Hello my feelers + healers! I went on an almost 3 week trip that involved 4 flights, 7 train rides, a few metro rides, 3 countries, 6 cities. And a lot of walking. And some boat rides. I was definitely nervous before this trip. I was remembering last year's Galapagos trip which yes was a lot more "adventure travel" than this one. But yanno part of the brain's job is to try to predict + problem solve the future so that you can be safe. So I had some prep work mentally and emotionally to do. Mostly to remind myself that whatever happens on this trip I'll be ok. It can be a complete disaster and while I might be disappointed I'll be ok. It's so funny when I was on my trip I had so much to say. Now that I've been home for a month, I can't remember. But I can remember how I feel now and I think that's important because it's tied into how I helped myself on the trip and how that subconscious programming has continued to be metabolized and integrated into my beliefs about my body, what it's capable of and how to continue on the journey of expanding my physical and emotional capacity, while decreasing a sense of fear, threat or danger. Traveling is definitely a place where I see fear arise for myself and my clients. There's SO MUCH unknown. And there's so much that's out of our control and out of our routine. AND that's what makes it perfect for creating corrective experiences and new predictive coding for our brain, body + nervous system. Listen well and think about how you can create those corrective experiences for yourself.
Hello my feelers + healers!
I went on an almost 3 week trip that involved 4 flights, 7 train rides, a few metro rides, 3 countries, 6 cities.
And a lot of walking.
And some boat rides.
I was definitely nervous before this trip.
I was remembering last year's Galapagos trip which yes was a lot more "adventure travel" than this one.
But yanno part of the brain's job is to try to predict + problem solve the future so that you can be safe.
So I had some prep work mentally and emotionally to do. Mostly to remind myself that whatever happens on this trip I'll be ok.
It can be a complete disaster and while I might be disappointed I'll be ok.
It's so funny when I was on my trip I had so much to say.
Now that I've been home for a month, I can't remember.
But I can remember how I feel now and I think that's important because it's tied into how I helped myself on the trip and how that subconscious programming has continued to be metabolized and integrated into my beliefs about my body, what it's capable of and how to continue on the journey of expanding my physical and emotional capacity, while decreasing a sense of fear, threat or danger.
Traveling is definitely a place where I see fear arise for myself and my clients. There's SO MUCH unknown.
And there's so much that's out of our control and out of our routine. AND that's what makes it perfect for creating corrective experiences and new predictive coding for our brain, body + nervous system.
Listen well and think about how you can create those corrective experiences for yourself.
TCCEP55
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Curiosity Cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist, trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder, fat human on planet Earth. Here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame free curiosity, so you can feel more, better, more of the time in the body you have today, and build the rich full life that you want to live.
[00:00:39] A quick disclaimer, this podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey. But always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:55] Hello, my feelers and healers. It is so nice to be back with you. I am your host, Deb, and I've been off in a mix of planning for a book that I'm gonna be writing about my former clothing store, Re/Dress NYC. I am so excited. I am beyond excited. It is all that I've been talking about. I'm slightly obsessed.
[00:01:15] I am envisioning this beautiful coffee table slash art book, and I don't know when that will happen. I don't know when that will come out. I don't actually know how to write a book, but I didn't know how to run a store, did that. So I'm sure I will figure it out. And I've got really awesome people on my side who are helping me.
[00:01:35] And if you know anything about publishing a coffee table book, please let me know. Hit me up. And I've been taken out a little bit by the combo pack of natural disaster intensity of the floods in Texas as well as the passing of the legislation that I believe is gonna be very harmful to millions of people.
[00:01:59] And I've also been going to the beach with friends and celebrating pride and reminding myself that regardless of what's happening in the world, I am still alive and my life is mine to be cherished. The podcast that I did with Maggie, which was the last podcast before this one on emotional leadership, has so stuck with me.
[00:02:20] When I feel overwhelmed, I notice that there's a little voice that pops up and asks, what would it look like to take emotional leadership right now? And what I notice is that I orient towards taking some kind of action that's good for me, whether that's making food, taking a walk, connecting with someone, doing a task on my to-do list.
[00:02:44] I noticed that asking that gentle question. It snaps me out of the overthinking and over feeling in a way that's really helpful for me. Another small shift has been to change my language from I have to, to, I get to, and I know that sounds very basic Mel Robbins type advice, but I do think because I'm at a place in my life where I personally have so much freedom, I don't have many, I have tos.
[00:03:15] It's good to recognize, again, my sense of agency and power that I get to do my laundry versus I have to do my laundry and it just hits different and helps me relax into the moment by moment expansive safety that I am privileged to experience. Now. I've never had that feel more fragile in my life. So in the spirit of do not comply ahead of time.
