Hey, everyone, I Meg teets and this is sort of Awesome. Okay, hello, and welcome back Awesome's. You are listening to the show that is all about helping you be smart, strong, and social. We are in your earbuds every single week with all the awesome that you need to know. And you can also find us over on Instagram at sort of Awesome show or on Facebook and our sort of Awesome hangout group. This is episode one hundred and twenty eight of sort Of Awesome and I am so excited to welcome today's guest, Jen Hoffman. Jen has been cheering on sort of Awesome since we launched in the spring of two fifteen, and her support of our work and if our community has been priceless for all of you awesome who are listening right now. If you would also like to support our work, it's sort of Awesome as we continue to make the year of the awesome. We would love for you to join our community of listener supporters by going to sort of Awesome show dot com slash support. Don't forget that. What are the perks of becoming a listener supporter is occasionally you might get early access to episodes, you might get full length, un edited episodes. All of those episodes that we have shared with our supporters in the past are yours again. You can find out more details about how to sign up for this It's sort of awesome show dot com slash support. So yes, it's episode. I am so happy today to be joined by my very dear friend, someone who has taught me so much about my relationship with my body and has helped me to find the awesome about my body when it was really really hard to do that. So Jen Hoffman, Welcome to is sort of awesome. I am so be to be here. Thank you so much. We have so much ground to cover today. I cannot wait to dig into it. But for those of you who are not familiar with Jen's work, Jen is a total body and mindset nerd that's self proclaimed. I'm not calling her. She's a public account INTERNS certified personal trainer and a registered yoga instructor. She's also the founder of healthy moving dot Com. Jen's mission is to help people think healthy thoughts as they weave healthy moving into the fabric of their days, and when she's not teaching, she enjoys walking and homeschooling and family life. A very busy family life with her husband and her three beautiful children. So, Jen, we are going to dig in and really talk about what do we do, especially right here at the beginning of the year, but really throughout the year when we start getting bombarded with all of the messaging that our culture has for us about how we need to fix our bodies. We need to be leaner, we need to be younger, looking all of the things that we need to change about ourselves. I know you have some thoughts on all of that. Just yeah, we're going to get to that in a minute, But first, let's go ahead and start this show the way we always do with are Awesome. So the week, it's that moment in the show when we each share with you all about the books or the TV shows, the podcast, the music, whatever it is that's making our lives a little bit more awesome. This week, Jen, you gave me a little preview of your Awesome of the Week. I have to tell you, I am wildly fascinated by this. So first tell us what this thing is. You're Awesome of the week. Okay, my Awesome of the week is a crash pad. Now pad, a crash pad, That's what it's called the crash pad. Okay, let me tell you first how and kind of why I found this. Okay, So I have a son who is and I don't know, maybe this is more common than I realized with boys because I'm from a family of a girl and now I'm a mom of a girl and then two boys. But he has an energy and the best word I can use to describe it is very physical energy, Like he wants to be embraced in a hug. But he would love it if it was a hug while I was running a marathon, Like that's the best way to Oh my gosh, yeah, that's perfect, to just sit and snuggle. He wants that physicality, but it needs to be a dynamic hug. Okay. And it's I can never fill his cup. It's the need for this is boundless. So in the way of Facebook, always knowing exactly what you need to see, one day, this video popped into my feed. I think someone shared it, but it was about a school that had a sensory room, and I'm passionate about movement and education, so it piqued my interest right away. But this was a room for autistic children or children you know on this actrum who had sensory processing stuff in this room. I am an HSP like you. So part of the room looked completely overwhelming to me. And I give the teacher major props because there would be a lot of loud happening in the room, like balls throwing against the wall lights that like a wall light and stuff. But one of the things in the room was this crash pad. And it was a very quick video, no voice over or anything. It was just showcasing the room, and I was like, I saw the kids kind of crashing onto it. And a friend a while back had recommended a trampoline might be something to help with some of Max's energy, and it helps, but it can make the energy more if that makes we seem like it down plays the energy and fights can escalate quickly and all kinds of stuff, so amongst the siblings, So I was peaked. My curiosity was peaked because the crash pad is basically like a trampoline meets a foam pit if you've ever seen a phone, So it's like this kind of air mattress shape, but it's a sack that's filled with those foam chunks, like those foam pieces. So we put We have a little rebounder trampoline, so we put that in front of the crash pad. So he jumps on the trampoline and then he jumps into and I say he but I really should say wait, and we jump and you kind of crash on and then you're enveloped like it's like a hug is happening to you. When you land, it all closes in around you. And I'm telling you, it has been phenomenal for him and the siblings are getting along really well on it. We've used like my husband and I we lay the kids on one end of it. We have the big one. They come in, we have the big one. We line up the kids and then he and I will trust fall onto it so then they like pop up in the air a little bit and we'll all laugh, like, so what happened is it's expend I will say that it's an expensive thing, but it has been so worth it. We've only had it since Christmas. My mom wanted a multiple sibling big gift, so she is the one. Nana gets all the props for making it actually happen in our house. But we have a big room that I