Get over the fear of your humanity and treat the body as the messenger it's always been.
Most of us are afraid of our own bodies. It doesn't always act, feel, or respond the way we hope it would. Sometimes it feels pain. Sometimes it houses sadness or anger. Sometimes it's telling us that the way we are living is hurting us. And oftentimes, it's telling us things we would rather ignore. This is because the body is a divining tool. Our bodies are expressions of energy and interpreters of energy. And if we can cultivate a listening to it, we will find the divine expression within ourselves.
Katie Kennedy is a functional medicine practitioner as well as a certified yoga teacher. She sits right at the crossroads of materialism and spiritualism, and she knows from her own experience that the body can be seen as a healer--even in the face of chronic pain.
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INTERPRETING THE MESSAGES OF THE BODY feat. Katie Kennedy
Julia: [00:00:00] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Becoming Divine. My name is Julia Wesley. I'm a professional medium, and a channel for my guides. And today we have Katie Kennedy with us. Dr. Katherine, Katie Kennedy is a doctor of physical therapy, functional medicine practitioner, certified yoga instructor and FRC mobility specialist.
Dr. Katie is the owner of Sattva Being, which empowers holistic health and healing of the mind, body and soul. So thank you so much for being with us today.
Katie: [00:00:44] Thank you for having me. I'm so grateful to be here, Julia, this is a wonderful opportunity and I'm so grateful.
Julia: [00:00:50] And I'm excited to get into our topics today. I know we wanted to start off with listening to the signals of your body, which is I think very important in the work that you do.
Katie: [00:01:02] Yes. It definitely is because if we're not listening to the signals of our body, it's going to make you listen.
I've had many people coming to the clinic and who I've seen in the past where they're like, I just don't understand. It came out of nowhere and. All of a sudden, my shoulder just stopped working and I'm like, okay, let's problem solve this a little bit. And think back, did you do anything? Did anything happen?
They're like, yeah. Like six months ago I did get this weird feeling in my shoulder while I did something. And I was like, what'd you do? They show me how they move their arms. completely out of the ordinary and not something they normally would do. And then I'm like, okay, Do you think that might've related to that?
you know, It really, I think it might've because when I do that right now, it actually hurts.
Julia: [00:01:43] When it's something that happened so long ago, I think you just assume that by the time it starts hurting, like that couldn't be what it was
Katie: [00:01:49] Correct. Yeah. And the thing is there's a lot of people who are experts in this there's so many books are written on it, but how the body knows.
And how it keeps the score, it keeps a record of what happened. I really believe that these signals are opportunities to learn. And really they are communication between you and the cellular function of your body. So if something feels great and good, you should take note of that because it's, cool.
I like that. How can I maintain that? Or stay in that, what did I do to do that? Or something might not feel so good. It's, okay what does that feel like? And how is that contributing to what I'm experiencing and what did I do to create that? If we think about it from a physical standpoint, from physical movement-- so a pair of shoes you don't normally wear.
And have you decided to wear them while walking around a new place you've never been for about 10 hours, your feet are gonna hurt the next day. And just in the middle of the day, you started notice your feet are sore and that was your body saying, Hey, take your shoes off and sit down. But you ignored those signals and just kept going through the day.
And then the next day you have to deal with the body signals are telling you. So that's like a big picture of why that's super important.
Julia: [00:03:00] Yeah, I was going to ask the listening to your body thing is something that we typically don't do, at least in this culture. We very much push through.
Do you find that it's hard to get people to start listening?
Katie: [00:03:16] I would say initially, yes, because of the mindset you just said. That you pushed through, no pain no gain. There's a lot of programming and preconceived knowledge around how things should be and how things should be experienced. So oftentimes with our society and our, and really today with everything being a convenience and go.
We are being drawn away from the internal to the external, to maintain and sustain doing something. So what happens is we push away the things that are subtle or simple, or may not necessarily be of that great importance in that moment, because we're dealing with this thing in front of us to help us get to the next task and the next task after that.
And I know from my own personal experience and many other people I've worked with burnout is a real thing. And that is another easy way to think about how listening to your body when you notice some of those sensations of like fatigue and exhaustion. Maybe if you're tired, not saying, Oh, I'm tired this morning.
