. It’s one of the very first things that we make an association with. Food for comfort is very natural. It only becomes a problem if it is a person’s only reliance for comfort, or they don’t feel good about it. If it is, or if you don’t feel good, look into other ways to soothe the system.
It’s okay to use food, to enjoy food. You don’t need to feel guilty about what you eat, even if you decide in retrospect that wasn’t a great choice. You didn’t fail. It’s just such a natural part of our evolution. Just be mindful about it.
How would you recommend someone pursue a health goal without becoming influenced by diet culture?
It’s helpful to look at what you think is working or not working. Ideally what we try to do with eating is balance nutrition with pleasure. You want to satisfy the pleasurable aspect of eating, but also want to give your body all the nutrients that it needs.
Historically, most people don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. That’s a good one. Are you getting enough fruits and vegetables? Not because it’s a diet thing, but because they’re loaded with vitamins and nutrients. Vegetables often have a negative association with diet culture. This is your opportunity to look at what your body gets from these foods and find delightful ways to prepare them. Maybe you want to roast them in olive oil or in a way that brings out sweetness. Prepare them in a way that tastes good.
The other is fluid. Do you keep your body well-hydrated, which helps with elimination, with keeping your skin from being too dry. All of the metabolic processes in your body take place in water. Those are two very simple things that really do promote health.
The other piece is to pay attention and be curious about how you’re using food. Why do you eat when you’re not hungry? No judgment. Just pay attention.
If you’re focusing relating to food differently, try eating mindfully. A lot of eating is mindless. You might walk by some M&Ms and grab a handful, that’s not criminal, but be aware of what you’re doing and if you enjoyed it. The whole point is to enjoy the treat. When we are enjoying different foods, we are being mindful versus mindless. It is not a black or white thing. You don’t have to eat every single morsel mindfully. The idea is to pay attention so that you’re aware of what you’re eating and if it tastes good.
Another thing I find interesting, is when people who have binged on foods in the past give themselves unconditional permission to eat, they often find out they didn’t even like those binge foods.
If someone wants to just take away one thing, it’s trying to eat mindfully. Slow down and enjoy and pay attention and see what you really like and don’t.
If we’re told we can’t have something, we might want it even more. When you have permission to eat anything you want, what truly tastes good? My friend Annie will say, there’s optimal foods and go to foods, but then there are foods that meet all of your needs down to the tip of your toes. What are those foods? Are we aware of what brings us that satisfaction?
What can people do to feel better, to create a different way of existing in the world?
Creating an internal mantra or new internal narrative. That’s what they’re doing and this is okay for me.
Research shows that habits change if people feel good about what they’re doing. It releases dopamine, a feel good chemical, in your brain and your brain is like, oh, I like that, I want to do it again. So, when you are acting on behaviors that are in your interest, give yourself an attagirl or an attaboy to get that dopamine hit, because then you’ll want to do it again. Avoid beating yourself up for things, because it’s not going to put you in a position where you can easily act. Really appreciate even a little progress that is going to move you forward. Give yourself positive reinforcement no matter how small it seems.
A lot of the eating and die culture is simply habits. It’s helpful to question them and decide what you want your habits to look like going forward. Then, be specific about how you want to accomplish it. For example, I’m going to have a vegetable every day this week. I have carrots and lettuce and am going to do this with them. Then have a plan to help back you up. You’ll be more successful if you know what you want to do.
The biggest thing is self-compassion. People have an idea that the more they beat themselves up, the more they’ll act on positive behaviors. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Working one’s way out of this takes time and patience. It’s a process that works much better with self-compassion. Research even shows that when people are compassionate with themselves, they reach their goals much quicker and maintain them much longer. They also report feeling better the entire time. That helps them maintain long-term health behaviors. Self-criticism and criticizing other people doesn’t work. It just makes our brain not want to do that thing. Compassion truly does help us reach our goals. It’s not about giving yourself permission to do nothing, it’s about giving yourself permission to be human.
Janice, thank you so much.
How can people learn more about you?
They can contact me through the Madison eating disorder support network. I have a website, Janice Antoniewicz-Werner Consulting will be in the show notes. I offer services and am very happy to support people in this process. My personal goal is to help people be joyful and peaceful eaters.
I’m so grateful we have you in our community. Thank you.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today is an episode long in the making. I’m honored to introduce you to Mare Chapman.
Mare is a mindfulness-based psychotherapist, mindfulness teacher, consultant, and author building on 40 years of clinical experience and 30 years of studying and practicing mindfulness. She’s devoted to understanding how cultural conditioning trains women to disconnect from their authenticity, thereby by losing their voice and power and how mindfulness can be applied to transform these habits so women can live fully empowered, vibrant, and healthy lives. Her recently published book, Unshakable Confidence: The Freedom to Be Our Authentic Selves, Mindfulness for Women, is based on a class she’s been teaching to women here in Madison, Wisconsin for over 20 years.
Mare, would you mind sharing a little bit of your story and how you came to this work?
What’s always been true for me is that our mind creates our heaven and our hell. From early high school I wanted to learn about the mind and our thoughts. College psychology classes got me even more interested in picking this as a career path. When I was pregnant with my son, I woke up to the cultural conditioning that happens for every single woman in this country and in this world, which is so patriarchal.
My mother sent me Betty Friedan’s book, A Feminine Mystique. I read it while I was pregnant and thought, oh my gosh, I have bought the cultural conditioning hook, line and sinker. I knew from that moment on that I believe in women’s equality, that I was a feminist, and this was essential to my being.
Along with that, also knowing for a long time that power has been so abused and misused. When we’re talking about the patriarchy, it’s the male gender that has been in the dominant position for thousands of years. Domination requires subordination, so there’s automatically an unequal power base which is oppressive.
Moving forward, at one of my early jobs working in the public mental health system, I was the director of a program that’s now called the Yahara House, a unit of the mental health center of Dane County. I was in the middle management position, and I witnessed myself repeatedly giving my power away to my bosses, even though I disagreed with them; even though I had a clear vision of what we wanted to create. I could not stop myself. I would become angry at myself because I saw myself doing this, but I seemed to have no control over that habit. That sent me on a path of trying to find a method for working with our mind.