usually record in, so the crash Pad lives in there and they all three. Sometimes they'll just lay on it, like not even jumping. They'll just lay and you know, read a book on it. But it's kind of like it's similar to how a bean bag would like close around you, but it's multiple sensory levels and I'm telling you it's helping him. I find it so relaxing. We got it on Christmas Day and we had a whole bunch of people over for Christmas, and all the adults laid down on it and everyone was like cut water Betty feeling with how it like deforms underneath you it if you, I don't think Max has specific sensory processing. He just has sensory needs. I think hs can be different needs right like you. I think he had a little bit of what I have, but he just has different input needs than me, and he is different all day long because of it. So amazing. That's like awesome maybe of the year or of his whole childhood exactly. And also, if you want to be the fun house, since it's been the holidays, we've had tons of people in the house. If you want to be the fun house, get one of these, because nobody has one and everybody loves it. Everybody. All the kids are like, yeah, we want to go play at the Hoffman House. So so bonus, totally. I love that. Well, you texted me the link to it, and I started looking at it and reading about it, and I was like, well, I think I know what the twins are getting for their birthday. Their birthday is next month. There are five lots of big energy gin to five year old boys. It's a lot of energy. There's already so much jumping, I know, and so many of the things though that like are supposed to get energy out. I feel like, for at least for mine, it's like fills the energy wind. It's like he needs more. Yes, this is not that. This is like it brings the energy down a little. Oh my goodness of this could be a life changer for lots of us. So I cannot wait to hear how it goes over in other houses. So good, so good. Okay, Well, my awesome of the week this week is no surprise, a new podcast that I've been listening to. The podcast itself isn't new, it's well into its second season. It is the found podcast. It's actually hosted here on Wondering one of the Wondering podcast We're part of the Wondering Network as well, and I had not heard of this podcast. Bit last week in our Awesome of the Week thread, somebody mentioned that they had been loving this podcast Found and so I checked it out because they said it was kind of like almost like there's a little mystery dissolved, similar to the give Let Show, Mystery Show Which May It Rest in Peace. It was like some of the best audio ever. So I was like, well, I love mystery shows. I'm gonna check this out. It is so fantastic. So the concept for the show. It's hosted by a man named Dakie Rothbart and he is kind of obsessed with found notes, like little found pieces, scraps of paper, and he's been collecting these for years. He turned it into like a magazine. This has been years ago, but he would like people would send him their submissions, he'd feature them. Sometimes after a note was featured, they would like the people who had written the note or the who had found the note. There would be connections made and like you would get to find out the rest of the story of what happened with you know, yeah, totally the whole story behind these notes, and so Davy Rothbart has turned this whole concept into a podcast, and it really is. I mean, it's that same thing I like, here was a note, Here's the story of where the note was found, kind of gives you the background on the note itself, and then he does the work of tracking down like who wrote this and what happened, like where's the rest of the story. So if you would like to check it out, I would suggest so all the way back to the first full episode it's called Asian Oprah and give it a listen. You will know by listening to that episode if this is your style of show, if this is a show for you or not. He explores the idea of somebody found a note in a parking lot of a production company in Los Angeles, written by a guy who was pitching himself as he could be the next Oprah, but he was going to be the Asian Oprah, and where the story goes from there. I'm telling you, Jen, this will not surprise anybody you or anyone who knows me. I was totally in tears by the end because the story takes a big turned from what you think it's going to be. But where it goes is very amazing and very awesome. So is it like a gimlet podcast where they're bringing in audio from other like bits and pieces of the story, So like a very produced kind of telling of this story. Yes, it's very well produced, that's true. And it is that same. It's like an audio narrative. So he takes you on the journey through the whole episode and definitely like the you know, there's hits and misses. He kind of takes you along as he's trying to solve you know, what's going on, and it brings an audio from his talks with people along the way. Oh it's so good. It's so good, I can't wait. A highly highly recommend. And if you do like it, there are lots of episodes that would make a great binge if you're needing something to keep you busy as you're going about all of your business here in January. So highly recommend found podcast again. It's here on the Wondering Network. You can find it wherever you listen to your podcasts. So alright, those are our awesomes of the week. Just a reminder that every single Friday, in this sort of awesome hangout group, we open up the floor for you all to share your awesomes of the I find myself heavily influenced by these every week, Jaid. If you're not part of our community on Facebook, but you would like to be, you can find us by going to Facebook dot com, slash groups slash sort of Awesome hang Out, Hey Awesome. So is going to be a pretty awesome mirror for me and my husband Kyle. This June, we are celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary and we will have so much fun remembering everything that went into planning our wedding. But I can promise you that one thing we did not love was setting up our wedding registries because, oh my goodness, it was so overwhelming for both of us. I'm so happy that the sponsor for this week's episode is sort of Awesome is Zola. No one knows better than Zola what couples are looking for in a wedding registry, including how to fight the overwhelm. That's why Zola dot com provides couples with a