I need to drink more caffeine. Maybe you're tired because you stayed up till 2:00 AM the night before. And the night before that. And the night before that, and your body's just tired and you just need to sleep. And it's just a conditioning that we have to break through.
And it's something that each and every single one of us has to sit with and sit in a state of awareness with ourselves to see where we're willing to say, like I'll take awareness to that. Or you're willing to say you're not doing that.
You're doing the opposite. We're just saying, Oh, that's not something I need to pay attention to right now. It's not that big of a problem. I'll take care of it someday. I know personally, and I hate relating the body to the car, but this is a very good example of if you have something wrong with your car and you ignore it for six thousand miles, however long you do it, you're going to make someone upset that, that preferably it's like, why did you do that?
Julia: [00:05:10] There are a couple of things that you hit on there that I'm really interested to explore. You mentioned the culture of basically pushing through. And what you're proposing is such a radical shift. Because in my perspective, that whole push through the pain, don't listen to your body.
Drink another cup of coffee rather than go take a nap is very patriarchal. It's very current paradigm. And what you're suggesting is honor your body, is a bit revolutionary. And I actually think that it's the paradigm that we're moving into. Would you agree?
Katie: [00:05:51] I hope so.
I would love to be there. Make my job so much easier!
Julia: [00:05:56] And when you're trying to teach someone, maybe you should try listening to your body this time-- do you ever run up against common themes that people tell you of, oh, I can't because of this. And then how do you help them work through it?
Katie: [00:06:12] Yes. There are definitely common themes that people have as to why it creates resistance. Essentially it's a common theme of, they haven't experienced enough pain to want to change. So there's resistance in the experience because it's new and it's not familiar or comfortable.
And I'd say like one of the big ones is people with chronic pain. I've worked with so many people with chronic pain, especially of their spine and joints of their body. That's just affected them so much, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, all spectrums.
And they give me the biggest square-eyed look, like you gotta be on crack lady-- when they're in pain, I'm like, we gotta move. They're like, no, you need a massage me. That'll make me feel better. I'm like, no, you got to move. Let's get through this together. Let's figure out why you don't want to move-- because it hurts. That's because your body is now perceiving that sensation, that stimulus is different.
And the same thing happens with psychological disorders like anxiety and depression is that you create a new controlled paradigm in which you orchestrate your life from. And now you have someone coming in saying we have to change it and shift that so that you can exceed beyond that. While in theory, when you talk about it, that's exactly what people want to do, but nobody wants to be taken out of what they already know because it's uncomfortable.
It's scary. It's unknown. And when you're working with people, especially if you are going through it yourself, an experience of chronic pain related to a traumatic event emotionally or physically, even mentally, just any of it. Cause it does manifest on that physical level and does show up as physical, chronic pain because that in order to get through that pain, you actually have to work into it.
In a very intelligent, cognizant way. And what I mean by that is this takes a very embodied approach because there's different types of pain. And when you have chronic pain, you cannot discern different types of pain. Because it all sends off a signal in a already stimulated nerve to say, hey, pain, danger, Hey, pain, danger. Don't go there, danger, stay away, danger.
And now you begin to perceive cognitively every time you go into that range or that position, danger. And when you're trying to teach people to pull into theirselves, into that frightened moment into that fear and into that pain, it's scary.
And it takes time and patience, compassion and love for the process. Not the outcome, the process. Because, if you're not in love with experiencing the different sensations in your body and understanding them for what they are as information to help you understand your environment, then you're not going to exceed beyond the constraints you create.
And at some point that's just going to get smaller and smaller and smaller because you don't want to go beyond what you don't know. So you're just going to move into comfortable rage.
Julia: [00:09:22] Why would you fall in love with your body when it's experiencing pain?
Katie: [00:09:28] So I know it's counterintuitive. I've experienced chronic pain. So that's how I know. It affected me so much, like to the point where I was just crying. I didn't know what to do other than just cry. But I really had to sit with the fact that I was in so much physical discomfort and no one knew why that I had to be the reason why I understood I was in pain.
