Season 3 Episode 5: Change in the Body
In this episode, Nancy shares about building a relationship with our body.
In this episode Nancy shares the story we've all been waiting for... a little tale about a rogue Segway. But it's actually about a lot more than that. The Segway story brings Nancy to think about how she's viewed her body over the years, and the way that changes around our physical self can be tough. Then she talks to an expert practitioner and teacher of the Feldenkrais Method-- a movement practice that encourages gentle movement and bodily awareness to promote overall wellness.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
- Nancy's personal story about change and her body.
- Information and insights from Feldenkrais practitioner Elizabeth Beringer.
- How to learn more about Self Loyalty School.
Learn more about Elizabeth Beringer:
-Go to Feldenkraisresources.com/
+ Read the Transcript
Nancy Jane Smith: [00:00:00] Hey guys, it's me. Nancy Jane Smith. Welcome back to the happier approach. The show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships. Last week, we talked all about change and emotions, how emotions aren't just thoughts, but how we feel them in our book.
And they can cause us to act to create change. So this week we're taking that concept one step further and focusing on change in our bodies, just like we can get stuck in an emotional wreck. Our bodies get stuck in ruts, two habits that we formed out of necessity, like walking a little heavier on our right foot because of an injury to our left can cause physical and even emotional pain down the line.
Like a lot of what we've talked about this season, it's hard to shake ourselves out of old habits and routines, especially when they're [00:01:00] physically ingrained in us, but it is possible to work with our bodies to change our habits in a way that is gentle, safe, and respectful. But let me tell you, it took me a long time to learn that lesson.
Earlier this season in episode two, I mentioned that I had a story about a segway accident that I'd say for another time. Well now is that. It was the summer. And my cousin from Oakland called me to invite me to her baby shower. It was a little last minute for a trip across the country, but we decided to add a stay in San Francisco.
I love San Francisco and had been there a few times with family and friends. My husband had never been to San Francisco and I was excited to show him all that. I scheduled a tour to Alcatraz and booked a wine tour through Napa. And on our first day, I booked a segway tour around fisherman's Wharf. The perfect trip.
I [00:02:00] was so excited on the day of the segway tour. We ate a delicious breakfast in our hotel and made our way to fishermen's war for the tour. We successfully completed the basic training, how to wear a helmet, how to get on the segway and stopping it. Finally, we were off, it took us a minute, but soon my husband and I and the other tour participants were confidently segwaying around the city, gliding between pedestrians and writing with traffic down the streets.
Then we came to one of those famous San Francisco Hills looking straight up as the road seemed to reach for the sky. As she started up hill, the leader of the tour casually yelled over her. Oh, we forgot to talk about this, but just lean forward on the segway to go up a hill. Oh no, I thought we didn't cover this in the training.
I would think this would be pretty important. Well, for the very small woman in front of me leaning forward, wasn't quite [00:03:00] cutting it to get her up the hill or segway started going the wrong way. It started slipping backward down the hill towards. And I couldn't get out of her way because there was traffic coming at me on the left and a row of parked cars on the right.
So I fell off my segway and because we were on a hill, well, my segway kept on cruising right over my ankle. As we sat on the road, it took a while for the leader. And even my husband to figure out that I was seriously hurt because I kept laughing. Yep. My shock response. But a hospital ride later, they determined my ankle was heavily bruised and had no major breaks, but it was too swollen to see any minor or hairline breaks.
So they sent me home with pain, meds, crutches, and instructions to staff my foot and see my doctor when I got back home. But here we were day one of our 10 day vacation and we were [00:04:00] staying in a hotel in downtown San Francisco, all our plans camp. I cried as my husband canceled our wine tour and thought to myself, hi, just spent the past four months recovering from major surgery.
I just had a hysterectomy earlier that year, and now my future is going to be filled with more doctors. The thought felt crushing. It was like my body had betrayed me and I couldn't even imagine a time when we'd have a peaceful let alone healthy and happy relationship.
Elizabeth Beringer: Sometimes you can sound like a snake oil salesman, because this is such a, it's such a kind of primary approach that it can be applied in a lot of different ways.
And if you list all those ways, you could sound like a snake oil salesman, but it's because being able to move better, being able to breathe better, being more comfortable in yourself that improves. [00:05:00] Anything that humans do. It's so central.