great starter guide and features registries of real couples and all of their interesting picks, like Happy Campers Melissa and Quentin, who added a role links samsoniteduffel bag to their registry, or minimalists Kate and Josh, whose registry includes a collection of beautiful organic cotton Turkish towels. I've spent enough time creeping through the registries of lots of couples to know that Zola dot com is super easy to use and is filled with features for couples, including a group gifting option for guests to contribute to, and couples can also personalize the registries with photos and notes about the gifts on their list. When you create a registry on Zola, you can also use their top rated app for iPhone and Android to manage your registry on the go. Is going to ring the wedding bells for you or someone you love, You have to check out Zola in fact awesomes. To sign up with Zola and receive a fifty dollar credit towards your registry. Go to zola dot com slash awesome. That's Zola, z o l a dot com slash awesome for fifty dollars towards your registry. Thank you Zola. All right, Jen, I cannot wait to dig in and talk about some of this stuff you know here I'm sort of awesome. We are calling this, we are declaring it the Year of the Awesome, and we're spending the first part of the year breaking down the Awesome Manifesto. I talked about this last week. Kelly and I had a really long conversation about this last weekend episode seven. If you haven't listened to that, go back and listen just so you can kind of get an idea of what we're talking about. That we are declaring this is the Year the Awesome. We are going to take our awesome that we already know is within each of us, and we're gonna move out into this world that is in desperate need of some awesome. And we're going to start though, by talking about how do we first before we go out to sprinkle and spread awesome around wherever we go, how do we make sure that we're taking care of ourselves so that we are fully equipped and fully prepared to be awesome to the people around us. So we're really focusing in in January on taking care of ourselves. A huge part I think I have come to realize through the years of caring for ourselves is examining and looking at where we are in our relationship with our bodies? Where are we doing great in our relationship with our bodies? Where do we need to find some healing? There's so much there, you know, Jen, Laura and I just put together the My Body Connection series on Smartest Person in the Room where this came up over and over that you know, the connection, that there's so much connection that we don't even in our culture especially, begin to scratch the surface of between who we are as people and how we think about, view, and treat our bodies. Now, this is totally your, your area of expertise, the focus of your teaching, but I want to start let's back up a little bit. I would love to hear you kind of trace the story of how you went from so you were a c p ant moved into becoming a yoga teacher. But then I know somewhere along the way you pivoted towards this more sort of holistic view of movement and how important it is for all of us. Can you just kind of traice that story for us a little bit? Sure? So let me first just say that because of an injury when I was a child, when I was five years old, I was run over by a car and thankfully. It was a serious injury, but obviously I'm still here and I moved pretty well, so all at all, it was pretty good. But my leg, my left leg was broken in eight or nine places, and I had a cast from my toes to my hip for much of a year. And this was you and I share a birth here, Yes, love and life at forty. So this was thirty five years ago, and at the time physical therapy wasn't as prominently recommended as it is today. So when my cast came off after a long time of having a cast, like we have pictures, my left leg was tiny compared to my right, like all the muscles had atrophied and everything. But it was just like, Okay, the cast is off, You're good. And I adopted then a gate cycle, a walking cycle that did not serve me well long term. I didn't know that was the problem. And but what happened is I threw out my entire childhood and adolescence had multiple problems. The car went specifically over my ankle, but I had stressed fractures up my leg, but my left ankle it would give out when I was trying to do physical things. I had sprained ankles so many times, like I was on crutches so much, and it caused this, there's no other way to say this negative body image. That I didn't feel like my body allowed me to do the things that other kids did, and any attempt at doing physics, cool things, sports, exercise, anything made me feel worse about my body, like none of it drawed me in. It always ended up in me feeling like I don't have a body like everybody else. I'm stuck. There's nothing I can do. This is just how I am. And I always said because of this accident, because of this accident, because of this accident, I mean, that was the story that was my body story. And then at the end of college and as I was beginning my career in public accounting and working like eight hour orders week and you know all the demands that came with that, I physically was getting worse and worse, Like even though I hadn't been a sports person, I had been active, but then I stopped having activity in my life and started spending my life sitting at a computer. And it really started at the end of college and then got worse as I started. My stress level went up. I was having more pain, I wasn't feeling good and someone suggested yoga, and it felt different enough to everything I had tried before that I was willing to dip my toe in the water. And it was the first time my matt was the first time where I felt good about what my body could do. And it was a kind of movement that didn't put demands on the parts of me that were weak and helped me find parts of me that were strong. And that was the beginning of me feeling differently about my body. But what would happen is, and I'm sure anyone who does yoga on a regular basis, you feel so great right after you feel great physically, you feel great mentally, and then like a day later, those benefits are gone. It doesn't stay with you. And so for a few years I was in the cycle of telling myself that I just wasn't doing enough, Like the pain is coming back and you're stressed because