And it was a part of myself I did not love or understand or appreciate. So I shifted away from it. And this is something I see very commonly. I know I'm a physical therapist, but it's like, gosh, when you work with people, you get to see a lot of different cognitive and psychological states with people, especially with chronic pain.
And it really makes me very interested in why people have this aversion to pain? I know from a protective mechanism, yeah, that makes sense. But on a daily basis, has our society conditioned us so much that we perceive pain and everything negative as so bad that we can't learn from it?
So that's what I mean by it. Fall in love with the fact that this is an opportunity to learn from your body and your experience. Not only to help yourself, but help others, because I'm a firm believer that you are an expert of your experience and your body. I can't go to a client and say, you should do this because I'm telling you it would be good for you.
I just feel like that's not the right thing. I feel like I should go to them and say, I think that what this here does may benefit you for these reasons. Maybe you should consider it and here's some other options. So there's a different way of going about it to empower people in the relationship that they have with themselves.
And I think that's why our culture is, has such a negative relationship around pain. And it's so negative that we always want to be diverted from it. I have one person that I worked with that was so averting the pain, would do anything to be out of pain-- but change their lifestyle.
They were eating very unhealthy, fast food and things that do not contribute to healing in the body. They contribute to more inflammation and that's why the person was having the issues they were having.
And this is not just an individual experience. And the one person that I'm thinking of right now, I found it very enlightening to experience their perception of pain, because it helped me understand a little bit better why people do not want to have it.
And it was because it created such an emotional response for her that she absolutely positively did not want to have anything to do with pain, no matter what it was. And I think the avoidance type of behaviors around that are something learned through our own childhoods, our society and programming.
It is just something you need to be aware that you have an opportunity to change, but you just have to be aware of it.
Julia: [00:12:28] Yeah. And I'm more equipped to help people deal with emotional pain than physical pain per se. And I can say 100% that we just don't have the tools as a, for lack of a better term, a Western society, because we're so disconnected from our spirituality and listening to our body and our intuition, that we just don't have the tools to deal with these things.
And because of that, the default response is to deny, ignore, pretend it doesn't exist. So when someone is experiencing something. Like shame, fear, anger, grief, any kind of pain. They shy away from it. And I would assume that it would be the same physically. Cause we emotionally don't know what to do with physical pain either.
How do I process that? Because you're feeling it physically, but you still need to respond to it internally because that's where your motivation comes from. So there's an emotion connected with that pain. Maybe it's panic, maybe it's fear. Maybe it's this feeling of helplessness. But, and we don't know what to do with any of that.
So I like what you're doing, bringing a holistic approach to it because it's an interesting way to think that we need to deal with physical pain emotionally or spiritually.
Katie: [00:13:49] Yeah. And even ancestrally. And that's a newer concept to me. And to be honest, now that I know that I can not go back, it's like one of those things where it's my brain's been open to that and I'm going to now see that in people.
And you can see it in how people carry weight. Or hoarding. I had a great-grandmother who hoarded and had a house full of stuff, and I'm just like, what are you going to do with all of this?
So it's just like that clinging. And it's the avoiding or kind of clinging to something that's external without realizing that you can cling to what's internal and trying to find that satisfaction in that purpose with what's outside versus with what's inside. And that's how I view all of healing and being a physical therapist.
It's very challenging to communicate that to people when they're not ready for it. So the best way to communicate that to people is through a scientific approach through the nervous system. And I feel that as we begin to shift people into higher states of self knowledge and self-awareness through empowered states of being, especially with science or the actual anatomy and physiology of their own body, we're going to allow them to open up a door, to tap into true self healing through consciousness.
And that's my goal. My goal is not to help people heal consciously. My goal is to help them understand that they can do it themselves through helping them establish a better connection with themselves for different strategies, techniques, and tools, from a physical therapy, functional medicine, yoga and Ayurveda perspective.
I really feel that when people are empowered, there's much more that we as healers can do. As someone who provides like some sort of holistic health service, I'm just there to help them do their job.
Julia: [00:15:50] Yeah, no, I agree with that a lot. Someone has to be ready and willing to show up to do the work, but in order for them to feel ready, they first need to be empowered and to think that they can make that kind of change. And it sounds as if your work is really about helping people understand the reason they feel pain is because there's a disconnect between themselves. There's some part of themselves that they're ignoring. And the part that's feeling ignored is saying, hey!