I studied with two other very prominent spiritual perspectives that had meditation practices in them. When I sat my first insight meditation retreat, that cultivates mindfulness, I really found the method that made the most sense to me. The whole intention of mindfulness, is to free our minds from the habits of our conditioning so that we can access our true nature, our wisdom and our open loving heart. Our authentic self. That brings us to today, talking about freeing women from internalized oppression, allowing them to be their authentic selves.
Before we move on, I would like to take a moment to recognize that we are speaking about this from a female perspective. Mare, you shared with me that your work orients towards people who identify as female, and works to acknowledge the historical intergenerational experiences of oppression against people who were assigned female at birth.
We work to be as inclusive as possible in the work we do, so I would like to take this moment to acknowledge that all of our minds have been unavoidably conditioned. We hope all persons listening will be able to identify with what you’re saying because gender conditioning and internalized oppression is so pervasive. Often, it’s so deep that we don’t recognize it.
A common comment that I get when I teach my 10-session class on applying mindfulness to our internalized misogyny, is that women will say, my mind does all the time, and no one has ever said this before. I thought it was just me. People are so grateful for an explanation of what’s been going on inside of them. It helps us realize that what we have been feeling is negative self-talk or self-hate, is, in some ways the conditioning of our culture oppressing us to believe this about ourselves.
When we talked about why we wanted to have this episode, you brought up the idea of naming that all of this work exists because women experience two to three times more anxiety and depression than men.
I check those statistics frequently to see if they’re changing. They have not changed at all.
Why do you think that those rates are so much higher?
It certainly is not because as a gender we’re weaker or there’s something the matter with us. I think it’s the conditioning. We internalize the misogynistic messages of patriarchy that teach us to believe on some very deep, mostly unconscious, level that there’s something the matter with us, we’re not enough, we’re flawed in some way.
Because of this, we cannot validate our own experiences as being normal and appropriate. Instead, we learn to put our awareness to the outside, to others, in the hopes that they will affirm that we’re lovable and worthwhile.
This teaches us to always be moving our attention away from ourselves to that other person, our boss, our teacher, our neighbor, or friend, parent or partner in the hopes that if we are just pleasing enough to them, if we do a good enough job of taking care of them and responding to them, they’ll validate us and then we’ll be safe and secure, and will be able to relax with ourselves.
This habit of othering creates a constant, uncomfortable, self-consciousness. Always wondering, am I doing okay with you? Are you all right with me right now? Did I just say something that wasn’t so good? Did I do something that wasn’t right? We’re always assessing how we’re doing with the other. That creates a constant state of anxiety.
Along with the belief that there’s something the matter with me, there’s a lot of negative self-talk, comparisons, and judgements that add up to making us feel not good about ourselves. We don’t feel safe. If our brains and bodies don’t feel safe, we can continually be in a sympathetic state, which can feel like anxiety, or dorsal vagal, which can feel like depression, and our resources are continually going towards finding that safety. When we don’t know that we’ve been conditioned to look for that safety outside of ourselves, we think that’s the path.
In regular psychotherapy, we go back to our childhood. I’m a big proponent and the inner child, so I’m not displacing that, but we’re still othering. We’re still going towards what person changed me at some point which shaped who I was in order to have safety. That is othering going far back into early developmental stages.
All genders learn as tiny beings coming into the world, that we are vulnerable and dependent on our caregivers. It’s smart of us to learn to pay attention to them and to figure out how to be in order to get their love, support, approval, kindness and care.
Then, research shows that around the age of puberty, there begins to be quite a shift between genders. At that point, boys begin to develop their confidence and build up their esteem. It goes the other way for girls. Unfortunately, for girls, this habit of othering becomes more solidly in place and our connection with our authentic experience goes even deeper, underground.
I was watching a video where someone was filming a group of teenagers. The person with her camera was commenting on how she walked into a room with her children and their friends and asked who wants me to order pizza? The people who identify as men shot their hands up immediately. They know if they’re hungry or not. The young women look around to each other and to the men to defer and decide if it’s appropriate to be hungry right now. You know, what a turning away from our innate wisdom and trust in ourselves. It happened in milliseconds, and they didn’t know they were doing it. One of the effects of always attending to the other person first, always thinking about them, always wondering about them, worrying about them, fantasizing about them, means that you’re not aware of your own body or what’s going on with you.
You write that over time we lose connection with what’s happening in our bodies or, if we do know and what our bodies need is inconvenient to the other, we tend to override it. We’re lost in others and not aware of our authentic experience. Consequently, we become unknown to ourselves, often unclear about what we really want, feel, or think. We get cut off from our intuition, innate wisdom, and intelligence. We react according to ‘shoulds,’ the mind’s story of how we’re supposed to be. We may say yes, when we don’t want to, pretend we’re feeling things we aren’t feeling, or want things we don’t really want. We lose our center, the anchor to ourself, and we become lost in the other. We may feel an ache or emptiness and missing ourselves. Our striving for perfection is an ever-raising bar. We can never achieve it. This bondage to perfection, profoundly limits our relationships and keeps us stuck in the cycle of suffering.
Let’s talk a little bit more about internalized misogyny and the messages that we’re getting.
Internalized misogyny. How would you explain it?
Misogyny, up until the ‘Me Too’ movement, was not really used in our vocabulary. It’s a relief to have it named because we can’t change anything about how we are or about how our society is until we become aware of it.
The way I understand how internalized misogyny works is that patriotic men are dominant. Men call the shots. Men assume privilege. In turn, the other gender is viewed as dependent, weak, erratic, often too emotional. We get messages, from the dominant group, that were not acceptable except as an attractive object to have sexual relationships with. As a caregiver for the children that we bear. Those are really our primary functions and roles in the culture for thousands of years.
