Have you ever wanted to just SMASH things? Leanne Pedante and her husband Miles’ relationship was built on bravery and communication - they worked so hard to reach the next step together, excited to explore the edges of possibility in love and in life. On his way back to see Leanne after several months away, Miles’ car veered off the road, and he was killed.
In the just under two years since, Leanne has continued to grow the virtual reality fitness community, Supernatural. As a late-comer to fitness, Leanne is no stranger to using movement as a way to process and express pain. In today’s show, we discuss the ways grief has upended her life, and the ways that both movement and community have kept her alive - willing, at least most days, to lean into the full experience of life.
In this episode we cover:
About our guest:
Leanne Pedante is a trainer and trauma + resiliency coach, whose work focuses on connecting people to their bodies and to their full potential. She works as both coach and the Head of Fitness for Supernatural, the VR fitness platform. Her own workouts let her celebrate her physical and mental strength and she wants to show others how to access the pride and power within joyful movement. Her husband, Miles, died in a car accident in 2021.
Additional resources:
Sign up for Leanne’s newsletter and check out the other community-building things she’s created at her website
Try Supernatural with a free trial (you do need a VR headset)
Get in touch:
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Have a question, comment, or a topic you’d like us to cover? call us at (323) 643-3768 or visit megandevine.co
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Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s Okay That You're Not Okay and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed
My friend Cammy, and she would just hold my hand or hold me and look me in the eyes and say, this is so horrible, this is horrible. She wasn't trying to make me feel better, she wasn't trying to distract me. She was like fucking like pissed and horrified, which was so validating because I was horrified and I was shocked and couldn't believe it, and like to have the reality of someone just saying over and over again began this is horrible, this is horrible. Like it just brought me back to earth and made me feel like I was like in relation with a true human being, and that was so comforting. This is Year After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine, author of the best selling book It's Okay that You're Not Okay. This week on Hereafter, a very cool guest head of fitness programming at the virtual reality fitness app Supernatural, Leanne padant Hey, Now, why is a fitness pro on the show? That my friends has to do with the fact that grief is everywhere, even where you don't expect it. Here all about it coming up right after this first break. Before we get started, one quick note while we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in our time here together. This show is not a substitute for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, Okay, so several months ago a friend of mine told me she's been doing the virtual reality workouts through an app called Supernatural, and I was, let's just say, less than enthusiastic about that idea. But my friends swore that VR fitness was great. So I tried it, and, surprising especially myself, I absolutely loved it. Now, if you don't know, Supernatural is a virtual reality fitness platform where you can box or do these workouts that they call flow that are pretty much like wielding lightsabers and incoming objects. It has great coaches, fantastic music, including punk, classics and heavy metal soundtracks, which are my favorites. And because it's virtual reality, you're working out in beautiful, albeit simulated locations around the world. But this episode is not about Supernatural, not really. See I follow Supernatural's head of fitness, Leon Padante on Instagram, and one day a few months ago, she posted about her wedding anniversary, the second anniversary she survived after her husband's sudden accidental death. I tell you, widows are everywhere. I reached out to Lean on Instagram to invite her onto the show to talk about love and fitness and trauma and what it's like to be an encouraging, upbeat coach in front of the camera and then cry screaming in the car all the way home. If you've ever been a grieving person, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I bet now we cut this show down quite a bit from our original conversation. Leanne and I have so many things in common. We actually talked for over two hours, and we only stopped because we both had appointments coming up. We even talked about collaborating on some projects in the months ahead. She's just She's just that rad everybody. If you have ever needed to punch the crap out of things, or you have absolutely had it with fitness instructors that tell you everything is unfolding for your deepest and best good, I cannot wait to introduce you to Lean. I am so glad to have you here with me today. I was talking in the bio a little bit about how I feel like I'm at an advantage because I see you in my in my workout headset almost every single day. But but him, I'm gonna I'm gonna fan girl for a little bit. We have so much to talk about. I want to just like jump right in. So to give us a starting point, to help everybody understand where we're starting, could you introduce us to Miles and to the life that you built together. Yeah. Absolutely, I love talking about Miles. I have a billion things to say because he was one of the most complex and kind of magical humans that I've I've ever encountered, which is why I fell in love with them first time. Then I later on him. You know. So we we met a little over a decade ago at a party, and I remember looking at him and then turning to my friend and being like him, like, yeah, I might have even pointed I was just like this one. I went into that not knowing a couple of things. I went into that not knowing that he had a girlfriend. I went that not knowing that um, I had already had quite a bit of wine that night, and that he was in probably his like by then gosh, twelfth year of sobriety. So he resisted like a pure, like a pure sober gentleman, um my best attempts to make him fall instantly in love with me that night. And then months passed and I, you know, was dating. I was in a relationship. It wasn't great, it wasn't going anywhere, and I broke up with the guy that I had been seeing. I went home and I had an email from Miles, where I had met once at this party, and he was saying, I've been thinking about you for the past six months. I live in Los Angeles. Now I'm going to be on the East Coast. I'd like to come see you. And it was so shocking and so perfect because I've been thinking about him too, And so he came to the East Coast with the intention of like staying for a day, and he spent four days, and I moved to l A to be with him within the next two months. It was very fast, it was very obvious. And he was a musician. He was an artist and a musician. Um He was in a band called Akron Family for many, many years. They were still touring and making music when they got together, and then he transitioned to being a solo artist. And like, he had so much integrity in the things he believed. I was so shocked over and over again in a million different ways by like the level of commitment he had to his values and ideas. So at some point he realized that pursuing the kind of Los Angeles version of music, trying to get gigs, trying to kind of compete within this grow cosm of indie musicians and the same you know, thirty people over and over again that you're buying for these really limited resources, wasn't really working. And he had experienced a different version, a different