Ask Lifeyness: You can try out the new Lifeyness Assistant here if you have a Chat GPT 4 account.

 

What is the origin of lifeyness? And how is it best practiced?

Welp, I thought you'd never ask! Welcome to the season finale of Season 1 of Lifeyness.

In this final episode, Professor Sarah examines various ways to support a holistically healthy life. She summarizes her research, which combines academic study, guest interviews, and her personal experiences, into ten main principles. These include sound healing, conscious embodiment, breathwork, temperature therapy, and barefoot living among others. She leans on her interviews and readings from notable experts in psychology, spirituality and holistic health, such as Michael Singer, Dr. Tracy Alloway, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Rhonda Patrick. All in the name of enhancing general wellness, emotional health, and a vibrant physical state of being!

 

Takeaways (with links)!

Get started here with some suggestions from each practice:

1. Conscious Embodiment

Abigail Rose Clarke (Ep 18), Jessi Fiske and Qoya (Ep 7), Sara Sohn (Ep 13),Qoya

1. Breathwork

James Nestor, Breath, Wim Hof style Lifeyness breathing meditation, Rob Lenfesty guided breathwork

1. Surrender and Flow: Michael Singer, Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Byron Katie, Martha Beck

2. Temperature Therapy: Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Wim Hof

3. Nature Immersion

Dr. Jean Larson, Nature Based Therapeutics

6. Barefoot Health

Earthing, Clinton Ober

7. Play Therapy

Jessie Shternshus, Improv Effect, Tracy Alloway, award-winning psychologist,

Ash Perrin, Founder and CEO of The Flying Seagulls project

8. Somatic Healing

Peter Levine, Efu Nyaki of Somatic Experiencing

9. Touch and Sound Therapy

Julia Everson talks about healing

10. Belonging and Sanctuary

Brene Brown

Episode 19: Place and Embodiment for Artists

 

Contact:

Tiktok @book_of_lifeyness

Instagram @book_of_lifeyness

Email: [email protected]

00:00 Introduction to Lifeyness
02:01 The Journey Begins: Interviewing Alexis
02:50 Exploring the Roots of Addiction
03:50 A New Life: The Family's Second Chance
04:08 The Lifeyness Project: A Lived Research
04:48 The Power of Nature and Body Harmony
05:18 The Struggle Against Nature: Society's Influence
05:45 The Joy of Letting Go and Embracing Nature
06:27 The Lifeyness Capsule: Distilling the Research
07:12 The Lifeyness Assistant: An AI Wellness Guide
07:58 The 10 Key Practices of Lifiness
11:39 The Power of Breath Work
15:03 Surrender and Flow: Embracing Life's Currents
16:56 Temperature Therapy: The Biohack
18:09 Nature Immersion: Returning to Our Roots
20:23 Barefoot Living: Grounding in Nature
21:35 Embracing Play: Learning from Kids
21:57 Somatic and Trauma Healing: Addressing the Nervous System
24:40 Therapeutic Touch and Sound: Healing Through Sensation
26:04 Belonging to Place and Creating Home: Bridging Inner and Outer Worlds
30:10 Conclusion: The End of Season One

Image Credit: DigitalMarketingSupport.org

Music Credit: Song for a New Beginning by William Claeson

 

 

Full script:

  This season has been an exploration into all of the ways I can support this kind of life. From sound healing, to play experts, to the teachings of Michael Singer, it was a research project made social by way of podcasting.  My background is in academia and typically research and writing are done in solitude. 

So this speaking with friends and colleagues in public on shareable bits of audio has been a treat.  And now I want to distill all of the research into a capsule here.  I call it a capsule because I'm reminded of those time capsules that you bury in the ground and then you pull them up 20 years later to see what was important to the family at a moment in time. 

But this one I don't want to bury. I want to remember it. daily if possible and share it with anyone else who may find it beneficial as well.  So I've compacted all of the books I've read and episodes I've researched into the 10 best practices of lifeyness. 

Do you remember what it feels like? Comfortable in your own skin?  Not just confident, but also pain free,  healthy, and carefree?  Think about the most robust version of your own childhood body.  This is what lifiness feels like.  A joyful spirit and a vibrant physical state of being.  I'm your guide, Professor Sarah.

Storyteller, teacher, and wellness enthusiast.  Reach into the vitality of your own girlhood to supercharge your grown up life. Hello 

listeners, and welcome back to Lifiness.  In January of last year, I had an idea. I wanted to interview my daughter, Alexis. She'd been sober for a year and living with us again for six months.  After having gone through the grief and constant pain of being separated from a child and not knowing if she would return from the grip of addiction, This turn of events seemed like a dream. 

