 Talk Talk, I'm Crystal. So today we're going to talk about some women stuff, but men don't go away because this involves you. You know the beauty of women? The beauty is that we transform. You know, we transcend, we morph, we go from blooming, budding, blooming to perhaps withering or perhaps going into becoming some full-bodied wine. It's just so interesting and intricate as women, especially if you're in tune with your body. So today we're going to talk about this whole transformation process in our lives and how we can use yoga to get in touch with that and know that these little milestones are really important and that men in our lives can help support and understand and it's just a mutual thing and we grow together. So on that note we're going to introduce our wonderful guest today to talk about the transformations. Kathy, Kathy, Luis Broda, who is the owner of Purple Yoga, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to be here today. Well it's wonderful to have somebody so rich in tune with your body and wanting to share that with people and you're just saying that you know in your yoga studio you use all of your personal experience into your practice and let's talk a little bit about that and why you started Purple Yoga. Well, I first started yoga when I was 24 years old and I didn't That's pretty late, yeah? Kind of. Kind of, yeah. I didn't have any intention of being a yoga teacher. I was just interested in yoga. I wanted to be healthy. It was kind of, it was instead of going to the gym I started going to yoga classes and from there I just started doing more and more and ended up doing a small teacher training and then started my own classes. I've been teaching now since 24 and I'm 51 now and I feel like in my early days I understood that I just wanted to get healthy. I wanted to be fit. I didn't really know about meditation. I didn't understand any of that but it was just I was living in New York City so it was just kind of slowing my life down a little bit. That's ironic. How do you slow yourself down in New York? You go yoga class. And I think as I started to teach it was kind of just teaching what I was what I knew and what I was experiencing. Then from New York I moved to London and I was teaching in London again another big city. I did a pregnancy yoga training with a good friend of mine and she always encouraged me because I was so far away from having kids at that point. I didn't even know if I wanted to have kids and she said well one day maybe you'll start a yoga class for pregnancy and so when we moved to Hawaii we moved in 2002 and my husband and I we met in London and we wanted to move to Hawaii or New Zealand. He's from New Zealand. And he was a yogi before you met him? Yeah we were both practicing together and we wanted to just start our own yoga studio and kind of have our own programs. But why Astanga? I started Astanga. My first class that I walked into was an Astanga class. If people don't understand the differences in yoga can you just give a brief description of what Astanga means? Astanga it's a it's a sequence of there's different sequences that we practice. A lot of people might know primary series there's also second series and then there's third series and fourth there's many different series. Each series progressively gets more difficult so it's not that it's not like your our goal is to get to second series or third series it's really just to practice and start to learn about our bodies and through the practice it's a sequence each time we practice we're practicing the same sequence each time. So I've been practicing my sequences since I was 24 and I can say that each stage of my life that I go through being young being pregnant recovering from pregnancy and now heading into menopause. Each stage the yoga practice has helped me to stay healthy in tuned. Sometimes it's been really difficult especially after having babies. Right I think that's the hardest one. But before we get into the pregnant yoga let's start even before that because I don't think people don't think as a young teen you can practice yoga and you should encourage kids to maybe do that. What is it with you know the teen especially the girls you know they're going through so much self-consciousness and so much you know hormonal change and with the hormones one of the things that happens in puberty is that kids generally are very loose and limber. Yeah when they start to hit puberty for girls when they start to have estrogen being produced in their bodies the body starts to get really stiff and tight. So the assumption is that they're going to be remain limber and then you kind of switch on estrogen and all of a sudden the body the hips the spine everything starts to get tight and then they're also growing so everything is getting long they often go through these major growth spurts and and it's like the the muscles can't keep up with how quickly the body is growing. Exactly. So if a girl going going into womanhood can do some stretching or yoga I always I don't like to say let's do yoga because for girls going into teenage years they're like oh that's like for an old lady or that's old stuff or I don't want to do that yeah only old people go Facebook so so I'm like well you can do some very easy stretching and and then if they're doing things like any kind of dance or gymnastics or swimming there's always some yoga type stretching that they're doing for me it's really about giving girls when they're going through these different phases kind of empowering their bodies and letting them see that even though their body is changing a lot and they're watching it change really quickly that they should be