ecosystem of music in Italy when he had been touring, and so he started going there and playing with musicians there and found this like thriving community where he was able to be a musician, able to have a certain quality of life, able to kind of delve into like a lot more exploration and a lot less emphasis on capitol and like celebrity. And so for many years of our relationship he was either touring and on the road, or he was in Italy for a couple of months at a time and then back here in Los Angeles. Um, so we did lots of long distance time. He was massively into reading and spirituality was always like pushing his mind and pushing everyone and who he met to like find their outer edges whatever that kind of meant for them, and for me that meant that, like when we met, I was a graphic designer. I wasn't really like into my work that much. And at some point, very early on when we're dating, I let it slip that I like had this secret dream of like being like running an awesome kick ass exercise class because I loved music and I loved seeing people like get into this quasi spiritual state of like physical ecstasy together. And because I let this like secret attention known to him, he glommed onto it right and started to like nudge me, thank you, Hey, why don't you do that? Why don't you why don't you? Oh, you mentioned that, and you just can bring it up and bring it up. So when I moved to l a like largely because he became this voice in my life, it was like, Hey, you can do this thing. You're a desire to do this thing. Is the permission you need to start doing this thing. So I did. I started getting certifications and training friends, and all of that stuff ended up tremendously changing my life. So now I'm a professional fitness expert, which if you had told fifteen year oldly On that, she would have blown cigarette smoke in your face and laughed really hard. And about eighteen months ago, UM Miles was living in Oregon, I was still in l A and he was driving back home. I hadn't seen him for several months, and his car, for still an unknown reason, just drove off the road and he was killed. And I was expecting him to walk through the door a couple of hours later, and instead I woke up to a phone call that he was dead. And you know, my life, you know, as you imagine, as you know, it hasn't been the same and probably never will. I mean, we talked about this a little bit before we got rolling, and that that moment of before and after there is no such thing as going back to what happened or the life or the understanding of the world that existed before that phone call. Yeah, so interesting too, because I'm I know that the human memory is remarkably unreliable, right, I know this, There's good data on it. Like we we think that we are better at remembering things than we really are, and so that also clouds this kind of permanent sensation you have of like the time before. I think I think there's a tendency to over romanticize probably how happy you were, how stable, insane feeling you were. I've had this sense over the past, you know, since Miles died of just like I don't really know who I am anymore, and I don't really remember who I was before this. So you're kind of this like ghost of a person that feels rather un tathered to either a past or a present. It's very bizarre. I don't know that lands with you at all. Yes, that complete reworking of the self, the complete dissolution of everything you thought you knew before that moment. And you know, I say that as you know in my own life a person who like a lot of maths in my relationship mirrors your relationship with Myles. Obviously not the same. Matt was also sober for a long time before we met, which is fascinating. We've we've got some really interesting intersections, but you and I both had relationships that involved real conversation, like even when things were difficult, really talking about things, talking about what does it mean to be partnered? What does it mean to believe in yourself and believe in the people that you love, Like, you know, there's the thing that like, oh, you know, whatever happens to you is meant to teach you a lesson or make you stronger, make more of yourself. And and for me, you know, I remember soon after Matt died, I was like I was good before, Like I didn't I didn't need this like to to teach me a lesson or to become a better person. But I do think that there is this like the things that I understood about the world. Not only did I not really remember that, but for me, it brought all of the things that I knew about myself and the world and my place in it into question, right right, right, yes, yes, yeah, exactly. And that's and I think one of those things for me was was that, like you know, I had done all this work to around identity. I'm fascinated by our relationship with identity. It's one of the things that I think is the most powerful about movement is that you start to see a physical change. You start to show up for yourself in a physical way. You experience some level of change, whether that's in how it feels to move or what your body can do. And then the experience of seeing that change makes you realize that you're extraordinarily malleable, and that there's twenty other ways in which you can change internally. You can get out of the job, you can get out of the relationship, you can do you know, whatever you think. Because the ship that you said to yourself about what was true of you, maybe it wasn't all of the facts right. And that's the powerful thing about moving. And so for me, I had been touting this for years as a person who was never an athlete. Growing up, I literally was like the anti athlete. I skipped gym class to the point where I almost got kicked out of high school. Like I was just like so not into this. For me to be able to like convince myself help that I was an athlete into my thirties was a tremendous thing. And then this death came, and then all of the things that I thought I was able to do to shift my perception of myself and to transmute hard things into stuff that serves me, I'm like, I'm like, oh, that's that's all nonsense. It's not working. This is not making me a better person. Like that's the feeling that I'm not. I'm not a better person as a result of this. This has nothing to do with being a better person. I am just still alive, That's what I am. A lot of the days, the sphere, the sphere of I don't know, concrete reality gets very very small. It's it's really interesting to hear you say that, you know, you said you know the things that you knew about fitness and being in your body and moving your body, and the things that it taught you about yourself, and how endlessly adaptable we are, and how we can grow and question the things that we know and we think we know. And then Miles sudden death sort of intersects with that and and dissolves it in a second. Right, like all of the things that I've known are crap, Yeah, which of course isn't true. Like I still, you know, I am. I think it's a rule of like never speaking absolute, right then I never seek an absolute. But like so, you know, so few things are ever and either or so a few things are ever, Like this is true or this is untrue? Oh it is. It is a lot of both. And this is one of those situations where it's like I do still believe that I still see it all like every single day in Supernatural members and the people that I experienced business with, like people are still having those huge shifts, and maybe not every single thing that happens in life is going to have that trajectory. Are that immediacy of like a turn a turnover what's perceived as like a positive turnover? You know, some things are going to be easier launchpads into a better version of yourself something I think you are just going to bear and be witness to and integrate into yourself, not walk through and leave behind. Yeah, I