How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life [Episode #805]

This week’s topic is: How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life

Sometimes we don’t think or correlate flexibility with strength, however, there is incredible power and strength once we learn about how to really use the power of flexibility and how to work with it and have it work for us. Flexibility is resilience and can carry across our lives and across our Four Cornerstones, which we will discuss today in terms of physical strength and suppleness.

The flexibility and resilience in our microbiome, our digestive systems, emotionally, in our relationships, and also spiritually in allowing ourselves to not get so caught up in daily life that we continually give our power away and we sacrifice our peace when we don’t have to.

I’m very excited about today’s show and this comes directly from inspiration in my own life as I continue to work with this energy.

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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: 00:00 Aloha, love and welcome back to our Monday solocast show. I am so excited to chat with you today around How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life. So sometimes we don’t think or core correlate flexibility with strength, but there is incredible power and strength once we learn about how to really use the power of flexibility and how to work with it and have it work for us. Flexibility is resilience. Flexibility can carry across our lives, across our four cornerstones, which we will discuss today in terms of physical strength and suppleness, and this flexibility and resilience in our microbiome, in our digestive systems emotionally and in our relationships, and also spiritually in allowing ourselves to not get so caught up in daily life that we continually give our power away and we sacrifice our peace when we don’t have to.

01:10 So I’m very excited about today’s show and this comes directly from inspiration in my own life as I continue to work with this energy. And if you are in our, on our mailing list, if you’ve received our July newsletter, you will are on my social media. You’ll also remember that I recently shared a story about getting bit by Centipede, and this brought forth a whole focus on flexibility as well. There’s a lot of lessons that we can learn from our animal friends, from our spirit animal friends, and I was spending a lot of energy avoiding the centipedes in Hawaii and, and when we were farming. And then I got bit and realized that it wasn’t really that bad, it wasn’t worth a distraction, but I also learned from watching these incredible creatures, how they move and how they just are able to navigate their way across the world in incredible fluidity and flexibility. I started to really meditate on this powerful energy and that’s part of the inspiration for our show today. So lessons come from everywhere. We are all interconnected. I’ll bring in some quotes today from the Dow and Jay Krishna Murti and some Yogananda and some real inspiration around the power of being flexible and what it can really do, what, what it can bring to your life.

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02:53 So before we get into it, I wanted to give a shout out to our fan of the week and his or her name is Los Familia and he or she writes daily inspiration. So very thankful for this podcast. I use these podcasts to educate, inspire, and align myself with purpose and care. I’m in a community of mostly unconscious people, so having these podcasts and listening to the information and interviews truly gives me hope and reminds me I’m on the right path. Thank you for sharing and putting this work out into the world. Los Familia, thank you so much for writing into me. I’m so grateful and happy that we connected and we found each other in this matrix of energy through cyberspace, and I look forward to connecting with you more. So thank you so much and I’m so thrilled and honored that these shows can bring more inspiration and light to your life.

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03:59 And please let me know how I can continue to support you, giving you a big virtual hug wherever you are. And also my love for you listening to this. If you haven’t yet had an opportunity to leave us a review, please take a moment to do so with your free will. It’s a beautiful, powerful way that you can support. So thank you so much in advance on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to our show, please also subscribe as an act of self-care just to be in the flow of all our information coming in. These, uh, solo casts and interviews are always on Mondays, and then Thursday is always our q and a show. Please also pass along the show to anyone that you think would benefit. We are here to share. I think of it as a, as a grid, a matrix. The more we share with one another, the more we can support each other, the more abundance comes back to us.

04:58 It’s really important that we make an effort to connect with each other and support each other. And then last little reminder here before we dive in, that we have many resources on our website, my sauna.com. It’s summertime. So you may wanna check out some of our incredible simple food recipes. You may wanna check out our three day holistic waterfall cleanse, which involves guided meditation and journaling and stretching, and a guided plan with recipes. So there is a lot on our website and I highly encourage you to sign up for our mailing list if you haven’t yet already, because we have a lot of fun stuff, a lot of information going out all the time, including our newsletter and recipes and more.

