Ritam Studio Podcast With Jonni Pollard and Carla Dimattina

Mind-Body Connection: Unlocking Your Divine Intelligence

• Jonni Pollard

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The mind and body are inextricably linked, and physical symptoms often point to deeper emotional blockages that need to be addressed for true healing and transformation to occur.

1 Giant Mind is evolving!! Check out Jonni's new project Ritam Studio.

  • With hundreds of hours of courses and knowledge content to take you ever deeper into understanding and supporting your growth & evolution. 
  • Stacks of movement classes with Carla Dimattina to strengthen and align so everything can flow.

Try for free today head to ritam.studio

Speaker 1:

Hi Carla.

Speaker 2:

Hi Johnny.

Speaker 1:

What a luxury that we get to sit here and just riff on fun stuff.

Speaker 2:

Yes, a luxury of a limited amount of time before I have to pick up the kids.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so let's cut to it, shall we?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

What are we talking about today?

Speaker 2:

I think it'd be great if you defined what RITAM means and why we called our studio Rittam Studio.

Speaker 1:

Great question. Rittam is a state, it's an experience in our consciousness that's cultivated through the process of recovering from our past, and what I mean by that is addressing the trauma and the beliefs that keep us in a very small container of our minds and keep us locked in tension, fear and reactivity, defensiveness. When we confront this, what we do is unlock what is there and what is there is a dynamic intelligence. There is a dynamic intelligence that, in the experience of it, reveals who and what we are, what our purpose is, how to be in relationship with life and what to do next. That is going to ensure that your presence and contribution in any relationship dynamic is going to be evolutionary, life-supporting, expansive. And the reason why we called Ritam Studio this is because Ritam is ultimately where our practices and everything that we teach lead us to. This is what we want people to experience. Is what I just described, then.

Speaker 1:

It's a very big state you just described, then yeah, and it is our nature and it is absolutely attainable, but we have a big disconnect right. Correct and this is, I think, a really good thing to discuss in this podcast what that disconnect is From your perspective. Why do people come to you?

Speaker 2:

Because they're in pain, their back hurts, they can't lift their shoulder, they're in discomfort, there's something with their body that doesn't feel right, but they never come in telling me that there's something with their mind that's not right.

Speaker 1:

You have to do that for them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that can be really confronting. It's much easier to address a physical symptom in someone's body or easier for someone to talk to about that, because I think they feel less ashamed that there's a problem because it's in their body versus the mind. But the truth is that they're interconnected. They're inextricably linked. You cannot separate them and anything that's physically presenting in the body is a result of some deep, deeper emotional um blockage within you, and this is what I address and highlight in my sessions is it always a surprise to to people?

Speaker 2:

no, I get the, the knowing nod. You know the silence, but the, the nod that it's just like I've just hit something very deep, that they they're like oh yeah and and they allow themselves for a moment to correlate them. It's very rare that I'll get an upturned eyebrow like what are you talking about?

Speaker 1:

so what you're talking about here is when they uh talk about their, their symptoms, their pain, you do a an assessment of them through some basic movement patterns and whatever. You identify what you believe to be the issue and then ask them some questions about what's going on in their life.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And then arrive at what.

Speaker 2:

Arrive at connecting the dots between the two, allow them to see how their body started hurting. It wasn't just that they bent down in a funny position to pick something up. It doesn't just happen overnight, that's you know. There's a buildup over time that causes that, that one particular incident, to be the thing that makes you have to go seek help, and so I always celebrate a discomfort because it's like great something's gone so far that you need to help it. Nature will not let you sustain this, and I'm sure with you the same thing. When people come to learn to meditate, it's more often than not reactionary to some event in their life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's reactive and primarily, you know, primarily most people are just concerned with alleviating symptoms and interestingly, you know, it's only a small group of people that post-alleviating symptoms will remain engaged with the same fervor and might unless there is a context created. You know, if I remember back in the day I'd always talk about meditation as this really great way to reduce stress and anxiety, to get rid of fatigue in the body, to get greater mental clarity so you can be more effective, because it's like that's as deep as you could really go. And after a while I found that, because I was only setting that expectation, once they kind of got the alleviation of stress, the symptoms of anxiety and fatigue sort of dissolved, then they're like, okay, I achieved what I needed to achieve with this meditation thing, and then they generally drop it until it returns. And over time what it became really clear is that we have to create the context for the deeper why.

Speaker 1:

Why are we doing this? Because you got into your stressed and anxious state, because you're operating in a way that is not congruent with your deeper intelligence. There's something that you're doing or ignoring or not doing that is causing this distress and anxiety and discomfort. It's something in you that is not resolved, that you're unable to see, and what we need to do is really unpack that and get to the core of it and resolve it at that causal level in order to liberate a deeper, wholer experience of the self, which we refer to as Rittam. So is this a pattern that you're observing as well, with your kind of the greater why?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you know I'm sure anyone out there listening knows that they'll if they've gone to see a physio for back pain, they'll stick with the program up until the pain subsides and then off they go.