think we have this sort of everything is a lesson, Everything is for your own growth, take any difficulty and use it to your advantage. I think we use that as sort of like our multi tool that it fits every human experience, and it's not that it doesn't fit a lot of them. You know, what you're describing is like that that process of self reflection and insight and questioning the limits that you feel like you have in your life or in your relationships, and wondering if life is actually bigger or different than the story that you've created about it. Like there's such value in that, There is such value in that and it's not the answer to every part of human life. And I think like for me, that's what changed after my own experience with sudden death, is like not everything, you know, to use that sort of old silly analogy, like not everything is a nail for that hammer, right, And I think it's been very challenging for me not to apply that framework to this situation just out of instinct, you know, um, and the the like the rigidity and the hardness or the harshness of trying to force this horrible, shocking thing into being having some sort of silver lining is a cruelty to myself, Like it's so it's so over the top, it's so mean, it's such a mean thing to try to force myself through. And I have to keep like supervising that that kind of instinct to be like, but where where are you getting better? Where are you growing? Like let's look, let's find it before and after year And it's like, no, man, you're just having a very hard time. That is all that's happening right now. You're having a very hard time. Sometimes it's less hard. So much of me has had to soften in the past eightwo months, and that's been really hard. Because I'm like being a badass bit you know, yes, yes, I love that image of like I have to supervise my own learned narrative. I have to supervise my own tendency to look for the silver lining you. I think a lot of us fight really hard, or have fought really hard in our lives to not collapse in despair around certain things. And you know, the practice of gratitude, of looking for the growth, of looking for the gifts inside difficulties, like for a lot of us, that is a really really hard one practice. And when something like this, like Orders of Magnitude, different than every other hardship you've gone through, there is that part of you that reaches for those old tools and tries to force it. And what I what I love about what you just described, and I actually saw it in a lot of the Instagram stalking research stalking that I did over the last couple of days is like that impulse to expand your view two allow feeling states to be feeling states. I don't know if you see it from where you are, but as somebody who just reviewed your Instagram, like that that was in there. There's a post that you have on Instagram and I'm going to completely motion like several of them together, but one of the taglines is the wrong word, but like one of the relationship mottos, I guess that you and Miles had was the full experience. Yes and arms, yes, yes, well time, well time, yeah, yeah, thank you. But that that idea of the full experience. I first heard you say that in a supernatural workout, and then I saw it again in your in your Instagram posts soon after Miles died, And I just feel like there has been something in the small window of you that I've observed that in a way has always welcomed in the harder parts of life. It sounds like one of the things that's different for you now is maybe please correct me if I'm absolutely freaking wrong, because I'm often wrong, but it sounds like one of the major things that's shifted for you is previous in your in your before life, when hard things happened, you knew to sit with them and to be kind to yourself around them, and to give them space and not try to force them away. But there was also a what are we going to do with this second? Part of that second part of that approach to life, and it sounds like one of the things that's changed since miles death is sometimes there's no part too to allowing a bad thing to exist. Sometimes there is no silver lining, sometimes there is no working with it. Sometimes the bad thing is just a bad thing, full stop. Does that feel accurate? Yeah, that's very very wise. It's it is, And it's just such a treat to like to speak to you and speak to somebody who's yeah, doing such a poignant job both like hearing and seeing me as a person. It is. I think it's probably one of the things we desire most as human beings, and it's just really nice. So thank you. Yeah, you know, I think early on in my partnership with Miles, like I really saw him as as a person who was very unafraid of a lot of things. Like you know, he was just he had lived through many extreme things as a young man. He had been homeless, he had been extremely addicted to drugs. He had just like lived in these very vast extremes and came out ultimately like one of the kindest, softest, most lovely people that I've ever met. And I saw myself as being a person that was really afraid and really risk averse and really admired, like how kind of wild I saw him. And so through these discussions about like fear and stuff, I think at some point I, in talking about what I what we wanted, I was like, you know, what I actually want is too, like on my deathbed not look back and say I protected myself, like I was prioritized protecting myself from fear or from bad feelings and missed out on anything highs lows all of it, like I want to die feeling like I drained the gas tank of this whole human experience thing. And that phrase became like our shorthand for when we either of us were scared to do something or we were trying to avoid an uncomfortable feeling or avoid an uncomfortable conversation. It was like this little like call call your bluff, like I thought, you want, you want the full experience, because this is it, baby, like this is it. And I remember, you know that we had separated for a period of time right before Miles died, and we were really trying to figure out what we wanted in partnership. We'd spent so many years of living apart and become so autonomous that we really had to like look at what parts of the partnership were still working. You know, it was a really non traditional partnership anyway, because of the distance, and that was you know, there were so many hard conversations. There were so many conversations where I was like, I can't believe that I'm that I have the courage to say this to a person. In the previous versions with me would have been so afraid of hurting someone's feelings that I just would have afford to this conversation forever. And I remember having this one conversation We're on the phone. It was probably only you know, weeks before he was coming back for our like big amazing reunion, and she was saying some stuff that was like really triggering to me, and I was feeling really jealous, but I was feeling really like threatened to thinking about other women that are prettier and cooler and of nicer teeth like that, you know, you know, and like I just remember feeling so many things, and he was like, full experience, isn't it. I was like, this is the most full experience. And we both ended up like screaming in the phone, just be like this is crazy, Like I feel wild you feel wild. This is so cool, Like this is like the height of like the craziest and I was just like whoa, Like we were like it was still a bad feeling, but we were like writing it like we're on some sort of like bronco it was. And I was like, fuck, man, Like this is to me what love is. This is like holding each father's hands, screaming into the emotional void and being like this is so scary, Oh my god, don't let go. And I was so proud of us, was so proud of us, And this is very get emotional because this is where like the fact that