How to Thrive in Life with Anxiety with Sarah Wilson [Episode #593]

This week’s topic is: How to Thrive in Life with Anxiety with Sarah Wilson

I am so excited to have my very special guest, Sarah Wilson, who is a New York Times bestselling and #1 Amazon bestselling author and founder of IQuitSugar.com and host of the Wild with Sarah Wilson podcast. Listen in as Sarah shares her personal journey traveling the world, tips for self-connection, and how to thrive with anxiety.

[BULLETS]

• Anxiety and how to stay in a sustained state of presence in your work…
• How to descend into the messiness of life, knowing things can’t always be fixed…
• The anxiety epidemic and if it’s out of control…
• Tips on self-connection and what to include in your daily rituals…
• Forest bathing and what it entails…
• Creating new pathways and rewiring your brain…

[FEATURED GUESTS]

About Sarah Wilson 

Sarah Wilson is a former journalist and TV presenter, author and activist. She wrote the New York Times bestsellers I Quit Sugar and First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, which Mark Manson described as “the best book on living with anxiety that I’ve ever read”. She is the author of another 11 cookbooks that sell in 52 countries. Sarah lives minimally, rides a hand-built bike and is known for traveling the world for eight years with one bag.

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Sarah Wilson’s Interview

• Sarah’s Websites 
• Sarah’s Podcast

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• Tips for Handling Anxiety Throughout the Day
• What To Do When Anxiety Hits
• The Ayurvedic Approach to Calming Anxiety and Your Nervous System with Dr. Jay
• Meditation Tips & Overcoming Anxiety!

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly : Hi Beauties. And welcome back to our Monday Interview Podcast, where I have a very special guest for you today. And a very interesting woman. Her name is Sarah Wilson, and she’s a New York Times bestselling author with a new book out called, This One Wild and Precious Life. She talks about living with anxiety and creating meaningful connections. She was also the editor of Cosmo Australia, host of Master Chef Australia and founder of the largest wellness website in Australia, Iquitsugar.com. But very interestingly in 2018, she closed the business and gave all the money away to charity. She’s a very inspiring woman. She has done so many things in her life and she lives from her heart and her passions. And I think that you will get a lot out of this interview, so super excited.

Kimberly : But before we dive in, I want to give a quick shout out to our fan of the week, and her name is Shelly Coco, and she writes, “I’ve been a follower of Kimberly for many years. Her books and her podcasts are essential to my life and wellness. Kimberly is an inspiration and a beautiful person down to her core. She lifts me up and makes me feel like I am special and perfect just as I am. I find her wisdom, positivity and energy infectious. She makes me feel like I can move mountains and make a difference in my own life, as well as the lives I touch. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are a soul sister to me and I love you.” Wow. I have tingles Shelly, just so you know, and goosebumps all over my body. I really took that in and I cannot thank you enough, my sister, for your amazing review, it truly does mean the world to me, and thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I hope we get to meet one day.

Kimberly : Just ruminating in that love for a moment. And I want to announce that we have started something very special as well, where if you leave us a review for the show, you screenshot it and email it to reviews@mysolluna.com. We will mail you our whole, self-love affirmation program that I created, which is a really wonderful way to start shifting some limiting beliefs and opening the door to true self-love and true self-acceptance, which leads to infinite things, infinite amazingness. So again, take a screenshot of your review and send it over to reviews@mysolluna.com. And while you’re over there, please be sure to subscribe to our show and that way you don’t miss out on any of these wonderful interviews or our Thursday Q&Ashow.

Kimberly : All right. All that being said, let’s get into our interview today with Sarah Wilson.

Interview with Sarah Wilson

Kimberly: 00:03 Sarah, thank you so much for being on our podcast today.

Sarah: 00:13 It’s, it’s wonderful to be talking to you from the other side of the world.

Kimberly: 00:16 It’s so funny because we were just talking about you being in Bondi Beach. And it reminds me of all these memories when I lived there, and I used to do that beach walk from Bondi to Coogee, and oh my gosh, just the beaches there. It’s so beautiful. And I feel like Australian people are so nice.

Sarah: 00:34 Well, when you live by the beach, and you’ve got that kind of vista, it turns you into a nice person, I think. But at the moment we’ve got whales breaching. So they come from the Antarctic, and they come up towards warmer waters to have their babies. And it’s just the water it’s full of breaching whales. And in September, they head back down the other way with their, is it cubs? I think it is. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s beautiful. So there’s just whales everywhere, all along that walk at the moment.

Kimberly: 01:04 Oh, amazing. So you do do that walk too.

Sarah: 01:07 Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Kimberly: 01:08 And have you been there during the whole pandemic? Have you moved around? Have you just stay it in [inaudible 00:01:15] Bondi?

Sarah: 01:16 I have stayed here, because we’ve had these really full on lockdowns, very locked down at the moment. So Sydney is in a two week lockdown, where we can only leave the house to go to the supermarket, to go to the doctor. And we can walk outside and do exercise in the fresh air. But yeah, so we pulse in and out, but the COVID rates are really low here as a result. We’ve got very low vaccination levels, which is a worry for the government. But yes, I have been stuck here. It’s the longest I’ve been anywhere since I left home at 16, 17. And I’ve got a foster daughter here who’s living with me, so we’re in lockdown together.

Kimberly: 01:53 Oh wow. How old is your foster daughter?

Sarah: 01:56 She’s 16. Yeah, she’s 16.

We share our personal journeys while traveling the world

Kimberly: 01:57 Wow. Wow. Well, I was reading about your work, Sarah. And I was reading about your adventures, and I loved that we have this shared experience of backpacking. I read you’ve backpacked for eight years. I was on the road for three years. Started in Australia actually, and then obviously that’s the easy gateway to Asia and Africa. So were you on the road for eight years straight pretty much, or were you dipping in and out? Did you have any sort of roof?

Sarah: 02:26 No, I didn’t have… Well, I was in and out of Australia, but when I was in Australia, I was just living in Airbnbs, I was staying with friends. I lived in an army shed in a forest for a while, and I still had one backpack. So I lived that way for eight years. And like I say, it came to an end, I moved here to Bondi, thought I’d try settling down for a bit. And I actually got real life furniture. And it’s all sourced from the street, eBay and all of that kind of thing. All of it’s second hand. But yeah, then of course COVID happened, and I would normally be moving by now again, but yeah, here I am. But it was eight years. So it started I moved to Byron Bay, and then I had two suitcases of belongings and as everything wore out, I didn’t replace it.

