Are you feeling overwhelmed? Are you navigating menopause? Join host Heather Carey in this enlightening episode of Real Food Stories, where she sits down with Kathy White, a passionate yoga instructor specializing in joint renewal. Together, they delve into the transformative power of yoga for women entering midlife, particularly during the often-challenging phase of menopause.

Kathy opens up about her personal journey with yoga, revealing how she turned to this ancient practice after experiencing profound grief from losing her first child. As she approached menopause, Kathy faced new hurdles, including joint pain and menopausal symptoms that made traditional yoga less effective for her. This pivotal moment inspired her to innovate and create her unique jointful yoga practice designed specifically for those over 50, helping women to embrace their bodies with love and compassion.

Throughout the conversation, Kathy emphasizes the importance of listening to your body and adapting yoga practices to meet individual needs, especially as we age and navigating menopause. She shares invaluable insights on how nutrition plays a crucial role in joint health, highlighting her own experience of eliminating inflammatory foods to improve her symptoms. This connection between diet and wellness is a vital aspect of navigating menopause, and Kathy’s advice is both practical and inspiring.

Diving deeper, Kathy discusses the psychological aspects of trauma and how yoga can serve as a powerful tool for individuals to reconnect with their bodies, promoting healing and resilience. Her gentle, mindful approach to yoga encourages women to honor their unique journeys, making this practice accessible for everyone, regardless of flexibility or fitness level. This episode is not just about yoga; it’s about embracing midlife body positivity and making healthy lifestyle choices that resonate with your personal food journey.

Join us as we explore the intersection of yoga, nutrition, and emotional well-being, providing you with the tools to navigate menopause with grace and confidence. Whether you’re seeking nutrition advice, healthy eating tips, or simply a sense of community in your midlife journey, this episode of Real Food Stories is a must-listen. Tune in to discover how you can empower yourself through mindful eating practices and the healing power of yoga, all while embracing the beauty of your personal food stories and family food traditions.

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Transcript:

Speaker #0
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back. And if you are just tuning in with me for the very first time, it’s so nice to meet you. And I’m really glad you’re here with me today. I am your host, Heather Carey, nutritionist, chef, mom, and a woman who has been around the block with food. I want to open up about real food in relation to health, weight, and our bodies so you can make peace with what you eat. Hey everybody and welcome back. Today I sat down with Kathy White who is a yoga instructor specializing in joint renewal and if you are a woman going into midlife or somewhere around there and you’ve been experiencing some kind of ache and pain and don’t really know what to do with it, Kathy has a great solution. and a really really interesting story of how she got to specialize in joint renewal and flexibility it’s so important for when we get older take a listen to my interview with kathy white hi everybody and welcome back i am talking today with kathy white who’s a yoga instructor in midlife and who has been teaching yoga for over 20 years. When Kathy turned 50, her joints were aching, her menopausal symptoms were raging, and she was not gaining any benefit from her practice anymore. So after researching, exploring, and retraining, she has now refined her method into a jointful yoga practice for active women and men over 50. who want to keep doing the sports and activities they love. Kathy likens it to adding WD-40 to your joints. She offers a unique and mindful approach to body and mind that rejuvenates the body, calms the nervous system, and builds strength, mobility, and resilience, which are vital, especially as people grow older. So thanks so much for being here today, Kathy.

Speaker #1
Thank you, Heather. Nice to be here.

Speaker #0
Sure. And I’m looking forward to talking with you about what you do, because I know for me, yoga has taken on an edge that I no longer feel like I can relate to. Sometimes it feels like it’s for like those younger women. I was never really that flexible growing up. And as I’m getting older, I think like you, I have some decent joint issues. I always feel like, like all my joints are sort of like creaking and That’s almost in a way made me feel even more fearful of doing something like yoga. I don’t want to mess anything up like any further. So plus yoga sometimes just feels like it’s, you know, like I said, for very fit, active women, not for the many, you know, but for like those few like blessed women. And so I want to hear from you all about yoga and, you know, and all the pros about it. So let’s talk about you and your experience with yoga, how you got into it. And I definitely want to hear about what you are doing now.

Speaker #1
Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. So my yoga journey started back in the 80s. I’m dating myself here, but sorry, the 90s. So in the 80s, when I was sort of university age, that was the era of. aerobics, you know, leg warmers and aerobics. Oh,

Speaker #0
yeah, I love that.