that he passed away so shortly after all of those big breakthroughs, it just feels like, oh man, like we worked so hard and we were right on this really cool edge and it was so exciting to see what was about to happen. And then he died and like you said, that's like we'll stop. It's so mind bogglingly unfair and unthinkable. Right, Like I feel like even with all of the years that I've done this work and as much as I rail about, like you know, the world is not a vending machine where you do all of the right things and you get rewarded like it doesn't work that way. And I hear that story and I'm like, God, damn it, you did the work right. Like to to be brave enough to tell the whole truth and hold hands while doing it and not get to have the reward of seeing how that unfolds is really not cool. It's really not cool, and it does like it messes with you. Yeah, you know, I think that if I was a person listening to me right and not living this experience, I wouldn't be tempted to be like, yeah, but isn't it cool that you experience that love? Because now you know it's possible to experience that love. Yeah, it's better to have loved like that than never to have known it, Like is it better to have their face and recognizable or because I'm about to put it in a new order, right, Like the things that we say under the guise of being helpful, just because we don't want to hold that person's hand and stare into the emotional abyss that some ship just happens and there is no reason and there is no redemption and there is no greater plan for it. It just sucks, like it is so difficult and as you described, exhilarating two stand there next to the abyss that just opened up in somebody's life and hold their hand and not look away from it. M Yeah, I was so struck by one of the most helpful things. And I tell this to like anyone I know who's love someone who now loses someone like this was just my experience, but the most helpful thing that a person said to me in those very early raw days, my friend Cammy, and she would just hold my hand or hold me and look me in the eyes and say, this is so horrible, this is horrible. She wasn't trying to make me feel better, she wasn't trying to distract me. She was like fucking like pissed and horrified, which was so validating because I was horrified and I was shocked and couldn't believe it, and like to have the reality of someone just saying over and over again again, this is horrible, this is horrible. Like it just brought me back to earth and made me feel like I was like in relation with a true human being, and that was so comforting. I would have never known that that's the thing you're supposed to say to someone who just lost something. Would it feel like the opposite? Yeah, it goes against everything that we've been taught, right, Like we think our job is to remind people of the good times, help them not feel so bad, you know, help them remember that life is still beautiful all of these things, and and time and time and time again. What I've seen and what I've lived and what I've heard is that somebody mirroring the completely destroyed world back to you is your anchor, like somebody looking you in the eyes and saying, what the hell right, because otherwise you think you've lost your mind? Right? And this I think you mentioned this actually a few minutes ago, about like what every human being wants is to be seen and heard and loved as who they are in that moment, right, and like that that includes holding hands with somebody at the ABYSS and calling crap crap. Yes, yeah, exactly. It's that mirroring. It's that like reflecting back and being like, you're not crazy, this is real, You're real. All of this is real. Yeah. So it's so interesting how regulating it is too, So get that kind of reflection back from another person. This is hereafter, and I'm your host, Megan Divine we've been talking with the immensely awesome Leon Padante. Let's get back to it. There are two things that I would love to talk to you about, and they're both fitness related. One is your own physical practice, and one is your professional presence in the world as a fitness leader and a fitness trainer and a community builder. So I think where I want to start here is that fitness has been a survival tool for you for a while now. You you've mentioned a couple of times that as a kid you were not into fitness. Like I have this image of you skipping Jim to go like smoke cigarettes back and the thing you're not. I think I'm older than you enough that in my day that would have been skipping school to go to the smoking lounge at the high schools, right, and like, so you take this you like you take this image of our young land, you know, too cool for gym class, and you went through an experience with disordered eating that brought you into physicality and fitness in a different way. Now I don't want to tell that story for you. I think where I'm going here again is like fitness as a survival tool is not new for you. That's a great way to put it, yes, right, but and fit like seeing the different sides of the fitness coin, both as a weapon against yourself and as a tool in support of yourself. I've experienced many of the variations of that too, So yeah, like you said, you know that the short version is like in my in my teens, I was I never thought about what I ate. I never thought about trying to move my body. I was just a poetry love in cigarette smoking whatever. And then, you know, out of nowhere, like truly seemingly nowhere, I started what I now realized that interact behaviors. I I started slowly stopping eating, I started exercising, I started over exercising. That transitioned into bolimia, and I just slid down this very fast, very steep rabbit hole into a just massive eating disorder. And that eventually, uh, you know, the rock bottom of that was after I was out of high school as a young adult, I tried to kill myself because I and I truly could not. I couldn't stop the behaviors and I couldn't keep living with the behaviors, and I did not know what other option I had, And so I woke up in a hospital, and that was the start of several years of kind of clawing back into a place of recovery. So I went through lots of therapy, lots of support, lots of groups, lots of trying a variety of medications tools, all of the things ended up in a place where I was feeling pretty stable again into my twenties. And then I, you know, I was like, gosh, what would it even feel like to exercise? If I even do a jumping jack, am I going to end up back in this hospital? Like I could not figure out if it was going to be so dangerous for me to even like touch that modality again. And so I went to the y m c A. And I went to like a step class, step aerobics clubs, and I was the youngest person there by like thirty years, And it was so joyful and it did not trigger at all any of the stuff that I had experienced by you know, grueling lee, trying to bust out as many colleges as I could on a treadmill. Instead, it was like it felt like church, It felt like a club, it felt like a party. And that's where I kind of caught the like fitness bug of Oh wow, there's this other version, this thing in which you come into a room, you made friends, you feel supported, you move to music, you celebrate each other's strength, and you leave with this like massive high. And so then the fitness became this whole other thing that started to really support my mental health instead of, you know, deteriorate it. So that's like the spectrum that I had really experienced that drove me to want to be the person who helped I want to help other people figure out that there's a good version of movement without them having to get to the hospital first. You know. That was that's my like driving mechanism in this world now, you know, yeah, I love I mean, being in bodies is so complicated, right like, because it's