There are so many ways that messages that we don’t measure up, are not as important, not as worthwhile, not as valuable, not as significant, not as intense as men, get into our minds. They get into us in an unconscious way. We learn, subtly, to hold ourselves back, to keep ourselves quiet, to defer, all the time, to the other. Misogny can be outright, but also starts happening when the byproduct of this societal view starts causing shame and doubt within women that results in women beginning to undervalue themselves and others of their gender.
Many people’s preconceived notions about how women should exist, stem from societal expectations and gender norms. It’s difficult to identify. It’s important to be conscious of this and to be conscious of our own thoughts and ideas.
I find myself projecting internalized misogyny, onto myself more than I do to other women. I raise other women up and judge myself because maybe I’m being too assertive, which is considered aggressive, have too much ambition, maybe as a caretaker, I’m just supposed to quietly be in the background, sacrificing, with low pay and no benefits. I’m talking about how we treat women overall in our fields.
Even in groups of colleagues, I do that double checking after I meet with everyone. Did I talk too much? Did I seem to know what I was talking about? Did I make space for enough people? These are good things to think about in regard to balance, but I’ve spent a lot of brain time in my 40 some years, thinking about how much I’m impacting other people.
It is so common in our conditioning that we second guess ourselves or imagine what the other person might be thinking about us and, much of the time, what we imagine isn’t positive.
When we’re worrying and wondering about the other, we’re caught up in those patterns and habits. One thing that neuroscience has been teaching us is that our brains are super flexible and responsive to experience. The conclusion is that whatever we practice grows stronger in the brain. This is how neural grooves get created. It’s important to realize that we’re practicing every moment that we’re alive, not just in the moments when we’re meditating.
It’s important to wake up to these habits of our conditioning and see them as habits, not as who we are. To encourage ourselves to come back to our present moment, our authentic experience and practice respecting and accepting ourselves.
How do we take back our power through cultivating mindfulness and self-compassion?
It’s helpful to understand that all of our minds become conditioned. No one can grow up without a biased our view of reality. It’s also important to understandthat beyond our conditioned mind is our unconditioned mind, sometimes called our true nature, our higher self, our Buddha nature. Our unconditioned mind is stable and wise and spacious and kind and loving and generous. It’s who we really are. Our unconditioned mind is likened to the blue sky. It’s vast and open. It is always here.
We could think about our conditioned mind as being the difficult weather that moves the storm in. When we’re experiencing difficult weather, our habit is to get absorbed into that difficult weather, that angry mood or feeling of shame or anxiety or self-doubt. When we’re in that difficulty, we forget that the blue sky is always there beyond the storm.
In a way, mindfulness is a practice that allows us to become more aware of the storms that are moving in, without taking it personally. To learn how to relate to that difficult experience in a stable and wise way. We gain access to our wisdom, to our blue sky nature, to our unconditioned mind.
Mindfulness is all about practice and about bringing our attention into the present moment. Learning to observe what we’re experiencing in the moment with tons of curiosity. What are we thinking in our mind, feeling in the body, seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing.
We’re also learning to accept whatever it is rather than resisting or judging it we relate to it in a kind, compassionate, friendly way. This is self-compassion. Not identifying with it or taking it personally. Just seeing it as what is happening right now.
We begin to get to know ourselves, to see more clearly when we’re pulled into the habit of othering, comparing, or shaming ourselves. We learn how to notice, there is shaming happening right now. What’s the story in my mind? Given what’s happening, what’s a wise and kind way to respond to myself? What do I really need in this moment?
In doing this, we become a friend to ourselves. We begin to trust our experience, to know that it is always valid. Even though it may be uncomfortable or difficult, we stay on our own side and don’t turn against or disconnect from ourselves. It’s so important to stay connected to who we are and what our authentic experience is.
Mindfulness is truly a tool to poke holes in those clouds, to remember our unconditioned self, who is worthy, who is good enough, who is capable of working with difficult experiences.
So many women I work with don’t believe they can withstand their own emotions, so they do everything they can to avoid being present with their authentic experience. Mindfulness is a tool to work with those emotions so that confidence rises, and they feel like they’re capable.
The view that emotions are unimportant, irrational, don’t matter, and that women in general are too emotional, is part of patriarchy. We’re discounted for our emotionality, but also expected to hold all the emotions for everyone else. So much of what we do is emotional labor for other people.
Myself and a lot of my clients find themselves being so responsible for everybody else’s experience and everyone else’s feelings and thoughts.
What’s an example of using mindfulness to work with over responsibility?
If you had someone come to you and say, it’s the holidays and I’m really worried that all these things aren’t getting done, but it’s not my job to do those things.
Before I answer that question, I find that habit of over-responsibility to be one of the biggest hallmarks of our conditioning as women. Feeling like if anyone’s in trouble, I’ve got to jump in and fix it. When we’re making ourselves responsible, we believe that it’s our job to make others happy, which is impossible. Happiness is an inside job. We’re actually interfering with others learning to be responsible for themselves. Plus, being overly responsible is exhausting.
I did a session this morning with a woman who is waking up to lifelong patterns of doing everything herself as the fixer. In some ways it’s served her well. She has an amazing job in the community. She’s highly respected. She’s loved. Internally, she has been putting up with abuse from her boss and the marriage she’s been in for a long time has not been good for her. She’s been putting up with everything, trying to make sure everyone’s okay, even though she’s not. She is recognizing that the habit of assuming it’s her job to make sure everyone else is okay has been coming at her own cost, to the point where her body is physically ill.
I think we have to recognize over-responsibility as a conditioned patterned. It’s not in everyone’s best interest to continue in that habit and encourage ourselves to refrain from jumping in. Then noticing what that’s like, ‘I’m not the one to fix this’. How is that for me?
The mind might start playing stories; you’re being lazy, you’re being selfish. Guilt comes up. Can we be with the distress of not doing anything? Often our sense of self, our value is tied into that. We’ve learned to identify that as part of who we think we are.
It’s an important habit to learn to change our relationship to so that we can have more freedom. If we can’t say no, we have a hard time setting boundaries. Right now, my plate is full. I don’t have any energy for that. Saying something like that can be terrifying. It takes a lot of courage to refrain from being pulled into these habits.