Solocast: How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life

Kimberly: 05:56 Okay, let’s get into our show today, which is about the power of flexibility and how we can tap into it. So I wanna start with this quote from the Dow. The Dow de Ching was written by Lazu hundreds of years ago, and there are different translations. It’s one of my favorite texts. I read it every year, <laugh> several times a year, and I seem to get more and more out of it through its 81 verses. So in this verse, lasu teaches us a living being is tender and flexible. A corpse is hard and stiff. So he’s literally comparing being alive to flexibility, this quality of suppleness, of moving with life. So we can think of it physically and metaphysically when our bodies are soft and pliable. We have beautiful glowing skin, we have dynamic movement as far as blood flow and in the flow of our lymphatic system and our muscles are supple. And when we’re rigid and stiff, there is buildup.

07:16 We feel aches and pains in our body, and we tend to have poor posture. We’re hunched over. This is not conducive to health, this is not conducive to vitality. The Indian philosopher Jay Krishna Murti, who was born in the late 18 hundreds, who wrote many books about tapping into inner freedom and finding this potential to live in a free state no matter what our outer circumstances might entail. And I originally actually found Jay Krishna Murti and his teachings through David Bom, who is one of my favorite theoretical physicists and talks about the wholeness of all things, and was very influenced by Jay Krishna Marti. And one of the aspects of j Jay Krishna Mar’s teachings that really resonated with me is that he teaches that his secret to life and the core of all that he teaches is that he doesn’t mind what happens <laugh>.

08:33 So it sounds really simple, right? I don’t mind what happens, but there’s profound teaching in that there’s a profound truth and meaning that whatever’s going on, if we open up to being flexible, then we can flow with the present moment. We don’t up resistance, we don’t build up this energy and always fighting things and pushing things away. Instead, we flow. And in that great flow means that we merge. So it’s this tapping in this merging with life. And when we do that, we create harmony. And harmony breeds collaboration. It breeds connection. It breeds abundance. It breeds our highest potential energy being able to come forth because we’re not squandering our energy in resistance. So resistance breaks us, it cracks us. It’s what we perceive in nature. When we see the willow tree, I love this example because I grew up in Connecticut and we had a lot of willow trees around in the neighborhood at my, I remember my elementary school, we had these mighty willows, and you would see the wind blowing them and they would bow and they would move and they would flow and stretch in the wind and they would not break.

10:06 And there’s a difference when we see these brittle branches that are really rigid and stiff. And so when the storm comes, the branches break off. They aren’t able to flow with the elements, with the wind, with what is happening in this now moment. Now what’s interesting about the Dow is there are, I believe, 18 references to the element of water. So there’s the great power of the flexibility of water. So water yields, right? The boat or the water moves around the shape of the boat in the water and the water flows around different rocks and mountains in its path. But there is incredible strength in that water as well, because over time that water can shape the mountain, it can move the land. So we have a lot of lessons from nature, from these great philosophers in that flexibility, which from the limited linear mind, from the egoic mind, which wants to push and force can seem weak.

11:24 But actually the real strength comes in flexibility because it’s about merging with what is showing up in front of you. This also relates to the concept of non-attachment. So when we are really attached in our lives to things playing out in a certain way to having to control or, um, force a certain expectation that we have, whether it’s for a relationship, hitting certain milestones at certain times, oh, we’re supposed to move in by now, we’re supposed to be married by now, or we’re supposed to have kids by now, or whatever it is, right? I’m supposed to be at a certain position in the company by this time, we start to block ourselves from the power of what’s showing up. So of course we can plan and we can have ideas, we can have, you know, a general, um, outline of what we want, but we don’t wanna get rigid because then it closes us off from potential.

12:38 So the great yoga guru, Paramahansa Yogananda talked often about aversions and attachments, and he cautions us about getting too caught up in our preferences. So this means we’re spending a lot of energy resisting again, pushing away, I don’t want it to look like this. I don’t want to go to that restaurant. I don’t want the day to play out like this. It’s supposed to be like this. I prefer this. I want the weather to be like this. I want us to drive this way. Whatever it is, there’s so much energy in that. Instead, when we step into the power of flexibility, what it means is that we conserve our energy for what’s really important, our life force, our vitality, our health, our tissue and organ integrity, the flow of our digestive power known as Agni, the flow of our creative power, known as our creative potential to manifest and create what we want, whether it’s in a beautiful conversation or in a new website or workout routine or relationship or whatever it is, you know, having the most beautiful interaction with our child that day.