the seat. It's the seat of everything, right Like, it's the seat of disorder and trauma and fragile bodies that break with the you know, sometimes it's the slightest of touches, but it's also the seat of power, right And it really is about that ever changing relationship in there. And you fought really hard to understand fitness and physicality as a companion to whatever was going on in the world. So it makes me curious how your own personal practice of exercise and movement changed with Miles stuff. You know, I mean one of the first places that I tried to return to. It was almost a tandem. I went back to living, you know, quote normal normal looking, not normal feeling. But I went back to life rather quickly. I think within two weeks I was working full time again. And I also returned back to going to my gym spots, because that's where a lot of my community happened. You know, I needed to be seen by people, and it's happened in a lot of things were still in the COVID hybrid reality, so being in a space with real humans was like I needed. That happened. But after workouts was one of the times I would most frequently break down. I would finish a workout, I would feel amazing, I would have endorphins in my body. I'd be like, God, I finally feel it. Just got a glimpse of my real self, like we're reliefly, I'm still in there. And then I get my car, and then I would sob uncontrollably for along that took. And then I drive to work, and I work and I get a camera and then I get back in my car cry again. So, you know, I started to recognize that, like there was some part of the release that was happening that was releasing both the good things and it was releasing the hard things I've been keeping bay so that I could operate as a functioning member of society. You know, I'm still, I think, really changing my relationship with movement and figuring out what what means to change, because in the past six months, I started to have physical symptoms of grief, right. You know this As a trainer early days, I knew that, like chronic stress causes your body too massively change your all of your systems, your hormonal systems, your thyroid system, everything can go offline and go rogue and create some really interesting effects. And I knew that intellectually, and then I started to experience it, and I'm like, oh, what is this. You gotta be kidding me? Like, are you kidding me? I now get physical symptoms that tell me that I'm poisoning my body through stress and that the only fix for them is to be less stressed. Will solve all of your stress? Do I get to start having a period again? If I figure out how to be less stress, Like what it's it's uh, you know, it's very humbling. It's very humbling. Having a body is humbling. Yess. I'm like, I mean, I think you pull out so many good things here. One is like, there is something very powerful about sort of a continuation of the thread from before to after, right. Like one of the images that I that I really think about is, you know, there's a there's a bridge between life before and life now, and a lot of the work of the first years of grief is going back and forth over that bridge and finding out what parts of before belong in this life that I have now, right, and and going back to your body and going back to fitness and going back to community. It's like here, just as you said, Oh, but there's a piece of me. Wow, look like this still exists, and I'm arriving in a completely different starship than I was in last time I was here. Right. And also that piece about the physicality of grief, that's really something that we don't get prepared for, right, We just know, and honestly, I think I would have believed it. Like, I think that is one of the reasons that we have such a hard time drawing or embodying the truth of the connection between grief and stress, being held in our bodies, having a physical space is because like you do, like I just think it's a really hard sell. You're like, I understand that that might happen to some people, but that's clearly not going to happen to me. That's what I like. I'm so in touch with my body and I take really good care of myself. None of those things are going to happen. It's just like hello, welcome to your morning. Where everything hurts and it's it's not that bad. I mean, it's bad, but it's not that it's not so bad that I'm going to have physical change. Yeah, I mean, it just feels like it's it feels like a hard sell, and I think that, you know, that's one of the things that like I did this whole Trauma Life Coaching certification last year because I really wanted to understand more about like when we talk about trauma and when we talk about those systems, like what are we really talking about and what's the path, what's the approach like, because I feel intimately I have my own understanding of what trauma, PTSD, shock, all those things can feel like and I have zero idea about what to do with any of that or how you know, if there's any anything to do. So it was a very selfishly motivated thing, but also you know, I'm hoping that at some point I help another person in life. And yeah, I mean I think that like taking that course in tandem with trying to exercise and trying to grieve simultaneously was a really good reminder that, like your nervous system has a threshold, and whether it's stress from life or whether it's intentional stress from sprinting or boxing or working out, like your body has a threshold as to how much stress it can take. And we need to do some addition, some cumulative inventory of what's the ask that we're putting on our nervous system constantly, what's the refill that you're putting into that like parasympathetic nervous system to chill, Because if that math is off for a very long time, then it's like a cog gets thrown into the system like that. It's not great. And one of the things that I thought was so fascinating about all this kind of trauma framework was like that people who are under chronic stress or who kind of are in per long traumatized state, their window of tolerance for disruption or disregulation gets rather small, right, and their resources and physically this is a this is a neurological thing. Their ability to differ and move into the parts of their brain where they can think about long term consequences, where they can think about reason and weighing that cost benefit. All that stuff physically goes offline, and so what you get our impulse anger, you know, outburst or complete shutdown, no action, right, and to understand that as like a as a physical neurological response. Once you've kind of passed this window of threshold opens up the ability to experience other human beings with so much more understanding and so much more empathy, because it's it's not a moral thing. They're not a bad person with bad character and bad judgment. Their person operating from a system that is offline and they're only operating from those other systems of online And again, like intellectually that might be a hard thing to accept, especially because we really like the idea that people are good or bad. But what you're grieving and you see yourself, who you think of as a good person lose your ship at very bizarre, weird, not big deep things, then you can believe, oh wow, maybe there's something to this. And the road rage that I had in the immediate aftermath of Miles dying, I felt like I a completely different person. I have never, ever, ever, ever experienced anything like that. And I would be behind somebody at a red light and they wouldn't go, or somebody would haunk at me to go, and my body would flood with I mean like crazy, crazy thing, crazy thoughts, crazy reaction, and it was like, oh my god, here it is, this is it, this is And I'm not the only trumpatized person walking around l A. So like, once I experienced that, I was like, Wow, guys like guys as in