Speaker #1
And I didn’t do very well on it. I just remember getting hot and sweaty and a big red face and thinking, no, this is really uncomfortable. And yoga suited my personality a lot more. So when I came across it in the 90s, I sort of did a few classes and thought it was really interesting. And you I liked the kind of more meditative aspect of it. Some people say spiritual aspect, you know, non-denominational, although obviously it comes from India and has this Hindu connection. It doesn’t necessarily need to be all about Hindu gods and everything. And then I tragically lost my first child. He died at birth. And it was yoga that brought me back to life. I can remember a friend dragging me off the couch where I’d been sitting grieving for months. It was a really, really difficult, difficult time for me. And she said, come to this yoga class. And I’m just not really wanting to go. that i can still remember that first yoga class that she took me to having done a little bit before as i say and it was just the the stirrings of something within me that just oh life movement um connection and and that’s the root of the word yoga it means connection and i was so disconnected you know through the grieving process and through the actual trauma of losing the child, because I had an emergency C-section as well. So I’ve been through a major operation and yoga connected me back. So that was, you know, the real kind of life-saving aspect. And it really was life-saving for me that yoga gave me. And it sustained me for many, many years, a few decades and took me through. two subsequent births of children I even had my yoga instructor at the time Louise she came with me and was like my birth doula for the birth of my son yeah and and and it really helped me stay like very connected and then with menopause it was it just stopped working I mean it wasn’t overnight it was just kind of gradually gradually i was getting these symptoms as as you read in my in my bio when you read my bio out these symptoms of joint pain especially my knees i had low back issues my shoulders were really really tight you know i’d come home and just like feel i couldn’t couldn’t move and and and it was like yoga’s not working for me it’s just not working for me and so because i think Thank you. Because of the connection that I’d had to yoga before, if it had just been something I was doing, I might have moved on and done a bit of qigong or tai chi or something, which is more a kindred to my personality. Some other kind of gentle movement. But because of this connection to my son and how life… giving and life affirming yoga had been to me in my journey I didn’t want to readily give it up you know I didn’t want to move out of it and go oh well it’s not working for me I’m too old for yoga now like you mentioned yeah no

Speaker #0
I’m hitting 50 I can’t do those poses anymore yeah so I mean something that yeah you really had a deep connection with it I mean it’s such a in a time of such deep pain, you really…

Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah, that sense of it being a real lifeline. So I wasn’t willing to kind of give up. So instead, I just became a bit of a yoga junkie for a while. I just tried everything, any kind of system, any kind of yoga, anything. I was just desperately looking for some sort of practice. And then I came across this practice from Brazil called K.I.U.T. That’s K.A.I.U.T. And I. immediately felt its difference and we’ll come on to that a bit later how different it is and and I just knew I had to follow this path I retrained they were having a training in Toronto at the time I flew back and forth for 18 months I had these big 10 day blocks of going to Toronto doing another training going home practicing lots and lots and lots going back to Toronto another 10 days. It was just a phenomenal. time in my life and I’ve subsequently during the pandemic the online they they did an online training I thought oh that’s great I don’t have to do all the flying I’ll do another training with them so benefit of COVID exactly exactly and so that that was that was the story really of of just developing and then what I realized was that From my previous work, I’d worked very much in the Scaravelli tradition. If anyone has heard of that, it’s not very well known. But Wanda Scaravelli had worked with Iyengar and she’d developed a kind of a real beautiful awakening of the spine kind of movement. And that had been where I’d been coming from before. But I needed this extra pressure in the joints. I needed a bit more of a systematic approach to my hips and pelvis. and the spine that combined with the more fluid kind of curiosity way of moving that I’d learned before these two approaches create I created this joint renewal system which you know within my own body definitely within my students bodies just phenomenal results. I start to start to show up.

Speaker #0
Do you feel that you were starting to have joint issues because of menopause? Because I know that, you know, for so many women, this is all, this is one of these vague symptoms that you can get with menopause, you know, that we don’t, that’s not really talked about, you know, there’s, there’s like 35 different menopause symptoms. We We know of hot flashes. We know of those. night sweats and those classic symptoms. But joint issues is not something that I think a lot of women equate with menopause. So do you feel like this was happening with you?