14:05 Flexibility is about energy conservation. It also keeps us from dipping into the dangerous territory of swings in our moods. Yogananda calls, moods, the a formidable stumbling block on our path of progress. So rigidity means that we often feel moody <laugh> when things don’t go our way, when things show up that we don’t like, or we feel out of control with our external circumstances. So flexibility flow, think about how that beautiful centipede moves around objects and leaves means that we can stay in a state of inner peace and tranquility. This all important energetic and yogic quality of serenity. Serenity is practical. It means that we can communicate in the best possible way. We can get more results, better results in our organization at work or you know, in a parenting committee or in our home family relationships with our roommate, with our immediate family, with our extended family and so on.

15:37 So we wanna stay centered, we wanna stay in our hearts, we wanna stay in the power of our true self. And when we are rigid, it pulls us into the ego and pulls us into the little me instead of the big, the larger self, the self of spirit, you know, which is flowing through this energy, this formless energy flowing through us and through our hearts out into the world. It makes us more, um, easily able to perceive our intuitive messages and to be guided in our everyday life. So you can start to see that there is enormous power in flexibility. So we’re gonna cover it now from the four cornerstone perspective. And we will also of course include how flexibility is so important from a physical standpoint and what this means from a, you know, in your physical body, how this shows up in your physical world as well.

Body Cornerstone on: How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life

16:45 So everything is connected to everything else. Everything is energy. So when we have this flexible energy, it means flowing energy. And so let’s start with a body. Actually think about a body of flow. It means there isn’t a buildup, there isn’t congestion in your blood. It means a normalizing of blood pressure. It means that there isn’t a bioaccumulation of toxicity or heavy metals or bloating, which means that food isn’t adequately digesting through your system. So there’s dynamic flow, like the waterfall reference that I so often like to use that, you know, there is nutrition and energy coming in and also exiting and flowing out. So we can think of the flexible body as one that is pliable. So one of the ways that you can create this flexibility is through stretching every day. And this is, this has become actually a very important part of my self-care.

18:00 We all build up energy throughout the day. We sit at desks, we drive, we hold our body in certain positions. Sometimes we don’t sleep really well. So for me, at the end of the day, I do it by myself. I do it my husband sometimes when he’s willing to come on the mat with me. But it feels like a huge release at the end of the day, even if it’s just for five or 10 minutes, I roll out my yoga mat, I listen to music, or sometimes I just do it in silence. And I like to use a foam roller. So we’ve done certain shows, we’ve had podcasts on here with biomechanists and body workers, and we will link to some of them in the show notes that, you know, a lot of them really hail the benefits of working with a foam roller, which is a pretty inexpensive tool.

18:56 You can pick one up for I think 20 bucks, like Target or online. And the power of a foam roller is this, it allows you this fluid way of working your tissues out, your fascia out, which is a connective tissue that is around, wraps around all your bones and muscles and tissues and connects everything. So I use a foam roller specifically on my neck and my shoulder and my hips. Those are the areas that tend to get tight for me. And it feels amazing. It almost feels like a self massage. And sometimes I get a massage, sometimes it feels, you know, I mean it always feels great, but sometimes I think, oh, I get stiff right away. Um, I spend all this money on a massage and it feels it’s important, it’s wonderful, and self massage is wonderful, but then I feel when I’m doing a foam roller every day for a few minutes, I get a lot of those benefits.