[00:03:44] I am so not going to be despairing over mundane life tasks because oh my God, I am so freaking alive and free to do these mundane tasks. So, hey, laundry, let's get it on. Uh, dishes. It's you and me. We ate the shit out of that food and we will be making more. So dirty dishes are a part of the, the delio.
[00:04:12] There's a quality of appreciation that feels really useful for me, if not bittersweet. So that's a little bit of what's been on my radar. And I went on an almost three week trip that involved four flights, seven train rides, a few metro rides, three countries and six cities, and a lot of walking and some boat rides.
[00:04:40] I was definitely nervous before this trip because I was remembering last year's Galapagos trip, which was, yes, a lot more adventure travel than this one. But you know, part of our brain's job is to try to predict and problem solve the future so that you can be safe. So I had some prep work mentally and emotionally to do, mostly to remind myself that whatever happens on this trip, I'll be okay.
[00:05:08] Even it could be a complete disaster. And while I might be disappointed, I'll be okay. It's so funny, when I was on the trip, I had so much to say, and now that I've been home for a month, like I can't remember, but I can remember how I feel now, and I think that's important because it's tied to how I helped myself on this trip and how that subconscious programming.
[00:05:36] Has continued to be metabolized and integrated into my beliefs about my body, what it's capable of, and how to continue on the journey of expanding my physical and emotional capacity while decreasing a sense of fear, threat, or danger. And traveling is definitely a place where I see fear arise for myself and for my clients.
[00:06:03] There is so much unknown. There's so much that is out of our control or full of new experiences. It is out of our routine and that's what makes it perfect for creating corrective experiences and new predictive coding for our brain, body and nervous system. Since I've been home, I've done multiple days of physical activity in a row from marching in the dyke March from 42nd Street all the way down to Washington Square Park.
[00:06:34] Then going to Rese the following day, which if you don't know, involves a good amount of walking. And then I jumped around and played in the ocean, and then I went back another day to the beach and I took a long walk and also played in the waves again. And my pain, which had been on and off, seems to be in a place where it's quiet.
[00:06:54] I might have soreness, but now I pretty much take soreness to mean, hey, I exerted myself, but we are good and you're gonna be fine the next day. Which has been true, even if I am a little sore when getting up, it shifts as I get moving. So I honestly don't even pay attention to those kinds of sensations anymore.
[00:07:15] I think my brain is still on a little bit of high alert, feeling like it needs to make sure that I'm getting rest, hydration, and some TLC and my brain isn't wrong. We, we all need that. So I will say I did make a major change after I got home from my trip. Before I was away, I'd been supplementing with collagen, both powder and liquid, and I didn't bring any of it with me on vacation.
[00:07:45] And I noticed that my knee pain felt better over the course of my trip and I thought that was because I was walking a lot. When I got home, I started taking it again and it, it was very much that scene with Madeline Kahn from the movie Clue. Where she's like, flames. Flames on the side of my head, except mine were flames on the side of my knee.
[00:08:09] I was like, Hmm, that is so interesting. I am having a different experience than what I imagine. So I did what I generally don't do actually, which is Google, knee pain and collagen supplements, and I found a long thread on Quora of people having the same experience. So I stopped taking the collagen.
[00:08:29] And I feel better who knows why? It was definitely one of those things where other people's opinions got me to both try it and then to stop it, and none of this is a recommendation for you to take or stop taking a supplement that is for you to do under the guidance of your medical team and with your own informed consent.
[00:08:49] I did feel like this was important for me to share. It was also interesting to stop taking something that was supposed to be helpful and was sold to me as a solution and realize that I feel better without it. So being on vacation in which I'm traveling a lot and walking a lot and going places I've never been can trigger a few themes for me.
[00:09:13] Loneliness, if I'm traveling solo. Fomo because I will absolutely miss seeing something and perfectionism, the feeling like there's a right way to be doing this trip. And if I'm not doing it that way, I'm not doing it right. So I consciously thought about challenging those ideas and decided whatever I chose, I wasn't going to make myself wrong for it, even if I would not make the same decision again.
[00:09:40] Putting this trip together was at first a frustrating puzzle. Once I realized it was actually a puzzle because I was starting off in Berlin and ending up in Glasgow, I decided that the best thing to do was actually to treat it like a fun game. And then I trusted myself to figure it out. And once I shifted my attitude from perfectionism to curiosity, my brain started connecting with creative thinking and I was able to make.
