Hello, hello, welcome back to Rebirth Era. My name is Jessica Jade Patterson, and I am so excited you're joining me here for this episode. We're still in body territory. If you've listened to the previous episode, I am doing kind of a set of three different aspects of self episodes, including a couple of book recommendations and just really tangible, easy access advice for you to start considering if you have certain things going on in your life to create more wholeness, more groundedness, more love, unconditional love for self from within, like radiating from you essentially. So these are different concepts that I explored at the beginning of my healing journey and actual things that I put into place to create the next level version of me. Now, this version of me is always evolving, so you'll always probably hear me talking about my growth and how I'm doing this next thing and whatever. But at the moment, I feel like we're in a bit of a period that really resembles something that we've gone through in the past before. And that previous moment in time was one of the most transformative periods that I've ever had in my whole life, and it really taught me quite a lot about surviving, thriving, being resourceful, and making change that lasts literally my lifetime. Because once you get started on these things and you really feel the benefits of how they make you feel from the inside out, you're gonna want to really start to just add these different things to your toolbox, experiment with them and see what works for you. This is gonna be a bit of a rift episode. I do have a few facts and pieces that I want to add into this today. It's gonna be on the shorter side again. I essentially want to talk to you today about the body, about posture, about how your posture signals like all sorts of different things to your brain and how your body is signal signaling all of these different things to your brain. And so when you start working with your body from this different perspective of, okay, well, um, I haven't been like for me, for example, okay, so for my whole life, I loved slouching. I loved it. Everyone always told me to sit up straight. Anytime anyone told me to do anything, I basically did the opposite. But I loved slouching, I loved sitting on like recliner couches and just being like a flopsy doodle like worm, essentially. Like my posture. I was like, you know, if I ever need to fix that one day, I'll figure that out one day. So the one day definitely came around 2020 for me. Prior to that, I'd done a lot of yoga and all sorts of things, but I'd also experimented with F45 style CrossFit style exercises that really were incredible for my muscle tone and the way that my body looked, but also at the same time did a lot of deeper I want to say damage, but like it was reversible. So, you know, it had a deeper effect on me at the time that I'm still working through some of that pain today. Like I have had a huge journey with my back from having a really curved posture, from not only the era of my life of just being a slouch potato, but also from about the age of 25, I've been in the medical industry. I've been patient-facing and I have had to perform in a way that is professional against all odds. Like if someone told me the worst news of their life, I had to learn and train myself to keep the straightest face I've ever held while also processing the information that they're telling me and being a rock for them. I'm their healthcare professional, I'm their therapist. I need to be the one that holds them through the storm. Not necessarily like a therapist. I was a radiation therapist, so I worked with cancer patients, but I was still having to talk to people about quite significant topics, while also after a life of being the most expressive person with my face, that energy had to go somewhere. I was literally like a statue in the face of just crazy information. And that information all went to my back and my body, and just slowly over time, my muscles kind of like solidified at a certain age and basically left me with this curved back that if I tried to do anything to straighten it, would cause me excruciating pain. It has been a journey, but it has been this most incredible, like fact-finding mission about my body and the way that I treated it and the way that I treat it now and the difference that it makes from not only like an internal how does my body feel sort of standpoint, but I feel more confident when I stand. I feel more sure of myself depending on how I stand, and I know how I'm feeling inside my mind when certain aspects of my body are wanting to behave in a certain way. Presence is key, little bits over time is the method, and we'll get into all of that. It's gonna be a very casual episode of me just talking about my experience, but it's also hopefully gonna be informative. So, first and foremost, there are many books that talk about the nature of the fact that our posture is something that signals to our brain. If you go onto YouTube or if you haven't ever heard about it, there is a TED talk all about power posing for people, for women. The lady on Ted Lasso also does like examples of power posing. Like when you roll your shoulders back and stand up straight or make yourself as big as humanly possible, you're signalling that it's safe to be big. You're signaling that it's safe to be strong in yourself. You're signaling all of these things biologically and physiologically to yourself, depending on how you're activating, i.e., choosing to stand with your