Sarah: 03:18 And I ended up with a carry on bag, so I think 35 pounds is what I ended up owning. Yeah. And that’s how I traveled the world. But I also had a business, the I Quit Sugar business with 25 staff based here in Sydney, so I’d come back and touch base and work solidly. And then I was writing books on the road. So I wrote probably… Well, I wrote five books, but then also produced another extra set of seven books during that time via the I Quit Sugar team. So yeah, it wasn’t like I was off hiking the whole time, I was exploring and then I wrote books off those explorations. Yeah.

Kimberly: 04:01 Yeah. No, it sounds like you were productive. I on the other hand, Sarah, I was learning the whole time, but there were phases of… And I was in India, I was doing ayurveda and yoga, but there was phases of definitely just straight partying, if I’m honest. And just trying to figure things out. It was right after college. So I came back and then I started writing books. But unlike you, Sarah, I was not that productive on the road.

Sarah: 04:24 You were a lot younger than me, so I have to be more responsible. When I was 18, I traveled the world as well for a year out of one bag, and just worked enough to get enough money to move to the next country. So I did the same thing, I’ve been doing it for years. But yeah, I’m now almost, well, approaching 50. So it’s not what a normal woman in her forties does.

Kimberly: 04:43 I feel like some people are built differently, and you talk about anxiety in your work, which I want to get to in just a moment. But for some people, they hear about, “Oh, I don’t know where I’m going to stay tomorrow, I only have this bag, and what am I going to do?” It’s so freeing, but at the same time, you have to step into that flow of letting go of a lot of ideas and plans and all the stuff that you. For all the what ifs, there is just this real feeling of shedding, I felt like. In the first month or two when I was backpacking, that it took me a couple of weeks to get into it.

Sarah: 05:19 Oh yeah. I mean, I still struggle with it each time I head off again, like I’m an A-type. I am high-intensity, I love order and structure and all of that kind of thing. So I know what you mean. But I’d go to that space, that edge, that’s the edge for me. And I go to that edge to test myself, to push myself, to be scared, to be honest. And anyone listening who has anxiety, you might relate, not everyone does, but I find that a lot of people do. I was diagnosed with bipolar when I was 21, and I’ve got OCD, and I’ve got a bunch of different “disorders”. But what I find is that when I push myself into fearful places, like taking off and not knowing where I’m going to be, where I’m going to sleep at night, et cetera. What I find is, I don’t know, I suppose the flight fight mechanism is put to good use, and I’m actually alive, I’m being a human as I’m meant to be.

Sarah: 06:21 I’m meant to be engaged, I’m meant to be agile, I’m meant to be, I use the word fending, I’m meant to be fending, grappling, working out where I’m meant to go. And with hiking, you’d notice as well, hiking’s like that. You don’t know what the past is going to look like, all your faculties have to be on. And then you go into that state of flow, which of course brings you straight into the present, and that gets rid of all anxiety, really does. So hiking, an extension of that is being on the road, it’s this idea of being fully human. So that’s why I do it, is precisely to go to that edge and feel my humanness.

Anxiety and how to stay in a sustained state of presence in your work

Kimberly: 06:59 Well, what about, Sarah, you muster up the will to get going, you use that power, like you stated, I’ve never heard anyone put it that way. You take that anxious energy, whatever we want to say, and you channel it. You get on the road. Okay, now you’re feeling present. And then first night you close your eyes and you try to sleep, and then you’re like, “Oh my God.” All the anxiety starts to flood back. So I guess my question is, how do we stay in that flow state, someone that’s really anxious? As a lot of people suffer from anxiety as well, that’s paired with the anxiousness, how do we stay there? Something could seem exciting, like, “I want to take this trip.” And then once that wears off, how do we say stay in that sustained state of presence in your work?

Sarah: 07:42 My short answer is, you can’t. You can’t. Life-

Kimberly: 07:47 [crosstalk 00:07:47].

Sarah: 07:47 … it goes up and down, you have anxious moments. And the beauty and the meaningfulness and the richness that we all seek at the end of the day, our anxiety is about a desire, a yearning to seek the depth, the richness and everything that comes about from that struggle that you have with yourself when you’re lying in bed, or when you hit the train station, all of a sudden you realize you’ve missed the last train to wherever it is. So over the years, I’ve just learned to accept these things happen. And I just have to have conversations with myself. I’m constantly, constantly talking to myself. And look, I’m talking to you now, it’s 8:00 in the morning, I’ve had two hours sleep. I just couldn’t sleep last night. My head had to fret and worry and process things.

Sarah: 08:35 And in the past, that would’ve got me really upset. I would have got anxious that I was anxious, and then you get anxious that you’re anxious that you’re anxious, and down the spiral you go. Now, from years of this, years and years of it, I just go, “Well, this is just the way it is. And I’m going to have to be gentle with myself tomorrow.” And this is what my subconsciousness is needing to do, it’s needing have a moral wrestle with itself while it’s quiet and there’s no distractions. And I just accept that that’s who I am, that’s what I do. So my answer to your question is… So in First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, my book that chronicles my seven year journey around trying to find an answer to what it is that can bring beauty to our anxiety, so that we can use it as a superpower.

Sarah: 09:22 I start off with an anecdote where I met His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I was the ambassador to His Holiness in Australia for three years. So each time he came, and he came to Australia quite a bit, I would host him or interview him for various media outlets. And I said to him once, I said, “How do we stop our mind from chattering?” Which is at the heart of anxiety, right? That constant chatter. And he said, “Ah, waste of time, don’t bother.” He said, “Yes, you could go and learn to meditate in a cave on a mountain for two years, and maybe you could quiet it down.” He says, “What waste of time. We need to be engaged in altruism, need to be helping other people.” And what I took from that is we can do both, we can be anxious and we can get on with having a good life. And that’s a choice that I make when I’m lying there in the middle of the night, going, “My day’s now going to be ruined. What’s going to happen?”

Sarah: 10:15 I just go, “Well, I’m doing anxiety. This is what happens. I know I’m doing it.” And I also get on with having a great day tomorrow. I’ll just have to.

Kimberly: 10:24 Yeah. Wow.

Sarah: 10:25 There’s a different reframing the things, it’s a completely different perspective. Yeah.