[00:10:11] The larger decisions that helped guide my process. Once I booked my flights, I started wondering how to get from point A to point B without driving and ideally without flying. And well, it's Europe and they have pretty good trains, so I realized there's a train from Berlin to Paris. I was headed in the direction of Wales, but I had a number of days before I needed to be there.
[00:10:38] I spent a day and a half in Paris, and then another day in London before getting on the train to Wales, and that helped me decide where to stay because it was easy to stay close to the train stations, although in London I ended up training into one station and then out of the other, but whatever, all of those pieces coming together gave shape to my trip, and then I was able to reach out to friends and make plans.
[00:11:05] I noticed as I had some frameworks around what I was doing, my body felt more and more comfortable. I realized that I was so thrilled with the novelty and was amused by the combination of frivolity and practicality of my decisions. Like when things went well, I noticed how pleased I was with myself, and I noticed how that feeling of being pleased helped me feel even more and more capable.
[00:11:35] Open to more possibilities and more things going well. I had been low key shifting my thinking from the protective brain, trying to prevent all the worst case scenarios from happening, many of which are out of my control, to more envisioning things going well. Another question I would ask myself is, what would I think and feel about myself and this situation?
[00:11:59] Which was also reminding myself that I could trust my ability to problem solve, to generate solutions when they're needed. That was another approach that I've started to notice that my brain is automating, is starting to offer me on its own. That's such a signal to me that this gentle neuroplasticity approach.
[00:12:22] Is working to change my brain on a, a kind of a global level 'cause that is more of my thinking, which is rather nice. I found that the most distress came up on the Paris part of my trip. I only had one plan to meet up with a friend for breakfast, and the rest was up in the air. I heard many people say they loved the Musee de Orsay and the impressionist paintings that were there.
[00:12:51] I walked from breakfast, which was after taking the metro and walking to the cafe, and then I walked to the Eiffel Tower and then along the Seine to get to the museum, and I had some sensations in my knees and feeling a bit unsure of how far I could walk or whether or not I was even enjoying myself. I put on some good podcasts and I decided that my own company and being in France was a hundred percent enjoyable.
[00:13:19] That I was free to go where I wanted to go and do what I wanted to do at a pace that felt good. I had untimed tickets for the museum, so I waited online and then in the museum itself, it was really crowded and I kept wondering, maybe I don't like museums, and you know, maybe that's true. It was a very beautiful space.
[00:13:43] I liked looking at the paintings, but the exhibit I found most moving was about the museum itself, a former train station and how it was used after World War II to help refugees. And that made me think of the US today and the situation we are in with capturing people and putting them in camps and being hostile to refugees.
[00:14:06] And so it's not an overstatement that my tender self had some feelings after that exhibit. I think that was one of the reasons why I found just wandering around the museum hard because it's the feeling that I don't like the most right now of helplessness, of feeling like history is happening now and thinking about what it was like to think of the United States as the heroes and not the villains.
[00:14:32] Just some light thoughts for the fun museum visit, right. So after that I was really unclear of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. But because I'm a skilled practitioner of self witnessing with compassion, I could tell that I was needing some TLC, some ease, and something where I was not efforting so hard.
[00:14:57] My intention in the evening was to go to a restaurant called Bistro de Letters, which I was told had delicious french onion soup and a novel activity where you write a letter to yourself or anyone else and it gets mailed to you in the future. As I was imagining what to do, I saw that there were boats that went up and down the Seine, like a bus dropping people off at different sites, and my restaurant was near Notre Dame.
[00:15:24] I got on the boat and I rode it around a few times, enjoying being on the water, visiting the tourist sites from the boat, which was protected from the rain, and talking to my body like a good friend. I can tell that my brain wanted to worry about the rest of my trip, the part I was gonna be doing with friends or getting from one place to another.
[00:15:47] And what I told it and knew to be true was that how I was feeling in that moment isn't a snapshot that I take and will experience for the rest of the time. That I was, in fact getting my walking legs on. And the more relaxed I was, the more capacity they would have, and that at any time I could sit down and take breaks.
[00:16:09] When I gave myself that permission in the museum, I could feel a tendril of care flowing through my whole timeline. The permission that I needed at different times of my life that wasn't push through or stop, both felt with shame. It was to pause, tend, extend love and compassion, and to inquire what do I need now?
[00:16:35] I could feel this current me visiting those past mes that were full of shame for not being able to achieve certain physical feats. Whether that was trying to do a Brooklyn Borough bike ride without any training or the me who couldn't lift myself out of the pool at Club Med when I was playing water volleyball with my cousins and my mother had to help me get out, or the me that couldn't help my friends move their belongings up and down the stairs of an apartment.