Speaker #1
Yeah, absolutely. I would say for sure. It kind of just crept up as the perimenopausal symptoms were going. So yeah, I had all the hot flashes. I had Zay. you know, all that kind of normal, as it were, menopausal symptoms. And the joints was, yeah, surprising. It was like, is this menopause? Why? I can’t be. I mean, for goodness sake, because I guess it was surprising for me as a symptom because I was already a yoga practitioner.

Speaker #0
Right. Yeah. You were already probably very flexible and very.

Speaker #1
Yeah, and not so much on the on the flexibility, but just, you know, the range of motion, the range of motion. I was used to moving my body, you know, regularly in many in a variety of different ways. And so the fact that it was starting to seize up didn’t make sense to what my practice was. So that that then it was like, well, is this menopause? I guess it must be. And then I did some research and it is it is a kind of not so well known symptom. that many women suffer from so yeah and the the thing also heather that i would say is that it wasn’t just the yoga i would say eliminating sugar eliminating dairy and eliminating wheat made a huge difference to my joints and i would know that because i would do juice fasting and i would be be on a juice fast for a week for quite a long time a week 10 days and within by day three day four when I got kind of through the headache and the you know symptoms of kind of going on to a fast I’m just drinking lots of water fresh fresh organic juices and suddenly my body would have no pain anymore no joint pain and my yoga practice would be just fluid and beautiful and everything would be flowing and and then I’d maintain that as I started to introduce food again and just keep going and keep going and then within I started to be able to be sensitive like within 24 hours of eating sugar

Speaker #0
I would get joint pain again yeah well I mean sugar we know is so highly inflammatory right so that yeah there certainly could be a connection. and dairy and wheat for some people. Exactly.

Speaker #1
So the same thing that making sure that I wasn’t eating inflammatory foods nowadays, I don’t have to be so extreme. You know, if we go out for dinner, I’m not going to phone the hostess and say, honey, there’s Connie that Connie that, you know, when I’m at home, I tend to avoid those things. Right. I go out, then I’m fine. And that that seems to be a healthy balance with it.

Speaker #0
That’s great. Yeah, that’s that is a a nice balance right you’re not going to be so regimented and strict right we want to enjoy our food too sometimes and but but knowing that right these things triggered you know some inflammation with you which then in turn triggered

Speaker #1
joint pain and you actually with your yoga practice yeah and and again wanting to keep my yoga practice as this like just such a pillar of my health and well-being. Right. Mental, physical, emotional. It was it was really important that I’d be able to to move my body in the same same way. But the other thing about it is that, you know, this new way of working that I discovered in my menopausal perimenopausal years, the joint renewal system, as I call it, I meet my body how it is today. So if today, you know, if yesterday I went out for a meal and. you know, my joints are sore, then I don’t do the practice to the same degree as what I would do on a day that I’ve been on a juice fast for a week. You know, just learning that ability to really listen to your body. very carefully and having that dialogue and interaction with your body, connecting with your body, listening to the feedback it gives you and saying, ah, okay, so more gentle today, where we won’t move that, we won’t hold it for such a long period of time, we won’t apply so much pressure. Ah, today, it feels like, yes, let’s go for a lot of pressure. Let’s go for a big kind of long hold in one of the poses and so thinking non-linearly about my practice i’m thinking that it doesn’t we get so fixed in kind of bigger better faster more oh yeah exactly right that i mean even as i mean when

Speaker #0
you were just saying that you know that it’s you’re just honoring your body day to day that’s very different than i think when we were in our 30s or 20s you know and and just we could push a little harder. That’s just the way society works sometimes, right? If we’re not pushing harder and faster and more and doing. And I think getting into midlife, that is something that we have to shift with and turn around a little bit is to start being a little more kind and compassionate with ourselves and honoring your body without judgment. So if you are having a hard day, You’re just feeling tired that day. Just working with that and knowing that the next day you might have a great day.

Speaker #1
Exactly, exactly. And learning, you know, to listen to our body and to know it’s a dialogue. Like the body speaks in its language. And then we tend to be very verbal and mental with our response to it. And so learning to listen to the language of the body, which is, yeah, maybe there’s a soreness, a tightness, a tension, a discomfort. And that’s how the body’s telling us that we need to slow down, take more care, be more easy with it. But at the same time as saying, please move me, you know, please do something like help. this you know with 70% water it’s like what happens to water if it’s not being flushed through is it stagnates and that’s the same with our body it’s like if it’s not being flushed through if we’re not which is what is the beauty of yoga because we’re moving all the different joints ligaments tendons muscles of the body and the more variety you can have in your practice the better it is because of that let’s just get things moving

Speaker #0
Yeah. I mean, we can fit, you know, all day long. I mean, you know, sometimes I can even get caught up in like, you know, you get in front of your computer, focus, hours have gone by. I, you know, you haven’t moved at all. You’re just sitting and I know how dangerous that is and how I probably over the years, you know, that just ends up accumulating and then causing pain and, you know, and all sorts of other different elements.