comfortable in their bodies and and really happy and celebrate what they're doing and and how their body is changing. Do you think yoga helps to give them that confidence to celebrate their bodies? I think it does it just it you you start to understand where your toes are where your head is okay and then in between you start to see the transformation from being a pre- pubescent into going into puberty that a girl's body shifts within one or two years there's a huge change my daughter's 13 same as yours right and she woke up and she put all this stuff on her face and she feels like she's breaking out and I think you know it's stress related I'm like it's just part of it's just part of it yes and I always say it's not that it gets any easier it's just different and I'm always I'm telling my my daughters I'm telling my students I'm like it's not good or bad it's just interesting I always say it's just interesting because it's not like you get through puberty and then everything's great because you're constantly shifting you know in your 20s yeah and things are shifting and then in your 30s things shift so there's always there's always some discomfort so there's always little mini transformations within the big transformation yes and then if you can look back yeah and think okay where was I five years ago yeah my my one of my twins was saying the other night she goes I don't want to go through puberty I don't want to change right you can't it's just yeah yeah it's just at the same time they want to grow up yeah I want to be an adult I want to be able to wear heels and go out and party yeah yeah and all of that but I'm always like well yeah and you have to slowly it's like slowly getting comfortable with everything yeah but it's difficult I think puberty is probably the most awkward time for girls more than boys yes yeah yeah and especially now with social media there's so much attention on how we perceive ourselves yeah so yoga is something definitely to do are there any other areas in puberty before we move on because I want to get through I know it sounds crazy but we want to touch on yeah the life of a woman yeah I think that one of the things is the early sharing and I think it's I'm I'm I keep reading and hearing things about how it's how important it is that we share our stories with our daughters and if you don't have children then share it with I was listening to a podcast the other day and the talk speaker was saying talk to you might end up being a mentor for a friend's child yeah I can't I'm not comfortable talking with my daughter right you could talk to her right and so I'm always just encouraging mothers it's like an even from when you're a baby yeah like talk to your babies talk to your children yeah communicate and it's a lost art because nowadays everyone so consumed with again social media yes they're getting you know facts or non facts from their friends yes and they don't have the maturity to see beyond certain situations one of the things we do at home is we have dinner every night together yeah I'm like put the devices away turn everything on and every night we download what's happened you know what happened at school how are you going through all the aches and pains whatever it is and through that communication then we can have the personal conversations with my daughters where I talk about what's gonna happen when they have a menstrual cycle what happens when they're you know the body starts develop yeah I didn't even get to do that talk with my daughter because her period came when she was with a sleepover with her friends and her friends told her everything I was like oh that's okay I gotta do this and it was like bam I was gone yeah I've been doing it with my daughters I started kind of when they were 10 my oldest daughter just 13 now I started when she was about 10 years old because I was developing this women's workshop okay and she had questions yeah so I said well let's look at the charts let's look at the pictures right look at it I I go from a very little pictures or charts or graphs because it's different no I actually get out the anatomy books okay and I'm like let's look at let's look at the anatomy of a woman and all the parts right and name the parts properly why not because otherwise it's this whole kind of like thing that we don't talk about yeah and for me my mom did the best that she could but I didn't get any information it's interesting only skim over things that you're supposed to know yes and and there again through this podcast yeah listening to this woman was saying she goes we're basically only giving our girls the dangers like be careful about this yes the bad things I'm like there's this whole good side about our body absolutely that we should be comfortable with right and I was watching your interview last week we need to empower we need to feel empowered by these changes as opposed to ashamed by ashamed right and I think through the yoga practice and through my yoga teaching that's the thing that I want to give to women through all these different stages of all these transitions and transformations that it's like it's amazing what we do and you're opening up I mean there's the literature opening up because yoga opens up your body yes but it opens up your heart and then you know no kidding it sounds kind of like cliche but it does it opens up your mind your concept of life yes yes and then also the acceptance yeah that yoga is about change and then about accepting the change not fighting it sometimes we fight it and when you fight it it's even harder give a good example in terms of yoga you know like if there's a position that you're stuck and you feel stuck but you