I’d like to bring in the idea of compassion versus empathy and that it may be more beneficial to be compassionate, which does not involve being overly responsible versus empathetic.
There was an amazing study done looking at the difference between empathy and compassion. What they found was that when people feel empathy, it lights up the pain centers in the brain. When someone’s telling you something that’s difficult, we recruit a memory of our own to match their experience. We join with that person in their pain.
Alternatively, when we’re experiencing compassion, we feel sorrow and sympathy for their pain and also understand that this is part of being alive, that we all experience pain and suffering as part of the human condition. We recognize that this is that person’s moment of being in a difficult situation. What this researcher discovered is that compassion lights up the pleasure centers in our brain. Connecting with them in this way gives us a sense of satisfaction.
If you’re on hike and your friend falls and breaks their leg, would you also break your legs so you can experience their pain or would you help them to the car and bring them to the hospital? Empathy is breaking your leg too. Compassion is understanding, witnessing, and seeing their pain, and then helping them do something about it. From that place, we are much more viable to the people we love.
Looking at this internalized oppression to challenge the patriarchy, doesn’t separate you from your loved ones. It connects you more to your authentic self, and also connects you more to those that you care about. It makes our relationships with our loved ones much more satisfying and real.
I know other people are going to want to learn more about you. Where can we find you? I have a website, www.marechapman.com. My website has my philosophy about how I work, in individual work and classes and also has some CDs that you can download. Then, I have another website from my book called marechapmanauthor.com, which has information about my book and my Dharma talks. My book is available online.
I want to just thank you so much. I could talk with you about this for hours and hours. Thank you.
Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-based mental health podcast.
Today, our theme is the subtle energy system, otherwise known as the chakras. We are going to talk about psychology and energy and ways to integrate mind, body, and spirit in our own lives and in the therapeutic relationship.
I’m a certified yoga therapist and have had many years of training in yoga and yoga philosophy, in addition to the Masters in Mental Health Counseling and my license. I want to make sure to give credit where it’s due, so I’d like to acknowledge that we’re using this knowledge, passed down through the system of yoga. These traditions date back thousands of years, coming from South Asia. This is a time for us to acknowledge our privilege as white and non-disabled people with access to resources that allow us to study and integrate these important principles.
I also want to mention that I use the work of Anodea Judith. She’s a prolific author and body-centered psychotherapist, who wrote Eastern Body Western Mind, a book about psychology and the chakra system as a path to the self. I’m borrowing from traditions that come from the East. but also, will integrate that into the West and our education system.
A lot of this is evidence-based. We wouldn’t bring this to a mental health podcast unless we have science. The chakra system is just another lens we can look through. Another way to conceptualize our being, because we are body centered therapists. We’re not just concerned with the mind. We want to talk about mind, body, and then whatever that other thing is, spirit, soul, energy. That is so important when we’re talking about healing.
Chakra is a Sanskrit word. Sanskrit is a sacred language used in yoga. Today, we’ll keep things in Western terms to ensure we’re honoring this and being very respectful of the system.
The chakra system was referred to in the ancient literature of the Vedas and the Yoga Sutras ofPatanjali. This system is thousands of years old. It’s a way for us to reconceptualize our experience. A chakra is a wheel or a disc that refers to an energy center. They can help us understand the framework of mind, body, and spirit. Chakras, these wheels or discs, are ways for us to examine energy.
What is energy? Energy could be a charge. It could be our attention. It could be our awareness. In yoga we look at it in terms of life force, we call it prana, which is the force within us that animates us. It also can be our breath.
In yoga, the belief is that we have this energy channel that is analogous to our spinal cord. The spinal cord is really the seat of our life and our main line of energy. There are other channels of energy in our bodies.
In yoga, the belief is that we have two main channels that wrap around our central channel, our spinal cord. Where those two channels intersect with the spine are our chakras. The system we’re talking about today is the seven main chakras. They store energy. They store our thoughts or feelings or memories or experiences, our actions. They direct our mindset, our behavior, our emotional health. This is such a rich framework.
I’m a body-centered therapist and a yoga therapist, the two connect. This is a way to do self-exploration.
Where might there be an imbalance in your life? Where do you notice that in your body? It’s that simple. Is there something happening in your heart center that we can identify and work on? How do we bring that into balance? This is just a framework, a way of looking at our experiences.
When I was reviewing how each chakra taps into different things that are happening within you, it was almost inspirational. That sounds like something I have noticed happening, or that feels stuck within me. Then there’s different ways of pursuing healing or just even thinking about it differently.
The chakras also associate with the nerves along the spinal cord. The locations are fluid and different for each person, but there are nerve bundles along the spine where we experience a heightened, intense energy for each of the seven centers. In yoga, when we do poses, we’re moving our spines and manipulating our energies through those movements. We can target different energy centers through a yoga practice, poses, via our breath, chanting, or dance.
I can’t see that you have an excessive throat chakra, but we can talk about what sort of physical things you have going on, what sort of emotional items are stuck for you, and then talk about ways to heal what is out of balance in your life. There’s so much literature on this. I like to take it into the mental and emotional realm too. Our goal is to help people work through their past, work through their present, and to try to live in more balance.
We can think about this in terms of psychology too. It’s kind of like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This is very complimentary because a lot of human development is physiological and mental, but also about our relationship with ourselves and others across our lifespan. There seems to be specific things that show up and that we work through both physiologically cognitively and emotionally around each of these zones, almost in a way that could compliment Erik Erikson or Piaget.
Typically, people who come to see me are interested in yoga and the body and a different approach. I don’t bring it up unless somebody is interested. I want people to do their self-exploration so that they can recognize when something is out of balance. We always look back at where things changed. What developmental stage? What can I do to bring balance to that?
If we can identify something big that happened to us, let’s say age seven there was a divorce or we moved, we can look at what is showing up in our systems at that time in place, and what chakra, behavioral rhythm, or inner child work is associated with that age. There’s different tools and paths to healing
There are seven main chakras centers, and we’ll start with the root.