It was a new life. No matter what happened from that point, which I had learned that I had very little control over. That's the typical takeaway from the ruins of addiction.  But no matter what happened, I wanted to document that point in time.  I also had thoughts of creating a podcast. But these two things were not necessarily one in the same until I actually did the interview, that first interview.

The conversation I had with her was more of an exploration of what the heck happened.  I had family members and perhaps the larger community in mind when we recorded it. An explanation of sorts. But what I found was there was this nugget of truth I had been discovering on my own about myself.  And that was the joy of embodiment and the hell of disembodiment. 

So when we got to the question, what made you start using?  What made you start down this path of addiction?  It was clear to her that feeling uncomfortable in her body and disconnected was key.  At the time of that first recording, I was kind of in the middle of reconfiguring my home life.  My son,  her younger brother, was starting high school, you know, and she was here starting her whole new life again.

And starting college.  Um, so for all of us it was a whole new life. It was a second chance at family. We were going to do it together.  I had the blessing of a sabbatical from work.  And I was making sure our home felt like the sanctuary that it could be.  I was also finishing my first novel. And nourishing other creative projects.

And lifiness is one of those.  It became this lived research project in which I was trying out concepts and practices on myself. And realizing life could be so much fuller, more comfortable, more joyful.  I actually abandoned my novel revisions at the time, um, because I was so inspired by the non fiction books that I was reading, and by my peers who were doing amazing things, and by the results I was getting in both mind and body, that I borrowed a mic. 

I downloaded some software and I set up shop as a podcaster.  Like I said, I decided it would be a research project.  In a nutshell, what I learned is that living in harmony with nature and the nature of your body is a sure way to find peace and achieve health.  Inspired by my daughter's sober living, I wondered, Do I really need to be on antidepressants?

Like I have been for 15 years.  So that was a big shift for me, one that I didn't take lightly. I did under the supervision of my doctor, but now I've been antidepressant free for over a year.  The thing is,  there are so many messages coming in that tell us to fight against nature, whether that's ads for processed foods or antidepressants.

Or anti aging propaganda, or social media and TV, keeping us rooted to the couch and not moving the way our bodies are built to move. There's also the push to constantly self promote, acquire more and more, and work around the clock.  You may not even realize you're under this spell. I know I didn't fully comprehend it until I started practicing letting go, playing, and spending unrestricted time in nature. 

I started feeling more relaxed and playful and carefree. And it began to feel like this direct route to health and happiness.  And I wanted to name it, and write it down, and create best practices for myself.  I just didn't want to forget it because it served me so well.  Reading and interviewing, trial and error, research and practice. 

It all became what I call lifeyness.  And at this point, I think I've really found a good mix.  And now I want to distill all of the research into a capsule here.  This is not a summary of all the episodes, by any means, but rather a thoughtful distillation of everything I've learned over the past year or two, really, as I've journeyed into health and happiness. 

I'm giving 10 basic tenets here.  I've actually also created Lifeyness Guided Meditations that live on YouTube that I will mention as well.  But I'm dumping an exhaustive list of valuable insight into a brand new genre and tool, the GPT.  As I continue to work on this as a book, which I am also doing as well, I thought it could be cool to create my own lifiness assistant. 

I've been playing around in the AI space lately, so I thought it'd be  interesting to see how to create a GPT that is a wellness assistant, specifically a lifiness assistant. Since I can only include so much here as a podcast. Episode, I've uploaded all of the knowledge and books and thought leaders and my own ideas about emotional health and spiritual health and wellness. 

into this GPT. So you can go to OpenAI if you want to ask Lifeyness a question. I hope this is helpful and I hope that it enhances your life in some way.  Please reach out to me on Instagram at bookoflifeyness or TikTok at bookoflifeyness  to let me know.  All right, so here we are with the 10 key practices of Lifeyness. 

Number one, we have to start with  conscious embodiment.  This is kind of the key to everything else, or a goal to get to, with some of the other tactics I have here.  So, embodiment is the awareness that body, thoughts, and emotions are all aligned components that have an effect on your overall health.  So, a lot like animals, young children, they really inhabit themselves fully.

But injury or neglect can sever the mind body connection over time.  So some of my ideas are that through loving attention and support, we can come back to our bodies again. I um, interviewed Abigail Rose Clark, who just published a book called Returning Home to Our Bodies, and she is a somatics expert.

She is someone who has a background in yoga, but she has a lot of tactics to get embodied and to know what that really feels like.  The background for me is that I didn't realize in the past that I would almost, like, lose consciousness in a way and forget what I would say when I was in a social setting or, like, speaking publicly.