posture and your spine. And so I don't remember what Jordan Peterson's book is called, but if you don't know Jordan Peterson, he has a very famous book that's name is currently escaping me. But he also talks about like this concept from the fact of lobsters, I'm pretty sure. But essentially, when he talks about posture, he's talking about evolutionary biology, so dominance versus submission signaling, embodied cognition, and clinical psychology observations. So when we're depressed or feeling shame or anxiety, our body behaves in a certain way differently compared to the when we're feeling empowered, confident, sure of ourselves. And it is very animalistic. Even like, for example, like nervous system regulation. So there are nervous system regulation tools that you can do. We'll get into that in probably another episode, that help you shake out or like let go of these tense built-up feelings that we have. If you have a dog, or I'm not sure if cats do this, but if you have a dog and you've ever seen them do that, shaking their head and then they shake their whole body sort of thing, they've just experienced a micro trauma in some way, shape, or form that freaked them out. And their way of getting that out of their body is by shaking that out. And then they don't go on inhibited for life, being like, oh, trauma is around every corner. They're back to good. They're back to like, where's the food at? You know, like how can we go about like vibing today? Because I've shaked that out on the best, you know. That's essentially what we want to retrain in your body. I see it everywhere. I can tell so much about how somebody feels about themselves because of the amount of research that I've done into this just by looking at somebody. You can see it on their face, you can see it in their body, the way that they hold themselves. The way that we move through the world is literally subconsciously signaling to everyone how we feel. Whether they realize it or not, whether you realize it or not, it is happening. So for me personally, I really always wanted to be tall and like open. And when I recognized as well that I think it was in one of my very first Reiki sessions ever, I was told that my clo my heart was very closed off. It was very protected in so many different ways, and my body was a reflection of that. That person didn't necessarily say it to me that way, but the evidence around that time was all pointing to the same thing. I needed to open myself up more physically in order to aid the work that I was doing energetically on my heart space, on the way that I was feeling about myself. But not only that, if I'm subconsciously feeling like let's say that my posture, my slouchy posture, was constantly firing signals to my brain going, you aren't confident, you aren't good at anything, da-da-da-da-da. That was the narrative going on in my brain. No wonder my body was reflecting that. And every time your brain and your body are syncing up about something, you're literally constantly scanning your environment for evidence to the fact that those things are true. This information can be upsetting, or it can be the most empowering thing you've ever heard of in your life. You're literally a computer program that, or you're just like a living, walking computer that you can reprogram your brain to believe new beliefs, but kind of you need your body, your mind, and your spirit to all buy into the same belief in order to make lasting change, i.e., manifesting. So why is this important? Because if you are a person in this world, from every angle, the world is trying to program you to believe certain things about yourself. The beauty industry is like one of the biggest industries in the world because it is constantly feeding you things that are telling you that you're not good enough, and if you just go and pay for some jabs in your face, it will be better. That isn't even permanent, long-lasting change. There are ways to work with your own body and physiology to reverse aging in ways, and I know that that sounds probably crazy and totally impossible to some people, but if you look at any spiritual people on the internet, they kind of have this glow about them, an undeniable, like emanating glow that makes you go, I want more of what they've got. How do I buy into that? And it's by taking care of yourself and understanding the relationship of your body, your mind, and your soul and how that has an effect on you. So when as well, when you're taking care of your body or even stretching your body, you like you're kind of reprogramming the belief that you don't love yourself because you're actively putting time and effort into yourself that you were previously putting somewhere else. And so for me personally, now if I was to go and like do some stretching or something, while I'm doing it or before I'm doing it, I would be like consciously like this is for me because I love myself. I love my body enough to stretch it, to do these movements to create more freedom. And the more freedom you have in your body on the inside, what do you think is gonna manifest on the outside? More freedom, more feeling free. So recognizing that and recognizing that all of these statements or like you know the relationship of what our body's trying to show us, if everything based on the law of reflections is a reflection of how we are thinking and feeling on the inside, your body is one of those puzzle pieces to this entire thing. So, for me personally, for this journey, what I did, because I'm not gonna go into