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Welcome to the Inspired Woman podcast with your host, Sam Bell. Get ready to be inspired by inspirational women and men who are making a real difference in our world today. Listen in as they share their stories and provide their weekly dose of inspiration to help you stop existing and start living your life with passion, purpose, and joy.
Get ready to be inspired. Hello, and welcome to the Inspired Woman show. And I am delighted to introduce a lady called Keisha Lawrence this week, who after years of feeling stuck in exhaustion, anxiety, and addiction, even though that she thought she was doing all the right things, she finally broke free from the soul-sucking life by calming her candida overgrowth.
Keisha is a nationally board certified health and wellness coach that is passionate about empowering women to step into their personal power and ride through life with grace, both figuratively and literally. She specialise in helping high achieving, mountain biking moms calm anxiety and build confidence. Keisha combines a deep understanding of health and wellness with her love for adventure and the great outdoors.
Drawing from years of experience as a massage therapist and a lifelong learner in holistic health, Keisha inspires her clients and audiences to take intentional action toward their wellbeing. Her practical strategies and relatable stories make her a sought after speaker and coach for anyone looking to improve their mindset, resilience, and overall health. And she certainly inspired me, so I'm sharing you.
Keisha, welcome to the show. Hello, Sam. Thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate being here. I love that the work that you're doing out there. And when I asked you to be a podcast guest, I asked you who or what inspires you? Yeah, and my answer is quite simple, people who lead with love and vulnerability.
I know, and I mean, we talk a lot about leading with love and trying to be kind from our heart space, but vulnerability, I mean, it took me a long time to realise what vulnerability was and why it was so powerful. And, you know, at first I'll just tell you how I felt. You know, I had years of counselling and doing EMDR and it was mucky, it was not pretty.
And I knew that I had to be vulnerable and I was vulnerable and I did not like that because I'd always wanted to be in control. And I think that that is something when you're in survival mode, you do very much become in control of everything. You know, you don't like any surprises, but vulnerability seems to me to be the complete opposite.
What are your views on vulnerability? Well, I almost see it as a way to help ourselves be in a little bit of control in terms of just, we get to show what we want to the people around us, right? And Brene Brown, obviously the hard charger for us with vulnerability, but our whole lives we have been taught to armor up, you know, to when something's coming at us, we've been taught to protect our heart and armor up against it. When we have these new wonderful teachers like Joan Halifax and Elizabeth Lesser, who are saying to open our chest to the conflict, open our chest, allow ourselves to be vulnerable and to be broken open, but yet remain strong, right? So strong back, soft front. So I feel that if we can really address the world in this manner, that everyone around us is given the opportunity to be vulnerable as well.
I mean, what if I were to say, I don't want to feel all of that, you know? I like to have my chest armor, my plate of armor there and I don't want to do that. Is that a good thing, would you say? Everybody gets to choose. It's always challenge by choice.
And another thing I like to say a lot is choose your hard because remaining armored has its difficulties as well. It's not always super clean over there. It's a little messy, all armored up.
Sometimes we get to the point where that's just really uncomfortable. Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things I think I remember being told is learn to be comfortable with the discomfort, you know? And to accept it as not a sign of being weak.
Because I think that might be, that might've been me personally, that if I let down my armor, then I would show people that I was weak or I open myself up to being judged. And I think judgment is a big piece there, you know? Yeah. We've all been taught that vulnerability is quote unquote weakness, right? But luckily the paradigm gets to change and we get to see it as courage, as strength to allow yourself to be human.
Right? And I do think there's discomfort on all sides of the spectrum, right? If you are over here, armored up, there's gonna be some discomfort. I mean, we call it the comfort zone, but I like to call it the familiar zone. Because many people are very sick and uncomfortable in their familiar zone.
They just don't know how to get to that unfamiliar zone. They actually do wanna make the jump to dropping off some of that armor and becoming more vulnerable. But it's scary as hell over there, right? But at the same time, they're extremely uncomfortable over here.
Like my question is oftentimes, how comfortable are you? And the people who wanna step into it get uncomfortable enough that they are gonna make the jump. Some people are gonna stay right there and nobody is here to make anyone step out of the comfort zone that they don't want to, right? We all get to be grown up humans now and make the choices that we want. And if you wanna stay there, it's totally fine.
Yeah, because as my business partner, Cindy Smith, she always says, we have free will. Yes. And if somebody's free will or that ego comes in and says, nope, then you have to, okay.