Kimberly: 10:29 Well, it comes through the word that you said a couple moments ago, acceptance, because we can accept this is how it is, and stop that resistance and that eternal struggle against what is. Which moves us away from presence, it moves us away from being in the moment, versus, like you said. Because sometimes people think, “Oh, acceptance and surrender is just giving up.” But it really is that merging with the moment. So I love that instead of thinking, “Oh, it should be different. I’ve screwed up my day. This is terrible.” Being in it, and being okay with it, being okay with the so-called perfectly imperfect moments, and just loving ourselves through them.

Sarah: 11:08 One thing that I just thought about is, I think we live in a culture, and particularly young people who’ve grown up with this almost mandate, that anything that’s a problem must be fixed. So if you don’t know the answer to something, you go and Google it. If it doesn’t arrive straight away, you can look up the app to go and place a complaint. So everybody’s used to everything having to be fixed and determined and certain, et cetera. When I was backpacking, I’m going to sound really old, it was before mobile phones, it was before the internet. And you just had to accept that you would arrive in a town at midnight. I’d arrive somewhere in Mexico, wouldn’t know where I’d stay, and you’d have to accept that you would have to fend somehow, and that there would be no perfection.

How to descend into the messiness of life, knowing things can’t always be fixed

Sarah: 11:52 I think we live a culture, and of course I absorbed just as much as you, because I’ve got my phone at all times to solve everything, fix everything immediately so that I don’t have to sit in discomfort for longer than 30 seconds. We feel that we’ve got to fix our anxiety. We feel that we can’t move on with things until we’ve perfected [inaudible 00:12:12] and all the self-help books, spoken to the gurus, got ourselves into this. So the acceptance thing isn’t so much about perfecting acceptance as a mantra or a self-help goal, it’s really messier than that. It’s descending into the messiness of life, that is the flow. The flow of life isn’t calm and peaceful, the flow of life is calm and peaceful at times, but it’s messy, tumultuous, just like an ocean or a river or whatever it might be.

Sarah: 12:44 So I think it’s a real disservice that our culture has done, well, to young people, but all of us, to think that everything must be fixed, perfect, peaceful, zen, centered, present, and everything all the time. It’s not what humans are about. We are about that moral wrestle.

Kimberly: 13:04 Well, and also starting with ourselves, right? We have to be fixed, everything has to be so-called neat and perfect. And then that we take into our perspective of the external world, all of this should be a certain way, and we should be a certain way. So I call myself, Sarah, a recovering perfectionist, because I’ve been so hard on myself, overachiever. And what’s really helped me, I am a big meditator, but all this time, I’m a big journaler, just sitting with myself and starting to… This word gets tossed around so much, the self-love word. But I feel like after all these years, I’ve been meditating over 10 years, just really starting to see, it’s not right or wrong, good or bad, this or that, just the being, the essence, getting underneath all the labels.

Kimberly: 13:55 That’s really helped me with anxiety, because I’m someone that would say, “Well, this isn’t good enough.” Or, “It should be this, it should be that.” So moving beyond. I started moving beyond numbers years ago, because I would count calories, and I would weigh myself and all this stuff. So I started letting go of numbers, and now it’s just letting go of more and more labels has also made me feel more peaceful.

Sarah: 14:15 Including having to fix your perfectionism, because I love perfectionists, I love a perfectionist.

Kimberly: 14:22 It’s not always fun being a perfectionist.

Sarah: 14:24 No, it’s not, but I’ve got a little page in First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, and it’s called, a singular page on why it is awesome to have a anxious person in your life. And I said, “You can leave this page open for loved ones, or you can just read it yourself to remind yourself that you’re actually a good person to have around.” And I tick off all the things that I love about anxious people, like you know that the anxious perfectionist person will have a plan B if there’s a picnic organized, they’ll know if Colin is gluten intolerant and have an option for him. And if I was on a deserted island, I’d want someone like you, who can see the danger coming, you can stop things, “The storm is coming. We better [inaudible 00:15:11].” All of that. So when I talk about the whole evolutionary biology of anxiety, that it’s an evolutionary quirk that a percentage of the population must have to ensure our survival.

Sarah: 15:24 So they’ve found that 1.2% of any population in the world, whether it’s in the US, Australia, Madagascar, the middle of the Amazon, will be displaying what you’d call OCD behaviors, and also bipolar, similar percentage. And essentially they existed to make sure that there was safety and precautions. OCD is all about safety and hygiene.

Kimberly: 15:49 Hygiene?

Sarah: 15:52 So the washing of the hands. When there was a pandemic-

Kimberly: 15:56 Oh my God.

Sarah: 15:57 … back in caveman times, it was the OCDs, the 1.2% of the population with OCD that was going, “Hey everyone, wash your hands.” And what they’ve found, is that it’s the shaman, the community leaders, and then later political leaders during war time or crisis points in history, that were bipolar. So something like 70% of wartime leaders were bipolar. And they found that shaman possess what you would now call obsessive compulsive behaviors, because you needed this hypervigilant people for survival.

We discuss the anxiety epidemic and if it’s out of control

Kimberly: 16:30 But nowadays, Sarah, feels like way more than 1.2%, it feels like the anxiety epidemic is out of control. It feels like, I don’t know, the exact figure, but it feels like people on the edge have crossed over, and then people that are really prone to it have gotten more heightened. And just the fast paced world we live in and all the stress and all of that, and fears are coming up, so nowadays it feels like it’s just still imbalanced.

Sarah: 16:57 Yeah. And Kimberly, you make a really good point. The fast paced life you just said yeah. Our way of life emulates the anxious experience, so running around madly, toggling between screens, toggling between activities, that puts us into a permanent flight or fight response. So we are, yes. I mean, and there’s a distinction between disordered anxiety, the type that ends up in the DSM, which is the main diagnostic manual used in the US and here in Australia, and what I would call fair enough anxiety. So I think fair enough anxiety, like anxiety that’s an appropriate response to what’s going on in the world, has gone through the roof, because we live in anxious times. I almost wouldn’t trust somebody if they weren’t anxious right now. You know what I mean? About the climate, about COVID, about [inaudible 00:17:52] fragmentation, everything, the racial stuff, the sexual assault stuff that’s going on around the world.

Kimberly: 17:58 Guns all around.

Sarah: 18:00 Everything, everything. So it is an appropriate response. But what happens, is we feel we’ve got to medicate it, we’ve got to get rid of it, going back to that perfectionist thing, that culture where we have to fix things. What if we actually went, “No, this is appropriate.” Let’s get out of ourselves, and get on with fixing the world, because that’s what’s broken, not us.