this Jordan Peterson book because I haven't read it in a hot second, but I do know that he talks about lobsters or something and like how they studied the lobsters and how that has this relationship to our posture. And essentially, like our body is this like signage or like a poster of how we're feeling. Everything is kind of subconsciously giving signals to everyone, our energy, our minds, and the way that we talk, and then our body and the way that we present ourselves is all signaling to ourselves, to our own brain, and to others how we're feeling, what we feel about ourselves, etc. etc. etc. So for me, I was previously diagnosed with anxiety and depression. I was medicated for it. I had a really massive dysregulation in my nervous system, and I felt like everything around every corner was dangerous and was gonna like hate me, kill me, you name it, the negative thoughts that were going on in my brain were always on and ever present. And so, as much as I have done a lot of work to rewire that, rewiring that alone would never have been enough without getting my body on board. But also at the same time, like I was living in this state where my body was like curling over in conversations that weren't scary. And it was creating so much more pain for me to go back to that position than it was to continue to work on stretching it out. So initially, what I did, I started at this yoga gym that was doing like functional training with yoga stretching and animal movement. So animal movement's more of like a calisthenics, like fascia type situation because your fascia holds stored emotions, but it's also the can it's like the connective webbing between the muscle and the bone. So even that, it's like this spider web that goes over your entire body of electrical signals that's telling your muscles, oh, we need to run from this bear here, or oh, we're safe and we're chilling. So what I did first was started working on stretching and strength. And then when things really started to kind of get a little bit dicey in my everyday life, I started implementing 20 minutes of yin yoga every single day before I did anything else. And I'd go out on my balcony and I'd do this 20 minutes of yoga before I started my day. I'd do a five little minute meditation at the end, but not necessarily always. The stretching was the most important thing. I would go on YouTube, I would look up yin yoga, anything from 15 to 30 minutes, whatever I had time for, and I would stretch different parts of my body before I started the day. What I noticed in real time in this high pressure, high-stakes environment, that I I, in order to continue living my life the way that I was living it, I had to continue showing up to this role. And I also loved the role, I didn't feel like it was my time to leave yet. As much as I was forced to inject myself with things that I didn't want to do in order to keep that role, etc., etc. etc., I still felt like my job was to be there for the patients and to show up to this job and to use that environment as my data or my information to heal and grow and evolve from this place. So what I was finding once I started implementing the 20 minutes of yoga or stretching every single morning before actually going into that environment was that when I was faced with something that might have built up pressure inside of me and built up the stress and then ended up with me being reactive, what I found was a cooler version of myself in the moment. And I was like, huh. I've been doing this yoga for like two or three weeks now. I feel cooler, I feel calmer, I feel more together. Wow. Okay, I can do this. It was like an I can do this moment. This free, easy adjustment to my morning. Yeah, I had to get out of bed and when I didn't want to get out of bed, but it was an easy adjustment. It was available to me, and it became this thing that really transformed my now moment in an environment that I was previously not wanting to show up to because I didn't know how to handle myself appropriately in a lot of respects. It was high pressure, high stakes, and I was feeling it. I didn't feel like I had the support in my life, and I only had the support of myself. So I had to show up for myself every morning, and I carried that with me through that the entire day because I'd set this up in the morning for myself. Every time I went back to a stressful moment in my now moment, I was able to think back to the morning and go, you know what? Well, the first thing I did for myself today was for me, was stretching for me, was showing up for me. I did that for me, and so I'm proud of me, I love me, and I'm so grateful that I did that, you know? And it was actually really transformative for my stress, for myself, and for the way that I was showing up, that then gave me evidence to the fact that something was working for me and I should keep going down that road. So I kept stretching to the point that I started stretching in between patients. Just little arm movements, little back moments, but it made all of the difference. And people kept asking me, like, why are you stretching all the time? Da-da-da-da-da. The more I did it, the more I just felt like, oh my god, my body just feels amazing. Like, this is feeling so good. It helped me do that little shakeout between moments, like dogs do. And I was like, who cares if this looks insane? I know that I'm reaping the benefits of this reward. And the more that I focused on the stretching, and the more that I found freedom in my posture, the more that I was able to