Far 2 Fabulous

Healing Through Harmony: The Miraculous Power of Craniosacral Therapy and Vagal Tone

March 14, 2024 • Julie Clark & Catherine Chapman • Episode 9

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When Sarah Johnson's daughter faced a traumatic birth, her search for healing led her to the transformative world of craniosacral therapy. Tune in as Sarah, a seasoned craniosacral therapist, takes us through her journey of discovery, demonstrating how this non-invasive technique not only alleviates ailments like migraines and tinnitus, but also serves as a pathway to overall well-being by soothing the nervous system. In our enlightening discussion, we unravel how this therapy can shift the body from relentless stress states into restorative calm, revealing why it's often the saving grace for those who've exhausted other medical avenues.

Ever wonder about the invisible forces steering your stress responses? This episode casts a spotlight on the vagus nerve, the unsung hero managing your body's reactions to stress. We'll explore techniques as simple as controlled breathing and the resonant 'VOO' sound that can significantly enhance the vagus nerve's ability to bring you back from the brink of fight-or-flight. Our conversation is an ode to the power of basic exercises in recalibrating our nervous systems, and an invitation to reclaim serenity in a world that often feels like it's spinning too fast.

In our final segments, we confront the realities of remote communication's toll on mental health and the critical nature of self-care for resilience. The digital age has redefined our connections, and it's more important than ever to foster personal relationships and address the roots of stress. We share not just strategies for self-care but also the imperative of reaching out and building a supportive community. Let's embrace self-kindness and joy as not just luxuries, but necessities, and learn to cultivate gratitude for the community we're creating—one step at a time, together.

For more information about Sarah please visit her website here and Facebook here.

Got a question or comment? Send us a text message here!

Thank you for listening.

You can continue the conversation with us in the Far 2 Fabulous Facebook group. Come and connect with other women on a journey to empowered health.


For more information about Julie Clark Nutrition, click HERE
For more information about Catherine Chapman, click HERE

We look forward to you joining us on the next episode.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Far Too Fabulous, hosted by Julie and Catherine. Join us on a mission to embrace your fabulously and redefine wellness. Get ready for some feistiness, inspiration, candy chaps and humour as we journey together towards empowered wellbeing. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome to this week's podcast. Now we are very, very excited because we've got our first guest, and when we were discussing who to bring on, I immediately said this person, and there are many reasons for it, other than the fact that she's absolutely lovely. She's an amazing therapist and it tied really nicely into what we've been talking about regarding stress. So I'd love to welcome Sarah Johnson, who is a cranial sacrum therapist. I always want to say that we're on the other side for some reason. Yeah, we're going to be talking about stress today, so welcome, sarah, to our podcast. Please tell the viewers a bit about yourself.

Speaker 2:

Oh, hello, yes, so thank you for having me, first of all, very excited to be here. So, yeah, I am Sarah Johnson of Craneo, kent, so I graduated as a craniosacral therapist in 2011 and I have been working as a therapist ever since. I've done some tutoring at different colleges in London and I'm a clinical supervisor as well to other therapists now, but I still run my practice, so I see all sorts of people, from newborns right through to the elderly.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's great. I think it would be really good to know how you came to be a craniosacral therapist.

Speaker 2:

It's an interesting one actually, because a lot of people get into it because they had treatment themselves and saw amazing results and that really got them interested. For me it was because I took my first daughter to see a craniosacral therapist. She'd had a traumatic birth and it had been recommended to me by my midwife that I took her to be seen and when I watched what was going on it looked like magic and I was really interested, started investigating and decided to start training myself. So yeah, I hadn't actually received a treatment myself when I started the training.

Speaker 1:

Amazing. Can you tell everybody because that's my experience of craniosacral therapy is through my children as well. Can you tell anybody that's listening what it is that doesn't have a clue?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, okay, so craniosacral therapy originally was developed from osteopathy and it works on the basis that any shock or trauma that we experience in life anything that's too much for us to completely resolve at the time, gets held somewhere in the physiology.