Each chakra is associated with a:
Human right.
a color, because each wheel or disc vibrates at a certain frequency.
developmental stage up to adulthood.
Chakra One – Root Chakra
Our very earliest developmental stage. It spans from in utero to about one year old. The root chakra is our right to be; our right to exist. We’re learning our body, as babies. It’s associated with the color red.
With that root chakra, some things that can interrupt development, we might call these traumas, would be birth trauma, abandonment, neglect, difficulty attaching to an attachment figure, a caregiver major illness or surgery, an abusive environment, and intergenerational inherited trauma. It aligns with Erik Erikson. From infancy to 18 months, the conflict is trust versus mistrust. How safe or not am I? Am I safe? Trust versus mistrust is a wonderful way to conceptualize the root chakra. We have to trust ourselves. We have to trust our bodies.
What are some healing practices we can do? I always suggest yoga as a way for us to build trust with our bodies and connect mind and body. Yoga means ‘to yoke’ mind and body, to unite. We can also practice grounding. The act of feeling our feet wherever we are.
Consider the traumas that are associated with the root chakra, neglect for attachment and abuse. Those disrupt our ability to be intuitive with our bodies. We’ve talked about interoception, the process of knowing what’s happening in our bodies. Trauma at any age can interfere with the interoceptive process.
People ask me how they can know which chakra is imbalanced. There are physical ways for us to suss that out, but you have to do the introspective work. I use books from Anodea Judith and Brenda Davies. Brenda is a psychiatrist who wrote The Seven Healing Chakras. There are assessments galore in their books so you can take control of the journey yourself, which is so much more powerful than having somebody tell you where you’re imbalanced.
Chakra Two – Sacral Chakra
Physically, this is located in our feet, legs, and the base of our torso. Just under our belly button. It is associated with the color orange and with our right to feel.
Moving up that developmental channel, we’re at six months to two years. Here we’re starting to develop the capacity for emotions. Again, it lines up with Piaget, another huge proponent in child development and human development. This is the stage where children start to get to know their worlds and realize how their actions can cause things to happen around them. They’re separate from other people.
The sacral chakra talks about gaining insight into our default reactions, looking at our deeper emotions, and learning to express ourselves and set healthy boundaries. That’s what two-year-olds are all about.
Traumas that occur at this developmental stage or chakra could be, not being able to identify with our feelings, enmeshment, or sexual abuse.
How do we heal? Movement and movement therapy, emotional identification and releases, working with boundaries, treating addictions, engaging in healthy pleasures and digging into inner child work.
Our brains have a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere. The right brain is more creative, and the left brain is associated with logic and reasoning. The right brain is much more online from ages zero to three and then the left brain shows up. The right brain is all about the body and sensory. That’s how we make sense of the world. When I think about going deeper into our default reactions, our deeper emotions, our inner child work, we really need to bring the body and sensory to the table. That brings up mindful awareness and bearing witness to our body’s memories and what happens in our sensorimotor processing system. We don’t just process things through our thoughts and feelings, but through our body and our nervous systems.
Working through this chakra comes down to listening, providing for, and protecting our inner child through boundaries and gaining insight into what we need and how we can provide for ourselves.
We’re talking about reparenting our two-year-old, but we need to reparent ourselves at every age. It is lifelong work. What a blessing to be aware that it’s possible to have that healing and change.
With chakras, we can also look at other tools. We can use essential oils that help to balance those chakras, meditations, visualizations, colors. Little nods to our subtle energy system to work on bringing balance in ways that are both big and small.
Chakra Three – Solar Plexus
Located above the navel and below the heart. It’s color is yellow, the sun and it is our power center. The right here is the right to act. Two to four years old is the developmental stage for our third chakra.
When we think about traumas, shaming, controlling abuse, or a child who has to act as the parent can be seen here.
To help balance, again inner child work. Also, relaxation, stress management, exercise, building up our ego strength. We can find a lot of anger at that third chakra so we might want to work on releasing that anger or managing it with the help of a therapist or a group.
Also working on shame. Piaget talks about the same things; autonomy versus shame and doubt. How can we live into following our gut, work through feelings of shame and develop confidence. Often exploration is what leads to confidence. Learning that it’s okay to fail, let’s see what happens. Trying something new. That comes back to feeling like we’re independent, that we can rely on ourselves and that we’re there for ourselves.
When someone has a lot of anger or excessive drive or are addicted to work and are constantly on the go, we work to bring balance to the solar plexus. It’s a pretty tangible, but we have to do that exploration first. We have to do that introspection.
It’s important to remember that when chakras get imbalanced, they can be excessive or deficient. They can, we can have too much of this energy or too little. So our healing practices are going to be to balance. “Like increases like.” If we’re workaholics, we’re not going to try to exercise a bunch more or do things that create more heat. We’re going to bring in some cooling centers.
Chakra Four – Heart Chakra
Located in the heart center, this is our right to love and be loved. It’s color is green and it is associated with ages four to seven.
Traumas here are rejection, abandonment, loss, criticism, grief, divorce, death, abuse. We often have an imbalance one way or the other here.
This is the idea of being connected. People who have just very little connection to their heart chakras may be perceived as cold or unfeeling. People who are in excess may be clinging, holding on, or loving and not having it reciprocated.
If someone is in dorsal vagal or shut down, there’s a disconnection to others, and maybe disconnection, dissociation or numbing from ourselves. Getting connected to the heart chakra can help to direct love back to ourselves and our bodies and to address the tendencies to isolate or to disconnect.
What do we do to heal the heart chakra? I like to think about compassion, joy, and gratitude. Communicating with your inner child, noticing their wounds. Grounding in our adult self, and being there for that child that was hurt or left or abandoned. I like to just start with deep breathing to get us into parasympathetic.
Chakra Five – Throat Center
Our throat is the right to speak and to be heard. Ages seven to 12 years old, this is when we’re developing our voice. Anything associated with communication really lives here.