[00:17:04] So I watched the truck instead. Those were the times that when I felt immense shame about my body and my physicality, my physical capabilities, those memories and others would come flowing back in these times of walking through Paris as if to say, Hey, that was particularly awful, and I don't want to experience that kind of shame anymore.
[00:17:27] I was able to meet those shamed parts of me with care and love. Compassion, understanding and kindness, and I had a mind body knowledge of how the body creates ease of movement through decreasing the threat response and building nervous system trust. And through repetition. I could bring all of that to this moment and love myself no matter what my walking looked like that day.
[00:17:54] And love on those past mes who didn't know how to be self-affirming or rebellious. Or even how to meet their perfectly imperfect body with care. Walking through the museum and then through Paris became opportunities for so much healing, past, present, and future, as well as creating corrective experiences.
[00:18:19] Once I latched onto what I was being offered, I felt so much better. I didn't have to be afraid of what might happen at any part of the trip. And what I did notice was how much my body bounced back each time I took rest, that the pain eased, and then I was able to continue walking and I would just walk and rest and then walk and rest.
[00:18:43] And then I was feeling so sovereign and empowered. The following day I went off on the train to London and my legs felt fine, and that evening I ended up walking away to the theater and back. It was really enjoyable how easeful my walking was the following day, and to notice how differently my self-talk was.
[00:19:06] That whole trip and the time since I feel like my body is getting stronger again, and it's such a lovely reminder for myself to recognize that nothing I'm experiencing necessarily stays stuck even in moments of feeling weak. I can witness strength. Get super curious about what I'm experiencing. I've traveled extensively and I learned that I could trust myself to be kind and daring, to be curious and caring, to be willing to walk up and down hills, but rebelliously at my pace without apology, and giving my body a lot of credit for what it's capable of doing. Meeting myself in the moment through a mind body approach, taking what I am calling the curiosity cure into my life,.
[00:20:04] That it's a bit of a monologue, but that is how my trip went and how I really feel substantially different about my body, about myself, about my self. Talk about. This work and this approach, this trip was profound on a lot of levels.
[00:20:26] It was profound on a level of spending time with friends in a way that felt really healing and really generative. So I came back feeling renewed, and I think one of the things that came out of this trip was this desire to close the chapter of a book. I. Of shame that's been open for a little while. The shame that I felt around what I used to think of as a failure, which was closing my store and now getting to really lean into what an incredible time that was and wanting to capture it in a way that is generative and shares the magic and.
[00:21:14] The empowerment of what it was that we created, and this really feels like the best time for me to revisit that time in my life because I do think there are still opportunities for healing and getting to like look at that time head on and getting to like revisit the excitement and the empowerment that still is needed.
[00:21:39] Like I was just in a aqua aerobics class the other day with power plus wellness. Which is co-run by one of my friends, Maddie Jones from Plus Model Magazine and we go way back, right? We think of ourselves as the OGs and there was a woman behind me in the class that said, I've never had this much fun exercising.
[00:22:01] She was having also a corrective experience around movement that was profound and deeply important, and that is still. The mission of my store, the mission of my body, work, practice, and the lens that I look at mind, body work through, which is one of the reasons why my colleagues and I are going to be presenting on weight stigma at the at TNS conference, at the Association for the treatment of neuroplastic symptoms like we are bringing this lens.
[00:22:35] I do think that that's something. I feel like has been a consistent through line in my life. Also, I'm presenting at hypno Thoughts live a class called Breaking the Trance of Diet Culture. Basically, the idea that we are entranced by many different factors to always be perceiving weight loss as a goal.
[00:23:00] Smaller bodies as healthy, and these subconscious messages are influencing us all the time, and they're often driven by capitalism and by racism, and driven by forces that we are not choosing to be actively participating in. So I'm excited to be working on my book. I'm excited to help people feel at home in their bodies.
[00:23:28] And help them feel like they have the power to create the kind of change that they want to be feeling, that you want to be feeling. So what it does mean for my practice is I will still have room to work with one or two new people at a time. So if you have been thinking about working with a mindbody coach, wanting to talk to me about working together, now really is.
[00:23:57] The time to get on my calendar and let's have a conversation about what working together might look like. I hope that this podcast has been helpful. Please let me know. I want you to listen to how I've described my approach on this trip to meeting my body and holding it loosely. and taking the opportunity for creating a corrective experience and also teaching my brain that doing certain activities are safe and really meeting that me with so much kindness and love.
[00:24:35] So I hope that some of this information filters through your ears and into your brain and settles in your nervous system and your subconscious in a way that makes sense for you. I'm wishing you well, and I look forward to hearing from you and talking to you next time. Thank you so much.