Speaker #1
And, you know, there’s studies out there that say a sedentary lifestyle really knocks years off your age. It’s actually a health risk. It’s, you know, it’s a real problem in our Western world. And, you know, many people do have hip issues. And partly why we have a kind of epidemic of hip issues really is because of sitting in cultures where they don’t have the same chair culture that we have. where we sit to eat, where we sit to watch TV, where we sit to drive our cars, where we sit to chat with friends, where we sit, sit, sit, sit. In cultures that don’t have that, or they squat, or they sit on the floor or whatever, they don’t have hip replacements. They don’t need joint replacements in their hips because they’re using their hips entirely differently and more in the way that we were naturally designed for.

Speaker #0
Right. Yeah. No, that is a very good point that We, yeah, I mean, we just go from sitting to sitting to sitting to sitting. Maybe we’ll go for a walk and then we go sit some more and, you know, or even just take a little yoga class and then we’ll sit some more. So it’s, I agree with you. I think that it’s being sedentary like that is, is not good for your health and to learn. And, but, you know, and so then to learn these, another type of yoga, I think that sounds so perfect. You know, that’s why I’m so intrigued with what you teach because it just sounds so perfect for somebody my age, you know, and, and so it’s not that, you know, what I know of some yoga practices, like, you know, Bikram’s yoga was very like, you know, I think I took one hot yoga class once and it was like, that is a no. I mean, that’s just not, that’s not a hard no. So I’m curious about your Tell me a little bit more about this Brazilian Coyote yoga.

Speaker #1
Yeah, the Coyote.

Speaker #0
I’ve never heard of before.

Speaker #1
Sure. So basically, what happens in Coyote is the first principle of healing in the body, in the system that we know, you know, from clinical studies, trials, everything is what we all know just intuitively. When you’re sick, you go to bed you rest right so that’s the first principle of yoga is that if you’re going to do a movement practice that is going to be healing then you need to be resting while you’re doing the practice your whole system your nervous system the response of the body needs to be in what we call the parasympathetic mode you which is rest and restore. So that’s the first principle. It’s like, okay, how can I connect with my breath? How can I make this really restful? And then we start to move the body. So we move the body very slowly because then we can keep track of how restful we are. But we also need variety and pressure in the joints. So what we’re creating in the joints is that If I use my hand as an example, I’m going to squeeze my hand and I’m going to hold that. So I’m applying pressure. I’m creating a grip. I’m using pressure on the joints, every joint in the hand. So and the hand itself is squeezed. So there’s less blood flow in the hands. Now, I’m doing that on one area of my body. But if I was. you know teaching a class i would i would be saying and relax your jaw relax your shoulders you know breathe in through your belly so the rest of the body is still very restful right and then i release the pose so i let go of my hand for example and the blood naturally just rushes back in and the quality of the blood that rushes back in is blood that is not carrying all those signals of stress or there’s no adrenaline being pumped around there’s no there’s no cortisol there’s there’s just those like calming nutrients because and there’s maybe your digestive system has a bit more more because that’s when we when When we’re rested, we digest, rest and digest. That there’s a bit more nutrients in the blood because you’ve actually been calming the system down so that the meal you ate is actually being, you know, the nutrients can be extracted from it. And so you have like beautiful, perfect, healing, restorative movement system. You’re still moving the body. As I said before, we want to get all that stagnation out. We want the new nutrients to come in. Thank you. we want to stay rested so that’s really the approach that we take so it sounds it sounds wonderful i mean it sounds very gentle and not competitive you know and just you’re doing it at your own at your own level and speed absolutely absolutely you know when i teach how i um often will say to students close your eyes and you won’t need to open them again for another 60 60 minutes Because I don’t teach by demonstrating with my body. I teach with my voice and I teach the student to really go inside of their own system. So when I say, you know, lift your leg up and flex your foot, they’ll lift their leg and flex their foot. And some of them will have their leg, because they have mobility in the hip, have their leg perpendicular to the floor or a little bit further down. Not beyond 90 degrees, but a little bit, you know, towards 45 degrees. Some of them will just have their leg a little bit lifted. Depends on the student, depends on the flexibility, mobility. It doesn’t really matter in the shape of the pose. It’s what it feels like inside. And they can feel that by closing their eyes and just dropping in to that movement themselves.