Like, I would go to parties, um, and have to drink a lot so I would feel comfortable just, like, speaking. Like, I would almost black out and have this sense of not being in my body at all. So I've had to practice kind of, like, Keeping mind and body together while I'm out in public and social situations.

Even to this day, I'm, like, when I'm speaking in front of an audience, um, or even more so when I'm kind of, like, socializing, um, one on one, I have this feeling of disembodiment. And, um,  I've gotten better at it, but sometimes that connection between mind and body is very tenuous.  The episode with Sarah Sohn on sex and embodiment, um, in that episode, which is number 13,  she has a practice on embodiment and sexual wellness, which is kind of a fun one to do. 

And then also, Jessie Fisk, she is the teacher of Koya, which their motto is, we remember that our essence is wise, wild, and free. And one thing I've learned over the past few years is that freedom, security, play, and relaxation are necessary to a good life. So Koya was a good way of me coming back into my body and going to the Koya dance classes that Jessie would put on here in Jacksonville, and she still does. 

So I just want to give you one practical takeaway for each of these. Practical way to practice conscious embodiment. It's to just set aside time each day for a body scan meditation, and you can Google that. There's plenty of them out there on YouTube,  but basically it systematically brings awareness to each part of your body without judgment.

Um, I have some meditations on YouTube for this kind of thing as well, but really it's just a body scan because a lot of times we go day after day after day without even kind of paying attention to certain parts of our bodies. Um, whether, you know, we don't touch them, we don't stretch them, but just not having awareness can kind of sever that mind body connection.

So number one is conscious embodiment. That's a really important one.  Number two is breath work.  Breath work starts with a really simple premise.  Just by directing attention toward the inhale and the exhale,  we can tap into our parasympathetic nervous system to counter anxiety and stress.  So, I came to this from Wim Hof's methods to in breath serving this highway between mind and body. 

So, like I said from last time, you know, I would kind of have this severance between mind and body, especially in social situations. And one way to really kind of disconnect and not have to feel that is using alcohol. And I feel like I used that a lot when I was living with a former boyfriend.  And especially when his friends would come over, it made me feel very uncomfortable.

And so either I would go out for a walk, kind of run away, or I'd go to the alcohol if I couldn't leave, right? It was at his house during COVID that I discovered breathwork. It would, it was a way for me to really alleviate  anxiety, whether that was anxiety over COVID. And thinking about the oxygenation of my bloodstream for the first time ever, or if it was a social anxiety just kind of having to be with him all the time and we weren't really aligned in our personalities. 

And I was teaching from home and I would do, I found these Wim Hof breathing methods and it would help me reduce anxiety  about whether it was work, working from home, our relationship, the kids working or doing their schoolwork from home. A lot of it, it was just very stressful.  And what I found is after three rounds of this breath work, I discovered this feeling, not just the feeling of reduced anxiety,  but a feeling of euphoria that I had never achieved, you know, without drugs or chemicals or running.

Running is one of them, but it's a harder to get there. So this felt like a magical biohack. And that's when I went kind of down the rabbit hole of intentional breath work and I began healing myself from the outside in, rather than the inside out, meaning, I was calming down my body physically so that my spirit could feel safe and that's kind of my way of getting  closer to like a spiritual healing.

I had to start from the kind of physical side. So breath work is a really good way of doing that. If you're not somebody who is into meditation or spiritual kind of work. You're, you kind of respond better physically. I have a meditation, a Wim Hof meditation on YouTube, but it's also based on Rob Limfeste's work, and he does Wim Hof breathing.

You can find him on YouTube as well. Another way that I really got into breath work and learned a little bit more about it, um, this is kind of another takeaway, is reading the book by James Nestor called Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. Um, and that teaches readers a lot about kind of the anatomy of your sinuses, your mouth, your um, your breathing, and how it supports health or how it can support health. 

Number three, I call this one Surrender and Flow. So I want to begin with a quote by Michael Singer. He says, you gain nothing by being bothered by life's events. It doesn't change the world. You just suffer.  There's always going to be something that can bother you if you let it.  Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself or give it to yourself. 

So basically here he's talking about unconditional happiness. Just going to the source of happiness, going into happiness. Something that everyone can potentially do. Not putting conditions on your happiness. Like saying, once I feel better, I'll be happy.  Once I'm wealthier, I'll be happy. Once I have this relationship, I'll be happy.

