Listen on iTunes | Listen on Spotify | Subscribe to the Podcast
I’ve sweated more this past month than I have in the past 5 years.
After a looooong absence from the high-intensity-energy scene, I’m back in my high-rise activewear that Australians love so much (activewear is a legitimate 24/7 dress code where I live).
It’s got me thinking a lot about my journey from a once-hard-core-hot-yoga-fan to a never-exercise-flowing-feminine-embodiment-practice, and back again.
I’ve come full circle this year and the 10ish-year journey has bought with it some big insights about embodiment, exercise & the different (key) roles they play in my life.
If you are:
- Trying to future out the right exercise regimen for yourself
- Feel your exercise it “to yang” or “not feminine enough” or
- Having trouble deepening your embodiment skills
This episode could contain a few gems for you.
In this episode, we discuss
- Using hot yoga & high-intensity exercise to “get out of your head” (a highly ineffective strategy I used for too long)
- Why I had to quit strong yoga to turn up the sensitivity of my body
- How I first learned about embodiment practices (even if I didn’t know that’s what it was called)
- The different dimensions of the body & how exercise and embodied movement practice care for them
- How to choose the right embodiment & exercise options for your body
This episode marks the first in Season 8 of the podcast, a season devoted to Embodied Movement. We’ll be speaking with some amazing practitioners & creators of modality in the somatic movement arts – I can’t wait to share them with you.
Resources
Resources mentioned in this podcast:
- Primal Feminine Flow – At Home Embodied Movement Practice
- Some of my influences in embodied movement: Non-Linear Movement Method, Amber Grey, Marcela Widgrig
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- Find a Feminine Embodiment Coach in our Professional Directory
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
Trying to figure out the right exercise regime for yourself can be super challenging. Maybe you’re feeling like your exercise is a little too yang or not feminine enough, or maybe you are interested in an exercise regime that also supports you to deepen your embodiment skills. I understand all these desires and sometimes conflicting challenges. This past month, I have exercised and sweated more than I have in the previous five years combined. I’ve had a really long absence from the high intensity energetic exercise scene, but this month I’m back in my high-rise activewear that Australians love so much, and it’s had me thinking a lot about my journey from once hardcore hot yoga chick, all the way swinging to the other end of the spectrum of never exercising, doing the feminine flowing thing to extremes and back again.
Over this past 10 year journey, I’ve really come full circle and it’s brought a lot of insights around embodiment practices, exercise, and the different and key roles that they each play in my life. Today’s podcast, which is the first in our season eight, a season dedicated to embodied movement, tips, practitioners and different ways of doing it, we are discussing using high energy intensity exercise as one technique to get out of your head, and often a highly ineffective technique. We’re talking about my experience of quitting strong yoga so that I could turn up the sensitivity of my body, how I first learnt about embodiment practices, and we also speak about exercise, embodiment and how they support different dimensions of our body and some of the key questions that I use to choose the right options for me. I hope you enjoy this first episode in our series of embodied movement and learning a little bit more about why I quit high intensity exercise these past five years. A really warm welcome.
Welcome to the School of Embodied Arts podcast. I’m your hostess, Jenna Ward, feminine embodiment coach here for our weekly explorations of living, leading, and coaching as emotionally empowered, centrally alive and magnetic women.
In the past month, I’ve had several epiphanies around exercise and embodied movement practice, and looking back, they seem really obvious now, but I feel for many people, myself included, who are on a path of figuring how to bring more of the feminine, sensual, embodied, slow and sensitive qualities into my life, it’s really had a huge impact on how I’ve exercised over the past decade, and I’ve come to a place of some new clarity of late. To kick off this season on the podcast, which is all about embodied movement, I would love to share with you some really key questions to ask yourself if you are contemplating if you’re embodied movement practices and your exercise regime is really set up to support the most vibrancy and the deepest embodiment possible.
I don’t think that there’s a one size fits all approach to that answer, and I’m certainly not suggesting that what I’m doing now is what you should do. The first thing that I want to stress before I dive into the story is in fact that I feel one of the key qualities around embodiment is the fact that it is really non-dogmatic. If embodiment really relates to how we are feeling, sensing and inhabiting our own individual bodies, it means that each of us will have a different set of desires and sensitivities, qualities, skills, and dispositions. Each of our bodies is an utterly unique makeup, an utterly unique constellation. With that in mind, knowing that there’s no one size fits all approach to how we might build the most delectable embodiment and exercise practice, let me take you on a little walk down memory lane about how I used to exercise, how I’m exercising now, and how embodiment has woven and dramatically altered what that’s looked like over the past decade.