Speaker #0
That sounds great. I mean, that sounds really… a very gentle approachable way to address joint stiffness achiness pain

Speaker #1
Exactly. And what I move people away from is this whole notion of stretch. It’s funny, I was teaching a class this morning and I said something about leaning over with a side thing. And I said, and then you’ll feel the stretch. And I was like, no, I did not say that word. The word stretch from your vocabulary. And I’m really careful. I mean, I very, very rarely, it’s usually like a mistake like that. I say stretch because As soon as you say stretch, it triggers within people an overreach and something like, oh, I have to like go to the maximum level. And we don’t want to go to the maximum level. We want to go to the optimal level. And it’s different for everyone.

Speaker #0
Yeah, I mean, that also reminds me of, you know, like I said before, growing up, I was never super flexible. And so when. you know, I would just have these memories of going to like gym class, you know, as a younger girl, like the stretching. And I just, you know, that it just brought up, you know, I’m not good enough. I can’t do this, you know? And I think, and I think that that’s how I, I perceived yoga here and there for a while is just that, like, I’m not going to be able to do what you’re doing. You know, like I’m going to go into yoga class and not be good enough and people are watching and So it sounds like yours is very gentle. Go at your own rate. And it’s not.

Speaker #1
Part of that is built up because this idea of having the instructor at the front of the class demonstrating, because the type of person who’s often drawn to yoga does have a more naturally flexible body because of that mindset that you need to be flexible to be able to do yoga. It’s not true. The most stiff, I mean, my 92-year-old father does yoga with me twice a week on Zoom. And he lives in the UK and he comes on Zoom. And he, I mean, you can imagine 92, a guy, he’s not flexible at all. And yet, for an hour, for 60 minutes, he does the beginnings of every single pose and just stays there at the beginning stage. He doesn’t progress, you know, further. He’s like, if we’re doing a forward flexion, he’ll maybe just drop his head. And these days his spine comes, you know, maybe 10 degrees a bit further forward. But that doesn’t matter because he’s working with his rigidity and his particular body type and shape. And for 92 to be practicing yoga, that’s pretty amazing.

Speaker #0
Yeah, no, that’s great. Because my next question was, I was going to ask you, like, If someone came to you and said, like, I’m just stiff, I’m old, I can’t get up off the floor from, you know, from sitting in my.a candidate for yoga? I mean, it sounds like… Sure, for sure.

Speaker #1
You know, to deal with not getting up and down off the floor, I have some students who will do certain poses from a chair and then they’ll go onto their bed. So they’ll have the chair by the side of the bed and they’ll do various poses that I’ll direct them to do from the chair. And then if there’s any lying down poses they’ll get onto their bed and lie. horizontal on their bed and that works perfectly it’s a little more tricky if they’re coming to my studio because obviously i’ve just got yoga mats on the on the floor there um but still there are ways in which i can give them a chair to help them stand up and to to regain that ability to get up and down off the floor that in itself is just really really important because if otherwise subconsciously you’ll always have a really big fear of falling because you know if you fall you won’t be able to get back up and what if I fall and I’m on my own and I won’t be able to get back up I won’t be able to tell anyone that I’ve fallen you know that fear lives in the system if you know that you can’t get up if you’ve if you go down to the floor so yeah see back up for people is super important.

Speaker #0
Yeah, no, I know that that is definitely a fear. I mean, I’ve seen my mother, you know, I, you know, people older, but it’s something that we need to work on now. Right.