19:59 So check it out for yourself. Another aspect of body fluidity and flexibility is hydration, which we talk about a good amount here, but it is crucial. It’s really hard not to get stiff and not to get these little signs of dehydration, which also manifest as headaches and aches and pains when we’re low in our water intake. So I start, you know, I started drinking out of these large jugs, these big glass jars or jugs, and it just makes my hydration easier because, you know, little water glasses have to be filled up. Sometimes I’m busy, I don’t fill them up as quickly. So increase the size of your water container as a really practical, easy way to start your hydration. It’s really important. Make sure you’re drinking throughout the day. Make sure that this isn’t something that you neglect. And of course, we also have our hot water with lemon. We also have, you know, elixir as part of our practice drinking our glowing green smoothie. So all the ways in which you can get more adequate nutrition, uh, hydration into your body is going to be really important for your flexibility.

21:16 I also promote oil massage, which is important to keep your skin really flexible and pliable. We also have a amazing new sauna product, our healing bomb, which I like to rub on my elbows and the bottoms of my feet in the evening. And I also rub it on my belly and a clockwise pattern. So this is a practice that I learned about years ago from traditional Chinese medicine, which is said to help promote digestion. It also feels really good to touch your center, which is your money pour chakra, your sacral center with love and with care. We wanna connect. And our healing bomb includes amazing botanicals for healing and promoting cell turnover like gota cola and moth beam and cocoa butter, very connected to the cacao tree. So the, this act of nourishing and moisturizing your skin is also really important. Fluidity and flexibility in the body is an internal practice and an external practice as well.

Food Cornerstone: How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life

22:32 So let’s move to the food cornerstone now. And when it comes to flexibility, we want to correlate that with lightness and movement. So this means that lighter foods digest easier and quicker through the body, so there’s less transfer, bloating and bioaccumulation. On the other hand, foods that are more dense spend a longer transit time in your body. So that means that it can create this stiffness, this depositing of uric acid and heavy metals and the soft chi tissues like your joints. It starts to create more hardness in your midsection. We literally have over 30 feet of our digestive system to work through. So if you’re eating a lot of meat, a lot of dairy, gluten, stickier, heavier, denser foods, it doesn’t lend itself to this beautiful flexibility. So remember here in the community, we’re not all or nothing, but it’s just something to keep in mind.

23:44 When we simpler, when we eat more plant foods, we get more nutrients in an easier, more efficient way. When we food combine, and we’ll add some links to shows I’ve done on food combining, which really boils down to some simplicity and efficiency in your digestive system. We take in nutrients, we expel the waste. I also recommend taking digestive enzymes. We have our amazing feel good digestive enzymes that I take three before lunch and three before dinner. It allows you to break down foods more efficiently for this flexibility taking in, releasing this is the power that we see in nature of not holding on to excess, right? So we don’t want to build up. Building up means we become heavier. We tend to hold onto more weight. We tend to hold on, you know, metaphysically and energetically, if we’re holding onto a lot of resentments, a lot of pain from childhood or old wounds, we tend to get heavier.

24:53 We feel heavier throughout the day. So food wise, lightness correlates with flexibility and eating a lighter morning, having your hot water with lemon and drinking your glowing green smoothie versus eating a really dense, heavy breakfast in the morning like a bagel with cream cheese or you know, a bunch of eggs can lighten up your flow. It’s, you know, it does correlate with some aspects of intermittent fasting in that we’re not jamming ourselves with a lot of digestive heavy products first thing in the morning. So a lot of energy goes straight down into our GI tract versus up into the mind, into the flow of our hearts and our, you know, intuition and, you know, just many other places where we want to go into in the day to start the day with vitality and clarity and creativity.

Emotional Wellbeing Cornerstone: How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life

So our next cornerstone is emotional wellbeing. And the big word that I want to point out here is yield. Yield. Do not try to always push your way, it just creates resistance in this flow. It doesn’t mean that you, um, can effectively communicate your needs and your desires. It’s really important that we create healthy boundaries, but in that there is room to listen, there is room to meld to create win-win situations in our everyday interactions and in our work, in our,

Kimberly: 26:42 Um, relationships. This is such a huge part of healthy relationships is yielding. So we all know if we’ve been in a relationship with someone that isn’t able to yield, it creates inflexibility. And often those relationships crack or there’s deep fissures in the relationship. Sometimes they can be healed, sometimes they cannot be healed, and the ends to this leads to the end of a relationship. Or if it’s with a relative, someone that you don’t really connect with, someone that you don’t really want to interact with very much, which is unfortunate, but that is the way that it goes sometimes. So emotionally we feel better, we feel less distracted when we’re not, again, um, pushing our way. We can yield in daily life, we can yield and be really effective. Remember, this is about strength. This is about tapping into your potential. This isn’t about cowering or weakness.

