How to Slow Down Enough to Learn What Your Body Really Needs

How to Slow Down Enough to Learn What Your Body Really Needs

Welcome to episode 138 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento, and today we have Canada’s only Realignment Coach Diana Lockett with us and she is going to be telling us how to slow down enough to learn what our body needs. So welcome Diana, So give the audience a little bit of an idea of who you are, how you got into what you’re doing, and your background

I’ve been working as a speech and language pathologist for 32 years in the specialty area of augmentative communication, which is working for nonverbal kids. I still do that right now and I do it as a service opportunity where I receive grants from corporations to be able to identify and deliver equipment to kids who are non-verbal in orphanages in Africa. 

So that’s like a passion project that I’m doing right now that I’m loving.  In that journey, I was introduced to yoga and before that, I knew there was something in me that was just longing to wake up in my life.

I was 32 years old. I was married. I had a daughter, and I had a nice house. I had nice cars. I did my two trips a year. Something was not feeling settled in my body and I didn’t know what it was. So I started seeking and I was introduced to yoga. I was introduced to breathwork and meditation and I started incorporating all of those as daily practices for a while

I decided to become certified and as a teacher, I opened up a teacher training academy. I’ve trained 500 or 700 people now in the greater Toronto area to be yoga instructors and what’s different about my yoga teacher training program is that it’s a personal development program disguised as yoga. 

So people come thinking, they’re just going to learn how to teach poses and they leave having a really deep relationship with themselves and with each other because it’s very much of a heart-opening experience. So I continued to do that and then about six years ago, I realized there are a lot of people who need these teachings, these spiritual and personal teachings, these communities that are heart-centered and authentic and rich that don’t go to yoga

I started coaching and so my coaching program is a blend of spiritual coaching, Eastern philosophy, personal development, mindset, coaching, and then really deep embodied practices and people come to me usually with this feeling of not being happy or that something is missing or I feel like I don’t know what I don’t want to do, etc.

So together we explore, I give them homework and assignments. I have them reflect on things in their life that are getting in the way and the teachings that they’ve taken on.

I use remembrance as a noun, the practice of remembrance, what do we want to remember? How do we want to show up? How do we want to feel? and that takes us to these practices that help us to slow down.

I feel grateful that every day I am presented with an opportunity to coach myself as I’m coaching my clients, as I’m teaching my students, as I’m doing these interviews, as I’m writing my books, I know this seems like it’s for everybody else.

But I have a strong belief that you are me, cleverly disguised as you and so everything that I share is, so I get to practice the remembrance because I also get caught in the struggles and the tension and the worries and the fears because I’m human too

Thankfully, I have tools and I have practice because I’ve been doing this now for 15 years. I can take a step back and see the bigger picture and say that I get to choose how I experience this moment and I know people listening, might say, well, that’s easy to do for you because you’re a spiritual teacher, you’re a spiritual coach.

Let me tell you, I had the most incredibly painful year when my husband left our 15 years of marriage. My father died of COVID and my 15-year-old cat who slept on my belly every night died and my daughter, who was my best friend and support system when everybody else got pulled away because of COVID ended up moving forward to 300 kilometers, which is about 2,800 miles away and I supported her doing that.

I found myself facing some very dark moments in my life and thankfully I have my practice because I can take myself out of it. When I go back to my yoga teachings and it’s all about how we overcome the mind and that’s one practice but then we’ve got this thing called the body and the body.

We know the body keeps the score of everything that’s happened to us in our lifetime and when people come into this relaxed, slow state, all of a sudden, there’s wisdom that comes through. 

I need to breathe more. Or I have this longing to do a business, this awareness of how I want to parent, this way of being of how I want to be in a relationship with another. That wisdom comes through but it can only come from a relaxed state from inside you, not from someone else.

The word is gratitude. What are you grateful for at this moment? There’s always something to be grateful for and gratitude is a practice that allows you to attract more of the same

The more you can practice gratitude, you realize you have more things you have to be grateful for, and in the end, what do you need? And I’m really clear when I work with women, as my primary audience is women. 

When I work with women, it is so easy for us to deny our needs because we are so used to caring for others and we make ourselves care.  You then realize you need to take more time to care for yourself.

What advice do you have for moms that are kind of stepping into this process yet it’s hard to find the time?

To give you a monastic response. Remember the monastic is what meditation was built upon. If you don’t have time to meditate for 10 minutes a day you need to meditate for two-three hours a day. This is what that response would be. I am living in this human world with all of you.

We are all working moms and so I’m not going to say that to you. You set here a few strategies take your notes your paper and pen out people. So that you can write this down at the beginning of every day.

There is a theory called polyvagal theory which is that when if there’s a whole bunch of teachings but one of them is around the vagus nerve which is a nerve that runs from our brain into our gut and gets activated or toned or vibrating when we exhale audibly and that vagus nerve activates what we call the parasympathetic nervous response nervous system

This is the calming nervous system when you start your day like that three deep breaths with an audible exhalation you are setting yourself up to bring calmness into your day this is the way you start we don’t start by picking up our phones don’t start by looking at the news don’t start by reading messages scrolling Facebook any of that stuff the way to set yourself up for calmness and success in your day is breathe remember breath and everything changes.

Thanks, Diana for the amazing insight and so grateful to have you share all of this with us. This episode of The Determined Mom Show is brought to you by onlinemarketingformoms.com. The only marketing membership that allows moms CEOs to take hold of the reins of their marketing and learn DIY SEO, website building, marketing and so much more, so join us for more information.