Kimberly: 18:25 So Sarah, you don’t want to take any medication anymore for your anxiety?

Sarah: 18:29 No, but I’ll be really honest, last night I took a sleeping tablet. So I have a very mild dose of Valium, which I have just ready for nights like last night. And there’s other more natural practices that I have in place. And I also have the promise, and I have a few friends around me and family members that if my bipolar starts to swing out, if they see, they sit me down. They’ve got my permission to have an intervention with me. So that’s happened a couple of times in my life. And I’ll go back on medication for six to nine months, until I stabilize again. But that hasn’t happened for a really long time, and it’s really come about… I highly recommend it, yet don’t recommend it. I wrote a book about it, and it’s a bit like the benefits of journaling. Journaling-

Kimberly: 19:17 Which book is this one?

Sarah: 19:18 So there’s two actually. There’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, which is a reframing of anxiety, bipolar and so on. And then my most recent one that came out in the states in January, yes, This One Wild & Precious Life. [crosstalk 00:19:31].

Kimberly: 19:31 My hot little hands.

Sarah: 19:33 Yes. That one takes the journey out into the world, and it discusses the fragmentation. I call it the itch, the sense of overwhelm. It’s the guilt, the anger, the fear, the anxiety, the frustration that we’re all feeling like this is not how we’re meant to be living. We weren’t put on this planet to destroy it. We weren’t put on this planet to be having these didactic he says, she says arguments all the time. So I go on a three year exploration for that one, hiking around the world. And I follow in the footsteps of the big philosophers who were writing about this stuff at other times in history that were very tumultuous. So at the beginning of the industrialization period, but also I go hiking with poets in the lake district. Yeah, and meet random people all around the world, to come up with what I feel is a path forward for us all, that intersects with climate, COVID, everything.

Tips on self-connection and what to include in your daily rituals

Kimberly: 20:34 And I like how your subtitle here is the path back to connection in a fractured world. And it’s a practical book, there are definitely tangible practices that you talk about. I love this word so much, Sarah, connection, self connection, connection with a moment, connection with each other. We’re just chatting along and you say, “Hey, I’ve got this book about connection.” What’s the first practice would you say that you want to share with me? Girlfriend’s just chatting, “Hey Kimberly, you got to try it.”

Sarah: 21:07 Yep. [crosstalk 00:21:08]. Yeah. Oh gosh. Well, the big one, but also the sexiest one, the funniest one, the easiest one, the silver bullet one, is hike in nature, which I think you’d like, if I’m your friend by the sound of it.

Kimberly: 21:24 Total nature girl. Yeah.

Sarah: 21:26 So I break it down though. I mean, we intuitively know, I’ve intuitively known, that to calm anxiety, I’ve just got to get out into nature. And in fact, every time I hit a stuck point in that book, including the point where I’ve written 60,000 words, and I didn’t have my path forward, which I’d promised in the subtitles. So I went out into nature, I put a credit card down my sports bra, I get on a train, and I just run into bushland. And here in Sydney, as you’d know, we’re real close to beautiful bushland, and I’d just run and run and trees and rocks, and I’d get myself lost. And I realized in that moment, that what we need to do is to go back into nature, to reconnect with our nature. And that’s where you do see flow. And the word attunement is a beautiful word, and so is congruence.

Sarah: 22:16 So there’s a bunch of studies, it’s like 40,000 studies that have been done to show why going into nature, moving in nature, brings us to a point of connection, and obviously dials down anxiety to virtually zero. And I site a whole bunch of them, I researched just about all of them in the book. But one that I think is beautiful, is that we have fractals. Fractals are repeating patterns that we’re seeing nature, and I can see behind you you’ve got, is it a mandelo.

Kimberly: 22:44 Yeah. There’s so many different iterations of sacred geometry in here, but yeah-

Sarah: 22:48 Exactly. They’re a replication of fractals, and fractals occur inside a daisy or a fern frond, those recurring patterns. So we have fractals in our eyes, and when we see the fractals in nature, there’s an attunement, a recognition. And they’ve shown that our eyes will shift in this lovely connection when we see patterning like that. So that’s a really simple one, but another beautiful one, is that our brains emerged as human brains as we got upright, okay? And we put one foot in front of the other. So the walking motion is controlled by the same part of the brain that dials down our anxious thinking, and actually opens up the neocortex, which is the part of the brain that can think clearly. So walking goes at the same pace as discerning thought. And I would put down a lot of our pain in contemporary culture, down to the fact that we don’t have the space, the time, the motion, to do discerning thought, the kind of thought that you do when you’re writing journal.

Sarah: 23:50 The other thing that goes at the same pace as discerning thought, is handwriting.

Kimberly: 23:57 Right. [crosstalk 00:23:57].

Sarah: 23:57 That’s right. Because you find it so much easier than typing, right? You can think more clearly in that deep, connected way.

Kimberly: 24:04 Well, here’s my journal, Sarah. And you can see I like to use… Sometimes I’ll go in linear, nonlinear ways. I feel more connected to what I’m writing when I’m doing it by hand, it feels more authentic somehow.

Sarah: 24:18 Yeah. But it’s getting you attuned to the resonance of your natural thinking, the kind of thinking that can bring you into connection with yourself. So yes, walking in nature will do that. And then there’s all the chemicals that get released and all of that kind of thing. So I think it’s the most beautiful thing. It also takes us away from shopping. I have this hashtag on my Instagram, which is hike don’t shop. Wherever you are hiking, if you go out hiking on a Saturday or a Sunday, it takes most of the day, you get up, you make your coffee, you get on the train or your drive or whatever it might be. And then you’d get out there, you hike, you come back, you have a shower, you’re exhausted. You might just hang out. You’re not going to the shops. Shops basically trigger a whole heap of decision-making that you’ve got to make. It’s just this barrage of information data that gets us anxious, and also it’s destroying the planet.

Sarah: 25:10 So I’m a big anti consumer, I just don’t shop at all, or nothing new anyway. So there’s a whole range of cascading things that go on when you hike. So that’s one of the things I would definitely say, all the science just shows that it funnels you into the space of attunement, congruency, connection.

Kimberly: 25:30 It’s all interesting, Sarah. Sorry to interrupt, but when I walk around, I’m looking at this tree and you start to see these patterns on the bark. So it’s happening at a very deep subconscious level. The fractals in your eyes are registering, because you’re not saying, “Oh wow, look at this beautiful pattern.” What I see in these leaves or whatever. It’s just so part of our nature, it’s just happening like the way we breathe without thinking about it.