So thinkers like Michael Singer, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Byron Katie. Um, Martha Beck, they all are about non resistance, non attachment, flowing with life's currents. Um, so rather than exerting force or tension,  you go to what the tradition of  Daoism talks about is the middle way,  there's balancing ease and effort  so that you're meeting every moment kind of openheartedly. 

Um, so this is really important. And it's The knowledge that suffering is optional,  because a lot of the suffering that we do is just pushing back on life.  It doesn't mean you don't participate in life, that you don't try.  But that  all that trying and pushing and exerting is not conditional for your happiness. 

And I would definitely put, um, Eckhart Tolle in this, in this category, that with the power of now, you know, if we are embracing reality and taking it for what it is rather than putting our preferences on the world constantly, then we can be much happier.  So number four, temperature therapy, what I'm calling temperature therapy.

Um, I began following Dr. Rhonda Patrick on this one, um, dry saunas at around 160 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 15 minutes a day. This can be really helpful for human growth hormone, um, for sleep, for symptoms of perimenopause, for muscle recovery. I've been practicing this and this has kind of changed the game for me. 

I had already known that cold plunges, so this is why I call it temperature therapy, because it could be hot, it could be cold, but basically exposing your body to a little bit of stress, a little bit of controlled stress. And like I said, I'd known that I was really into cold plunges after doing the Wim Hof breathing and program.

Um, so I have a little cold bath outside that I keep on the balcony,  but only recently have I been doing the hot saunas, and that's really changed things.  So, ritualizing sauna, cryotherapy, cold showers, um, this can all boost your immune system and boost your mood. That's a big one for me.  Number five,  nature immersion.

This one I'm so excited about. I'm really happy that I have returned to nature after so many years thinking that I was a city girl. I'm really not. Um, but I don't even like those distinctions, those labels. We're all nature people, right? We all belong to the biological world, uh, it just kind of depends on how many barriers you've put  against the natural world. 

Um, but tuning into nature's wisdom really returns us to our senses. This is a really good way to get embodied. So those visual cues from the outside, the textures of the natural world, this grounds us in something that's larger than our narrow human affairs, right?  Like when we think about the world these days, a lot of times we're just thinking about the little human part of the world.

All of our stories and our technology, but really the world is so much bigger than that.  Um, so I think opening up and immersing in nature as Dr. Jean Larson of the University of Minnesota, I had her on the show. Um,  she talks about nature based therapeutics, which she's the developer of. She emphasized how important it is to integrate nature into healing, right?

She has these fancy names for it. Therapeutic horticulture, animal assisted interventions, facilitated green exercise, therapeutic landscapes.  But it's basically just getting out and being in nature. It really has a profound physical, emotional, and psychological side effect, positive side effect.  Just engaging with natural environments. 

This reduces stress,  and there's so much research to back this up, including Dr. Larson's research, but by engaging with natural environments, you can reduce stress, improve mood,  obviously increase your physical activity, um, you can even enhance cognitive function. I think that's really exciting. Number six, and if I had seen this A couple years ago I would think, wow, this is so crunchy, this is not me at all.

But barefoot living is a big one.  Whether inside or outdoors, feeling grounded.  And it's not just about having your naked feet on the earth, which is important. Um, there's all kinds of anti inflammatory benefits that you can get from this, from actually being grounded, like an electrical cord is grounded. 

But also for me, I had an ankle injury last summer and one of the things I started doing is just going around barefoot and it helped me with posture, with my musculature, which with healing, um, because of the way that I was walking and the way that my posture was realigning without shoes and without heels on.

So it's also very fun. I love being barefoot, but.  But I did read a lot of research on this.  And then the one book, Earthing, is one that I would recommend. It's a good takeaway. Martin Zucker, Steven Sinatra, and Clinton Ober, there's a lot of research in there.  Number seven, embracing play. This is so important for lifeyness.

As adults,  we can learn so much from kids. Um, I talked to several different people,  Tracy Alloway, who is a researcher here in Jacksonville at the University of North Florida on memory and happiness. Um, she talks a lot about how play is an important part. I talked to Jesse Stehrensjoos of the Improv Effect, who works with corporations and incorporates games and playing.

I also talked to Melissa Lorena. She just published a book on being a more playful mom.  We really all need outlets for this kind of thing,  not just gamifying things, not just gaming of course, but getting away from screens and really having kind of unsupervised play where you're just playing in the natural world or in the, you know, natural world of humans.

Like you're interacting with other humans and you're able to laugh and be silly. Maybe take an improv class.  So that's a big one.  The next one is, number seven, somatic and trauma healing. So somatic healing was pioneered by Dr. Peter Levine,  starting in the 1970s. I spoke with one of his faculty members at the Somatic Healing Center, Ifu Nayaki, um, She talks about when difficult emotions and memories take root in the body. 