This is interestingly a conversation I’ve also had with some peers in our coaching cert program lately, also a few really good girlfriends, and so I feel that it’s just a really topical topic in my life right now. If we rewind 10 years ago, I was a hardcore Bikram hot yoga fan. Oh my gosh, at least three times a week I would be in … I think it’s a 40 degree room. It’s a hot room. Sweating, sweating, sweating. I was loving my Bikram yoga at that time for two reasons. The first was that I was really at a point whereby I needed my exercise to help me to be a certain size in my body. I really wanted my exercise to keep me trim and taught and terrific and supple, not necessarily because I wanted my body to feel vital, but because I was buying into all the regular beauty codes and I wanted to be thin. That was the first reason I loved Bikram. It kept me thin.
Second reason I loved Bikram though was because at that point in my life, I was so in my head that I actually needed an exercise practice that was a force of nature degrees stronger than the grip of my mind. For me to have some type of exercise practice where I felt like I could just be out of my head, I could be so concentrating on what I was doing and so present in the moment, which I craved, the only way I knew to get that was to go degrees of force harder and stronger than the level of mental occupation, which was my norm at that time. I see this a lot in our culture, people exercising with extreme force, extreme heat, extreme intensity or duration, and maybe it’s the case that they just love that and it brings so much vitality and beauty to their life.
Awesome if that’s your body, but there’s also this disposition I feel of a lot of women who just have such strong tendencies to be in our mind that the type of exercise we then go and choose is one that can kind of come in and really strong arm and muscle over our own tendencies to help us to quiet our mind and relax. So that’s how I was doing exercise, and that’s how I was unknowingly finding my way a little bit more into my body by turning down the volume of my mind with really strong exercise. It was really interesting because as I began to get a little bit more curious about embodiment and what that looked like was I would look around me and I would see people that were connected to something more, they were connected to maybe more intuition or more passion for life, or they were connected to more sensuality.
They were connected to a wider bandwidth of just magic and ravishment, and I would look at my pretty linear, pretty controlled, pretty all in order typical life of which there was absolutely nothing wrong with, but it just didn’t feel like it had that more that I was yearning for. This is one of the things that got me really curious about, well, where does the edge of that more live and how can I get to know that more? Because even though I was getting out of my head using these strong Bikram yoga practices, it wasn’t necessarily taking me deep into those currents of that magical more I was looking for.
So I began to shift my practice from this super yang, very linear hot yoga, and if you do Bikram, I’m not dissing Bikram, I’m not dissing hot yoga. Maybe you love it and it’s perfect for your disposition. True embodiment practice is a non dogmatic so my experience absolutely won’t be your experience because I don’t live in your body and our bodies are so vastly different. But also maybe there are some aspects of your exercise practice which are just a way to strong arm over all of those strong tendencies that many of us have. So I began to shift into more yin practices, less linear practices, softer practices, and this was a process of softening my relationship to my body, to the size of my body, allowing my body to perhaps not be so quite thin and angular. This was a process of also softening into that current, that magical more.
That looked like coming into some regular yoga practices like asana practices, such beautiful practices. Coming into yin yoga, so really slow asanas, really slow yoga postures. Over a period of many years, this slowing down of my exercise practices morphed them out of the realm of what I would consider exercise and much more into the realm of what I would consider embodiment. To me, exercise is a way that we move the body, to of course increase our heart rate, to put our body up into the next level of efforting, and in my mind, exercise movements are about increasing the vitality of my body by really working my body. That’s different to embodiment practices. We’re, in this season of the podcast, going to be speaking to practitioners and creators of modalities from many different types of embodiment practices, but generally speaking, my definition of embodiment is one where we’re softening the body to increase sensitivity.
We are not working the physical dimension of our body. We’re instead working the inner, emotional, mental, and energy layers of our body. It’s like a workout for our inner domain, which requires a lot less efforting and a lot more softening. My exercise practices actually, over a course of many years, softened, softened, softened and that required me to rewire so much around my body shape, my body size, and the way that I entered into those or found those deeper currents, that magical more. Instead of strong arming my mind to be quiet, I instead began to balance my internal dialogue so that I could hear my thoughts, yes, but I could also hear my feelings, hear my energies, hear my intuitions, hear the deeper thrum of the universe as I moved my body in these softest, slower embodiment practices.
Ultimately that culminated in these soft and slow yoga asana practices, actually moving into just free movement, where my body, instead of me putting my body into the pose that I thought it should go or that the teacher told me to put my body into, it instead flipped and it was more my body saying, “Actually, put your body in this shape. Move at this pace. Try out that level of intensity”, not as a stretch or as a performance, but as an expression of what was alive inside me. So what was once exercise slowed and softened all the way down to an embodiment practice and it was actually only around this time that I began to get language around what embodiment was, what the feminine was, and realizing that I was so hungry for it.
I am forever grateful to all of the very good and sometimes not so great yoga asana teachers that supported me, but even more so to my body, which was, and as is yours, able actually to give these instructions, these impulses, these sparks of aliveness that want to be made manifest through movement and sound and breath. To me, that was an embodied movement practice.