you're just not doing enough yoga. You need to make time more yoga. You need to be on your map for an hour every day, and you know I and then I started slipping into this, well, I'm not getting all the benefits because I'm not doing enough and we all know that telling ourselves we're not doing enough is really bad. So I really had a period of slipping, like the yoga stopped even in the moment being as beneficial. And there's a whole weird layer to that, in my opinion, but that I stopped getting all the benefits because of the story I was telling myself, and so I wasn't fully in my body in the moments that I was even taking care doing this self care. Wow, so that's that my body connection, Like that's huge, because to look at you from the outside, anyone would have said, I mean, there's somebody who's fully connected. She's doing an hour more yoga a day. I was teaching like nine classes a week, and I was getting benefit, and I believe I was giving benefit to the people who were around me, but it wasn't. And I would hear regularly the same thing from them that I always was telling myself is that they felt so great after class, and then they would go to their job and the next day, by the end of the day, the shoulder tension would be back. And so I started to kind of have this realization that I needed to think about this differently. The first thing that happened is I went to a workshop with an amazing teacher who has since become a very close mentor and friend, Judith Hanson Lasseter. She's one of the top teachers in our country. And she heard my story in a workshop with like a hundred people, and we just like you know, those times where you just know you're connected. She really helped me. But what she said to me, she put her hands on my shoulders. I was sitting in a circle where like the whole workshops around me and were like workshopping on my issues, my injury and all that stuff. She put her hands on my shoulders and she said, I don't think it's the accident that's creating this problem. I think it's the way you learned to walk and continue to walk after the accident. And like, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I almost came out of my body and was watching that conversation happy, like realizing that this was a seminal moment in my life where things were going to change from here because maybe that one thing didn't define me, but my every day defined me, and that there was hope in choosing a different every day. And so she started working with me on my gate She started working with me on my gate cycle, and I realized, I've been walking on my toes for twenty years, not quite twenty years at that point, but for a long time, and that if you walk on your toes changes the whole structure of your ankle, your legs, your knees, your hips, everything. And so as we started to peel that back then, I started in my classes realizing I needed to help people with what they were doing throughout their day, that it was the same thing with neck and shoulder tension for people who were hovered over their computers all day or you know, all of that stuff. That I needed to figure out how to bring movement into their lives. And at the same time, a whole body of research started coming out about the limitations of exercise when it comes to canceling out our sedentary time. And news flash, your exercise doesn't cancel out your sedentary time. So I had this epiphany really around the time that I was pregnant with my first child, that with my daughter, that I needed to figure out how to help people have less sedentary time while still living the life they were living in that moment, because everybody who I knew at the time who was talking about decreasing sedentary time was like, you need to spend less time at the computer. And I was still working at Price Waterhouse Coopers at the time, and I was like, Yeah, that's not possible. This is my job, this is how I put foot on the table. I have to do this, and so I wanted to find a way to blend that. So that's really where I came to this epiphany. I remember I wrote down in my journal one day there's this expression that floats around. You might have heard it before, that the physical benefits of exercise are overestimated and the mental benefits of exercise are underestimated. And then I wrote in my journal a statement after that, but the physical and mental benefits of movement are all underestimated, and that there is this difference between exercise and movement. And I really wanted to pursue that, not to say not to exercise, especially because I really think mentally and emotionally and spiritually we need that, but to just try to help do something in addition to that that didn't cause people to have to completely overhaul their life and their work. So that was a pretty big pivotn to move away from like an exercise mentality to how do we incorporate movement all day in the radical change that makes in our experience of life absolutely And what also was happening at the same time for me is that so the numbers for people who actually follow through so like in a gym setting, it's like less than the people who are paying for a membership actually show up. And like that gives me like a gut punch, because do you know what happens every time someone's balancing their checking account statement and they see the gym membership but they know they didn't go, Like a really bad thing happens. And I concurrently to this belief that we needed to overhaul how we were moving our bodies. I was having this realization that how we think about all of this stuff, our mindset is absolutely critical because it all begins. I love the I can't remember where I first heard it, but that our emotions and our thoughts, Our feelings and our thoughts create our actions. We act based on those, and that if we want to act differently, we really have to start with how we're thinking and feeling. And that the delta between the people who pay and stick with a movement or exercise program is really the people who do it. They have a different mindset, but no one like I don't know, maybe now I haven't looked in a few years, but when I first decided that I wanted to have a movement program that also focused on mindset, no one else was doing that. Like every fitness program was all about do it this number of times a day, and no one was helping you think the thoughts that it would create that And so I just got