I know that my ego, my free will will come up every now and again. And I just have to say, I love you, ego. And that is usually when I'm in my fight or flight, right? I love you, ego.
You can be quiet. I feel safe. Yes.
We both had the honor of doing nervous system regulation healing. And as soon as you said, my brain is wired about that spectrum and over here you're in armor and how comfortable is it? Well, that's when you're living in fight or flight. And because we live in that fight or flight and our sympathetic nervous system, we feel really, it feels familiar.
So our nervous system is always going to choose to go there instead of going into the unfamiliar, which is that rest and digest state, because we're not used to resting and digesting. We actually end up feeling guilty about resting and digesting, you know? So bringing in a little bit of the nervous system regulation there, I can see how it relates to feeling safe or feeling unsafe as feeling in control or feeling vulnerable. You know, those two ends of the spectrum.
So yeah, interesting. Different, interesting analogy there. And listeners, you can reach out to either myself or Kesha.
I'll have all of her contact details and her bio in this episode available for you. But reach out to either of us if you're interested about, you know, that nervous system regulation piece, because it has certainly changed my life. It really has.
Now, honestly, another thing is I want to just talk a little bit about feelings and feelings of vulnerability. I know that one of my core desired feelings is authenticity because I went through my life and covering up my discomforts, I guess they were, and pushing them down, a little bit like pushing ego down and pushing forward with feeling in control. And in actual fact, I then realized that, you know, I was living in so much stress and anxiety.
It had a physical effect on my body with autoimmune diseases. You name it, an autoimmune encyclopedia. And it was only when I started to do EMDR therapy and some things started to come up and I started to feel vulnerable that I realized that all those years, I hadn't been living my true self.
And authenticity has now become something so important to me. And, you know, I just want to hear your perspectives there because I know it's something very dear to you as well, about being authentic. Yes, indeed.
I had a similar experience through massage therapy school and I had an emotional release and I started crying and I didn't stop crying for six months. That was 20 years ago, 19 years ago. And for years, I had been the woman who, I wasn't going to be high maintenance.
I wasn't going to let anyone wait on me. I wasn't going to, I didn't want to be trouble for anyone. I didn't want to take up too much space.
You know, I was the third child. So I really just kind of had to fit in where it worked for me, right? And so that was my whole premise was I'm just going to be a quiet little, I mean, I was never quiet, don't get me wrong, but I was just going to, I was going to be as low maintenance for everyone around me as possible. And as I attempted to do that, I squashed these feelings.
It was just always like, no worries. I, you know, there was a lot of worries, but I wasn't showing them outside and I was pushing them inside my body. And I found out in massage school that those are, there's actually memories and cell, cellular, the cells are holding on to all of that, right? And so then in massage school, I started crying and I didn't even know I had lived in this like delusion of joy and happiness and, you know, like toxic positivity, if you will, right? And, but not actually being my authentic self.
And it all started there. And I started to learn about how the emotions are creating dis-ease within the physical body. It's emotional constipation, if you will, that gets clogged up, right? And that causes dysfunction.
So yeah, the feelings are huge. The feelings are huge. And it's allowing ourselves to feel, you know? Yes, yes.
And really- No one's taught us. Yeah, giving yourself permission to feel. And then what I do with clients is I say, you know, I usually get them into that rest and digest state, you know, with using peripheral vision or grounding from my spiritual practices.
But getting somebody comfortable and then starting to feel, maybe there's a story or something, you know, you're feeling what name do you give to it? And it's lovely because what I might call joy, they might give it a colour. Or what I may call, you know, heartache, they may give it a colour or give it a different name. But I think, you know, as long as you give yourself that permission to really feel what that emotion is and understanding as well.
I was told a lovely analogy about feelings. I don't know if you've heard this. I can't remember who first told me.
Anyway, she uses the analogy and I've adopted it on many, many occasions that we have root feelings and fruit feelings. Have you heard that? I have never heard this one, yay. Right, so if you imagine the roots of a tree, they're always there, right? They're there, they're anchored in.
Those are your root feelings. So if my, one of my root feelings is joy, you know, it doesn't mean that every day I'm going to be joy and I'm going to be this wonderful, joyful person. I'm going to give myself some permission, recognising that there might be a fruit feeling that's going to come up.