Katie: [00:16:23] Pay attention to me. I need attention. Now, if you don't give me attention, you're going to have a problem. So one of the things that I love about being a human and having a physical body is that it corresponds so wonderfully to nature. So if I'm ever confused or struggling to figure out what I should be doing that day for my health and wellbeing, I just look to nature.
I'm like, what's going on outside, and what is happening in the world around me. And how can I balance my internal self so that I can be more situated in me. And that's how I view self-care. Self-care brings you more situated into yourself through processes and activities and different strategies and tools that make you feel more aligned with yourself.
And it's going to be different for everyone. There are some that are going to be the same for everyone just because we're all human. Scraping your tongue is a great self-care practice to remove toxins from your mouth. And as well as to stimulate the digestive process for the day, I love to do it morning and night.
I'm I did it once and I was like, I'm never not doing this again. So it was like an immediate love for tongue scraping. And there's going to be self-care practices like that, that really resonate with you and you have to find those. And they have to be things you do every day that help create balance.
Cause there's this synchronistic bio-rhythm that we have in our body, biologically and physiologically. And they don't happen in the same way they happen in similar ways. That interact with each other and enhance each other, or can affect each other.
So an example of that is this season we shifted into the spring, which is typically seen as wet and damp. So everyone's getting snow and the snow is probably a little heavy and wet. And when things start to melt in a couple of weeks to months, then we start to see the snow turn into mud. And if we're eating a lot of things in that period of time, that are very sticky, heavy, dense. Or if we're doing activities every day that are very lethargic, or we're not doing things that promote lymphatic movement, what we're going to do is create that mud that's outside in the environment, in our body as mucus and inflammation. More mucus than inflammation, but it's going to just build up. And some people may have a predisposition to certain things, and that's how it's expressed.
I always say, start with one and try to stick with one and do it every day until you have that aligned into your day-to-day practice and then add in the second one. And then just over time, you'll start to build up this toolbox of self care practices and techniques that you know how to do and when to do, whether it's an everyday thing once a week, once a month, a couple times a year.
And you do it based on what the environment and nature is telling you and what your body's telling you. So you wouldn't do a cleanse because it's January 1st and it's the start of the new year. Maybe that's not what your body needs, maybe your body needs more nourishment, grounding and balancing. But maybe in six months, it's the right time to do a cleanse.
And it's about understanding how your body's interacting with the environment around you, whether it's the stressors in life, the environmental toxins, or it's the great aspects of life. It's your friends, your family, the positive thing. It's just, you have to be aware of this constant continuum of flow.
And it honestly it's a lot. Yeah. It's like talking about it sounds simple. Doing it is like, she made it sound like I'd have to do like one to two things, but it really feels like I'm doing a thousand.
Julia: [00:19:58] Yeah. And that seems like good maintenance self-care. Keeping up on making sure that you're taking care of yourself, but it's also, it sounds like when you're in a crisis of like pain self-care is listening to the pain.
Katie: [00:20:14] Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that completely.
Julia: [00:20:17] What are like the types of pain and what exactly would they be trying to teach you?
Katie: [00:20:22] So that's a beautiful question when you're thinking about pain. And I like to think about pain as sensations. So there's different sensations that you experience and some of those sensations can be masked, cause it's not being fully listened to, it appears as one, but if you looked into it felt to it further, you would experience more with it. So understanding the different sensation. It's a beautiful practice that is based on Buddhist principles to tune into the sensations of your body and the space around you. You are withdrawing your senses, but you're withdrawing your senses by tuning them inward.
And you tune them internally to pay attention. And when you're looking at the different sensations, you may start to notice that for example, like I'll speak on one that's very common. For many people is like abdominal to lower back pain. Sometimes if you get bloating or gas, that pain can be very dull and achy, but it also could be very like airy-filled as well as it can have a cramping sensation, but it can exacerbate lower back pain.
So you could have an experience where that whole area feels a little sore and achy. So it would make it hard to discern its location to know what's giving you that experience. So noticing that if you're uncomfortable and not feeling good in one area of your body, how are you responding to that?