Some of the traumas can be mixed messages, lies, verbal abuse, criticism, having authoritarian parents, maybe some alcoholism in the family, or secrets.
Practicing using our voice is a big part of self-exploration. In order to speak our truth, we have to know what it that and feel safe and confident enough to articulate it.
This is the right to speak, but also to be heard. Often it is asking that we’re heard and using our words. We do a lot of communication practice in therapy, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships and couples’ work.
There are so many things we can do. Often, we quiet our voice and shift what we need to say or who we need to be in order to have the approval or support of others. Having a relationship with a therapist where you can use your voice and not be shamed or afraid that you’re going to say the wrong thing can be healing. You can speak your authentic truth and it is held in a safe container where there isn’t judgment, and you don’t have to edit or alter it so that other people are okay.
Heart chakra and throat chakra show up a lot in my therapy sessions. We need to be able to speak, but also to hear and to listen.
When we’ve got an excess throat chakra, people really like to hear the sound of their voice. Here, we may need to work on silence. Maybe some meditation and some discernment in our speech.
Chakra Six – Third Eye
This chakra is located right between your eyebrows at the forehead. Here is our right to see and be seen. Here is adolescence. We’re starting to see the world for what it is.
There can be a lot of traumas here. We may see things that don’t make sense to us; hypocrisy, invalidation, especially growing up in a traumatic environment.
Healing practices may be meditating, holding that awareness. Also, coloring, drawing, and artistic expression help bring balance because there’s a lot of input through our eyes and sometimes, we just need to play. When things start getting a bit too much, I find myself at a pottery class or weaving class or coloring. Adolescence is a time when we express creativity. It can be very useful to stop and think about, am I being seen, what am I seeing? How do I bring some balance to that?
Chakra Seven – The Crown
Located at the crown of the head or even just a little bit above, is the seventh chakra. This is our right to know and to learn. This is early adulthood when we start to know ourselves.
Some of our traumas at that crown chakra might be education that doesn’t really allow us to be curious, things that are forced upon us, perhaps religiosity, having our beliefs invalidated, having to be blindly obedient, being fed disinformation lies.
We can heal these by doing our own learning, studying, meditation, doing self-introspection or reflection, maybe examining our belief systems through therapy or with a spiritual guide. Here it’s really important to develop our own inner witness. The dual awareness of what’s happening with our minds and bodies and witnessing it from a place of compassion and detachment.
I don’t know if there’s any greater transformation than the change I see within my clients who utilize the knowledge that is out there to create change for themselves.
It feels very Jungian to me; a kind of collective unconscious that we tap into.
The interconnectedness that exists in the crown chakra, and developing spiritual relationships with self, allows us to integrate mind, body, spirit, and energy, and be that unit of peace that can then connect with others and make change. We change ourselves so that we can help change the community that we live in.
Looking back on our life and seeing the failures, the successes, and developing insight into understanding the role we’ve played in what we’ve experienced, and the insight of how we can change and how we can look at our default reactions, allows us to grow.
This is a path to self-discovery. You’re learning about external things, but you’re also doing internal work. That’s what this is all about. That’s what we do. We help other people on that journey, on the path to self. This is just one way we can look at it. It’s a way that makes it makes a lot of sense to me.
As we’ve gone through this journey, we talked about the different colors associated with each chakra. I wanted to mention that we left off with green at the heart. Our throat chakra is blue, our third eye is often like a deep indigo or purple, and our crown is seen as purple or white.
Thinking about our energy as this rainbow is a really uplifting way to conceptualize this, but it also reminds us of the mystery, right? Rainbows existed long before we understood the science, so when we think about the chakra system, it may be an esoteric conceptualization, but we’re digging into it now in these different ways that can help us understand the mystery.
Today we’re talking about Dance Movement Therapy. DMT integrates the creative process, movement, and verbal processing to help strengthen the mind body connection.
Our guest is Tara Rollins. Tara is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Dance Movement Therapist at Insight Counseling and Wellness. Tara has experience working with children and families, adolescents, and adults, in nonprofit agencies, inpatient hospitals, residential treatment centers, community centers, schools, and outpatient clinics. She specializes in working with children who are on the autism spectrum or have experienced trauma due to abuse or being placed outside of their home. Tara also works with individuals experiencing anxiety, depression, ADHD, body image issues, body-based traumas and anger management issues. Tara’s work is based on the belief that all individuals have strengths that can be used to overcome life’s challenges.
Tara, it’s so good to have you here. Tell us a little bit about Dance Movement Therapy?
The American Dance Therapy Association defines Dance Movement Therapy as the psychotherapeutic use of moving as a way to help people expand their emotional, cognitive and physical integration, creating a connection between each system so the actions of one system can facilitate the workings of another.
It’s an innovative, formal psychotherapy that uses connection of the body and the mind as its foundation and works to strengthen that connection. We work with the whole person integrating movement, their creative process, and verbal communication into sessions. It’s an eclectic blend of lots of different things.
What is the difference between Dance Movement Therapy and regular talk therapy?
Dance Movement Therapy is a body-based form of psychotherapy used for treating a diverse group of people, of all ages social, psychological, developmental, neurological, or physical challenges. We want to promote emotional, cognitive and physical wellbeing. We help clients integrate their mind, body, and emotions. Through this integration, find emotional growth and self-definition. We use movement and the creative process to help clients express emotions and experiences in a less direct, more unique way. Sessions include movement as well as verbalizations to process experiences and develop skills. We use movement as a tool for creative expression, insight and behavioral change in a supportive environment.
That’s one component of Dance Movement Therapy, and the part is dance movement. In DMT sessions, we teach dance concepts, imagery, metaphor, symbolic themes, as well as dance elements of space, rhythm, time and intensity. Then we use those elements to help clients experience new emotional states that they never developed, lost, or are uncomfortable using.
Creative dance techniques help open new avenues for expression, for insight, for transformation and we expand clients dance vocabulary and dance creativity which helps them to explore authentic emotions and develop a body language of expression. Which helps healing and processing experiences in a different way.