humanity. I'm really impressed that we actually don't do more horrible things to each other, because I think there's a lot of us that are operating from this place. We're doing pretty good a good job not ramming your cars into each other all day long. Yeah, yeah, I mean, the impulse control, the executive dysfunction, you know, all of all of these things that we know from trauma studies. We know that the impact of these things affects every system in the body. It affects every system in the body. It affects relationships, it affects community webs it affects so many things. And it's not that the impact is wrong, right, There's nothing that the body does that's wrong. It's all like stimulus response, stimulus response. There's nothing that it that it does that's wrong. I think education knowledge talking about this stuff like this actually does happen. There's nothing wrong with you for having a very short fuse. There's nothing wrong with you for not being able to understand how to make change for a file live in the weeks and months after your partner or your sibling or your sister dies, or you have long COVID and your brain just doesn't work anymore. Like, there's nothing that you're doing wrong. Your body is trying to absorb the impact of something that is way bigger than it and and it's going to show up. Right. I love that you talked about like having some insight into other people's poor behavior. I always want to point out when we talk about this stuff that understanding your own or other people's poor behavior does not mean that we allow other people to be destructive or abusive or violent. You can have understanding and compassion and boundaries right around these things, and it's just it's a really important thing to understand that when big ship happens to you, it makes sense that you are impacted in very big and very comprehensive system wide ways. Right. One of the things that I that I really love up out your your style of teaching is that while yes, you absolutely understand these things differently since Miles death, from what I can see sort of looking back into your history as a community leader and a community founder and an instructor, is that encouraging people to have the full experience has been part of you for such a long time that from what I can see both from stalking your Instagram, there's that. But but in case people aren't familiar with Supernatural, you don't only get to do the workouts that have been created recently, like you have access to the entire archives of things, so there's a mix of timelines in there, and there are clearly some workouts with you that predate Miles death in the archives as Supernatural. So this is what I'm basing my my um you're amazing ideas on, but that like you seem to have had a very deep understand ending that exercise and moving your body and community is not going to fix what hurts for you. But the real path here is in listening to it and finding a related nous with it and making space for it. Right, And it's the same thing in the aftermath of trauma, is that the goal here is not to erase the evidence of damage, but to listen to the evidence of damage and to find out how do we how do we listen to it? How do I support myself? How do I understand that I'm operating on three out of twenty cylinders right now? How do I make that as kind and gentle, as connected as I can? Yeah? I love that. I think that's a really beautiful way to put it. That understanding of ourselves and of each other. It's like, you know, like you said, never trying to kind of say that someone's lack of impulse control or bad behavior is excusable or endorsable, but if the person experiencing it can understand it, Like like for myself, it was like, once I understood what was happening, I was able to experience like a moment of rage and not look at it like I'm a bad person, I'm losing my mind or like I'm right and the other person was wrong or whatever. I was able to look at it. Oh, there's a sign that you have maxed out, and it's time to like shut it down. It's time to get quiet, it's time to put on soft clothes, like whatever it is. It was just like everything has to get ten percent smaller, quieter, softer, like shut it down, shut it down, shut it down, you know. And I think that understanding, like demystifying what it is that's happening, is really helpful because then you can actually do, like do something that is helpful. Again, like I've always as a fitness instructor wanted people to hold all the spaces themselves because I like, by the time again I you know, I wasn't old by any stretch, but like by the time I started to try to run for the first time in my life, like I was, hey, I had fewteen years of smoking cigarettes under my belt, and I was, you know, almost thirty or thirty, and like I was never going to run you know, six minute mile or whatever. You know. It was just like what I expected out of myself was a different version than what somebody who had been a collegiate athlete was gonna expect to themselves. So like even at my most intense training the way that I talked to myself was had to be different and like allow in all of the past versions of Leanne who are also showing up today. And I expect that most people are showing up with a lot of past versions of themselves in their mind, in their body, And I think that's really complex. I think the biggest deal for folks that are showing up to exercise is like you've chosen to make space and time, and those two things are like the biggest currents you have as a human being and the most sought after, the hardest to fight for. And the fact that you have decided to take time for yourself, for your mental being, for your well being physically, for whatever it is that you came here to do for a break, Like that's such a big deal. If for the next five minutes all you do is sit on the floor, that's great. Like the fact that you chose it and that you prioritize your choosing of yourself. I think it's just something that's not done as much as I would like to see it done. Yeah, there's such invitation and permission giving in the way that you talk to your community. I was going to say the way that you talk to your students, but really your whole approach is that this is community, both in supernatural and the other things that you've created. My favorite thing that you've created is the Pleas Leap Bye dance parties. But like this invitation to come as you are and experience this space with other people who are also arriving as they are, and that we are all in this see together, learning to be present and move and show up and listen and wherever and whenever we can find ways to celebrate that. Right, Like, I just I feel like that's such a thread in everything that you've woven together. Yeah, totally. Building to that is a decades long process, right, of understanding the power of community, Understanding that piece about how difficult it is for people to receive and what happens when you create a container in which people can share the full experience with each other, right, where people can not only come together and feel supported and support others, but they can get that by being the real versions of themselves. Right. There's so much in the fitness world that's like you can do anything like all of this like good vibes, only positive everything, which is just a freaking lie man, like you cannot do anything, Like you're gonna do a lot of things, but you can't do everything, Like I cannot be president by the time I'm thirty five. I'm too old for that ship, so it's not possible. But like this that whole vibe in fitness culture about how everything is possible and you're stronger than anything you're gonna encounter. Like that we build people up with what is really a false narrative. This is not true. And so much of what you've built and helped to build is a community that