Sarah: 25:56 I think for anxious people, you’re absolutely right. For anxious people, we try all these things, like, “I’ve got to do it like this, and I’ve got to get it right.” I just say, when you’re walking in nature, you don’t have to do a thing, right? It just does its job for you. Just walk with your eyes open, which you’ll have to, and then nature will do its thing to you. And you just have to be a little sponge for a while, vulnerable and at the mercy of nature. So people say to me all the time, I’m sure they say to you as well, Kimberly, like, “Oh, what’s your favorite hike?” And I’m like, “I’ve never had a bad hike.” You just can’t.

Sarah: 26:32 So my favorite hike is my next one, that’s just how it goes. You can’t have a bad hike, even if it’s a disaster and blah, blah, blah, you still come back just invigorated and you’ve learnt something and you feel bigger and richer for it.

Kimberly: 26:48 So I moved right before the pandemic, Sarah, I was down near Venice Beach. I don’t know if you’ve been to LA?

Sarah: 26:54 Yeah, I have. Yup

Kimberly: 26:54 I would just do a beach walk every day and it was amazing, and I was barefoot and I would feel the sand and I would collect all the shells and see all these beautiful patterns and the dolphins. And then we decided to move up here to the mountains, Topanga, which is just the other side of [crosstalk 00:27:10]. Love it. So at first it was like, “Oh my gosh, I could do the beach walks. It doesn’t take too much of my day to go down there.” And then I just stopped doing them, and I started doing these mountain walks. And it’s amazing how resilient we are. And after a month, I was like, “This mountain walk is the best thing ever.” It isn’t that I forgot the beach walk, but it was just another aspect of nature that I just attuned with, because we have so many different layers, we connect to so many different aspects, I think.

Sarah: 27:37 That’s right.

Kimberly: 27:38 Like you said, you don’t have to narrow it down.

Sarah: 27:41 I actually go forest bathing in Topanga.

Kimberly: 27:45 Really?

Sarah: 27:45 With a certified forest bathing expert. Yeah. So I write about that in the book, after trying to find the world’s biggest expert on forest bathing in Japan. So I hiked four days.

Kimberly: 27:57 [crosstalk 00:27:57] Japan. Yeah. I love Japan.

Sarah: 28:00 I went to Japan, hiked for four days into the mountains to find this monk who’s the world authority on all of this. Anyway, I finally meet him, and he’s wearing all these funny little bells and all this kind of thing. And I say, “Oh, forest bathing?” He’s like, “Never heard of it.” I’m like, “You’re kidding me.” And we just laughed our heads off. He says, “I’ll Google it later.” Anyway, so he knew nothing about it, but all these books and theories have been written about the stuff that he does. And anyway, so yes, I ended up having to get more of my information by doing it with somebody in LA.

Forest bathing and what it entails

Kimberly: 28:37 What is forest bathing, other than just being in nature?

Sarah: 28:39 Yeah. Well, you know how I mentioned the 40,000 studies and everything, most of those studies have been done by the Japanese and the south Koreans. So they actually incorporate what’s called forest bathing into their health policies. So the health insurance includes it in South Korea, delinquent kids who are bullies with ADHD gets sent out to the forest, instead of put on medication as a first instance. So it’s a legit health practice. And they’ve just found that there’s so many studies that point to the impact of walking in nature, that has effects on cardiovascular disease, on diabetes, on mood disorders, on childhood behaviors, et cetera. So it’s… I’ve forgotten the name. As I said, I’ve had two, three hours sleep. But it’s got a Japanese name, anyway.

Kimberly: 29:38 Oh yeah, I know the name. And it’s something linked to like pine trees. I think there’s a word for-

Sarah: 29:44 Yep. That’s right. Yeah.

Kimberly: 29:46 How is forest bathing different than just hiking?

Sarah: 29:50 Well, you’re all meant to be present, and it’s got a spiritual element. So anyone who’s been to Japan would know about this pilgrimage walks in nature and [crosstalk 00:30:00]. That’s it, part of the Shinto tradition. And you actually engage in the hardship of hiking these long distances. And there’s one that I did down south, right on the south of Japan. And the whole point of it, was people went there if they were sick, and literally it would either kill you or it would heal you. And you would be pushed to that extent. So this notion of pushing yourself and having nature meet you there, is the healing process. And I think you’d probably relate to that. It’s a bit like a vaccine, a vaccine pushes your immune system, so that it reacts, and then you become stronger for when the real thing hits. So many practices throughout spirituality and contemporary medicine are about that dialing up, pushing, stressing our system.

Sarah: 30:56 And there’s a word called antifragile, and it’s an economist coined this term and I talk about it in the book. Antifragile practices are absolutely required for human strengths, and it’s in economy, it’s in nature, it’s in our health. It’s like a muscle, we’ve got to tear the muscle by going to the gym or whatever it might be, to get it to them rebuild stronger. So that Shinto practice of hiking in nature is a similar thing, you go into yourself when you have to draw on your strengths to get up a mountain. So that’s how the practice works

Kimberly: 31:32 Well, can it also hold if you’re doing a more gentle walk in the woods, so we don’t feel like I’m always pushing, but you’re present, you use your breath, you’re still doing forest bathing to an extent, even if it’s not the most strenuous hike you’ve ever done?

Sarah: 31:45 Yeah. Well, as we all know, there’s two ways… Well, it’s several ways. But two predominant ways to get into presence. One, is to go down deep into, like I think any woman who’s had a baby knows that they go into a very present flow.

Kimberly: 31:59 Those contractions are no joke.

Sarah: 32:02 Yeah. So in that pain moment, going to that edge, once again, can get you very present, but equally being very gentle and going to the very delicateness of the moment will also do it. So yes, walking gently, and then hiking hard, can produce a very similar result. The common thing being in nature, engaging with what we emerged in, we are off nature. So that book, This One Wild and Precious Life, is almost a little bit of an anti self-help book, in the sense that I’m saying, let’s stop focusing on our inner chakras and ourselves and our other blah, we need to take that journey out into the world, because it’s our world that needs to be healed, and fast. Otherwise we’re not going to have the go to the classes, the sound bathing classes available. We’re going to be-

Kimberly: 32:55 I don’t want you to giggle, but yeah, I like how you framed it that way, Sarah. And you were saying what the Dalai Lama said, and here there’s an interesting quote about wild activism that you talk about in the book. It reminds me of [inaudible 00:33:09] and have huge, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. They have a big center in India. They came on the podcast as well. And they had a very bold line in their book where they said, and I’m paraphrasing. But it said, all suffering is a result of self obsession. So to their point about service and the yogis talk about this to my guru, Paramatta Yogananda, it says life is supposed to be mostly service. And when you’re out giving energy, you don’t have all this time to obsess about all the things in our head in our zit and this and this, your energy starts to go out from your heart because you’re focused on other people.