So if the immediate thing is to say, Oh my gosh, it's pain. And to just clam up then it's actually gonna make it worse. But if you were to like, Oh, what's that sensation? I'm feeling something in my back. Ooh, that's really weird. That's unusual. I didn't feel that earlier today. And you start noticing that sensation in your back and you're like following along with it.
You're like, Oh wow. I'm noticing that my abdominal area is a little bit more puffy and it's painful. It's sore. Oh my gosh. That actually sore like uncomfortable. I'm noticing that now. Wow. What did I do? And so just being aware of how, like you pull yourself into it can actually give you information as to what you're experiencing. I'll share a personal example.
I thought I was dying. It was like the shortest way to put it. I had all these red flags symptoms that I would be referring a client out to seeing a practitioner for a serious major workup. And for like months, I was freaking myself out that I was dying with this horrible disease.
And I just, I ignored it. I was ignoring a lot of this stuff. I just kept pushing, kept going. And eventually I just stopped. And I started listening to my body. I was like, Holy shit. I have Mono again. I was like, how did I not figure it out right away? It feels the exact same way. I felt that the first time I just ignored all the sensations. I had back pain from it.
I contributed that pain to my work. So that was. For me, very eye-opening. And I went to the doctors. I was like, I have Mono. And they're like, you don't have Mono, you can have all these different things. I was like, please test my blood for Mono. And so they did and found out that I had a flare up of Epstein-Barr and it was just like, okay, that made me feel a lot better, but it taught me so much to know that I could have saved so much time if I just sat with the sensations rather than avoiding them out of fear. Because my actual education had all these red flags and I did go see doctors and stuff like that. And they couldn't figure out what was going on. Like they're like, oh, your labs are all normal, but no one tested for Epstein-Barr until I asked for it.
Julia: [00:24:00] And that's the thing about the body is I think pain makes us fear having a body, right? Because not only does having a body in general contribute to the illusion of separation from literally everyone else, but then when your body starts feeling pain almost as if it's turned on you, then you feel separated from your body. And so now you feel like you're trapped in it and all of a sudden it's trying to kill you, then all of a sudden, you don't want to engage with that pain because it's scary. So there has to come a point where listening to the pain outweighs the assumed benefits of ignoring.
Katie: [00:24:40] I would completely agree.
Julia: [00:24:41] Where was the point for you when you were just done with the pain?
Katie: [00:24:45] Yeah, it was that moment actually. And I was basically burnt out. Because I was seeing 20 patients a day in a clinic where I was working about 40 plus hours a week driving over 30 minutes, one way to work.
So it was just a lot for me. And I'm very empathic, so everybody's different. But for me, when I work with people, it's a very intense experience. I begin to experience a lot about that person and what they're going through and I'm getting a lot better at discerning what's mine and what's not mine, but it's very intense.
And if I'm doing it in an inappropriate way or too much, it's draining and it got to a point where it, like I said, I thought I was dying and it's that exact same feeling that you said trapped and alienated.
I felt, God why did you give me this gift, this beautiful body? And I can't even function in it? I don't even know how to make it work better. I feel alienated. Every time I eat something bad happens. So it created a lot of problems for me.
But it really, it took patience, compassion, understanding, and awareness of the pain and what was giving me the issues. And a lot of it was me and I laugh because I just laugh at myself some days. And it's understanding that we're all human and the whole point of being a human is that consciousness got bored and consciousness was like, I want to experience myself in a different way because I already know everything.
Basically it wants to experience life. It wants to have awareness. It wants to feel the senses, but then we live in a materialistic, inverted world that pulls us away from our truth that we are all inherently a part of God. And essentially are God, we're just an expression of it experiencing itself. When you have that awareness and you can take it as you wish, like it could be like the universe and it's, whatever terminology feels good to you.
But when you view it that way, it makes these experiences easier to understand. Because I chose it. I can't be mad and frustrated with the fact that my body's going through this experience because I chose it.
So why am I trying to get away from it? It's just going to keep haunting me.
Julia: [00:27:01] And it's not the idea that you deserve it because you chose it. But it's the idea that you have control over the experience.