tells the truth together right, and that we look at where our community members are and wherever they are, we celebrate that and see that right, and that we know that in turn, we're going to get seen and celebrated for wherever we are. Off. All I can do today is a six minute, low intensity, barely moved, My hands were got like I showed up, and I get to be seen and applauded for that. So like that kind of community that sees each other, it is a really powerful thing. And how did that kind of community, whether professionally or personally either intersect or change for you. When Miles died. I'm very much still trying to work in progress. Check back in a few years. I you know, I through through your experiences with grief, like you called yourself names, I'm sure you like yourself a lot of things that a lot of moments was hypocrite. One of them comes up a lot for me. That's that's a thing that I punished myself with. Tell me about that. Yeah, so that's really cool energetic by of giving and receiving and how important that is. I believe that. And also I'm not being very good at it. I don't think since my oles died, you know, I'm trying. I'm trying much harder now than I've ever tried in my life before to let people see the real, gnarly version of what's going on. But I have spent the past eighteen months very much protecting people from seeing the truth of how horrible and hard this has been for me. And I just feel like a big you know, shny for doing that. That's not the advice I would give to somebody else. I know that's not the way through this. Like I get it, I see it. Uh, it's just really hard to turn off. You know. It takes a lot of trust that like you're going to get your needs met. And I think there's this feeling of like I don't want to permanently be this version of myself, and if I let people see fully see this impermanent, this temporary version of me, they're gonna hold on. They're going to remember it for too long, like and it's like it's like this super I feel like it's superstitious almost. You're like, this will stick around longer, this is gonna last longer. I'm committing to this as a more permanent thing in my life if I bring other people into the fold. So I just need to be a silo, get through this as soon as possible, and then let people attach to the normal future version of myself. But I actually am gonna feel healthy end. Yeah, Yeah, I totally get that speaking about myself here, like as somebody who creates communities where people can tell the entire truth about how hard something is. And because they're allowed to tell the whole truth about how hard it is, they're not afraid to talk about any beautiful bits inside it because they know that they're allowed to say that there's you know, I had a really good day, or this was really funny, or this I had like this really beautiful thing happened. They know that this community isn't going to think like you're all better now, right, Like there's a trust that they've built up that that this is a really wide and deep experience and all parts of it are welcome, and that kind of trust in seeing and being seen. I'll speak for myself here as somebody who creates that for other people, accessing it for myself as very difficult. There's something about being a leader, right. I talked about this with my dad um several months ago. My dad is such a sweetheart. I think I mentioned him like almost every show, but I was talking about how hard it is to be the leader of my company, to be the one who has to make the decisions and look at the patterns and and manage this relationship and this like all of these things. And he said, Maggie, it's so lonely at the top being the leader, because you can't tell the truth about it to everybody else because it's not their job to know all of that. M And I feel like, you know, those of us who have been driven and private by necessity, right, private by necessity, I think describes a lot of people's childhood and young adult life, Like there was no safe place to take your hat off and show your snakes right because it was dangerous, And so you learn to be self reliant. You learned to be the leader. You learn to create containers for other people because that is where it is safest to show your awesome right and to suddenly expect yourself to become a participant when you have built your life around creating the container for other participants is a really big request of yourself. M It's a really big request of yourself. Yeah, Miles, always give me up a hard time because whenever I would get sick, cold, whatever, like, it was like you are the cat that crawls under the porch and like bites the hand of anyone tries to take the chance. I'm like, yes, like that, even if I just have a cold, I'm like, do you do not look at me until I am back to n Like, just let me wither and die in this bed for seventy two hours and I will come back to all of you humans when I feel okay. And it's like, you know, it's been very hard to shed that mentality during multiple now years of it's hard to keep that off. Yeah, it's really hard to keep that up. And it's not fair either. I mean, you know, being a silo unto yourself as a protective mechanism is a wonderful mechanism when it's needed, and it's hard to shake off when what you really need is to be held and supported. So one, I want to say that I see that it's it's it's a hard channel to switch. It's a hard thing to switch back forth. Two And I think the thing that I've had to look at is like something you said earlier, how what a hard time people have receiving and how much they like to give, Like refusing to let people help is actually kind of mean because they need to feel useful. They need to feel like they are loving you effectively and tangibly. Right, So this is really a work in progress around like I have some needs for privacy and slow pacing with how much how visible I want to be because it's it's a lot for me, And what are some ways that I can let in support that make you feel like you're really being a great friend and really being really supportive in a way that helps me feel like it is safe to fall apart a little bit like this is this is you know, not stuff that you want to have to do in a state of emergency. This is why I like, I love to have these conversations before you need them, but like being able to. I'd doneify the people with whom you can have those conversations about how hard it is for you to be seen, and then it's much easier to create a container where other people can be seen. And I would like to have a corner of that from myself, but I'm not sure how m right, Like, yeah, it's really really hard. It's hard stuff, man, Like all of this stuff, like the full experience sucks people, Yes, it really does. And it's awesome. Yeah, the only it's all of it. It's all of it. You know. There's a couple of people in my life who you know, I've now explicitly told like, hey, call me on it if you see me doing the thing and pulling the shell up and saying no, I'm fine, and you don't buy it, Like I need you to be a little bit of a bully because I have a little of a bully and stuff like I need you to match my stubbornness. And that's been really helpful. You know, That's like true. Like I wasn't feeling well someone was like, hey, I want to bring you soup. Don't say no, You're like, oh, well all right, yeah, okay. That reminds me of what you were saying about the road rage thing that instead of being like, oh, I'm such a terrible person, like I have anger management issues, to see that as a sign that your circuits have run dry. And I also like think about, you know, the times that I am more receptive to the active love of my community are when I'm like, you know, rested and I'm able to communicate about instead of just being braddy. And I love that that you've proactively gone into your people, the people that you know, not