When we bring in the body, we’re tapping into our sensory motor processing system through posture and movement. All sorts of things come alive that we can’t necessarily tap into when we’re seated trying to think our way through it.
How did you find Dance Movement Therapy?
My mom says that I was dancing before I was born. From my first dance class, I fell in love with dance. After high school, I wanted to help people but also wanted to find a way to keep dance as a part of my life because it was so important to me.
I had a teacher who referred me to talk to the Dance Therapist at the Hancock Center for Dance and I was like, this is what I’m supposed do. It connected dance with the desire to help people. I studied psychology and dance in undergrad and went on to a graduate program specifically in Dance Movement Therapy. To become a dance therapist, you have to complete a master’s program that the American Dance Therapy Association accredits. In general, you study dance therapy theories and methodologies, as well as other areas of psychology and psychotherapy.
How did Dance Movement Therapy become a formal psychotherapy intervention?
Dance Movement Therapy started as a distinct profession the 1940s by a woman named Marian Chase. There are several other pioneers, such as Trudi Schoop, Mary Whitehouse, and Blanche Evans that continued on from her work, but Marianne Chase is the original dance therapist.
She had been teaching dance with kids of all ages and was asked to lead dance groups at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC for the patients.
Chase began to notice the positive therapeutic effects of the dance classes on the client’s health. The clients, or patients, were noticing that they were gaining physical and emotional benefits from taking the dance class.
She continued working with the clients to develop the main theories and structures that are still used in a lot of dance therapy today. The dance therapy field is also influenced by neuroscience, dance in Europe and the United States, nonverbal communication, anthropology and psychology brought together. We’ve been dancing for thousands of years, but this was creating the psychological psychotherapy lens as a specific tool.
Are there certain mental health diagnoses that Dance Movement Therapy treats more effectively than others?
DMT is effective at treating most types of mental health diagnoses because, like other creative arts therapies, it is really flexible in finding interventions that work for each client.
If a clinic, agency, organization, or even just a person, is open to the idea of this being helpful and trying it out, it can really be helpful. When verbal techniques are less accessible or less comfortable or more overwhelming, I think of my work with individuals on the autism spectrum. It can be particularly helpful for them. Also, when diagnosis affects the body a lot, for example, with people who’ve had early developmental trauma or trauma that happened before there was words.
It can be particularly successful when it’s integrated into a comprehensive treatment model that includes other forms of psychotherapy, as well as medical professions, school teams, natural supports.
How is Dance Movement Therapy used to heal body-based trauma?
We’re continuing to learn that when someone experiences some type of trauma, the body is affected. It is essential that the body is included in therapeutic work to heal trauma. Dancing with therapy can help clients, who’ve experienced trauma, work towards a connection or reconnection with their body, gain a sense of control over their body and hyper arousal or disassociation and develop compassion and provide nourishment to the body self.
We’ve also learned that when someone has repeated experiences, they internalize certain beliefs about themselves and about the world. Neurons that fire together, wire together, developing and strengthening neural pathways that affect every aspect of life. In DMT, we allow clients to have new positive experiences connecting to their body, which create new neural pathways that are self-affirming narratives to replace those older, negative neural pathways that were formed by trauma.
We have lots of props in DMT, things like dancing with music, moving with scarves, using movement props, creating movement metaphors, providing repeated opportunities for clients to experience joy while moving their body and experiencing body sensations. We’re allowing them to have positive experiences in real time, connecting to their body, noticing those sensations.
We allow clients to process experiences that are too difficult to address directly. We can touch on issues, by externalizing those feeling states, without having to directly address vulnerable emotional experiences. If someone’s feeling angry, they don’t have to talk about that anger, which could shift their state or trigger or hijack their brain into a survival response. They can mindfully and safely move in a way that expresses anger. Maybe moving in a capacity that feels like this force, this push is anger. We need to allow the body to move in a way that it wants to process those feelings and those experiences.
There’s this great body-centered therapist I follow on Instagram. I believe she’s in Australia.
She has something that is stretchy and you move around, and no one can see you. Some people call them stretch sacks. Think about being in a skin or a womb, or you’re an animal or you’re coming out of an egg.
I love the idea of how safe it feels that no one’s watching your facial expressions or your body. You’re inside this moveable stretchy bubble. It contains the experience, but also allows you to set down those parts of yourself that are self-conscious or judging what we’re doing. It looks really freeing. It also gives the sensory input of almost getting a hug from the stretch. And you can have fun with it as well. Noticing that not everything that’s connected with my body and physical sensations is negative. You can look at yourself in the mirror and laugh at how silly you look in a giant thing. It’s joy, exploration, feeling something in my body that doesn’t have to feel bad or overwhelming.
The nervous system can only play when it feels safe. So we can tell you’re in a place with that you’re feeling safe and playful and you’re moving again and making new neuropathways that reinforce that play and movement are safe.
Another thing that we do is talk about developmental stages.
There can be gaps when people experience trauma at an early age where they can get stuck or are not able to develop certain skills that they need. Our body is the one thing that’s with us from the time we’re born till to die. When we’re young movement and play are our language. DMT and body work help people move through physical experiences to go back to that time in their life and process using the language that we had.
We can’t sit down and talk about what happened when you were two, but we can put move like a two-year-old moves and all of a sudden, this wealth of knowledge and information comes up.
It’s so interesting how you can be doing something, and your brain taps into things you forgot about, and memories become clearer. For example, I used to pogo stick a lot and I found one a couple years ago and jumped on it and got a flood of memories. It’s so interesting that our bodies and movement store those things for us.
What do you think can be helpful for someone who is working on their inner child?
One thing that can be helpful is having clients create a dance journey or dance story. It’s about an early childhood experience, family of origin issue, or trauma experience. People will create a dance, to process either the whole journey or a specific part. Many clients pick music that was popular or that they were listening to when they were a certain age. They play that music and move to that music and see what happens. It often brings up body memories.
In dance therapy, we also talk about different movement qualities or rhythms that we develop.