Sarah: 33:50 Well, there’s that. That’s the benefit for the individual, but I also think that what we’ve done, is we’ve cherry picked. Contemporary cultures cherry picked bits of the spiritual traditions that we like, like, “Oh, we’ve chosen the nice self-love parts, and the chilled zen parts.” But as you said, spiritual tradition’s always been at least 50% about service and sacrifice and being of service. The whole point of the parable of the monk who comes down from the mountain. As per the Dalai Lama’s anecdote, you can go and sit up in a cave and meditate for two years. Great. Self-love, zen, you’re all peaceful. What’s the point? So the interesting bit is when the monk comes down from the mountain and into the village, and passes on what he/she has learned. And that’s what we should be doing, particularly at the moment.

Sarah: 34:47 I have a phrase that I borrowed from a wonderful US union psychologist called James Hollis. And he says, our souls are being called to an appointment with life. Our souls, and I think it’s our collective souls. And we get our little reminders as a little whisper, and then a tag, and then a prod and then a shove. And right now our collective souls are getting a collective shove to the appointment with life. We have to show up. If we don’t show up, and if we sit around in meditation circles for too much longer, we’re in trouble. And that is tied to the planet today. And yeah, I rail against… I live in Bondi, it’s a bit like Venice, right? It’s a bit like LA.

Sarah: 35:33 Everyone’s healthy, everyone’s into their yoga and their green smoothies. And I’m walking around with a green smoothie in a plastic cup, really? You talk about mother earth and Gaia and all of this, and you’re going to put that piece of plastic into the earth, that takes 400 years to decompose. And we’re putting more plastic into the ocean to the point where there’s more plastic than fish. We ingest a credit card sized piece of plastic every week, all of it, via the food and the water.

Kimberly: 36:06 Have you seen Seaspiracy, Sarah?

Sarah: 36:09 I have.

Kimberly: 36:10 Okay. So what’s interesting, and Kip is a friend of mine. I was actually in one of his documentaries, What the Health. I don’t know if you saw that one.

Sarah: 36:16 Yeah. I know the one.

What it looks like to get out of ourselves

Kimberly: 36:19 Back to what you were saying about getting out of ourselves, and then not to go too much down this tangent, but people are so attached to their food. And it’s like, wake up when that big fire happened how many months ago in the rainforest. It’s like, “Hey guys, most of the rainforest destruction is for your grass fed cattle, that they’re tearing down the forest.” And most of the plastic in the ocean isn’t the straws, it’s the fishing nets that are discarded because you want to keep eating your salmon, your tuna. And it’s just like this… It’s a way that people are so attached to the senses, they’re so attached to what they like and what they [inaudible 00:36:58] put in this temporary feeling of taste.

Kimberly: 37:01 And I think this is a real time to wake up to our choices. You’re talking about clothing, what an impact consumerism has on the world. Consuming food, every day we’re eating this food that’s destroying the planet. So there is that aspect.

Sarah: 37:14 Problem is wasting it. Eating it, we’ve got to eat, right? We have to eat. And we’ve got to get nutrition. And it should be evenly dispersed or that… But the big crime is that we waste. Here in Australia, we waste almost as much as the US, but 50% of food is wasted on the planet. And the biggest wasters are consumers, not supermarkets, not the farmers, not the production chain, right? Because that’s all efficient, it’s us. We’re throwing out over a third of our [inaudible 00:37:47] every week as individuals, so that’s what’s got to shift. People talk about going vegan, doing this, grass fed, whatever, if you want to make a difference to the planet and also the number of animals that have been killed for our food production system, stop wasting food, eat every single thing.

Sarah: 38:04 Don’t peel anything, boil your organic bones and get broth out of it. Do not let any piece of food be wasted ever. And people go, “Oh, I compost, [inaudible 00:38:15].” I’m like, “No, that should be for only the last dregs of what you haven’t repurposed?”

Kimberly: 38:20 Oh, totally. My favorite thing to do is just open up the fridge and see what’s in there and be creative, instead of [inaudible 00:38:28] recipe for exactly this, if I don’t have it, I have to go get… Just mix and match your veggies or do whatever.

Sarah: 38:35 [crosstalk 00:38:35]. Yeah. And use everything up before you go to the shops. So yeah, food waste is another big thing that I rail against. I mean, in Project Drawdown, which Paul Horton wrote. It’s a wonderful book on the biggest carbon emitters and the hundred biggest carbon emission practices. And food waste ranks as number three. And it’s the consumer food waste. It’s what we’re doing. It ranks as number three biggest carbon emitter on the planet.

Kimberly: 39:09 Yeah. You use this word again, waking up in the first page here, the inside of the book. And I think this wake up, this awareness of every moment, every choice, every meal, everything we’re doing instead of sleep walking through. And going back to this for just a moment, the wild activism, I was interested. It says here, if you can get 3.5% of a population participate in sustained, non violent protest, change happens, activism works. So I was interested in first of all, how did you quantify that 3.5%? Did that come from one of the studies you were reading for the book?

Sarah: 39:50 Yes.

Kimberly: 39:51 It’s actually been quantified?

Sarah: 39:52 Yeah. So there’s a great researcher called Erica Chenoweth, if anyone wants to look her up. She studied every peaceful protest from 1900 to 2014 or 2004, I think it was. And what she found was that whenever you got 3.5% of the population engaged, so it might be 3.5% of a school or a town or a country, the change that was being protested would happen, and in every single case. So it was 3.5% was that magical figure. And when you think about it, that’s not many, right? So then what happens is it becomes so charming, it becomes exponential, and politicians and industry can’t help but wake up. And we’re seeing that with the climate movement. People have been protesting for years, and in the states you’ve had people turning up to Keystone stuff, you’ve got Jane Fonder out there doing her thing.

