 Hi, I'm George Kow and today I am joined by Padma Gordon. We're going to be talking about how do we live a more conscious and aware life using our body as our ally. Padma, great to have you join me. Thank you so much, George. It's great to be here with you. Yeah. So I'm going to read your bio for the audience and then we'll get into this conversation. I'm looking forward to it. So Padma Gordon is a spiritual counselor, movement educator, women's group facilitator, writer, mother and a lover of life. Padma has been assisting people on their evolutionary journeys for over 25 years. She teaches people the physical, mental and energetic mechanics of being present through a mindfulness based somatic practice. And I will put the links to Padma's website, Facebook page, et cetera, on the links associated with this video. So be sure to take a look at her content and their offerings. So, all right Padma, this is great. You have so much to share with us and where should we start? Okay. Thank you, George. You know what I like to start with is just a moment of silence, a moment of silence and just because part of how we get present in our bodies is we pause and we bring the fullness of our attention to ourselves. So that's what I'd like to do to begin. So you'd be willing to close your eyes. I'll close my eyes for a moment. And let's just take a few nice deep breaths. It's simple. As you're breathing, you might notice that your attention is starting to slow down. And maybe it supports you in arriving here in this moment. Just letting everything settle, feeling how you're sitting, your seat in your chair. And maybe you'll notice that the body can start to relax in places where you didn't even realize you were holding tension and begin to soften, begin to let go just by virtue of bringing your awareness to yourself and into your body. Just as an experiment, just maybe sense the beat of your heart. Your heart is beating. Notice the tempo of your heartbeat. And then perhaps as you notice your heartbeat, you can also notice some other sensation in the palms of your hands. Could be anything tingling or pulsing, warmth or coolness. And taking another big breath. And just notice yourself for one more moment. Notice the effect of taking a little bit of time to notice what's happening in your body to notice the sensations. And then as you're ready, you can gently let the eyes open and receive the light and the shapes and colors. And so what I've just introduced you to is something that's called sensation tracking. And it's a way of coming into your body, coming in to the present and noticing what's actually happening here. Because when we notice what's happening in our bodies, we're actually present. And we can notice when we're, you know, hungry, thirsty, tired, maybe when we need to stretch, get up from our desk. So it's really a way of staying in touch and tending to yourself. And the more we do this, the more we can trust our body as our ally. And it can help us to be a kind of inner compass can help us to navigate. What do I need right now can help us to trust like, Oh, I've just met this person. How do I feel in my body with this new person because the body doesn't lie. So the invitation here is to learn how to trust it and to come out of our heads and down into our bodies and actually to connect the mind, the heart and the body so that the whole system works as a unified, kind of uniting uniting all of the intelligences as we move through our lives. That's great. That's very nice. Thank you. And so let's say we have some, you know, as we go through life we have situations come up that are scary. They might create some anxiety, they might stoke some negative emotions. How do we, yeah, how do we work with those as using our, our body as the ally. Great question. So naturally we're going to encounter things that are scary. We do we do every day. And so to really be able to discern is this really a threat or not. What level of threat is this, because we're not in the jungle, most of us, and there aren't tigers that are going to come and eat us. So we need to discover, oh, is this just, is this how scary is this. And so what you would do, if you felt afraid, or when you do feel afraid, is you just pause and notice. Because what happens when we get scared is we generally start telling ourselves scary stories, and we get up into our head and we tell ourselves scary stories and then we do something like we project on to the other person that they don't like us that they have it in for us and who knows what they might project on to someone else just just by virtue of a look they gave us or a moment when they didn't acknowledge us. What does that mean. So it interrupts the cycle of making meaning out of things that most likely have nothing to do with us. So by checking in, we come out of our heads, we come down into our body, maybe we notice, oh, my heart's beating really quickly, or my breathing has become more shallow. And then I just stay with myself and I'm doing this as I'm noticing someone as I'm in relationship to somebody, which I will say takes practice. So it can be really useful to practice what we did at the beginning, the sensation tracking by yourself. And it doesn't have to be for a long time, you could just do it for a minute. You could set a timer to go off twice a day for a minute and just say, all right, I'm just going to notice my body. And then I notice, oh, my ears are up by my