Speaker 2:

So we've all got stuff. Very often, a newborn baby will have unresolved shock or trauma held in their body and what happens during a treatment is that the client stays fully clothed. I put my hands on their body and I'm basically listening with my hands to the tissues and fluids in their system in order to ascertain whether there are any particular tensions or restrictions and then, when I find those, helping them to release. But it's all very, very gentle. There is no clicking, crunching, pulling any of that. We're really working at a much deeper level than that, the level of the nervous system, which brings me on to the other aspect of the treatment, really, and that is that we're working with the nervous system. Very often people present being stuck in fight, flight or freeze, and it's really about down regulating their nervous system so that they spend more time in that rest and digest, helping them to find the off switch. So there's a lot about safety and helping people to become more present in their bodies and live in a much calmer way, so that their system functions better.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, living in a calmer way. I think we all kind of aspire to do that, but we don't do a very good job of it, do we? Because of how life is these days it's very fast paced and people don't switch off at all. And we were talking about stress on our last episode and how we see people that don't even realise they're stressed. In fact, we were talking about our own experience and not realising that stress was a part of that.

Speaker 2:

Do you see that, with the work you do, yeah, all the time, and I think it takes vigilance once you understand a bit more about how your system is functioning. But I would say the vast majority of clients that I see new clients are in that fight flight off reason. They don't know that kind of hyper-vigilant state or very depressed state it can present in all manner of ways, but that's become the norm and even though they don't like it, they don't think there are there's any option maybe. Or if they realise there is an option, they don't know how to achieve it. So it's really really common and your right life these days really pulls us in the other direction very often, doesn't it? There are a lot of demands on us, there's a lot of pressure. It's very fast paced.

Speaker 1:

Are you often, for these people, a last resort, because they just don't know what's going on? And do they? Do they know what they're coming to release and does it matter?

Speaker 2:

Oh, there's really two really big questions there. So do they know what they're coming for? I'll tackle that one first. They usually do know what they think they're coming for, but they might get more than they bargained for. So they might think, oh, I'm coming because I've got tinnitus, I'm coming because I've got migraine. But actually the effects are far more far reaching than that and more profound and more life changing than they could have ever imagined actually. So yeah, do I see desperate people? Do I see people as a last resort? Yes, and not all the time. If someone is familiar with craniotherapy, it can be there, go to just for general well being. Often people have a maintenance session. They there doesn't have to be anything wrong as such for them to benefit, but usually, or very often, should I say people come because they've tried everything else. Certainly they've gone down the traditional medicine route and that has had a limiting effect or no effect and they need something else.

Speaker 1:

Amazing. And the last bit was does it matter if they know what they have released with you?

Speaker 2:

So you mean in terms of like, what was the stress, what was that about? No, it's really interesting. So often craniotherapy is described as body psychotherapy and whilst there are verbal skills involved and there often is conversation during the treatment when appropriate, I usually describe it as nine times out of 10, neither of us will know the detail. So there might be situation where the client gets very clear on oh, I know what this is about. I just got a flashback to, or this feels the same as when. So you know there's a strong indication there of what that particular stress or tension relates to, but nine times out of 10, neither of us do. We just know that there was something there and it released in a physiological way, and now it's gone, and actually it's the end result that matters, isn't it? So you know, I often say to people it doesn't matter where it came from, what it was about, how long it's been there, as long as it's gone and you get the results that you want. That's the main thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. I remember the results that I wanted was that Anya, who's my eldest, who was a swing from the chandeliers kind of toddler, slept and it was, it was, it was magic. I know it was absolutely heavenly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:

Well, sarah's treated my son Charlie back in the day quite a few years ago now and he was having some difficulties at school. And I remember him saying afterwards and I don't know if you'll recall, sarah, because at his age he's gone you see lots of people, but he just said all the noise just went. It went really quiet in my brain. It was just amazing. He came out there like he was floating around on a cloud. It was brilliant.

Speaker 2:

And often children really capture it beautifully. You know, all the noise went, you know, and often that's what we want, isn't it? As adults, we just want all the noise to go, you know, and it's these things that actually seem so simple but they're so profound to how we function. I remember a little girl left a while back and she's, as she went out the door she said, actually said it to her mom on the way home. She said I feel like a real person.

Speaker 2:

You know, and it was like, wow, I've just, I've come into my body. This is me, and you know it's profound, isn't it?