27:52 This is really about the, um, power of merging in the present with what is before you, who is before you, what situation is before you. And I can say that in my personal growth, I used to think that being strong meant, you know, hammering down and really getting, you know, your way and things to be resolved. But along the way I know like sauna, I realized that it didn’t always create the most harmonious interactions and sometimes it would create more like longer processes and more longer conversations versus just from the beginning having this, you know, this real perspective, this real intention to yield, yield, be flexible and the be the better results always come about.

Spiritual Cornerstone: How To Tap into The Power of Flexibility to Achieve Fulfillment in Life

And so this relates spiritually to the spiritual quality of surrender. And again, the ego likes to think that surrender means undefeated. You know, hey, put up the white flag like in the Civil War, or we think about, you know, these, these war analogies that we learned back in social studies class.

29:15 But that is not the surrender we’re talking about here. We’re talking about surrendering of the rigidity, letting go of the ego’s, um, rigid path. And it opens us up to all the beauty, all the love, all the peace, everything that we want. It means that we acknowledge that inner peace is more important than egoic, warring getting our way right or wrong. These, um, opposite these so-called opposites. Instead we meld into the union of opposites, so to speak. We find harmony with fluidity and flexibility. We don’t have to control the outer world to find real peace and harmony. In fact, that is the way, is to let go of all this rigidity that cracks us, that takes so much energy that leads to internal inflammation in our bodies and inflammation in our relationships and our day-to-day life. How many times do we get rigid about something and then we get annoyed and then that annoyance stays with us during our work commute or a time where we could be relaxing, we’re sort of mulling over it when we’re playing with our kids or we’re on the subway or whatever it is.

30:47 It doesn’t have to be that way. Flexibility means continuously letting go, letting go. And so we strengthen our connection to this inner world with intention. I start the day with prayers and I’ve mentioned this on um, some other places, but it’s really powerful practice of praying out loud with my husband that we do now every morning. And part of that prayer, it’s organic, it’s, you know, situational. It’s different every day. But I always pray for inner peace and resilience and moving with life and moving with that day. I pray for strength and meditation also allows us to create a separation with over-identifying with here and now. This doesn’t have to seem so important when I say this, I do mean the physical world, right? Metaphysically energetically. There is the inner world which is composed of formless energy. And when we tap into what that feels like, the freedom that comes from really understanding that we can choose to align more to freedom and flow means we step away from being so rigid out in the physical world because we understand that that is not all that there is, right? We are back to our four cornerstones. We are physical beings, but we are also emotional, mental, spiritual beings. And the more we support that in our holistic lifestyle, the more we step into our wholeness and our power

Kimberly: 32:38 And our true beauty. So flexibility is about the power of our wholeness. It allows us to flow through life in our highest, most beautiful potential. And I hope that today’s solo cast gave you some inspiration about tapping into this power in your own life as well as practically we will link to in the show notes some, um, our, uh, beauty detox, uh, lemme say it, right, beauty Detox Power Yoga series. If you’re interested in flowing with me, I have some YouTube videos I’ve created physically and our waterfall cleanse has a wonderful stretch video in it. Lots of food recipes to support you in f you know, eating for flexibility as well as our meditations, other podcasts I think you would enjoy around this topic. And also a reminder that we have our live community zoom every month for 30 minutes, which you automatically get invited into if you are a subscriber to any of our sauna products.

33:53 So it’s a wonderful way to connect emotionally in a community setting and to reinforce these principles together. And you can also ask me questions live. So I look forward to being back here with you Thursday for our next q and a. Remember that if you have a question that you want me to cover in a longer format, you could submit your question over on our website as well in the podcast section over@mysauna.com. Be sure to take wonderful care of your unique self. I will see you on social as well at underscore Kimberly Snyder. Till next time, sending you so much love and so much aloha. See you soon. Namaste.