So something that I hear in the media that gets me riled and gets me angry, puts me in that flunk. Well, that is a fruit feeling. It's not in my roots because my root feeling is joy, but that fruit feeling has come about and it's going to be there until it falls off the tree.
That's beautiful, I love this analogy, yeah. I love, I mean, I love analogies, but. This is beautiful even to help, you know, speak with children about feelings because oftentimes our feelings, if we feel angry or scared, our parent, and I found myself doing this with my child too, it's like, oh, there's nothing to be scared of.
Or, oh, those big feelings are making everyone else in the room uncomfortable. Can you please take those to your own space, you know? And so that was what I did was just say, okay, I'm just going to not have these feelings. I'm not going to trust these feelings anymore.
No one said, hey, just allow yourself to actually be angry instead of like, oh no, no, don't be angry about that. No, I'm pissed off, right? Let's allow ourself to be pissed off. And then as we are now learning, if you just give yourself that acute minute, 90 seconds in fact, of being pissed off about that, you're moving in the direction of ease and you're able to close that emotional stress loop off.
Rather than in that moment where you feel angry and then you try to not be angry, that's going in the opposite direction of ease. It's like a stuck drawer, right? So when the drawer is stuck, you can't just push it in. You can't just like go from sad to happy or pissed off to happy.
You have to move in the direction of ease. We have to pull the drawer out first, allow it to get aligned, and then we can easily push that drawer back in. If we just give ourselves to move in the direction of ease, of anger or sadness or grief, or whatever it may be that's uncomfortable, we just offer that space 90 seconds.
Then that fruit tree, that fruit's gonna fall off the tree so much faster rather than lingering around for decades because we didn't give it 90 seconds. And that's what happened to me in massage school was I never gave any of these things 90 seconds. And then it all started bubbling up and six months later, I'm still crying.
And I'm just like, I don't even know where this came from. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It's all, no one taught us how to do these things.
So a lot of it is learning to give permission to an individual to be vulnerable, to express their feelings, however pretty or ugly they may be. And then the other piece is judgment, being nonjudgmental, you know? So I used to host a lot of women's circles. Might get back to doing that.
When COVID hit, I stopped doing the in-person events and I should do them in a virtual environment again. But I was actually at a workshop last week, which was a pathway to reconciliation. I was up in Jasper in Alberta for a week and we had a classroom that was just a circle of chairs.
No desks, right? Nowhere to put your folder, nowhere to put your pen down. We were in circle. And it reminded me about how powerful a circle is.
You know, there's no leader and everybody respects the word of everybody else. Everybody listens and there's no judgment, you know? And when you think about ancestors gone by, how they would conduct business in circle instead of in a boardroom where you've got somebody at the head of the table, which to me is so patriarchal. The circle is so powerful, you know? And I think that what we're talking about is you create an environment.
And certainly women and men who joined us in circle, they would feel that safe container and that what happened in the circle stayed in circle. So there was no judgment. There wasn't anybody taking it outside, but really allowing people to feel.
So, I mean, it sounds like something so simplification to allow people to feel and yet our society doesn't allow us to do that. They certainly do not. They certainly do not.
And we now know that judgment is a low-grade dysregulation. So if we are judging another human, our nervous system is feeling unsafe for whatever reason. Yeah, that's an interesting point.
That totally, yeah, that totally makes sense, right? It does. So for our listeners to know, if I'm judging somebody, I might be judging them because I have an envy or a distaste for something about them or want to be like them. And recognizing in myself that I'm not as powerful or not as beautiful, not as well-spoken, not as in tune with her emotions, not as successful.
And I know that in one of our previous conversations, we were talking about tapping into others at a deeper level and not just looking at how they look or the car they drive. Oh, yeah. I mean, really seeing someone for who they are is extremely powerful.
You can walk through a grocery store and make an impact in people's lives simply by making eye contact with them, showing them that you see them as a human, offering them a genuine smile and moving through. I mean, it doesn't have to be complicated. Just seeing the human for who they are.
We are all struggling humans. And as far as I understand it, everyone is making this up. We're all just walking through and figuring it out as we go along.
And we're all one energetic source too. So anyone who is under the illusion that they are in fact able to judge because of whatever reason they've made up in their mind, they are under the illusion. We are all walking shoulder to shoulder.
And if we can actually see each other like that, really powerful things can happen. And that's what happens when you sit in a circle. You're all on one level.
You're all energetically taking on that space. You feel safe, hopefully, right? So your nervous system can be regulated. So we don't have to throw judgment around the circle.