Speaker 1:

Oh, how amazing. And I bet the children come to it without any of the garbage that we would come to it with Like we'd have had. We'd made all sorts of decisions before we arrived to you about what it was all about and or what it was not all about, and they just come and just accept.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they often do, and you're right. You know we can be really fearful. Children are fearful too sometimes. But you know, the people that I see are often very traumatized. They struggle to feel safe. It might have taken them years to pluck up the courage to come and book and see somebody. They're really fearful of what's going to come up or how they're going to cope. Children, particularly babies of course, are really kind of fresh and they don't have any preconceived ideas of what it's going to be like. So they don't have any preconceived ideas of what it's going to be like.

Speaker 1:

So they, you know, they just are kind of more able maybe to there are fewer layers, maybe to get through, I think it's really nice that we can talk about these things now, because not so long ago, talking about, you know, holding emotions inside your body and all of those things people would have found alien, but lots of people have even heard of the vagus nerve. Now I know that that is an important part of the work you do as well, and we touched on it slightly in our last episode and we said hang on a minute. We've got someone that knows what the vagus nerve is coming on, so let's discuss it when we've got Sarah with us. So yeah, sarah, the vagus nerve. Tell us more about that and why people have heard of it now.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you're right. You know, in the old days, even going back to when I changed, you know it was a fairly new, it was fairly new science that actually trauma wasn't held in the cognitive part of the brain, trauma was held in the body and in the limbic system, in the emotions. And now that is being more widely accepted and you hear of a lot of psychotherapists talking about it. You even start to hear now about doctors talking about it and actually the impact that the vagus nerve has over our nervous system, which is talked about so much now, and it's something that we as chronosacrotherapists have always known about and always worked with. But how stimulating the vagus nerve can really help to shift the nervous system from that fight, flight or freeze into the rest and digest. So the vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve and it comes down in two branches in the front of the neck and it comes from the brain obviously down into all the major organs.

Speaker 1:

So it really is the master of the nervous system and fundamental to how our nervous system is functioning I was talking about when we were talking about stress and I was talking about the endocrine system, I was saying that the adrenals are the boss of the endocrine system, and then you've got the vagus nerve, which is the boss of the nervous system.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1:

So when we're talking about these people that are stressed and they're stuck in flight and freeze and they don't know what's going on, we were talking about some ways to help our vagus nerve. But I'm interested to ask you, Sarah, because when I'm doing nutrition, I always think back to. Our body hasn't evolved to catch up with what how we live our lives now. So I'm always thinking about from a nutrition point of view, what does the body expect us to do? Really, when we're talking about the vagus nerve, how would our body have balanced the vagus nerve back in the day when we weren't subjected to the type of lifestyle that we have now?

Speaker 2:

Well, life was very different. I think the stresses were different way back and if we lived a bit more like we did back, then our vagus nerve probably wouldn't be suffering in the way that it is. We wouldn't be stuck in flight, flight or fleece for quite so long. It would be only when we were being chased by the tiger, for example, and we would very quickly and automatically switch out of that once the tiger had gone. But these days everything is so much more fast paced. I mean, there are techniques that we can use to help our vagus nerve, even outside of the craniosec, with therapy session, and I often teach people about breathing, for example, or I teach what they call the Vubre, which can really help to stimulate the vagus nerve and help us to slow down.

Speaker 1:

You might have to tell us a bit more about what the Vubre is. I know it's sound of the Vubre.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a really good one, actually, and it's really profound. I have a lot of clients who actually practice feeling all the time, and I often say to people you know how our breathing can either be that sort of very shallow, fast, chesty breathing or it can be the deep, slower, abdominal breathing. So to practice abdominal breathing, it's always best to do this, first of all, when you're laid on your back but have one hand on your chest, have one hand on your tummy, just breathe normally. And what we're really aiming for is for your, for your the hand on your tummy to be moving a lot more than the hand on your chest, and that really shows that you're breathing into your tummy. You're doing that abdominal breathing and if you're not to actually force the air out, it's as if you're forcing the air into your tummy with every breath.