have to allow yourself to any kind of twist right some people will get into a twist and then they're fighting it so instead of actually relaxing and find your finding their core strength and breathing yeah if we twist yeah right if you think about twisting yeah we can my hips are gonna stay in one place yeah my torso is gonna move that way right so if I fight it and my abs are too strong and my shoulders are really tight and I'm not breathing it's just gonna be I am just like push myself to do it but that's not really if I just say okay I'm gonna relax and then I'm gonna move into my center in my core I'm gonna move from where my uterus is where our power is that's right then I will be able to twist more deeply which then I feel the twist up to my heart center my spine my shoulder my neck and then there is some relief so sometimes in yoga we're fighting and if you just relax it's not get floppy no there's a difference there's a difference between relaxing and the relaxing is often with the breath and then just with telling ourselves it's okay to be here and it's okay sometimes it's scary to go deeper so that we're just on the edge I don't know if I want to go deeper because it's a scary like in life right you don't know that yes and you don't want to go there or you look at it or you go over the edge and you're like oh yeah I'm not gonna do it yeah so it's and then through the yoga practice we're just we constantly are changing the edge yes so the edge just goes a little and that happens with what happens with children we have that circle of safety yeah but each stage of the way they're pushing pushing that boundary we have to keep opening the fence so it's flexible yes this fence so we have to keep opening it it's not like Trump's stupid concrete fence no we're talking a flexible malleable beautiful organic yes and then through that if I'm saying these are the boundaries yeah or this is the asana yeah and then it's like oh you get good at that okay let's open up the door a little bit and include something else then it gets bigger now with girls and I think with children in general and then as we become adults if we know where the boundary is we'll push up against it and then it's like okay let's change the boundary again let's change it's not good or bad and you're not doing a bad job right we're just gonna make it a little bit more so then that becomes comfortable and it becomes empowering because you know you're pushing yourself a little further yes and so then if we go from girls into young women and then into pregnancy the change again is if the transformation is huge yeah and accepting yeah this is my belly's out here now and then all of a sudden and then the baby made a tire afterward that you got to deal with and confronting your new body yes and how you change that right so many things to talk about so okay we just hit like the tip of the iceberg here yeah so we're gonna take a quick break but we're gonna come back and we're gonna start talking about that pregnancy transformation and how that takes us through life and how it matures us and enriches us and goes further into menopause which is another phase so don't go away lots of stuff to talk about aloha this is kaley akina with the weekly a hana kako let's work together program on the think tech hawaii broadcast network mondays at two o'clock p.m. movers and shakers and great ideas join us we'll see you then aloha aloha my name is john why hey and i used to be a part of all the things that you might be angry at i served in government here and may have made decisions that affects you so i want to invite you in i want to invite you in to talk story with me and some very special guests every other monday here at talk story with john why hey come on in join us express your opinion learn more about your state and then do something about it aloha hello continuing on quack talk talking about the beautiful transformations between puberty through pregnancy to menopause now we touched on a lot of puberty issues and so we're going to go right into this pregnancy concept and how that wow that that's like the biggest transformation for a woman ever yeah kathy would you say i would say it okay yes and how do we embrace that through yoga and it's so unexpected sometimes the change is unexpected uh and i think sometimes we fight it but then there's a point where you just have to go oh my gosh i'm really pregnant and i'm going to have a baby and uh the shift usually happens about six seven months where all of a sudden the reality hits of in a few months or in a month and a half there's going to be a baby outside of me and what's going to happen and i don't know what's going to happen and it's a big huge question in my pregnancy yoga classes what we're mainly gearing women or teaching women is how to labor well that's one of the things this is the mom and baby class that i teach after pregnancy that's great that's fine you have the babies with you you have the baby yet and we try and do special we try and do some yoga mom yoga and then we get the babies involved we do a lot of yoga so you use the babies to lift them up we lift them up we swing them around like that so cute that this picture is one of the hardest things to do because your baby just gets heavier and heavier and heavier that's great but it's real yeah so i'm always telling women you don't need to go to the gym oh no you didn't get your baby up yeah yeah so you do a specific class on pregnancy yoga which i find is interesting yes very tailored yes um and how does that work um we i think that from my experience of of having a singleton which i had a single baby and then i had twins right i had twins i had