Sarah: 40:50 And Greta Thunberg obviously around the world has made a big difference. Everyone goes, “Oh God, it’s so exhausting.” But do you know what? It is producing the change? Look what’s happening in the Biden administration, they’re listening. But more importantly than that, industry is listening. You’ve got all the big finances defunding the fossil fuel industry, and divesting to sustainable energy. That is what’s happening. Industry has gone up, God, this is what the people want. We’re seeing the writing on the wall, we’re going this direction. So the change does happen, and we need to, I call it the 3.5% figure of hope. We must stay on track. We can’t let the overwhelm [crosstalk 00:41:34]. Yeah. We can’t let the overwhelm stall us into inaction, which is why we’re cocooning ourselves in self-love, and lovely little [inaudible 00:41:44] bathing rituals, which are great.

Sarah: 41:46 But just going back to that word, self-love. It was a black activist poet, Audre Lorde, who came up with that term. And it was a term that was used to encourage black women in particular, during, I think, the 1960s, to look after themselves so they had the energy to go out and protest and fight the racism. So self-love was a term that was used to ensure people looked after themselves, so they could be of service, so that they could stand up, so they could fight, not to go off and do nothing, not go off and sitting in action. Yeah.

Kimberly: 42:21 Well, it’s amazing too. You’re talking about all the different issues that have come up over the past year, year and a half. It’s been amazing to be part of and to witness the Black Lives Matter movement, which is all this underlying stuff that needed to be healed, it needed to be brought forward. There was so much that wasn’t right. And there’s still a long way to go, obviously in closing the disparity, but the attention and everywhere you go, Amazon or Netflix, these big companies, they’re really changing the face of what you see, what we’re starting to see. So to your point, I’m not sure what percentage of the company participated in the movement in some way, but it is amazing the changes that were very necessary and very important.

Kimberly: 43:06 And I hope the same will also happen with Stop Asian Hate. I’m half Asian so I’ve been part of that to an extent as well. Yeah, I feel like we go through periods where a lot of times you accept, “Oh, this is how it’s going to be. This sucks. Females aren’t the lead in movies, and people are treated differently because of their race.” But it is so helpful to hear, I think for me, a smaller number, 3.5% is what you can focus and rally on to make that change we want to see in the world. Because if it’s like, “Oh, we have to get 60% of people or 70%.” I mean, that can feel overwhelming, but 3.5% feels bite-sized. It feels-

Sarah: 43:50 And we don’t all have to be activists, right? Not everyone is going to be out there on the front line, not everyone’s a fighter. But what I do say in the book, another hack in there, is we’ve got to actually follow the good prophets. So we’ve got to choose better prophets. And that might be just on Instagram, go through your feed and get rid of the people promoting messages that are destructive to the planet. And support and like and follow, the people, the prophets, who are producing great messages that are about progression and fixing the planet. That’s how you can become part of that 3.5%. And wonderful Catholic nun, Sister Joan, who is an American, very, very progressive Catholic nun. She’s just said to me, she said, “Sarah, just tell everyone, follow the better prophet.”

Sarah: 44:44 And that’s an awesome piece of advice. So yeah, that’s what I would encourage people to do. Let’s stop following those influencers with plastic stuff that they’re promoting. Why are we putting a like to a big multinational trying to sell us something that destroys our beautiful planet? Why would we do that? And then there’s these people doing great work, and just because they’re not putting sexy selfies of themselves, we scroll past them.

Kimberly: 45:12 I know. It’s back more to that awareness. Everything’s a choice, we show up in this moment, we choose who to follow, we choose what to eat. It’s that real ownership, that co-creator inside of us, instead of sleeping and drifting along, or, “this is what my parents did, so I’m going to do the same thing.” Ancestral beliefs that also get past passed down intergenerationally. So it’s just that waking up, I think is powerful.

Sarah: 45:41 And it’s part of the flow that we talked about, is flow comes about like the energetic thing. If you’re supporting people who are like-minded, there’s a flow happening, there’s an energetic congruence, once again, right? And then we start to feel better, in terms of hacks as well. Kindness, engaging in kindness. And I have a chapter on [foreign language 00:46:01], which is a great concept of radical kindness to strangers. And it’s probably the most popular chapter in the book, where I go hiking with a guy and crate, and I explore this idea. And anyone who’s Greek would know this word, because you grow up with it. But it’s another way of getting into congruence and connection with life. It actually dials down anxiety as well. We can’t be-

Kimberly: 46:26 Radical kindness.

Sarah: 46:27 Exactly. We can’t be rigid and open at the same time. And kindness creates an openness in our synapses. And we actually can’t be anxious at the same time when we’re being kind. So that’s a practice I think that we need going forward. And the kindness comes about through even just the little actions, who you follow on social media, whether you smile at people in the street, going to your edge and saying hello to a stranger, sitting next to the homeless person on the train when everybody’s got up and walked away from him or her. There’s just things like that, and you start to feel better. You start to feel full.

Creating new pathways and rewiring your brain

Kimberly: 47:07 Well, it’s almost like this rigidity comes from an old pattern, or we don’t feel safe. We shut down, we let the fear shut us down. So back to this choice of opening back up, and maybe like you said, and you talk about it here, the discomfort of moving past it, pushing past. And then eventually your brain rewires, the neuroplasticity, you can create a new pathway, a new pattern.

Sarah: 47:30 And from a health point of view, as you would know, so much health dysregulation is about constriction of cells, rigidity of cells. So the openness starts to transform at a health level. And my work before all of this was in the sugar, the no sugar realm. And it’s a very similar practice, it’s all connected.

Kimberly: 47:53 Wow. It’s all connected. Speaking of which, Sarah, my last question for you and [inaudible 00:47:59] all day. So we have this part of the activism going out, and then we say love is in actions. We want to offer it, we want to open up, we want to feel that connection, we want to serve other people. But at the same time for me, we [inaudible 00:48:16] a little bit, but for me I do need the self practices. I am a big proponent of meditation. I center, and then I feel like I can be more active in the world. So it’s both right, right?

Sarah: 48:27 Yep.

Sarah shares her personal spiritual practices that helps support her dharma

Kimberly: 48:27 And I’d love to hear about some of your personal spiritual practices or your rituals that you do with yourself, whether you’re traveling or you’re home, that allows you to be this activist in the world, that supports your spirit, your dharma.