Speaker 2:

There's lots of descriptions of how to do abdominal breathing online, but once somebody gets good at that, then to look at how long the out breath can be. So very often with my clients the out breath is just maybe a count of two, something like maybe not even that we really want it to be getting to like a six or seven, something like that. So once somebody gets good abdominal breathing, introducing a longer out breath. So if they can get to maybe two and a half, that's brilliant, then maybe two or three, and this might take weeks to do 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening, but it has really. It tends to spill over then into their everyday breathing so that in between times they're breathing calmer, more deeply and that long out breath has more of a habit.

Speaker 2:

And then what I encourage people to do is introduce a VOO so I'll demonstrate which. So it's literally a breath in and then a VOO on the out breath and a really nice long out breath. So to demonstrate VOO, voo. So you get the idea. Yeah, I feel a bit stupid doing that. Yeah, so literally to practice that 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening can really have an impact on how you're breathing generally, how that habitual breathing is, and but even just literally, I can feel my legs tingling just literally through that, like one and a half breaths, one and a half VOO. And the point being, you know, julie, with like your singing and the humming, you know, it creates this vibration around the vagus nerve and helps to stimulate it. So it really helps to down, regulate everything slowing down the breath. So really there the three stages to get the abdominal breathing going, the long out breath, and then to introduce the VOO practice, that 10 minutes the morning, 10 minutes in the evening, and it really does make a change.

Speaker 1:

I love that and it's just like we were saying when we did our breakwork episode it's it's so simple and I think, because it's so simple, people don't do it because they don't think it's going to be as effective and incredible as it is. I like that, except I would probably break into VOO, la VOO. I don't know if that would be the french version or the ava version. I don't know where we're going from there, but it would be singing forgot.

Speaker 2:

Add in a bit of dance, can't go wrong.

Speaker 1:

I'm guessing that the sound that you're making for that VOO, because you were quite low you're looking for it to be low down, aren't you the vibration to be down there in your belly, almost like you're singing from your belly? I don't know.

Speaker 2:

Well, if you're calm and if you're relaxed, then your larynx will be more relaxed and your the tone will be lower anyway so yes, ideally, but just something to notice. If it's high, or if it's difficult or if it's shaky, or if you're out with a short, you know these are there? Just information, useful information, really, as to what's actually going on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's interesting because, yeah, when we were talking through breathwork because Catherine and I both qualified in breathwork and we've done different types of forces and things and we were talking a bit about it on our last episode and we were saying how so many people do not breathe properly and the impact that has?

Speaker 2:

Yes, you can do a lot of things to help your nervous system, but if you're going to stay in a pattern of fast, shallow breathing, the effects are going to be very limited.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I see it a lot in in my work with people eating too quick. You know, when you see something that could is so has such an impact on the body. Just slowing down your eating has a massive impact on how your body uses those nutrients.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I was slowing down up on how you do everything. Actually, you know, I'm very conscious that I'm probably not talking very slowly today, but I'm often conscious that I'm talking very slowly during a treatment. I'm often talking very slowly to my clients, I'm often moving very slowly, but actually, you know, there's a message there how is it to just slow down a little bit? What's difficult about that and when we really get more aware about how we're functioning can be really useful in terms of information and what do we need to do differently?

Speaker 1:

And again, we respect about this before in an episode where that is totally the opposite of what society expects of us. Now it suspects us to be efficient and fast pace and crown as much into every single minute of the day as we as we possibly can, and to our detriment. Yeah, sleep when you're dead. And actually, if you, if you take time out, the amount of people I work with because I've worked with a lot of mums the amount of time that they will say I feel guilty for doing absolutely nothing, even though I've said doing nothing is is a form of self-care. That guilt comes in, doesn't it?

Speaker 2:

I sit all the time and it's really a thing that we struggle to have downtime, we struggle to rest, we struggle maybe even to carve out eight or nine hours at night to sleep, you know, and it's not okay, is it? What is it about? Performance and going faster and having more, and it's just really detrimental to our health.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely. More is less is more right. Yeah, that's what we should be doing, yeah absolutely Work less, live more I need to say that. I've been over to myself on a daily basis.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I don't we all. You know it's a challenge. It's a I think it's a challenge for most of us. You know I'm guilty of rushing as well, a lot of the time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, when I was doing one of my breathwork courses, one of the exercises that we did in order to slow everything down was during our meditation, before we went into things like breath hold.