Speaker #1
not lose the ability like just keep getting up and down off the floor you know there’s the place in okinawa in japan one of the blue zones where the the people routinely sit on the floor every day they sit on the floor um they don’t have chairs and so yeah ditch the chair ditch the sedentary lifestyle

Speaker #0
you’re watching tv tonight get on the floor and watch telly yes exactly right i know we should just get rid of all our chairs that would probably help a lot so just going along with that you know what if someone has an injury they’ve been in an accident you know like just a chronic condition is it do you find yoga useful for that i know because i’ve had i’ve had back some back issues and I even had back surgery a number of years ago so that it’s I think that that just goes along with some of my fear of sure overstretching or doing something to make it worse yeah

Speaker #1
I mean the main thing is safety and part of the you know first principle as I said is is to get this very rest restful system that you it from which you practice yoga. So your whole body, mind, breath is rested. That’s where we have a long opening of the practice. We always start in one pose and hold it for five, maybe 10 minutes. And it’s usually a comfortable pose for most people. And then we adapt or modify if it’s not so comfortable, because the idea is you set the tone of being rested. And in that you start to feel safe. And so that if there is an old accident, injury, illness, something that’s being dealt with or has been in the past, there’s an area of fear that that could trigger something again. Then we just really gently approach that area from this place of rest. So the moment that you start to feel a little bit like, oh, nervous, don’t want to go there, then you stop. You just come back out a little bit, you know, and it can be a tiny little movement. You go an inch too far and then you come an inch back out and you go, OK, I can rest here. This feels fine. This feels fine. Because then tomorrow or next month or in six months time, you will make that movement a few inches deeper into the into the joint.

Speaker #0
Right.

Speaker #1
If the joint was injured or you’ve had a hip replacement or something else, you’ll be able to go go a little bit further. But you have lots of time. You know, if you think about yoga practice being something that’s going to be with you for life and is very life enhancing, then you have lots of time. It’s not like you’ve got a six week yoga block and you’re going to get everything sorted then. No, it’s like flossing your teeth, brushing your teeth. This is a daily habit or at least a few times a week kind of habit that you want to have for your job.

Speaker #0
I think that’s a really great point because… You know, I think a lot I mean me at least you know, I’ve got like I had this back surgery and then I Definitely got it into my head a little bit. Like I’ll never be able to fill in the blank, you know, like I would be able to. And so I love your philosophy of just making sure you feel safe, the resting and the safety part of it. I think it just really.

Speaker #1
That’s the foundation that has to be the foundation. And then from there you build your confidence, you build your resilience, both physically and mentally. And then you start to be more curious and a little bit more open. You really trust the process and then things can start to really shift.

Speaker #0
Yeah. Trusting the process, I think, is important. You know, if you go in with preconceived notions about, you know, how I might be feeling about yoga because I’ve had, you know, I’ve gone to those classes, like I said, where you’re just being stretched to like a limit that’s just, you know, is not comfortable. and then you get a day and you feel something.

Speaker #1
that good in your body you’re like oh then it right it yeah this whole cycle of then fear comes up and then we have these images you know that we’ve got from yoga books or these days from the internet you see these you know usually younger bendy women doing these impossible poses and yes i i i i’ll often joke with my students and i’ll say we are not trying out for cirque de soleil here people right We’re just making sure that we can get up and down off the floor and reach for a cup if it’s up on the top shelf. Right. Functional yoga here. Just keeping the wheels oiled, keeping the WD-40 in the joints so that we can keep moving through life. You know, and some people have bigger goals. Some people want to keep hiking mountains. Some people want to keep playing tennis or golf or whatever their favorite sport is. Some people want to keep sailing and getting on the water.

Speaker #0
Yeah.

Speaker #1
You know, whatever your what you love to do. I see yoga as the foundation to enable you to do that.

Speaker #0
Yes, it makes so much sense. So I want to just ask you one last question about trauma, because trauma is something that’s been on my mind a lot lately this past year. I’ve just been doing a lot of work, personal work around that. And I know you had a you had your own experience with trauma and how you got into yoga. Tell me a little bit more about just trauma and the relationship with yoga. You know, how did it help you with yoga? I mean, you had a very, you know, a very, very traumatic experience. And I know you were then, you know, a friend brought you into it. And then you were really embraced it for decades.

Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a whole path opened up for me. I mean, I think, you know, there’s a lot more research now about trauma and what trauma is and how it affects us and everything. And I think even the word trauma, you know, gosh, in 1996, when my son died, I don’t think people talked about trauma or that that was a trauma. You know, people said he wasn’t very, very sorry if his son died. It was like, yeah, thanks. But the fact that it was really traumatic. um didn’t really come into it but i think how the yoga helped and i you know much more cognitive about um or cognizance of of of the trauma process i’ve done a lot of research myself is that one thing that we tend to do in traumatic experiences is we check out of our body we lose contact with our body and we leave it you And then we become this thinking machine and our body becomes very secondary. And meanwhile, the body is saying, this is safe. This is not safe. This triggers me. This doesn’t trigger me. And we’re ignoring those symptoms or whatever. And so it has to scream a bit louder because we’re ignoring it because we don’t trust our body because we’ve had a traumatic experience with it. And the body doesn’t trust the mind. The mind doesn’t trust the body. And there’s this big disconnect. And so the whole idea of yoga, the root of the word yoga means joining, union, connecting. So we’re connecting to back ourselves to ourselves. And, you know, all the different I don’t not familiar if you’re familiar with IFS work, the internal.