Katie: [00:27:08] Yes, exactly. And the outcome, especially the outcome, because we're all able to generate and manifest.
I'm a firm believer of that. And if you're not aware of the fact that you've have the capabilities of doing that, you're not going to do it. So then once you're aware of it and you're positively manifesting for your health or actual healing, you're going to receive it because you're looking for it.
And you're putting that vibration out there and the universe is going to say, you know what? I see you, here you go.
Julia: [00:27:37] You're right. It's something that we do as we breathe, essentially. It's just, what are you unconsciously manifesting? And that's the importance of consciousness.
Particularly when it comes to manifestation because you're constantly manifesting. But if you're not aware of what it is that you're manifesting, if you're not examining those unconscious beliefs or even those-- the fears in particular, we tend to manifest because there's so much energy behind it-- then you're going to find unpleasant situations in your life.
And so when you, because this is just the way the universe is, when you start paying attention to what it is that you're thinking about all the time, what your beliefs are, what your consciousness is focusing on, then you can be like, oh, I don't want more of that.
I would like to be able to apply this to the body to figure out how can I enjoy having a body? Do you think it's just a shift in what we're attracting or how we're appreciating the body?
Katie: [00:28:34] Yes. And I want to compliment you first before I move on, because I love that, unconsciously manifesting, because personally, when I meditate, I have such weird experiences that it scares me.
So I'm waiting till I have a better grounded stability so that when that happens, I can understand it better. The unconscious manifesting is so strong to the point of understanding that every single moment is a meditation. And if you can find a way to focus and be present and stay with the flow, you can help that unconscious manifesting.
So I love that. Thank you for sharing that.
Julia: [00:29:09] My pleasure. That's the thing about meditation, right? It's not so that you can get into an altered state of consciousness, but so that you can just be paying attention to where you are so that you can take that outside of meditation. And now you don't have to concentrate so hard at it.
It's just normal. So I like to tell people that when they're trying to get into meditation, especially people who are like what's meditation? You don't need to like, get on top of a hilltop and cross your legs and float in the air and try and get into this existential, meditative state-- and just what are you doing right now?
What is that like? I think it makes it so much more accessible. Because a lot of people's introductions to meditation are like the Buddhist masters at it, or Hindu masters at it. And they're like, I don't know how to do that.
You wouldn't, you're brand new. I don't know how to float.
Katie: [00:29:56] I think it's beautiful. I love it.
Julia: [00:29:58] Thanks. But yeah. How can we use this, like paying attention to our body to figure out how to like it.
Katie: [00:30:05] Definitely so well the first thing I would say is mindset and how you think about your body.
How do you view your body when you injure it? Here's a great story. I, my dog, one morning, he's a puppy. He woke us up in the morning and I was trying to rush you out of that. I smacked my knees so hard on the board of my bed. I fell to the floor. I was like, Oh my God, I hurt so bad. And then I just thought to myself about people who can't feel things, and I was like, thank you, God, for helping me feel this. I'm so grateful that I have sensation. And within seconds it went away and it was just like, that's normally what happens. Cause I try to transmute pain, but that was the first time ever I was just like, I'm grateful to feel this.
And it's shifting your mindset about how you experience sensations and changing the word pain, it's a way to describe things, but instead of saying pain, because it's very minute and it thinks about one thing, think about sensations.
So sensations can be pain, it can be pleasurable, it can be neutral. It can be any of that spectrum of things. So if you change your mindset to I'm experiencing these sensations, what is it? You're going to start to bring in some more awareness. And one of the more challenging things with that mindset is if you are in chronic pain, because your pain is there every day. It's like, why am I having this lesson, please teach me?
And it's more so the lesson to be your own transformative force and knowing that you're the one that's personally responsible or in control of the outcome. If you want to have this body, because we all have it, it's a gift that we have received and you want to enjoy it so that you have a long life, but how do you do that?
You love it. And how do you love it? You give it what it needs when it asks for it. So you listen to it. And how do you listen to it? You pay attention to the sensations. And it's not easy. It's just like what we talked about with the meditation, what you were saying with like how clients come to you saying the meditation doesn't make sense.
Cause if they've only seen it from that Zen master status, not from the practical everyday meditation, and it makes the tasks seem much more challenging and impossible rather than making it seem attainable and easy.