Nancy Jane Smith: This is Elizabeth Berenger. She's one of the foremost teachers and trainers of the Feldenkrais method, a movement practice that uses gentle motions and sustained attention to help people reconnect with their bodies, increasing range of motion, decreasing pain, and even helping with emotional regulation.
Elizabeth has been a Feldenkrais practitioner for 40 years. Elizabeth Beringer: I met the founder when I was just 20 years old. So. I really absorbed the method and the philosophy of the method very early.
Nancy Jane Smith: When Elizabeth first learned that paying attention to our bodies can change our relationship to them. It blew her away.
Elizabeth Beringer: One of my early experiences in doing the group work, which we call awareness through movement, which today. We would refer to as a mindfulness-based practice, but that word didn't exist at that time. And had no [00:06:00] idea. I wasn't breathing fully, no idea that my shoulders were tight, who would talk about those things, who would think about those things?
And I felt so different and I felt so good and I felt, you know, bigger and more myself. Nancy Jane Smith: The Feldenkrais method is all about building that awareness of how you hold your body and how that makes your body. And you feel the practice can be useful for people with all kinds of health issues.
Elizabeth Beringer: So my practice has included very elderly people and top athletes, children, all kinds of people with neurological problems, different kinds of pain.
We work with people with multiple sclerosis and with Parkinson's and it's not per se a cure for those things. It helps people function better and in some cases, I've seen pretty remarkable [00:07:00] results. And I worked with people who stopped having incontinence problems were able to walk
Nancy Jane Smith: better and not only could practicing Feldenkrais help with physical pain, it can help with emotional pain too.
Elizabeth has experienced that firsthand.
Elizabeth Beringer: I'd already been practicing the method for a few years and I was getting more successful and I was really a little overwhelmed with how much I had to do. And I'd find like I'd get myself in a very anxious state, which would involve stopping breathing. So I said, okay, you know, like, hello, you're a felon Christ practitioner.
What are you? What are you doing about this? And I decided, okay, first thing is, I'm going to rather than beating myself up, which is what I was doing. Like, what are you? You're an imposter. You're having this experience. And. [00:08:00] Then you're supposed to be teaching other people. So I said, okay, first of all, I'm just going to observe myself without judgment.
And once I made that shift, things happened very fast when I was asking. I came into myself, physically. I checked my breathing. I was able to stop doing, because it was more conscious now what I've been doing to restrict my breathing. And then I could also have just stop myself at that one thing that started the cascade of thoughts and say, what action are you going to do rather than convincing myself that I was.
The, for me that action orientation is just stay in the present, breathe and think about what's the action you're going to take now to address what you just remembered, where you just realized you forgotten.
Nancy Jane Smith: Elizabeth says that physical [00:09:00] states and emotional states are really wedded together. If one changes the other candidate.
Elizabeth Beringer: Our habits are all intertwined together. And when I could just be with that and observe it, I had choice. I had some choices, which I didn't have before, because I wasn't aware of what I was doing.
Nancy Jane Smith: And this method, it can really change how you approach your day-to-day
Elizabeth Beringer: life. There's one woman I work with with really terrible pain, you know, messed up back operations and just terrible pain. I'd say the biggest breakthrough we had was. Th the work she was doing involved driving to different people's homes.
And I would just have her when she got back in the car and she would lean back and do a little awareness work in the car. And she said, that's what changed my life.
Nancy Jane Smith: Elizabeth says, this is all about remembering your body and embracing that you take up space and you can feel the world around you. [00:10:00] Even when the world around you feels really.
Elizabeth Beringer: You know, when you're in action, you're not necessarily sensing yourself. Sometimes remembering dissents yourself is enough. And then you start to breathe more fully. You drop your shoulders, you do whatever you need to do when you, when once you've gone through it. But you have to remember yourself.
Nancy Jane Smith: I know I felt like this before. Like my body and myself are two separate entities, but Elizabeth says that bringing those two parts together. Can really make a difference in how we feel both physically and mentally.
Elizabeth Beringer: I think that many people have an attitude towards their bodies of like, it's a thing separate from them. So first of all, We ask people to switch their language, to talk about themselves and not their body. So if you say, oh, I'm going to lie my body down, or my [00:11:00] body is X. We'd take you. I am, I'm lying down. I am my body. And whether you have different spiritual beliefs or not in this world, while we're moving around, owning our bodies and not running away from the sensations. We really change our language to be in the present with our sensation and the process. People can have big experiences the first time it develops and accumulates. And there are these shifts where like, what I just said about the body is a concern as really kind of a concept, but then it goes deeper and it is a lived experience.