Speaker #0
Yeah.

Speaker #1
Yeah. So internal family systems talks about our parts and all the different parts of ourselves. And so… Different parts of ourselves will show up in a yoga class, like the ambitious part, like I must get this done, or the defeated part, like I’ll never be able to do this. The hopeful part that says, yeah, I’m going to keep going on with my yoga. Like all those different parts show up on the mat, depending on what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. And so yoga just helps you integrate and you can come back to the breath and you can come back to the self that is. curious and compassionate and caring and open to life. right now in this moment and realizing again that you’re safe and that’s a key part of healing any trauma is to know that you’re safe now right yeah no that right that’s a feeling that you are safe in your own body is

Speaker #0
incredibly important for chronic pain for any trauma you know like like you’ve experienced. So that sounds like a really, so I mean, this. type of yoga that you teach sounds like a really nice modality for healing, helping heal.

Speaker #1
It is.

Speaker #0
Just feeling safe and getting out of fear of not being, you know, falling or not getting, being able to get up off the floor. It’s just anything. And just in getting out of pain, maybe get out of physical pain.

Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah. And the whole idea of pain these days, people are much more aware, all the research that’s coming out around chronic pain especially, is that it’s got to be seen in not just the physical, but in terms of the emotional, the spiritual, the cultural context in which somebody is experiencing pain. And pain in the body when it’s chronic is often… more psychological or emotional than the physiological symptom itself so yeah absolutely and I think that it’s it’s actually really exciting I think that there’s a lot more research and understanding of chronic pain now

Speaker #0
and the connection with your brain and just feel that right that being on high alert feeling safe so it’s yeah and it sounds like your yoga practice definitely complements that

Speaker #1
thanks absolutely absolutely it can it can fit right into whatever healing journey someone wants to wants to be on it just absolutely supports and gives such a basic foundation of just being in the body the breath the mind i mean it’s mindful meditation really um and for somebody who kind of goes oh i’m not sure i could meditate or um is a bit scared of meditation then this kind of yoga that I teach. the joint renewal yoga is very much bringing yourself back to the breath and using the body as the focus of the meditation. So you’re actually in a moving meditation for an hour.

Speaker #0
That’s a nice way to think of it. So tell me a bit more about where people can find you, your classes. I am assuming there are they online?

Speaker #1
they’re in person and yeah yeah so i have various different offerings and options the first thing i would say is just if you get onto my mailing list that’s the best thing and i give you a free guide that will give you a an overview of the joint renewal system so the joint renewal guide and if you just go to kathywhiteyoga.com so that’s www kathy white yoga or one word kathy with a k white with an I as in the colour. And I will put this all in the show notes as well.

Speaker #0
Show notes. Okay.

Speaker #1
Happywhiteyoga.com. And on the front page of my website, I’ve just got a little, you know, would you like a joint, the joint renewal guide? And you put your email details and I’ll send you that. I have regular challenges that come up that are free, seven-day kind of introduction to this method. I have a membership site if people prefer to do kind of more. at home practice with using recordings. I also have live classes on Zoom and in my studio in on Vancouver Island. If anyone listening is on Vancouver Island, you can come visit me.

Speaker #0
Sounds lovely. That’s it. Yeah, I live in, you know, I’m in Connecticut. So one day, I would love to come and see your studio. Well, Kathy, thank you so much for coming and talking about this. I think it’s really important work. And I think what you’re doing really helps take the stigma out of that yoga, you know, being up on that pedestal or like, I can’t do it. Other more flexible women can, I can’t. And really helping to address joint pain and trauma and just overall healing.

Speaker #1
Thank you. for having me on the show. It’s been a great, great time talking with you.

Speaker #0
Great. Thanks. Have a great day. And as always, if you loved this podcast, please consider gifting me with a five-star review. It is so helpful for me to get the word out on real eating, our real bodies and real food stories. Thank you so much and have a great week. Bye for now.