shoulders. And so I can just let them settle. Oh, I notice I haven't eaten for several hours. Maybe it's time for, you know, a meal. So it generally takes us out of our heads and into our bodies. And when we're in our bodies, we're in the present time. Most often when we're in our heads, we're either projecting something into the future or worrying about something that happened in the past, which is causing us to be afraid. So it helps us to really check in present time. And usually the last thing I'll say about this is when we feel something, a sensation, what you'll notice if you do take this practice on is that sensations change. All emotions, they come and they go. So it gives you a way of actually staying with what's happening and noticing, oh, it's, I'm scared now, and the fear has passed. Or I'm scared now. And let me jump out of the way of that bus that's coming because there's a really good reason for me to be afraid. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Um, so you have a couple of examples from, you know, you're, you're, and you've worked with so many clients over the years and, you know, in our, in our preparation for this conversation, you had, you thought about a couple of examples and I'd love for you to share, share, you know, share about those examples that you'd like. I think you had one about, let's call her Kathy, who, through the sensation tracking found her voice. Yes. Tell us about that. Yes. Well, I worked with her for a long time, actually, and she was, she was like my, my star student. She was amazing. She's since, you know, come full circle and is really thriving in her life. But she had her one of her issues that she was working with was that she was unable to speak up. Or when she did speak up, she would kind of blur something out, which is not always useful. So she really found a way to through presencing herself or listening to her body and really because what it does is it stops us. It stops us in our tracks. It interrupts our conditioned reaction, which most of us are running on lots of conditioned habit patterns. And so when by sensing herself, she was able to stop the conditioned pattern, which kind of vacillated between blurting and just becoming silent and not really speaking up. She learned how to speak in a skillful way, because she was listening to herself and not coming from fear, not coming from anger. Because when we sense what's going on, as I mentioned before, it usually passes, or at least it changes, it morphs, it evolves. And then I'm coming from a more quiet place, a more connected place. And then what I say isn't coming from charge, because most often when we speak from a charged place, the other person doesn't even hear us. They don't even hear us. And so the message kind of goes by. So that was really an incredible thing because she learned. She learned how to sense herself and really ground and then speak up and not just, you know, and kind of claim her space, claim her place and voice it in such a way that the other person could hear it. So it's, it actually really forms the basis for healthy communication, healthy relating. It's a great experience. Yeah, great example. And then you had another example of client we'll call Josh, who was dealing with, I think, with anxiety. And how did you, how did you work with him? Well, he's another wonderful client that I've worked with and still work with in a more maintenance kind of way over time. Yeah, when he came to me, he was very anxious and anxiety is basically fear of the future. We're just projecting into the future. And he came from a background that was was challenged a lot of difficult things that had happened to him. So there were, there were good reasons for his anxiety. And it was a kind of anxiety that really challenged him to to really function in a in a good way so he could live his life. And so over time and working with him, he also through learning, because what it does is it when you're in your body, and you have a sense of that the body is the ally. And also, there are many reasons that we can have, we can have experiences where we feel like the body is not the ally. So with that with Josh, I worked with him to really learn how to trust his body, and that the body was not was a safe place, a safe place to be a safe place to reside. Because once you're in the body, you can find a sense of peace, you can drop into your heart. And some people can also be it can be scary. I want to just acknowledge that it can be scary to come into the body, because the body, as in the case of Josh, is a map of all of our experiences. So some total of all of our life experiences are mapped out in our body. So when we go into the body, we're going into the list and we're also going into the unpleasant moments to or the really, you know, painful moments. So really with Josh, I worked a lot on getting him to ground, getting him to come out of his head, and into his body into his, especially the lower body, the legs, the feet, the seat, to just really feel a sense of, I'm safe here. Because usually with fear, there's a sense of I'm not safe here. It's not okay to be here. I'm not okay. Something's not okay. And that is based on having experiences where being somewhere was unsafe. So there are reasons. So just working a lot through embodiment, through being able to notice, to stay in. And as with Josh and other people, sometimes we can only stay in for a little bit of time. So