If you looked at Erik Erikson and developmental psychology and the stages of development, we create rhythms from that time. For example, the first rhythm we develop is the sucking rhythm. Sucking is the heartbeat the infant hears before they’re born. Sucking in breastfeeding and rocking is a soothing rhythm. In dance therapy, we talk about the idea of trying on the rhythm. Trying to move with this rocking, sucking rhythm helps us connect with that part of our life.
Then, different rhythms develop over time naturally.
If we went through an idea development, you would start with the sucking rhythm and then move to the higher, more complicated movement qualities. A lot of times when people experience trauma or get stuck, they miss that rhythm. We develop and practice different movement activities. For example, with sucking rhythm, we can rock. That is sometimes you can see people doing. When we’re self-soothing, what do we do? That’s an intuitive self-soothing quality that we learned before we’re even born with our mom’s heartbeat and her breath.
If someone’s interested in trying Dance Movement Therapy, what can they expect in a session?
The structure for individual, group, or family sessions varies a lot, depending on the Dance Movement Therapist leading the session and the person or population that you’re working with. There’s not a set structure or format for sessions.
Individual sessions in particular, tend to develop based on what the client is needing, expressing, or feeling that day. We meet the client where they’re at. If you’re doing group, sometimes you need a little bit more structured, but there’s always a creative process and playfulness. We’re picking up on what’s happening in the group, what’s happening with the individual and going with that.
Marian Chase created a structure that many people like to use. There, we have a warmup, a theme development, and a closure or cool down. I use those loosely because we like to go with what’s there and what’s happening.
Warm up is what it sounds like. Start moving the body, noticing the breath, connecting with the body and starting to notice what your body is needing and wanting today? We might give some directives depending on the individual client. The idea is to help them connect with their body. Some people don’t need a lot, maybe just some music and then they’re off.
Then we have theme development, which is where we work on practicing and developing skills, expanding on or exploring themes that might’ve come up in the warmup. Based on the energy of the group, is there some common movements or qualities or specific movements that are coming up. If it’s a group that has certain themes or skills that it’s working on, we might incorporate that into the theme development of the group.
The last part is the closure or the cool-down. We’re cooling down, slowing the body, not introducing new information and helping clients to feel grounded before the session ends or reflecting on what happened. It’s a loose structure, really about meeting the client where they’re at and with what they need that day.
What’s it like for a person who feels really hesitant at the beginning of DMT? Maybe they’re starting in a place where they’re not feeling connected to their body or that their body isn’t a safe place to be. Starting this new thing with a new person and they’re just supposed to move around. It makes me want to enter freeze just thinking about it.
Even though we do use dance concepts, creative processes, and improvisation, you do not have to have any dance experience. The most important thing is that you’re listening to your body and you’re staying safe.
I usually start small and start simple. It’s not a dance class. It can be connecting with your breath and noticing what your breath is doing. Maybe a body scan, noticing what sensations I’m having in my body today. Maybe we have music, and we tap out a rhythm on our legs, or we clap together, or we tap our feet. If we’re a group, we look around and see the other people in the group, and notice what they’re doing. It’s about connecting with the body and the breath and exploring new ways to express yourself and connect with your body.
There is no right or wrong way to move. We’re not teaching you dance skills. People do create dances and have what they’ve created witnessed by the therapist or the group members, but it’s always about what feels right to your body and challenging yourself to try different movements when it feels comfortable to you.
The key takeaway of dance therapy is how do I learn to feel comfortable connecting with and noticing what’s happening in my own body. To find my own way of expressing myself. There is not a right or wrong way. That can be very healing.
What are some ways a listener could bring Dance Movement Therapy into their life right now?
Therapists, as well as people outside of the fields of therapy, can use dance and movement in unique ways. I often give clients exercises to try outside of our therapy sessions. One example is when a situation or an interaction doesn’t go the way you want, is particularly challenging, or creates a lot of anxiety, take time either to think about how I was holding my body. What was the tone of my voice? What was my face doing? How close was I standing to that person? Then, try adjusting one or more of these things the next time you’re in that situation. See if it helps make things go a little better for you.
Anybody can do it day to day. What is my body doing when I’m going into fight or flight mode or aggressive mode? Did someone perceive me as being really angry and aggressive when I wasn’t. Your body will store those patterns. It’ll have the automatic response to thoughts and feelings. You won’t even notice, but the body will shift into a posture or pattern of movement, often because the brain is trying to predict the future based on past information. It will sometimes keep an old story or an old narrative or belief alive when that’s not even our actual reality anymore.
We all have movement preferences but also need an expansive movement repertoire to be successful. For example: some people tend to move with a lot of quickness and struggle to slow down. This is really helpful when you need to get things done quickly, or you’re doing something super active, playing a sport, moving, etc. At other times, this preference might cause some challenges like when you’re trying to rock a baby to sleep or carry a fragile dish. I ask people to challenge themselves to do a daily activity with a different movement quality and see how that affects your success. I might say people move like you’re walking through honey. Move like you’re a video in slow motion.
There are all of these different qualities and they’re on the spectrum. We don’t say there’s good and bad movements. We need all of them. We all naturally have preferences to certain patterns, certain qualities of movement. You might notice your partner or a friend who tends to move with a lot of quickness or like they’re moving through honey. Think about different professions and how different movement qualities would affect your success at them. Your interactions with people, how you move and hold your body affect that.
With DMT techniques, you can shift and play and try on other qualities. Light versus heavy, direct versus indirect, quick versus slow, free flow versus controlled. Knowing these things opens another way of looking at the world, looking at your interactions. Again, it’s challenging because it’s different. And it’s okay to have preferences, but you’re giving yourself options.
You’re expanding possibilities so that things don’t have to continue the same way if you don’t want them to. Whether it’s different tools to be creative and express yourself, or process through things. Maybe different ways to interact with people or different ways to connect with your breath, ultimately, we want to find ways to do things a little bit differently.
You’re so passionate. You’re so wise, so knowledgeable. Thank you for sharing yourself with us today.