So if you have an aversion to pain and that's your standing point, that's where you start notice what makes you feel good, find out what makes you feel good. And then notice are those things that make you feel good in a way that's wholesome, or unwholesome? So instead of using words like good or bad that are very charged and have different meanings to different people, choose words that are more neutral because when we talk to ourselves, we program our psyche.
So it's a form of neurolinguistic programming. So wholesome versus unwholesome are my activities. Do they contribute to this sensation in a way that is producing a positive outcome or a not so positive outcome? And the words that I like they're neutral or un-neutral.
So it's less oh wow, this feels super, super good. Cause you're going to always want to be drawn towards that. And the words that worked for me and worked for my clients are not going to be always the same words that work for everyone. So it's about playing with the vocabulary and the spelling the spell casting of words, to make your outcome as positive as you want it.
Julia: [00:33:24] I think it's really important because self-talk literally affects your body.
If you're angry at yourself, your body is going to reflect that. The way you hold yourself is going to be different the way that you-- I did it today. I was coming inside from all the snow and I was feeling overburdened and like I'm suffocating in all my winter jacket stuff and I'm too hot.
Cause I came inside and now it's not freezing. And I dropped everything I bumped into like literally everything there was snow everywhere. And then I eventually just had to be like, you know what? I did this to myself because I'm in an angry mood. If I had come inside with a better attitude, things probably would have gone smoother.
I wouldn't have been so clunky and so forceful and tight in my body, but it was because of my self-talk.
Katie: [00:34:14] Yep. That's a very good point. And thank you for sharing. I think self-talk is fundamental to healing and it's fundamental to health.
Anything, really. Just as you said, like it creates the energy around you.
Julia: [00:34:30] Yeah, absolutely. And I am of the mindset that your body is just an energetic expression of who you are, what you sought to be in this life and also what you're currently in experiencing.
So yeah, when we apply energy to it and beliefs and mindset and how we talk to ourselves, it's going to have an immediate effect on your body.
Katie: [00:34:58] I would agree with that. And there is talk amongst the ancient scholars that the cells have consciousness. So--
Julia: [00:35:05] I buy it.
Katie: [00:35:07] Yeah?
Julia: [00:35:08] Yeah. I do. And to a certain extent, if you're into consciousness at all, you have to believe it. Because everything is energy and it's just all of these little micro-consciousnesses that are creating a bigger consciousness. It really, so the one thing I like to say is we're all fractals of God and there's really no limit to how small and to how big that can get. A fractal kind of works both ways. If you think of the big triangle with a bunch of little teeny tiny triangles in it.
Is it the big triangle that can be separated into the little tiny triangles? Or is it the tiny triangles that creates the big triangle? There's really no separation there.
So it's really the same way with the whole holistic part of you, mind, body, soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it.
Katie: [00:35:55] Yup. I totally agree.
Julia: [00:35:57] I like your work. That's why I think it's so important to talk about how we can better relate to our body instead of thinking that it's something separate from us.
Katie: [00:36:07] Yeah. If you don't have a body, you don't have this experience. That's how I look at it.
Julia: [00:36:11] Thank you so much for being on Katie. I want to be mindful of your time. Do you want to tell people how they can find you?
Katie: [00:36:18] Definitely. So if you love your body and you want to nourish it a little bit more with some self-care, I do offer a free mobility and yoga series, so they can find that at www.sattva-being.com.
So sattva really quickly, it's a beautiful term. That means pure, wholesome, and virtuous is the inherent state of your soul, ego and senses. So there's crap that covers it, but know that underneath it, you are inherently pure, wholesome and virtuous.
So that is what sattva is about, but sattva-being.com is where you can go and you can sign up for this series. And every week I release a 15 minute yoga mobility class that helps connect your mind to your body and your body, to your mind. What's beautiful about it is it's really focused on bringing you into your physical experience while being mindfully cognizant of all the other ones.
Julia: [00:37:15] That's beautiful. Thank you so much, Katie. I appreciate it. Thank you for being on. Thanks. And we'll see you next time.
Katie: [00:37:23] Bye. Thank you. Goodbye.