passionate about helping people. That's why I say I'm a mindset and a move meant specialists, because I started just I spend as much time researching exercise science and physiology and kinesiology and biomechanics as I do mindset because I know that if I don't help people shift their mindset, they aren't going to stick with it, and that that fall off that don't stick with things, they're my jam like I want to find those people. I want to help those people because I know that even though we're talking about this in the context of right now, we're talking about this in the context of our own health and wellness and our own bodies. What you're talking about this month and sort of awesome. Is really what I'm interested in helping people change is that I know that what you bring to the world absolutely requires you to feel fully and passionately connected with yourself physically and to really love yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally. And that is no easy feat With all the messaging that we have, it's really not. It's easy to talk about how awesome it would be if we could do that, but when the rubber meets the road and you're actually taking that even just before you can put it into practice, like really just kind of getting meta with yourself for a little bit and thinking about how you think it's hard work and sometimes really emotional work too, to really dig in and impact some of this. In my coaching program, I do a weekly mindset practice, and one of the ones that's been the most powerful for people is I gave them the intention that they were willing to fail. Because every week I give an intention, and I say, you need to have an intention of I'm willing to fail because so much like nobody realizes that that desire to do everything perfectly is at the heart of why they don't finish so many things, because they just say, if I can't do it perfectly, then I'm not. So I give a daily challenge exercise. So many people, if they don't do one day, the next day they're like, oh, I already fell off. So I'm not like, I'm already not going to do it, and we don't think about how the thoughts were thinking. I call it the programming. The mental programming we're having is creating us, creating the playlist of what we do. And if we don't start looking at that, and it's all happening faster than fast subconsciously and we aren't paying attention to it, so we have to just start kind of peeling that back. Absolutely. Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the messaging, some of the what we have already programmed into our brain. Some of it because of family of origin stuff, because of the careers that we've chosen. There's a variety of reasons. But some of it's just because we were standing at the checkout at the supermarket a little too long and we were reading the headlines, yeah, which you know this time of year. Truly, I went and even looked at some of the headlines on some popular women's magazines right now, and it's things like how to finally get rid of your love handles, and even things like how Sharon Stone makes fifty nine look like forty five. Just like whatever you know, wherever you are in life, there's probably you don't have to look far to encounter a negative message about something about yourself. So when you encounter this messaging, like, how do you respond after you've been doing this for years and years and years? I have a very quick but it's a practiced thing. It won't happen overnight. But it is like when you hear that message, immediately follow that headline in your mind with and that will make my life better because blah blah blah blah blah. And if you cannot answer that question really quickly, and and when I say it will make my life better, like really like the love handles? Okay, so honestly, how will that change how you love people, how you do your job, how you do your And if you can't answer that question, then ignore that message. But if the article is five ways to get more sleep at night, well, how will that make my life better? Oh? I'll be more arrested, I'll be more like it works positively. So what I always ask people is the question what do you really want? You want to be calmer with your kids. You want to have more energy, like I loved the energy discussion last week. You want to have more energy to do your work. You want to be able to focus better. You want to like, what are the things that will really move the needle for you to show up fully and to give what you are here to give. And if you can't answer that, And I know people because we have so many layers to this. So if I'm first working with someone and they say I want to get rid of these love handles, and I say, okay, tell me how that will make your life better, Well, I'll feel better about my body and then I'll be able to do that. Why will you feel better about your body? Like? Really keep peeling it back? And I'm not saying, like I tell my students all the time, posterior strength, glute strength, developing a stronger backside is something I'm hugely passionate about because it's really important for your knee, back and pelvic floor health. It's absolutely important. I could care less what your butt looks like. I don't care. I don't care. I care. Can you stand with a vertical leg is your sacram and healthy alignment so that your peblic floor supported. Like, let's peel back and figure out why you might want the thing, because it is only the deep and true why that we can connect to and commit to. It's we have to understand that, or else it's shallow. It doesn't mean anything. And then because it doesn't mean anything, we are in a tract to doing it and showing up for that goal on a regular basis. And then when we don't show up for that goal on a regular basis, then we're like, I have no willpower, I'm horrible, I can't do it. And it feeds this. Really, it is this. I call it one of life's great paradoxes. Like unless and until, we're doing it because we truly love our body right now, right now, we say I love everything about me, and I want to do what's best for this vessel that I've been given. We won't show up for it, and any attempt to show up for it will only undermine us, It'll only take us further away from that. I love that. I think you're so right. It is the paradox. We're chasing this elusive thing of like if I could only get into this size dress, you know, then I would just be so happy. And