Speaker 1:

That we had to imagine that the thoughts that come into our head because there are millions of them that fly in really random ones you're like, oh okay, that's interesting. But we had to imagine that that voice had gone really slow and the impact that had I couldn't believe that on how many breaths you were taking and even like because we were wearing monitors and things your pulse rate and your heart rate just by when you were sitting there with all the thoughts coming into your head that you imagined, that you'd, you know you'd click the button back on the playback and it was slow. I mean, I listened to a lot of stuff on speed up, sometimes like right, I've got to listen to this, put it on to yeah, I'll get the just a bit yet, but to do it the other way around, the the impact it had on all of us that were doing the course, it blew me away actually.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and isn't that interesting when you look at, say, for example, when we use our phones for however many hours a day and we're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, like our brains are moving very fast and we're not present, we're often just associating. It's bad.

Speaker 1:

It is bad. Yeah, what are your thoughts on the increase in stress since the pandemic, because I've definitely seen a huge rise in stress related issues coming through my clinic since then. Seems to be a big increase.

Speaker 2:

It was very obvious to me early on in the pandemic body workers weren't weren't allowed to work for a couple of months, that was all. But when we came back it was very obvious straight away that everyone that I saw was more anxious than they had been. Nearly everyone was more anxious than they had been prior to the pandemic and I'm not sure that that really has got back to pre-pandemic levels. I think the fear perhaps is still in the field and very often we haven't got back to the good habits that we had prior to the the pandemic. So you know, if we used to see our friends a lot or we used to go to clubs or we used to socialize quite a bit, that is maybe something that we still haven't got back to. Have we forgotten what it was like before?

Speaker 1:

I find it really fascinating how big shifts happen. So for me I don't need to see someone in person and I always worked on, you know, zoom and things anyway, because you know I would see people from all over the place. But I still saw a lot of people in person in my clinic since the pandemic, even though I'm really busy and see a lot of people each week. I've seen two Sarah in person since the pandemic and you know, if I was a body worker like you, you have to. You know well you don't have to because I know you did zoom things with people. But because people don't have to come face to face, they don't. And I struggle a little bit with that because when you're working as a therapist on your own, you've missed that connection yourself.

Speaker 2:

You know, yeah, and there's really nothing like being in the same room as somebody is there, there's. There's more information available, I think when you're actually in the same room with somebody and, of course, with a body worker, it's a huge challenge, not to be in the same room.

Speaker 2:

But, yeah, people perhaps are still fearful, or perhaps they find it's more convenient to work from home or to see that a therapist, if possible online. But are we missing something? There is something about the connection lost, say, for example, working from home, for people that do that five days a week. There used to be such great social support when we worked in offices together or, you know, when we saw our peers, our co-workers, on a day-to-day basis. There was that camaraderie, there was that support and advice that we would give each other, even if it was just like oh you know, has your dog doing, or oh you know, you look a bit peeky today, or you know. A loss of that has gone, and I think that's a shame and it's something that we need to be aware of, because where is that connection if it's not going to be at work anymore? Where's your support? Where is your interaction? Are you seeing people more outside of work?

Speaker 1:

if not, probably should be yeah, I think you need to be aware of it and then do something about it. So I have a group of other nutritionist friends and we meet. We're meeting tomorrow. Actually, we meet once a month and our WhatsApp group is called cabin fever so we meet in person and just you know, talk about what you know, just general things. This connection as well is so important, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

but with regards to longevity, it's up there, it's one of the top sort of two or three and and again, because it's so simple, I think people think that it's not as impactful as it as it is yeah, and even in terms of phone calls, like how often you know, rewind 10, 20 years we would have always picked up the phone to speak to our mom or our sister, our best friend, and now we're making a fraction of the phone calls because it's a quick text and it's not the same, is it? So I always urge people to make the call or go see the person, so it serves us so much better.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a lot lost in translation there as well, isn't there?

Speaker 1:

true yeah, you'll get all of those again, all those signals, all that like even just on the telephone, that's the change of voice or pace or anything. You just all that is lost. Yeah, yeah, it is, it is important and it, you know, it's all of these little things that have changed in our life, all impact, whether our body thinks that we're threatened, or, you know, in fight and fly, or if everything's good and hunky dory. So I think it's all linked at the end of the day, isn't it?