Sarah: 48:42 Awesome question. Okay. So I meditate as well, and I’m quite vocal about being a bad meditator. I am a ratty meditator, I’ve been meditating for 12, 13 years, and I’m still really bad at it. But my argument is, the worse you are at it, the more you’re actually using that spiritual muscle of pulling yourself back to the mantra, back to the breath, whatever it is. I almost think that people are great meditators, they don’t do that as often as someone like I do, within my 20 minutes of meditation. I’m constantly going, “Okay, bring back gently to the mantra.”

Kimberly: 49:18 Go back to center.

Sarah: 49:20 And that practice is building a muscle over and over again, so then I can play it out in the rest of my life. And the whole point of meditation is that it’s the work that it does once you go out into the rest of your life. So I meditate crap or I’m a shit meditator is what I say. And I think that it’s wonderful that I am. I exercise. Exercise for me is like myself. It can be gentle, so I do yoga and Pilates. And then I’ll also do sand running and ocean swimming. I moved to where I live and I’m a really bad swimmer, but I swim a kilometer across the ocean, and it’s just inside the shark detector.

Kimberly: 50:00 Oh my God, is it scary?

Sarah: 50:03 Well, yes and no.

Kimberly: 50:07 Back to getting past your fear.

Sarah: 50:08 Going to my edge.

Kimberly: 50:10 What are the chances? The chances of a shark attack are less than getting in a car accident?

Sarah: 50:15 They’re less than being hit by a coconut on the head, seriously. So it’s nice to wrestle with that, and also to know that I’m in the ocean with all these creatures. And I see stingrays, I see fish. It’s just beautiful. So I do that. I also, I suppose I’ve made very big choices. I closed down my I Quit Sugar business May… Well, it was actually October, 2018. And I gave every cent of the money away to charity, and I continue to do that. So the business still runs, I sell cookbooks and so on. Yeah, I’ve given about 80% of my income away, and that’s a commitment I made. I got very sick with an autoimmune disease, and I made a commitment when I was sort of… I made the decision to live. I chose to live, I was 34, big story, it’s in my book so I flesh it all out as to what happened.

Sarah: 51:10 But I chose to live, and I chose to not get caught up ever again. So I made a commitment that once I’d got to a point where I was comfortable and I could live off the minimum wage until I was 94, I would give my income away. So that’s what I do as well. And that is a practice that keeps me unattached. Nobody can buy me, nobody can get me with a sponsored post where I have to say stuff I don’t believe in, that I don’t think is going to shift things. So that’s another thing. And then I chose not to have children as well, and I fostered… So I’ve been fostering children for three years, indigenous kids. And that is a spiritual practice because it’s damn hard.

Sarah: 51:49 It is damn hard, but it is so rewarding. And yeah, that would be… They’re probably my main, and walking, hiking. I go into nature to remind myself of what I’m doing. I say this, I think on the back of the book, we as humans, we fight to save what we love. And what we need to do is remind ourselves of what we love, and what we love is nature. And we love human nature, we love humanity. So the practices in my book are all about going to that point where we are reminded. You know when you get those tears of recognition, whether it’s in nature, in the smile of a child, I try to take people to that point of deep connected recognition, where we hurt and love at the same time. If we can go to that space, we will fight to save this planet. It’s one wild and precious life.

Definition of success

Kimberly: 52:40 So beautifully said. Wow, I got goosebumps. I was going to ask you, Sarah, about our four cornerstones at [Seleno 00:52:48], which are food, body, emotional wellbeing and spiritual growth, but you literally covered them all in that section there. So I will leave you with one last question that people ask me all the time. So sometimes I like to ask other people, and that is what is your definition, Sarah, of success? The most asked interview question, but it’s amazing how people connect to the question in such different way.

Sarah: 53:14 Yeah. Yeah. My definition of success would probably be, if I… All right, my definition of success, and have I reached it yet? Not yet, but this is my noble aim, is I want every single person that comes into my orbit, I want to be able to have some impact on them where I can have them… So there’s post-it down the road, it’s a very quick anecdote. When I was in middle of lockdown, and it said, “Daddy, what did you do to fight climate change?” And it gripped me. I went home and wailed for hours, and I was like, “Right. I want to ensure that every single person that I know, that I come in contact with, who reads my books, will be able to answer that child in 5, 10, 20 years and say, ‘I did everything I could.'” So that would be my definition of success.

Sarah: 54:04 Now, if you asked me five years ago, no, it’d be something else. Probably more woo woo and spiritual, but now it’s as pragmatic as that. I do want to give everyone the opportunity to choose to wake up, to feel the charm of that, to join that tribe. That’s how we change, is we join the more charming tribe. So we’ve got to make this way of living more charming than the status quo. So that’s what I aim to do, don’t know if I’ll achieve it in this lifetime, but it’ll be worth with it.

Kimberly: 54:31 On the path, with that intention. So the success is happening every day, that awareness, that action. Thank you so much, Sarah. This is so inspiring. I love this book. I haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but I will definitely finish the whole thing. I’m going to bring this up to my bed stand tonight, This One Wild and Precious Life. Thank you for your call to help us all wake up.

Sarah: 54:57 Oh my pleasure. Thank you for-

Kimberly: 54:59 [crosstalk 00:54:59] today, this moment.

Sarah: 55:01 Thank you for speaking to me from the other side of the world, what a funny world we live in where we can do this. Isn’t it beautiful?

Kimberly: 55:08 Sarah, it’s so funny because I was just saying, in a few weeks we’re going to make the podcast only in person, now it’s safe again. So I was like, “Oh, Sarah’s going to be one of my last in person guests.” And how perfect? Because you’re already in Sydney. So I wouldn’t be able to have you in person so easily anyway.

Sarah: 55:24 It’s had its benefits, hasn’t it? It’s had its benefits, this whole process. All the best up there in Topanga, go for a hike for me. I love it up there. It’s a special place. And yeah, and much love and wellness to all your listeners as well.

Kimberly: 55:40 Thank you so much, my love.

Kimberly : All right my love, well, I hope you enjoyed our interview today with the wonderful Sarah Wilson, such a passionate, alive woman, and I certainly am inspired by her. So check out our show notes as well for more information on Sarah, more information on articles, podcasts, other resources that I think you would really enjoy. And if you haven’t yet already checked out our free app, our Solluna app in the app store. Please do, it makes it very easy to find the meditations, the food recipes, all sorts of resources are very easily organized on the app. So be sure to check it out. I’m also on social @_kimberlysnyder. We will be back here Thursday for our next Q&A podcast. And this next one is a really, really goody, I have to say. So sending you so much love, take great care of yourself. I love you so much and see you back here soon.