There are practices that address the nervous system, um, that can heal the nervous system beyond talk therapy. So she includes talk therapy, but she also has body work and breathing exercises, um, so that  you can avoid cycles from the past and unwind that tension in your body and that post traumatic growth that has kind of taken hold in the body. 

Um, one concrete example of somatic healing, uh, somatic practice is Dr. Peter Levine's vooing technique,  which is where you sit comfortably, kind of like you're meditating, but you're just sitting there taking a deep breath, and then you make a low vibrating sound, voo, V O O, to release tension.  Use your most authentic but lowest voice you can,  and you breathe out with the sound vvvv,  and this stimulates the nerve that runs right, um, into, in the center of your core.

Um, You may have heard of the vasovagal response. Um, It's kind of a stress response. This is to calm it down and calm down all your organs in the meantime. 

Number eight is therapeutic touch and sound. So auditory, tactile, and vibration based therapies,  they can really remind us  how we are affected by these physical sensations, these external sensations. So I spoke with Julia Everson, um, she has a practice here called Touch, Massage, and Reiki, so she does some energy work as well.

But she is a wonderful practitioner of sound healing, which I, of course, I knew that I love massages  and I love touch therapy, but I had not been open to the idea, um,  of how sound therapy works. It operates on the principle that everything is in a state of vibration, including our bodies. So she would use singing bowls and gongs in her practice,  um, when I would go to the sessions. 

And something that you can do, if you're listening, is find a sound bath session in your area. They have them at yoga studios,  sometimes they hold them outside.  So look into that, that is a wonderful experience.  And with the right practitioner, they create this very safe space where you can really take this in  and get some healing out of it. 

Okay, number 10. We've gotten to the last lifiness best practice,  and that one is a little bit more abstract, but important for everyone.  This I'm just calling belonging to place and creating home. I think these go hand in hand.  I've been watching this show on Apple TV called Home, which takes a unique residential property with a unique design, and it explores the story of the family that lives there, the landscape, the town. 

And the architecture, of course,  it's kind of slow moving, but it's a beautiful documentary series, um, that I find soothing, especially the parts where they show how like a house can be integrated into nature,  um, makes me think of kind of the tradition of Frank Lloyd Wright.  Many of them like showcase unique ways of interacting with outdoors and a lot of them have like these indoor outdoor spaces. 

Um, but it also makes me think of our first best practice on this list, conscious embodiment. So kind of  finding the body, um, and the spirit  of the home,  right? And  making it not separated from the physical world, but integrated into the physical world, which is I think how our spirit should be too.  Part of this last one, belonging.

I feel like has to do with physical geography, has to do with maybe not feeling like you belong at first when you live in a place, but finding your space, finding your place. And belonging is not the same as fitting in. I believe that it was Brene Brown who made this distinction. Um, fitting in is kind of forcing.

Belonging is just having that sense of already being in the place that you feel comfortable.  And I think by putting down roots, we really bridge those inner and outer worlds. Once you find sanctuary,  um, in your home,  it's much easier to go out into the world and be brave and to create beautiful things and create networks and friendships.

I've struggled with this, I think, my whole life. Where I'm not grounded at home.  And so when I'm out in the world, I'm feeling insecure, I'm feeling ungrounded, I'm feeling untethered.  Um, so I think doing the work, I mean, it's almost like a metaphor for doing the work on the inside  before you can connect with other people doing the work of creating sanctuary and home. 

And we talked about this in the last episode where I had the artist round table on the show. And  they spoke of this feeling of not belonging  and belonging and feeling embodied and disembodied. And there were a lot of parallels there, kind of taking as artists, these, they were all artists and taking the ideas from the abstract world of the imagination into the physical reality through their art, kind of like giving that abstract idea a body and bringing it down to earth. 

So I think for this last best practice. I just want to say to listeners, creating more safety, more security, more sanctuary in the home  is a sure way to begin feeling safe. More connected outside of the home and being able to express yourself more safely. And that's something that I've been working on here in my home, and I feel like I have made that change.

And one of the reasons I have been feeling happy is because I always have a safe space, many safe spaces, to go to when I come home.  So thank you so much for joining me on this final episode of season one of Lifey ness. It's been a wonderful journey, and  I am so happy to have had so many amazing guests. 

And I would love to know what you think about this final episode if you could reach out to me at Book of Lifiness.  I'm definitely going to be taking a little break after this, um, but I hope to be back here soon. And I hope you have a beautiful day,  relaxing evening.