Speaker 2:

and that's a really important point as well, julie, because you know, often there is no imminent danger and yet our nervous system feels that there is yeah so you know, the danger has passed and yet we're stuck in this sense of something's about to go badly wrong and it's about recognising that actually in this moment we're safe. And it's again really such a basic principle, but a really really important one yes, it's a very valid point.

Speaker 1:

Actually, yeah, I do have a lot of people that say to me I'm just waiting for the next thing to happen, because that's how it feels.

Speaker 2:

And often their bodies are braced.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

You know they're just ready for the next impact. You know it's not good.

Speaker 1:

Not a good way to live? No, it's not. One of the things I do is I test people's hair and look at their minerals. And we look at calcium and magnesium and it's interesting that calcium is the mineral that will go up when everything is tight and rigid in the body and magnesium will come down and you want a balance between those two. So people say, but I don't eat a lot of dairy foods, or, and I say it's nothing to do with that, it's literally how your body is responding to what it perceives it needs.

Speaker 1:

You know the threats there, but I find that amazing with those two minerals, yeah, if you see a calcium really high, that calcium is stubborn, it's really tight and restrictive and that's exactly that brace position. Yeah, it's the one ready for action. Yeah, which is why people take magnesium to help them sleep and help with stress, because the calcium is being dominant, but it's only ever short lived until you deal with the underlying issue, which I think, going back to what you do, that is, you know you're getting at the root cause at that point, aren't you? Because if you can switch somebody's body out of stress, then we spoke about how many diseases stress is implicated in. Now it's. It can be hugely life changing for someone to have that treatment.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely, and I'm a big fan of traditional medicine, and yet it doesn't solve everything and it often is just a plaster over the wound, whereas actually, if we can get to the underlying cause, then that's when we really make long lasting change. And that's what everybody wants really, isn't it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely so. To finish up, how should we finish up with our chat on stress? I was. I was wondering what do you advise your clients that they can do themselves? So things like the Voo breathing. Is there anything, anything else that you advise?

Speaker 2:

Another really nice one actually is writing a list of 10 resources. So I get a lot of people to do this and I do this myself whenever I feel the need, because the list is different every time. So resources when I say resources, I mean things that feed your soul. So if money and time were no object, what would you be doing that would feed your soul? So typical things that somebody might put on the list would be things like phoning the best friend, writing a diary, praying, walking in the woods, going on a holiday, meditation, running. You know the list goes on. But in actual fact, when I ask that question to someone, I say what do you do for fun? What do you do to relax? What are you doing your spare time? They look at me like I'm a bit mad.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we were talking about this the other day because I said one of the things I asked my clients is where is the joy in your life? And I had a lady recently that just went I don't have any joy. I actually don't have any joy. I can't think of anything.

Speaker 2:

But she realized in that moment. She realized, and that's really important, isn't it? So you know, very often, and obviously with new mums, we get this all the time, you know, I say what do you do for yourself? You know slightly, tongue in cheek, very little, but you know, some people do look at me like I'm a bit mad because and they're so underresourced and it often is years or maybe even decades of self-neglect actually, and then they wonder why they're debilitated and why they're poorly and why they're struggling mentally. So, okay, outside of your craniocerebral sessions, what can you do?

Speaker 2:

Let's look at these 10 resources, and the harder it is to get to 10, the more important it is to do. And when you've got to 10, put it on the fridge so that you can see it regularly. And when you look at it. It might be that you can only do one of them at the moment, and that's fine. But what tends to happen is that in a few weeks they look and they go do you know what? Maybe I could do that second one, hmm, okay, and in time their focus starts to come back on nourishing themselves, being tender with themselves, building themselves up, building their resources, their resilience, and that window of tolerance starts to increase.

Speaker 1:

I love that. Yeah it's so lovely and again, we've spoken about this before in previous episodes how and I'm sitting today how society has not set up for us to do things for ourselves, like when you said about a new mum. Not only do they not have time for that, but it's almost frowned upon to be taking time for yourself. I don't know, I was going to say particularly for women. I imagine men probably do that as well, but we don't have a society set up to encourage you to sort of just love on yourself.