so we continue to shame ourselves, or even if we aren't, some of us definitely actively shame ourselves. But even if we're not even know, we're just kind of whatever. Then you're so right. We have not connected to that internal driver that's going to help us continue to show up for what it is that we really want and really need. But I say, those deep ones and needs their magnetic like we don't have to have the willpower because they just pull us toward them. Like if we just focus on what it is we really want and we really need. Like if you're staying awake at night watching you know, your Facebook feed, and you know I need to go to bed, If for a moment you say what do I really want from my day tomorrow? It's so easy to just shut off the phone and go to sleep. Like it's that the reason you fall away from it is that you're not paying attention to that deep need. I believe we are wired two want what's best for our body, and we don't need any external number. We don't need a number on a scale, we don't need a number on our clothing. We don't need a waste circumference. We don't need any of that that. If we just pay attention to how we're feeling and moving and where we have our energy and what our mood is like when we do X and all of that stuff, it'll take us all the way home. Maybe we don't need that extra stun Awesome's is eighteen, the year you plan to get serious about your future. I'm so excited to tell you about Mission You, a sponsor for this episode of sort of Awesome. Mission You is an education for the twenty one century. This when your program gives you the skills and experience you need to launch a successful career in data analytics, with skills that can be applied to any career. Mission You offers education with no upfront tuition costs or high risk loans, and it provides an environment that's uniquely immersive, collaborative, and efficient. Mission You is a full time commitment for one year that includes experiences with real world companies like Spotify, Ubert Worthy, Parker, and more. 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That's Mission you dot com slash awesome to learn more were about Mission You and get five upon your completion of the program. Thank you, Mission You. And I think that this is so helpful because some of this need just like a starting place, like what does this even look like? I don't know how I've you know, there may be a lot of people who are listening, both men and women who are thinking right now. I can't even imagine what it would be like to say I fully love my body the way it is right now. Okay, so great starting point. Okay, good, Yes, let's get started. It's going to be a shocker. Okay. The starting point is whatever hurts right now. And here's the thing. Most people think, Oh, well, I have all this neck and shoulder tension, or I have this back pain, I have this hip pain, I have this public floor problem. It's the thing that makes me not love my body. Okay, But what if it's the thing that's drawing you home to your body? Like what if the thing that hurts right now? So I love the idea of resistance, like the War of Art Stephen Pressfield, Yes, and he talks about resistance. But one of the things I've been trying to reframe in my own mindset is that what if because he kind of labels resistance as this evil thing. But sometimes I think resistance is the thing that's pulling you to the better path. So we encounter this pain, or we encounter this thing, and we think this is keeping me from but what if it's drawing you to So what if it's pulling you to a new thing? I think our body specifically, we can trust that when it sends us a signal positive or negative, that that's something we should pay attention to, that it's something that's a sign that your body is working perfectly. That what if it's like, instead of it being of this is my body failing me, this is my body not helping me, what if it's, oh, my body is letting me know that I need to pay attention to something that I'm not paying attention to. What if it's gently pulling me to a different path. And I say, like, our body sends us messages, and when we don't pay attention to those messages, it sends us warnings. And when we don't pay attention to those warnings, it goes into full on crisis. Like it's a path not to shame ourselves or say oh, look I got to this place, but instead to just say, oh, there's a deep need here that I have missed, and I'm going to start paying attention. One of the things I love about doing small movement throughout the day is that it's easy to do and it gives us I don't know if you remember when I first started working with you, we had a conversation and I was like, okay, let's do this one thing. Do you feel that that is your body right now coming to attention. Those are your muscles saying, oh, you asked something of me, I'll do them. And when we have a message over and over that our body is failing us, but we can do one small little movement where we see it actually shows up the second we ask it to. Because that is true about our bodies, that when we put ourselves in the position and put ourselves in certain positions that we haven't been that the body will say, okay, I'll respond to that. I'll come to attention and I'll work and like simple exercises where you can feel. I'm not about overnight change and instant results and lose ten pounds in two days, but I am about getting you quickly into your body and feeling something happen. Yes, that can happen in a moment, And when that happens, that's the beginning of the shift that how you think about your body. Because the goal to lose ten pounds in one week and not make that happen, that makes us feel worse about our body. But if we can see that, our body responds to the requests we make and the demands that we put on it. It starts this positive train. It's what happened to me in the beginning on the mat like when I saw that my body would be able my body, which I had so identified as it's not able to do any of this stuff, when I discovered that there were things it was able to do. And hear me, now, is your body going to be able to do every single thing that the person next to you body is going to be able to do. No, but you discovering what your body is capable of, and you discovering that you can communicate with it to discover what those are. That's the beginning of not in my opinion, not just positive body image, but self love. Like