just like I'm just going to stand on the corner here and like mholland and just like let everybody care for me. No, I'm not going to ever happen, but like this like strategic use of you know how I am, you know what I do. When you see me doing that, please know that I actually can't get out of it without your help, so please help me. H. These are the kinds of commune unication relational skills that I really just adore. It's not about doing it correctly, it's about being awkward as all get out and doing it anyway. Yeah. Ah, intersections of personal and professional worlds and communication skills and trauma things and it's a lot, and it's like it's it's bringing all of this stuff back to right here in this moment. What is it that I hear myself saying? And what do I need? What shoes do I need to step into? Right? And not trying to have it all figured out, because it's not puzzle that has a solution right right, right, So we could we could seriously keep going for like several several several hours and maybe we'll do a part to another time. But I'm going to start wrapping us up with something that I ask everybody that's sort of the close to every conversation, because it's something that I don't know and that is a work in progress for me. So knowing what you know everything, the full experience of what you know, what you've lived, what you've built, what you're learning, What does hope look like for you today in this moment? You know, one of the things I've struggled with the most and ongoing since mile start is like, you know, like you mentioned before, all these pieces of your identity, all these pieces of your past self, You've become really unsure of what you are going to be able to reclaim become again. And you know, I have a job, I have a career, and I have like a identity. You know. One of my favorite parts of myself is as a motivator, as a like person like at the front of the room, at the top of your workout, like telling you you're wonderful and it's going to be great and we're going to do it together. And I've think that my purpose and the reason that fitness became this vector for me to really change my life in a lot of ways that I love, is that I'm pretty sure I'm here to be a massive, like positive impact in other people's lives. I think that's the only reason I'm here. Hope would look like having greater confidence that I am going to be able to do that in a way that I believe in a way that feels very very very true to me. I still do that. And when I talk about other people and what other people are capable of, I believe it's so damp hard. That's not that's not a hard part. What is challenging about having a role like I have is that my relationship with myself and my relationship with like the opinions I have about what I'm going to be capable of from here on out have really changed. And so I feel like I'm telling just a little bit of a lie when I try to think of how to help other people, you know, because I'm still very much figuring out and help myself. Hope would look like feeling like I can offer things to the world without this nagging sensation that I'm telling just a little tiny lie. Yeah, So hope for you would feel like you are in alignment with the medicine that you're bringing to the world. Yeah. Yeah, that the medicine is for you too, and that you're also taking it. Yeah right. I love that. I love that there's something personal to reach for inside hope for yourself. If grief has stopped me anything, I'm willing to bet but in that moment, arise and it's gonna look and feel really different. And now I think it's gonna look in that everything has been a surprise, and I'm guessing we're going to keep that. I'm going to keep that theme rolling for a little while now. Probably the theme of surprise is always it's always going to show up in a clown wig when you were expecting a three piece business. It's just it's what it's going to do, all right, my friend. Thank you for that. I'm so glad that we got this time together and that we got to sort of step out of the professional role for a little while and talk about the human being and living at the at the center of the gifts that we bring to the world. So thank you for all of that. I am going to obviously linked to Supernatural and some of the local l A events that you have going on for community building. Is there anything else that you want people to know or places where you want people to find you? Oh gosh, I'm I'm only internet um leanne Pidante. Yeah. I love being able to have real conversations about the real full experience and all of it's complexity and depth. So thank you for letting me do that here. And yeah, Supernatural is a wonderful place where a lot of those depth conversations are happening amongst our members. It's something I'm really proud of so I'd encourage people to come check that out to excellent. All right, everybody, we will be right back after this break with your questions to carry with you. Don't go anywhere each week, I leave you with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. You know what really struck me in my conversation with Leanne just how personal this one was for me. Without sharing a bunch of details that didn't make it into the show. Leanne and I have so much in common. Being widowed at a young age is a statistically small groups, so we have that in common. But our overlapping experiences just kept coming. It was like getting to speak a language I almost forget, I know, so that was really cool. I also really love how quiet she got when I asked her about hope. It's tricky, isn't it, reaching for something hopeful when you're not sure anything exists. May we all hope that the goodness we give to the world is medicine for us to What stuck with you today? What parts of today's conversation made you think or cry the way that doing these closing remarks does for me? What made you feel inspired to create movement that feels right for you. Everybody's going to take something different from today's show, but I do hope you find something to hold onto. Hope really is a crowdsource thing. Check out Refuge in Grief on Instagram or hereafter Pod on TikTok to see video clips from the show and leave me your thoughts about hope, or fitness, nor anything. Be sure to tag us in your conversation starting posts on your own social accounts. Use the hashtag here after pod on all of the platforms. That is how we will find you. We love to see where the show takes you. Everybody. Also remember to subscribe and leave a review, and share your favorite episodes with your friends. Those actions help more than you know. If you want to tell us how today's show felt for you, or you have a request or a question, give us a call at three to three six four three three seven six eight and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can find the number in your show notes or visit Megan divine dot c O. If you'd rather send an email, you can do that too. Write on the website Megan Divine dot c O. We want to hear from you. I want to hear from you. This show, this world needs your voice. Together, we can make things better even when they can't be made right. I want more Hereafter. Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues. As my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about that without cliches or platitudes or accidentally jerkish statements is an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, professional resources, and my best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay at Megan Divine dot c O. Hereafter with Megan Divine is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown. Co produced by Elizabeth Fossio. Logistical and social media support from Micah. Edited by Houston Tilly, who is just immensely patient. Music provided by Wave Crush and background Noise Today provided by Luna and The Leaf blow Are Spool