As I began to do this kind of informal embodied movement practice just in my living room on my yoga mat with maybe some candles burning and some music that didn’t have some strong lyrics, as I began to do that over the course of many months and then over the course of years, I began to see that this is so simple, it’s so obvious, it’s in fact how kids move their body, and it’s just allowing me to inhabit the currents of aliveness that are here within me to get to know me more. There were so many happy side effects from this. I was processing and dealing with the different stresses of every day just more effectively. I was more connected with the beauty and the ravishment of life. I felt way more magnetic like my body was a magnet that was turned on just drawing towards me, different opportunities like the right house to rent or a really wonderful client.
I began to see so many different benefits from dropping the exercise and doing these really deep embodiment practices. I noticed this a lot when people are deepening their skills in the embodied feminine. If we think about the embodied feminine, imagine it’s on the left-hand side of you, and then let’s think about the more linear go energy of the masculine. Could also call that a more yang doing type of energy on the right. For many people, we are really skilled on the right-hand side. We’re skilled in that go energy. We’re skilled in that yang, pick it up, put it together type energy. Our right sides in this metaphor are well-developed, but for many of us, myself included, my left side was a lot less developed. So it was interesting because I actually had to swing all the way right over fire into my feminine, dropping all the exercise conventionally, all of the high intensity, all of the strong efforting for a while, for quite a few years.
I had to drop all of that and just swing all the way into really soft feminine practices so that I could develop the skills and the lexicon of language and the stamina to do those well. Yet hanging out with my pendulum all the way far over the left sometimes also isn’t in balance either, and so this year I’ve really began to find myself way back in a happy, happy medium place with my high intensity sweated out exercises happening multiple times a week that just leave me feeling radiant. But those exercises are not me trying to kind of force silence over my body or even force my body to a certain weight. Those exercises are now an expression of the desire for vitality in my body. This is the question that I really ask myself. How is it that I want my body to feel? I want my body to feel alive with the thrum of life, and that requires embodiment practices, but I also want my body to feel strong, vital, and well, that requires exercise practices.
So over the course of these many, many, many years, I’ve come full circle from hanging out far too much on the go side to swinging all the way over into the deep feminine and developing skills. I’ve also trained in many different embodied movement modalities. We’ll be speaking with some of my teachers, also some of my influences, over the course of this podcast series, and certainly … we won’t be speaking with all of them, though, so I’ll also include in the show notes a list of some of the people that I’ve studied and worked with around embodied movement because there are so many ways to do embodied movement, and I’m really looking forward to discussing those with you in upcoming episodes of the podcast. But I feel like what’s essential for us to really discern whether we’re in right harmony and right relationship with our exercise and/or our embodiment practices is just to be clear on what it is that we want to feel.
What am I here to feel? Because there is no one size fits all approach. You might be in a season of being really far over on the right or really swinging way out down on the left where I have spent many, many, many years very, very happily. I feel for many people when we’ve hung out on the far right end of the spectrum in the more hot yoga, let’s just describe it as that hot yoga, go yang end, and we’ve found the beauty of swinging more, left more into our feminine, into our flow, into our embodied sweet connection, it can feel a little bit terrifying, a little bit of a question mark to swing back towards the right, back towards the middle ground again. We can question or worry, “Is this balance? Is this me going back to an old identity because I’m going back to an old practice?”
I don’t think everybody has this experience of the swing from left to right and then find the middle, but I do see it a lot with the practitioners and coaches that I work with, and I fully believe that it’s very possible for us to engage with practices that we used to do in deeply disembodied ways, because we’ve developed a new skillset in embodiment, and so we can actually engage in those old practices with a totally different value and belief system in our body. I could go back and do hot yoga now and be a totally different person, but in the same pose, in the same room, in the same clothes.
I think this is the beauty of embodiment practices, and this is why I believe at this point in my life, it’s essential for me to distinguish that my exercise is different to my embodiment, but they are both practices for my wellbeing, my exercise at the physical dimension of my body, my embodiment at the more mental, emotional, spiritual dimension of my body, all of which actually takes care of me being a well, sane, sensually resourced, and spiritually connected human.
If you are interested in an at-home embodiment practice that you can cultivate or deepen, we have a beautiful download available on the website. It’s called Primal Feminine Flow. That’s the practice that was born out of this story that I’ve shared today, this story of moving into the slowdown of yoga and then all the way into my body leading me in the movement. I would really encourage you, if you are seeking a more formal practice or some more supports to develop your embodiment practice, go ahead to jennaward.co/flow and check that out. It’s a beautiful practice that you can do at home. If you’re interested in more different, diverse flavors and ways of engaging in your own embodied movement practices, we are going to be speaking with some wonderful practitioners and modality creators over the coming weeks on the podcast.
I really invite you to stay tuned and stay connected for that conversation. However you’re moving, embodied exercise or otherwise today, wishing you so well with your practice, however it suits your body best.
If you loved this episode and want to explore more like it, head over and subscribe on iTunes or jump across to jennaward.co/podcast and we will lovingly hand deliver the best of the podcast as well as new episodes to your inbox each week.