it's the foundation. If you don't have that, if you don't have that body connection, like I shared at the beginning of Christmas on my Facebook page at the beginning of the holiday season, I shared, I want everybody to have an intention where they just say I love myself, Like force yourself to say I love myself, look in the mirror and say I love myself, and I love that. And I think it's an a super fantastic practice. And everybody should do it. It feels awkward, and the more awkward it feels, the more you should do it. Yeah, I agree so much. You have to believe it when you say it. But I always want a couple that with giving you tastes of what it feels like to love yourself, and that happens physically. Like if you think about how attraction happens in relationship with other people, it can happen the same like physicality to our love of our body is really important. It's so important, and I love that you really emphasize sometimes you just need that little taste, that little spark. I do remember that moment, Jen, when you were coaching me and I was, you know, had gone through this difficult pregnancy with the twins. It was a very painful. I mean it wasn't just like mentally difficult. It was a very physically painful stretch of months, Especially towards the end. I was in so much constant pain in my hips and back that I spent a lot of time just in bed I wasn't on mandatory bed rest, but I just couldn't even Yeah, I had like tiny little snippets of time when I could actually get up and move and it was just chronic, constant pain. And so I went from that to then now I have two infants, and I was nursing them in in a lot of ways, I just like with the a long phase of just like I didn't know what else to do besides disconnect from my body because there was so much going on with my body that I just felt like I would just completely melt down if I even tried to, Like I felt like I couldn't even get close to connecting with my body. And so you do that for long enough, and even if the actual physical pain is gone, and you know, I had weaned the twins, and you know, was kind of trying to like, okay, now how do I get back into my clothes again? Type things? But I couldn't even fathom how I could even get close to that connection. Like you said, sometimes it's being guided into one movement where you feel your muscles engaged and they do snap to it tension, and you're like, oh wait, I think I remember this. My body actually can do things. My body actually is you know, eventually down the road, I could say my body actually has done some really amazing things. Yes, but for so long there was like a barrier there where I couldn't even imagine making that initial connection. And we think, because again our culture or whatever we think about like exercise and working out, we think we have to start with like this big grand thing, like a huge, big movement or a big commitment, when the truth is that's not where we have to start. We can start with just one spark, one moment. I love that you said the barrier because one of the things that I talk about with people is that we are not staying in the same place with respect to our body. We're either getting closer or further every single day. So when you talk about that barrier, every day you are either putting bricks on it or you're taking them off. So there's no demolition crew going to come around and hack the whole thing down for you. There's no solution that does that. I know that is disheartening in a culture where we want that. We want the quick fix, the overnight, we want the wrecking ball to tear that down. But that's just not how it works. What we have to do is every day step closer more fully into ourselves, or else we're going to step further. That barrier is going to get more or less bricks every single day, and so the choice is just am I going to put them on? Or am I going to take them off one at a time, because it doesn't happen like even though the pregnancy with the twins for you was this big thing, and even though my accident for me was this big thing. There are these seminal things, but it's really the culmination of the moments within the days that created that. It's not one moment. That wall doesn't get built in one moment, and it doesn't get torn down in one either, And so we have a choice in I going to take a little step toward I'm sure if any of the awesomes have heard me before, they're probably like, oh, she's gonna say her favorite expression, because I say this all the time. But small hinges swing big doors. I have this collection on my computer of big doors that I gather where I can see the hinge. Because even though you can only pull one brick off at a time, the beautiful, wonderful paradox, another paradox for us is that you don't have to tear the whole wall down for your entire life to shift. You don't. You can have big changes from those little steps. You just have to be more aware and cognizant. Like I've been doing this for a while, and thankfully to all the amazing students who have allowed me to work with them. I know for a lot of people what those little steps are really quickly, and I can help guide people to that quicker. But you also know if you can start getting in touch with your intuition. When I talk to people, I say like, if if you had to say, what the first thing you need to address with your health and wellnesses that will make everything else easier? What is that first thing? Most people who I talk to if they're not getting sleep will say sleep, Like sleep is you know the you guys did a great episode on that, remember if it was a bonus episode or it was a full sort of esome with Kelly and I talked it all about it, Yes, and you know that is like ground zero. And I love to help people with figuring out how what you're doing during the day and how you're moving during the day. I pacts your sleep and all that kind of stuff. So I know that you know, if you had to ask yourself right now, what is the one area that I need to pay attention to first, and I say, pay attention to the pain, pay attention to the resistance. Let that because that's the that's the little hint that's going to swing the big door. And if you can reframe how you're thinking about that thing, what if the fact that you're having trouble sleeping at night it is really your body's invitation, Like it's not something wrong with your body or something negative about your sleep