Nancy Jane Smith: Um, once people make that shift, they tend to stick with it
Elizabeth Beringer: . You experienced yourself as a whole, and you start to experience yourself. Uh, living [00:12:00] more actively in your kinesthetic experience as you engage in the method. So that becomes a resource and it, I think keeps us healthier because we don't go around hiking up a shoulder and developing pain and pain and more pain until we go to a professional to help us.
I also think that being more aware of ourselves, kinesthetically can be a resource for creativity., And for insights really this method is all about attention awareness and being gentle with yourself.
Nancy Jane Smith: All things I've definitely struggled with. It can be really easy to get stuck in habits and cycles of negative self-talk and thus negative physical states like heightened anxiety. The strange thing is because these are habits, they can make us feel. Even if they're ultimately harmful. So it's hard to change them.
Elizabeth Beringer: One really important [00:13:00] element of our work is safety. So when we have checked out from our physical experience or we have certain kinds of injuries or pain that can become a habit and it's not always comfortable to, to go through. The physical habits that we have, the emotional guarding and those kinds of things.
They happen for a reason. They solved a problem at a certain point and seeing them as actually, it was many times the only solution we had at the time and respecting that about ourselves. Like we were doing the best we could in that, in that situation. And then creating the safety to explore some other options and explore.
Nancy Jane Smith: Of course expanding my view of the body and its abilities and being gentle with myself during the process, as Elizabeth described is an approach that I've had to learn the hard way.[00:14:00]
When we last left off on my segue adventure, I was crying in my hotel room because it felt like my body. And once again, betrayed me after we returned home, I saw an orthopedic doctor who diagnosed me with a small hairline. And I was sentenced to eight weeks of no walking or driving, followed by PT. I remember going to work for the first time and realizing my no elevator office building would require me to crawl up the stairs with my husband carrying my scooter or on my particularly stubborn days.
I dragged it behind me. Tears were usually involved, but there was little compassion for myself, mostly anger and my body not co-op. I had had a hysterectomy earlier that year, that was a harder recovery than I thought it would be. I'd gone from working out five days a week to hardly being able to work out at all.
So having one more gigantic blow to my body was overwhelming. [00:15:00] My body image Munger came out in full force. If you were in better shape, it would be easier to move too bad. You let yourself go so badly or this would be. One night as I crawled up the stairs in tears, exhausted and defeated. I heard from my biggest fan, I thought to myself, oh girl, your foot may be broken, but you are not. You just can't move the way you used to. It'll be okay. You will move past this.
finally I was ready for. And I embraced it with passion booking sessions three times a week, and working out at home when I could, after 12 weeks, my ankle was healed. And I wish I could say that with that brief moment of self loyalty at the top of the stairs, my body shaming days are over. And I found a new way to love myself despite my brokenness.
Ah, but that would be. I've made some baby steps of [00:16:00] stopping body shaming myself in public and not having lunch conversations with friends about good foods and bad foods. But all I did was put all my body issues in a box and sealed it up and put it away. And what do we all know about ignoring things? It never works so fast forward to eight years later, with more diagnoses and more pain that have left me feeling discouraged about.
Listening to Elizabeth gave me renewed hope that it is possible to find a kind relationship with my body and the. Working with my body instead of forcing it into submission. Yes. Some of this is habitual as we discussed with Elliot, but I believe this issue is really about how I see my body and building that self loyalty. I never thought this season with the theme of change would lead me to so many off Hawes about my relationship with my body. I know it is one of the [00:17:00] areas where I struggle with self loyalty. I'm actually grateful for the woman on the segway. She dramatically changed my life first when I broke my ankle.
And then again, when I realized that break is the beginning of me building a better relationship with myself, even if it was eight years in the making
that's it for this week. And our next episode, we're going to look at how making meaningful change can be tricky when the BFF gets involved. That's next time on the happier approach. The happier approach is produced by Nicki Stein and me Nancy Jane Smith. Music provided by pod five and [00:18:00] epidemic sound for more episodes to get in touch or to learn more about self loyalty school, you can visit Nancy Jane smith.com.
And if you like the show, leave us a review. It actually helps us out a lot special. Thanks to Elizabeth Berenger for speaking with us today, you can find more information about Elizabeth and the Feldenkrais method@feldonchrist.com. The happier approach. We'll be back with another episode in two weeks. Take care until then.