be gentle with yourself. If you're someone who's had challenging experiences, painful experiences, which is everybody. You know, there are varying degrees of that. And so to just be gentle with yourself and to kind of dip your toe into your body, the toe of your attention into your body, and only staying as long as it feels like, all right, this is okay, this is okay. And then you can, you can back off. So there's a gentleness. It's of learning how to be in our bodies and learning how to trust the body as as an ally. Hmm. It's wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. It's helpful to hear these actual stories of clients you've worked with. And so there's this other concept you talk about. The whole system's sensing. And I know it's related to what you've been talking about, but is there anything you want to say about that? Yeah, that's really important. Thank you for bringing that up again. Yeah, whole system sensing means that all of our awareness is we have different intelligences. So it's bringing these different intelligences online. There's, there's a mental awareness. There's a physical awareness. There's emotional intelligence. And there's really, there's also energetic intelligence so that we're sensing things that are beyond our bodies that include our bodies and that all of our, that all of its working harmoniously. And this really takes practice because usually for most of us, we've been more or less dependent on one of them as a primary system. Of course, we're all using all of them, but to varying degrees. So a lot of people because we live in this world where we're really a lot in the mind. There's a lot coming through the mind. There's a lot of information coming in. And so a lot of us will really tend to reside in the mental body using a lot of mental intelligence. And there is a time for that. And the thing is that it's not all the time that we need to be in our analytical mind or our deductive reasoning or our, you know, tracking and sensing for on the level of scanning. A lot of times people will scan, they'll scan and they'll use their mind to see if everything's okay is everything okay is everything okay. So it's, it's allowing the mind to relax and to work in in a cooperative way, because there's a different there are different flavors of intelligence there's a mental intelligence and drop into the heart. And actually here's an interesting fact that I learned through heart math is that the heart when you show when you show somebody an image and say it's a whatever it's a beautiful image or it's a frightening image. The heart actually responds several seconds before the mind. So the heart is actually receiving the information and responding to the information before the mind. And we are so often relying on our minds that we bypass the heart even though the heart is is right on it. So to be able to learn to listen with your heart is a great thing because it's it's supremely intelligent. And then there's the body and all the information and the sensations that arise in response to a person a situation or even if you're just considering what to eat for lunch. And you look in the refrigerator you can actually notice oh my body is really happy or here's an example I was I was hungry before this interview. So I went in the kitchen and I looked for something to eat to just have a little snack. And then I had this. I ate half an avocado and my body was so happy. There was all so much happiness. The body settled. There were good feelings. And so it's being able to trust to not just go for what you think you should have, but to actually listen with your entire body and being. Is very empowering. Yeah, and it takes practice. I want to say it takes practice and we have to check ourselves from our this is what I think I should do or this is what I was told I should do and here I am and I know my mind is really brilliant. So I'm going to just do what my mind says and you may have really brilliant mind and it doesn't mean that it's useful to let it lead you always. Yeah, that's a great wonderful reminder. So if somebody watched is watching this and they would love to work with you. What is the next step. Oh, great. Thank you. Well, there are a few next steps. I mean one is you can always I do have some room for some more online clients and you can go on to my website. To my website, Padma Gordon calm and sign up for free exploratory session. I'd love to meet with you and see if we're a match and see to where you're who you are and where you're at. So that's one possibility. And then I also have an online women's group coming up later this fall so for anyone who is female or identifies as female. Please feel free to go on to my website and sign up to be on the waitlist for that so that'll be later on this fall. Lastly, if you live in the Bay Area. I have a couple more spots for my in person, embodying the feminine women's group that meets on a monthly basis and the online women's group is going to meet on a monthly basis as well and it goes for the duration of a year. So it's very good and the women's group has been going for nine years. Yes. Nice year. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you so much Padma for this conversation and just just really valuable reminders and inspiration for us to be a more integrated person. Yes. Yeah, thank you so much for having me George it's always wonderful to be with you. Yeah, thanks Padma. Yeah, thank you.