Speaker 2:

And also, we don't have a society anymore where we, our children, are brought up in the village. Yeah, you know, we don't have a society nowadays where it's easy to ask for help. We're supposed to cope on our own, or we feel like we are, when actually, you know, leaning on each other, finding those connections, supporting each other, living more in community, finding our networks, is a much, much healthier way to be.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it's bonkers, really, isn't it? Because I know I love people asking me for help and being able to give support and care and help for somebody. Yeah, I do as well. Yet even myself, I would still think twice, three times, four times before I went and asked for help.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it can be very unnatural. And again, it's good to have that awareness, isn't it because I will do the same very often? It's after the event that I realized I could have asked for help and I didn't. But I'm getting better at that. You know it's a work in progress.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and then we're a terrible, a terrible example for our daughters. That's what's spurred me on more than anything is that I want to be. I want to be a shining example to my children, and I often seem totally opposite to what society is saying. They're getting used to that Slowly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I remember watching a Brené Brown interview a while back and she said there are two types of children. She was joking about how even her own children would need therapy. I don't know if you know Brené Brown. I think you do too, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so she was talking about even her own children would need therapy, and she said there's only two types of children the ones who will ask for help and the ones that don't. And we can only hope that we're bringing up our children to ask for help, and the best way we can do that is to ask for help ourselves. Set the example, let them see us.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we've mentioned it quite a few times now that our kids don't do what we say. They do what we do. So, yeah, that's brilliant. I love the 10 ideas. I think it would be really nice if you're listening to this and you could share your 10 ideas with us. I think that would be lovely.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that would be so good. I'd love to see them. And actually, anytime I'm feeling run down or I realise I haven't coped with something very well, I go, oh gosh, okay, my 10 resources, what are they? And I write them again. They're different, slightly different every time, and then I think, right, okay, what could I be doing more? Or where am I neglecting myself? How could I nurture myself better?

Speaker 1:

and that's the answer yeah, we should do ours, our 10 resources, and put them in the show notes. I reckon, yeah, I reckon running might not be in mine not after eight, for anyway or may, whenever it is absolutely, absolutely not.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we're gonna have to draw this to the post, as I'm standing here and we were laughing earlier on that I I ran 20 miles yesterday and I need to sit down. I'm ready. I've ready to say I actually managed to hold a conversation today, though, so I'm really pleased about that. You've done well. Yeah, your body thinks that there was a tiger. For how long did it take you to run 20 miles?

Speaker 2:

four hours four hours.

Speaker 1:

Your body is like there's a tiger. It's still coming at me.

Speaker 1:

He's four hours now and now I actually, as I was running along, I was thinking I this, this is really terrible for my body. Two things I was thinking. One was I was breathing in and out through my mouth so I remember that conversation that we had for our breath work session last week. And the second thing was actually how can I fire up my fight or flight more, because I want to get home quicker yeah, quite tough, after four hours of running, I imagine yeah, but I and I, and here we go.

Speaker 1:

This is. I did ask for help and I went and had a massage in the week and I don't normally do that because I think that I can do it all myself and the difference that it made is is short of magic. It was, it's just absolutely incredible. And then I feel like a dumb dumb for not having done it in the first place. Like what? For all the years that I have been as physical as I am in my job and and just I enjoyed being like that, why have I never, ever, taken on the support with sports massage? What is wrong with?

Speaker 1:

me see that definitely needs to go on your list, yeah oh, my god, it's going to be on the top of my list all of the time now. Yeah, put it on your list, sarah. Thank you so much for coming on and being our first guest. That was a really good chat. We will put your details in the show notes as well. I know on social media, you always put such lovely thought for reflective things on your social media. I always see, I always read them and I think that's so nice. Yeah, I need to have a think about that. So, yeah, I would social media as well, don't we? I would urge people to go and find you and, yeah, we will make sure that that's all in there in the show notes. Is there anything else you want to finish with?

Speaker 2:

oh, no, just thank you for having me. And yeah, we're all on a journey, that's for sure. Thank you so much, thank you.

Speaker 1:

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