We can really just sit in ourselves. And oftentimes, as Carl Young would tell us, if something's bothering us about someone else, it's likely a reflection of something that bothers you about yourself, which can be a tough pill sometimes to take, right? Oh, yes. Yeah, this work isn't easy, right? If it was easy, we'd all do it and we'd all be wonderful.
But this work is difficult. And talking about that and the work that you do, how do you inspire others? Well, simply, I just don't ask anyone else to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. And I also just meet people where they are, where they don't have to take the path that I took to wellness.
They get to march their own path. They get to trudge their own path. I'm gonna help them clear the way.
I mean, their wellness is like the sunshine. It is always there. The dis-ease is just an umbrella shading that or a cloud shading that wellness, but they are pure wellness.
And the wellness is always there. So all I do is just help them clear the way, and find the way that works for them. I always say there's one path to grace, a path you can see, a path you can get on and a path you can stay on.
And no one else has the same path to grace as you. I love that. A path to grace.
I love that. Thank you. And when I asked you before, you said that walking your talk is really important to you as well.
Right? And I just wonder how many people, especially in our industry as wellness coaches, really truly walk their talk, you know? Well, certainly the people that I hang out with do. I mean, and most of us have gotten here to help others, to empower others, because we've walked ourselves back from dis-ease some way, shape or form. Right? So I don't, I just can't see someone stepping into helping and like on this, on the coaching side of things.
Right? Like I see that a lot in the medical profession, right? There's a lot of illness there. You know that firsthand as from being a nurse, right? But that's, I think, part of the system. There's a lack of education, but those of us who are really stepping into to create space for deeper, deeper wellness, we have to lead by example.
There's no other way. There, the energetic discrepancy would be too much that the person that we would be thinking about working with wouldn't be able to, there would be no integrity in the relationship. Yeah.
There needs to be that therapeutic relationship and that has to be the trust and the no judgment and all of the things that we've discussed already. And that's why that therapeutic relationship is so important to healing. Yeah.
And that's important for them to just know that we're in the trenches too. Yeah. Yeah.
And not to be, and again, being vulnerable, not being able to say, hey, I'm perfect. I've got it all figured out. Well, in actual fact, I'm not perfect and I'm still repeating mistakes and I'm still learning, you know, because that's what I'm here for.
I'm here in this world to walk this life and learn from it, you know? And I don't know about you, but I remember when I first started on, I call it my spiritual journey because I was already pretty well versed with the physical body and the emotional and the social, but I had no idea about spiritual, you know, being part of a holistic self. And so I started a spiritual journey, which really opened up so many aha moments for me and allowed me to become a truly holistic practitioner, looking at all facets of a person. But yeah, I remember starting on that spiritual journey and thinking, I've made this great big breakthrough.
Oh my goodness. And then something else would come and it'd be like, seriously? I thought I dealt with that. Oh, darn.
And you go forward again. And then you think, yep, I've cracked it this time. And then something else would come and you go, seriously? Yeah.
Yeah, it's amazing. It does feel like we are back to where we were, but everything in nature is a spiral. And I really feel like our learning journey is a spiral as well.
And as we move through it, it feels like we are back, but we're not. We've done a lot of learning. We've been a full revelation around that circle, right? Revolution around that circle.
And we're closer, we're closer. I mean, through my journey with addiction, I went back so many times. And eventually I was able to crack it.
I was able to step away and not look back. But those 26 years of being in it, you think it's just like another failed attempt, right? It feels like another failed attempt. I'm right back here again, and it can be discouraging.
But we just have to really keep thinking about how there are times in that cycle where it's gonna be down and back as we move through it. And that down and back feeling is just like when we're pulling the bow back on the arrow, right? Or we're pulling the string back on the bow to fling the arrow. We have to pull that string all the way back.
The first action is always the opposite direction, right? When we're gonna throw a ball, we have to bring our arm all the way back. So as we roll through that, when it feels like it's down and back and we're going backwards and not in the right direction at all, it's just the propulsion. It's what we need to propel ourselves off into the new direction, right? Yeah, I love that.
And something, again, that I teach is to stay in the now rather than going into the past. And that really resonates with me because I do feel that everything in life, everything in nature is a cycle. And there is a time when you're supposed to go within and dark and reflect.
And that's, you know, I follow the moon cycles. So it's that new moon feeling. Yes.
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