twins you should have a pregnancy class just for twins i mean there's just so that there's not that many all right but they do come in right um and the yoga practice helped me in my labor understanding how to breathe yeah understanding the transitions of a contraction of how a contraction rises and how a contraction falls it's no different than an asana we do a posture for a minute or two minutes and then we relax and it falls down so our whole teaching is really about understanding that rise and fall which then i always tell the women if you understand that rise and fall in a yoga practice you're going to understand it when you go into labor that a contraction rises it falls when it starts to fall or when it starts to release you breathe you relax your eyes your nose your jaw you breathe into your back so we're teaching women this mantra breathe relax your eyes nose and jaw breathe into your back take a deep inhale right so that's we're just teaching women that and that's the overwriting thing that women say after they have their babies is that they were able to breathe they had that mantra in my head i was thinking about that i was thinking about what the teachers say um it continues on after you have your baby well what about the psychological effects i mean a lot of times you think of the physical transformations but more deeply is yes the the change is you're going from a single person into becoming a mother and that is it's often a difficult transition because we're we either have a career um yeah we're happy right we're doing for ourselves we're doing things on ourselves and all of a sudden you have to take somebody else into consideration it is a it is a big change i think it's like all the when i had my daughter koko the moment she left my body i understood why i was here that i kind of pushed her out and i remember just thinking i know why i'm here i understand i don't know what it is i can't say what it is but it was just that kind of meaning of life for that it was like an initiation for me of like okay now i am in this next phase of my life right and i get to do mothering yeah um i know a lot of women who don't have children they're still going through that transition and that change in this middle section of our life yeah it's one of the things i talk about in the women's workshop that even if you don't have kids in this middle section between our 20 our 30s and 40s we are we become householders a householder is a person who has a house starts to have comfortable things right you buy your car right you have your job everything becomes more settled more stable um so whether you become a mom or not it's that we have this transition into this middle section of our life where again we're having to relearn our body and then there's that part of being able to look back and go oh yeah that 20 something body's gone exactly i was just going to say you know the transformation is so subtle for a long period of time that you don't think about it and then one day you would go oh my god what are these what did that come you know and and it's scary yes and you're walking over night i walk around i'm like i still feel 24 inside right i feel fabulous and then i look in the mirror and like shoot oh gosh i'm not it's so depressing but inside i'm like no i feel it inside and the yoga practice and doing yoga for all these years makes me upright i'm lifted i've got my core strength yeah feel great can we talk about the bundas a little bit because i feel like after pregnancy that's like one of the biggest things internally that changes and i know in yoga you estanga especially is you need to how do you explain that to people how do our bundas are our internal body locks and we have mula bunda which is the root lock and uh i always kind of joke that you don't have to have a baby to understand mula bunda but if you get pregnant and you have a vaginal delivery yeah you're going to understand mula all right because you're there are kegels right right right so the kegel muscles are the muscles that we use to hold the the pelvic floor muscles from the pubic bone to your tailbone right right so from there then we go to udiana udiana is the abdominal so it's a little higher up higher up yeah and um udiana and mula bunda the two kind of come together now interestingly for women that that connection happens at our inner uterus and in yoga we talk about uh harnessing the fire or getting agni yeah yeah agni is at that spot so for women when you have a menstrual cycle you get really hot oh okay when you have a baby they talk about a bun in the oven right that it's hot right right when you go through menopause or you have perimenopause you've got the heat right so we have as naturally as women we have a lot of heat in that core strength okay so in estanga we're always talking about finding the root lock and the abdominal lock in order to find our core strength now it's kind of a it's an energetic place in the beginning it's muscular where you are literally lifting your muscles right but then after that it becomes the energy of what you're lifting and into you know but the problem with pregnancies or not pregnancies maybe just age is that it loosens over time yes no matter what you do to try in fact i remember in Hong Kong i interviewed somebody about sex toys and she gave me this as a gift which i've never used an egg they're like these weights yeah and you stick it in and you walk around it's almost like create strength yes yes and that we don't we don't do that what's a natural way to do it then it's just squeezing so of squeezing the vaginal muscles okay that is literally from the outside moving through the vagina but for me it's