or how you I've always so many people identify I've always been a terrible sleeper. I've always struggled with And that message is really different than oh wow, maybe my body is responding to sleep this way because I need to make some shifts that will make everything about my health better. Like can you feel the difference between those two things? And how does doing all this stuff when you feel like I'm at war with my body and my sleep whatever, how does that feel compared to, Oh, my body and I are in this journey together to unpack what's creating this situation so that every aspect of my body can be healthier. Like it's just it's the basis, and we have to make that shift. That is so good and so helpful. Jan thank you for taking this really big idea and translating it down into like where do we start. We've been talking about intuition a lot. It's come up several times once we're of awesome. Lately in our bigger culture, I think more and more people are really starting to tune into this really ancient idea, tuning into our intuitions. And I think that that is a brilliant starting point for so many of us who are listening to your wisdom right now, thousands and thousands of people have tuned into your mission in your work at Healthy Moving, for people who are like I need more of this in my life. Tell us more about where we can find you, first of all, and kind of like what would some next steps be. I have Healthy Moving dot Com is my home base, but I live where a lot of people live on Facebook. That's right, Facebook dot com, forward slash Healthy Moving, and there I try to share some of the simple small hinges, you know, the simple tips. So if you go to that page, go to the videos, there's one for like if whatever your entry point, I told you to pay attention to your resistance, like if it's back pain or hip pain, there's a video for that. There's if you're having neck and shoulder pain, there's a video for that. I can give you some links to put in the show notes for some of these specific ones, but start with choosing one simple thing. And I also have mindset stuff there in the videos as well, because the exercise and the mindset has to go together. If you set yourself I just want to say this very quickly, if you set yourself a goal to change something about your exercise or your movement routine this year, if you're trying to do a challenge, if you're doing anything, please please please please please tell your like say, I am going to support my mindset shift along with this, and make a plan for yourself for how to do that. I have tons of free mindset stuff on the Facebook page. But you can't do one without the other. And I don't want you to slip and then start this negative mindset stuff. So really commit to focusing on both. But start with the thing, and it can be a mindset thing. Like if you think your first thing is that it just feels like it's too much, Like that's what a lot of people feel like, it's too much. I have stuff on my page about that, like if you go to I think you can still search pages. I never Facebook is always making changes. But if you moving or if I'll put some stuff for you in the show notes to make and for the hip and back stuff and the neck and shoulder and you know, mindset, small hinges, all that kind of stuff. But pick your thing, and if you want my support with it, we'll have links for you. But it doesn't have to be me. It can be any tool that you've found yourself. I believe your intuition will guide you to the resources that you need. So just pick that small thing and start there. It will take you all the way home. This is so important to me, and I'm so honored that you would come and spend time talking about this today, because I genuinely, in my heart of hearts, believe this is the time for us to embody what we call the awesome, but to embody a loving and gracious and even almost to the point of being like bringing a message of reconciliation and coming back together in our culture. And I believe that we are the people to do that. I have no doubt in my mind that this is the time for us to embody all of this. But truly I know because of the journey I myself have walked. I know that to embody something good to put out into the world, you have to have connected with your own actual physical body, your own body that you are dwelling in the vessel that we are using to take this good out into the world. We got to start here. So Jen's seriously truly, you're like I said at the top of the show, You've been a dear friend of mine for years, but this means so much that you would come and share this wisdom with us so that we can be better equipped as we move forward into this year. So thank you so much, and thank you for leading a great work of restoration that you are leading with your people. Meg. I'm so incredibly it is my joy. I love watching you do this and the awesome's Like I know they say it all the time in the Facebook group, but like I can't even You are a magnet for amusing people and I cannot wait to see what really bringing this awesome forth to the world does this year. It's gonna be amazing and I am so thrilled to be a part of it and to watch well. Thank you for that. I am super excited, genuinely truly in every fiber of my being so excited about this year. So Healthy Moving dot com and Healthy Moving on Facebook are a great place to find and don't forget that. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at sort of Awesome Meg. You can find the show over on Instagram and sort of Awesome show or on Twitter it's sort of Awesome pod. And you can just find us hanging out anytime as well on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash sort of Awesome. So thank you again to Jen, Thank you to our sponsors this week, Thank you all so much for listening, and we'll see y'all next time. Sort of Awesome was created and is hosted by me, Meg Teets. Sarah Robertson is our assistant producer, and production collaboration comes from Kelly Gordon and Rebecca Hoffer. Kelly Gordon is our digital media producer, and we are so thankful for the ongoing support from our listener supporters. Music is provided by the band Proger. You can find more of Proger's music at Proger music dot com. To find show notes on this and every episode of sort of Awesome, and also to spread the sort of Awesome love to all of your friends, you can head on over to sort of Awesome show dot com so