hold that really straight posture for a little bit longer than I did yesterday. And I just kept finding my little wins with it. And over time and overall, I just felt so much better, more capable, more confident, more sure of myself that I was able to take that momentum, that energy into my next tough moment and really handle myself better than I ever had before. This is what made me so obsessed with morning routines. This one little tweak of just doing yin yoga. And the reason I say yin yoga is because yin yoga poses are hot held for three to five minutes. It is low effort, high reward vibes. But the thing is as well, like you can decrease your cortisol with stretching your body. You really can have so many different amazing byproducts and like um, you know, buy-ins from doing this. It really helps your vagal tone, i.e., your nervous system, you really find more movement in your body, and you can just feel the difference, which then creates a difference in your mind as well, because your mind feels freer, because your body feels freer. And so my point is if I was to take anything away from this episode, your posture affects your mood, it affects your cognition, it affects your perceived agency, and it affects how you perceive yourself. And it can positively influence social outcomes. And all of these become really meaningful because the more that you recognize that this is having a positive effect on your life, the more that your reticular activating system is going, oh, things get to be positive. I buy into positive things because I'm doing good things for my body. And so you your RAS, your reticular activating system starts to go positive, positive, positive, that then creates more positive things to notice, which then creates more positive things to be a part of, that then creates more positivity in your life. Now, this isn't about toxic positive positivity, this is about feeling your feelings when you feel less than or undesirable emotions, and then also buying into the fact that you create a reality and you get to create more positive things by doing more positive things for yourself. Now, maybe it's not stretching, maybe it's not power posing, or maybe it's not those things yet, but there are ways to buy into what good things that you can do for your body at any price point at any stage. YouTube is just this wealth of resources. There's so many different videos of so many different things on there for you to be able to go and look at. Even EFT tapping is just an incredible thing if you want to do a like a brain body reprogramming. I would do yin yoga and then EFT tapping before I started the day. And then I just found that my mind was in a positive space. I would do something about like gratitude tapping, and I would do the stretching. And I would just feel like ready. Like people could come to me with like a negative statement, but it was my choice whether I wanted to buy into that or not. And the more that I doubled down on doing these things for myself before I did anything else in the day, the more that I was already primed and ready to approach the day. So if there's anything to take away from this, it's that you can really make amazing changes by just finding flexibility in your body and by just recognizing that the more freedom you have in your body, like maybe it's for you running and like really getting out all of the beans and all of the excess pent-up emotion and things with running, whatever your version of this is, understanding how you felt before you did it, and then recognizing how much better you felt after you did it is your buy-in. And the more that you buy in and the more that you recognize in real time, oh, this is great for me, the more that you create, oh, great for me in my life. It's that simple, but it's not that simple. It's an accumulative effect over time. So little buy-ins, just when you feel like you can do it, or if it works for you like it did for me, just committing to that 5 a.m. wake up every day and just doing that as the first thing I did after I made my bed and got dressed. Maybe that's your way of doing it. Just recognizing in real time the benefits that are coming up for you from doing this and seeing the changes in yourself over time as you implement these things is gonna be your biggest buy-in and reward over time because you're your greatest investment. And these are the little investments that you can make that have a compounding interest over time, if you love that sort of language. If not, the more that you do it, little by little, the more that you build on a skill and it has a cumulative effect over time, i.e., it has a greater effect, a better effect, a more long-lasting effect, the more that you continue to show up for yourself and for your body and choose to make these changes that help you just access more freedom and vitality within yourself. So go out there, try a bit of stretching. Just I love to, even if it's not yin yoga, sometimes I'll just set three or five minute timers and just sit in stretched posing, just when I feel like I want to stretch certain parts of my body. And if I just did that for 20 minutes a day, that's still 20 minutes more than I did the day before. Or if I did it 20 minutes a day before, then it's 40 minutes for the week. How cool is that? Find your buy-in, nourish your body, love your body in whatever way feels good to you, and recognize that every little bit counts and that I love you, and we'll see you in the next one. Go out there and do something cool for your body today.