a muscle i look at it as a muscle yeah and we're going from the outside to inside yeah now if you do those i call it the middle i'd like isn't the kiggles the same as exactly he's just holding in for from my experience when i'm lifting i feel now i'm lifting all the way up inside and i kind of hit the cervix i go into the uterus i can feel that wow and then it connects to my navel dang you're connected i'm so really connected right now i always try sometimes i drive and go okay i'm gonna hold it in i'm gonna try to tighten it one of the things i talk in my pregnancy class is i say uh and this is something one of my students said long time ago she said every time i go to a stop light i lift my kiggles that's great yeah yeah so they say you're waiting at the bus stop anywhere lift your kiggles hold it in breathe yeah do you how many times should you count to like hold it before you know you say you just try and hold it until you stop okay until you can't remember that you're holding it okay and i think because i do yoga yeah i kind of i'm holding it all the time i have to think about letting it go oh wow so i think that's just a you're a tight woman should i ask her okay because you know that pregnancies do it loosens you and this is a sad fact especially when you get older and you want to still feel young like you said but there are things in your body that are just loosening up yeah so let's talk about menopause and our short time left yeah what do we do to prepare for that big transformation so menopause it's i think for for me it was tracking my periods okay that was really important for me of watching what my monthly cycle was i started to see things going a little bit amiss around the age of 40 right after i had my twins my periods started to be just a little bit irregular at 45 it definitely started to change and i just noticed things like my skin was drying out yeah there were days in my yoga practice where i was really stiff and i couldn't you know one day i'd be great the next day i couldn't touch my toes that is again hormones in our body fluctuating greatly yeah sometimes my menstrual cycle is really heavy and sometimes again i was missing cycles but you know all this information you're giving now is fairly relevant for our partners who live with us because they need to know our transformations and understand why sometimes we do feel uptight or warm or overheated or i was talking to a student recently and saying because she we were talking about the the hot flashes we're feeling all of a sudden this warmth and it comes on all of a sudden there's no warning all of a sudden one day you're hot i remember exactly the first hot flash i had i was sitting i was like why are my shins sweating why you know my shins my shins were i was like i'm glistening right now why right um and i i told her i said you need to talk to your husband you need to talk to your partner so i'm always telling women talk to your partners about this because it's random yeah and one day i'm really happy one day i'm not i also talked to my daughters about it yeah because my daughters are going into uh into their fertile years right i'm exiting isn't that interesting i told my older daughter i said we're kind of doing the same thing yes you're just at the beginning i'm at the end now it doesn't mean at the end when i stop my menstrual cycles that's the end but it's like but the process is actually very similar it's funny you see that because i took my daughter to her pediatrician to get her woman's checkup and she's saying that your peer is going to be very irregular for the first year or so and i was joking hey that's funny me too yes it's like yeah on the similar ground but on the other way yes and i tell them also um and i tell my husband that i can feel when something's not right i can start to feel when i'm just getting agitated or i get angry really fast that it's like that fire inside comes up and i always say just like hang in there with me yeah um be nice to me i tell my daughter so like just be nice to me just be nice today because i can feel it and then sometimes also like when i go through a menstrual cycle i haven't had one for a while now but once i go through that cycle it's like that feeling of like okay i'm clear everything's everything's lifted i feel good and i'm always though communicating with my kids um and with my husband because that's it's so important that it's like everybody has to hang in with us right you're on the same boat you need to understand each other's and then i have some astanga students who now have said that once you're through it in their 60s and 70s everything is wonderful yeah kathy you know we have less than one minute to go i really want you to be able to promote this upcoming workshop yes what is that about so the um yoga for women's workshop that i'll be teaching in a couple weekends i basically take everybody through how we enter um womanhood and then how we exit and i talk about our creativity um we do some yoga the last session is really nice i had a friend of mine uh emma mitchell mitchell who will be in doing a crystal bowl meditation which is really lovely yeah um and it's it's a it's a chance for women to get together sometimes we share sometimes we don't i have a lot to say so it's like come yeah come and and it's like really learning about ourselves and then being able to then share that with other women exactly there you go that's it please enjoy um this you know kathy i've just enriched myself so much from just engaging conversation with you and i hope you did too enjoy your bodies enjoy your partners enjoy your life so thank you for tuning in today and we'll see you next time bye