Speaker 2:

But I was always concerned with that bit in the middle because generally those people return to therapy. What I was always trying to do with my work and have found, particularly since we've combined our work, is that it becomes proactive. You may enter it reactively and the pain can subside very quickly, but then you are in the best place to do the best work. So when you're not in a reactive state, you're. Then your body is such a great container to build strength, to continue building awareness, to prevent recurrences and, beyond that, begin living from a much deeper place that you know eliminates the stress that you were dealing with in the first place. But you have to stay connected to that deeper meaning and that deeper place and Rear Time Studio. Why we created it was a place that keeps you engaged to continue doing the work even when you feel good, because you're noticing an amplification in your life overall.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so the biggest misconception that I noticed as a kind of cultural trend in the whole wellness thing is, you know, when I have established a state of symptomlessness, I'm not noticing any real pain or anything. The value and the meaning of these practices becomes diluted and it's because, culturally, the principle of what's beyond our symptoms, it, hasn't yet been fully embraced. In our opinion, this is what we observe as trends within culture. On top of what you just said, carlos, it is to inspire people to have a much higher vision for what they're seeking to attain as an experience of themselves Versus you know, hot, cold versus breath.

Speaker 2:

Work to have a moment of feeling the state that you were describing before.

Speaker 1:

You know it's more of a sustained state we're trying to achieve yeah, and you know, all the therapies that you know people are engaging with are all fantastic as far as we're concerned.

Speaker 1:

However, if you're approaching it from the perspective of just alleviating symptoms, then there is great limitation in how deep you can actually go. What you're aspiring to, based on a deep and ancient understanding of what we are as human beings, which is divine intelligence with all the capacity, capability to become all the solutions to our problems, to our own problems, and to be a force of contribution to the solution of others' problems, by making yourself a benevolent, compassionate, dynamic state of consciousness to be interacted with. And in order to attain this state, we first have to understand the inextricable connection between mind-body and our spirituality and then engage in practices with this awareness to recover from the condition of ignorance. Of this, you know, when we talk about awakening, it's simply just the recovery of ignorance and the wear and tear on the nervous system, the brain and the body that ignorance generates. So would you agree in your work, carla, that people's pain is as a result of what they're not looking at?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1:

And so this ignorance is prevalent in every aspect of our lives as human beings, and as we start to wake up, we start to reveal layers of things that are playing out in our subconscious and in our body, and when we are able to address them, layer upon layer upon layer, through practices, we are able to liberate ourselves from them.

Speaker 1:

And this is essentially what you and I do right, carla, is we work together, with awareness as the central piece of our work. What we're doing is cultivating greater awareness, because with awareness, we can observe what's happening in the mind, in our emotions, in our body, and correlate them and see it as one whole thing and then treat the condition from a body, mind, emotion, spiritual perspective as one cohesive model and elevate ourselves in this way. And what we've noticed through working together is such profound leaps in advancement and transformation, and a big part of what we want to do with this podcast, as we keep saying, is embellishing. It's like we just want to emphasize this and challenge you to ask yourself why am I not doing this? Why am I not just applying this intelligent process to the thing that I want most, which is to be free? So, carla, you've very generously laid out your foundational system of chain movement on Ritam Studio. And all these videos are for free. Why have you offered them for free?

Speaker 2:

Because they're the baseline to every movement practice you do. So you don't have to exclusively practice chain movement to use these. These are the letters of an alphabet. You can make any word from these letters. You can do any movement practice from this space. And they're just, they're non-negotiable in your practice If you want to create great change in your body beyond just aesthetics. So there's one thing to, to train to to look a certain way. I don't train to look anything. I train to to to be. I don't train to look anything. I train to be, I train to be a certain way. And these foundations give you all of the layering to train in a place of being, to train in a place connected to your state of deepest self-awareness. So, no matter what you're doing, I encourage you to go and check them out and start putting them into your weight session, into your yoga class, whatever it is you do.

Speaker 1:

But like you could also just do chain classes, which is really, you know, I've mentioned before. It's completely changed the way that I see myself, my body, the way I move and how I hold myself. It's just given me so much more dimensionality in the experience of myself by connecting far more deeply with my body in such an elegant and simple way and aesthetically he, he looks better too.

Speaker 2:

The dad belly's gone a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So maybe we'll wrap it up here, because you've got to go pick up the kids and we'll continue riffing on the correlation between the separation between mind and body and how they correlate and how we can continue cultivating awareness and the reason why it's so important that we bring the two of them together.

Speaker 2:

And we encourage you to jump online and start the seven-day transformation so you can have really experience what we're describing here. Begin with my fundamental series and then jump straight into the 30 day challenge, which is 10 minutes of movement on a mat every day. Subscribe to the newsletter online and you'll get all this information in there. You'll also have the link to join Johnny's live group meditation every Thursday night at 7 pm. Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Speaker 1:

And you'll notice that all the videos on Ritam Studio of me and my discourses are the recordings from these live events. So you can actually bring questions to these live meditation events, where there's a substantial amount of time for Q&A, and contribute to the ever-growing body of knowledge and insight and support for all the members of Ritam Studio. And if you subscribe to our newsletter, it's going to be jam-packed on a weekly basis with new episodes from the podcast, new episodes on our YouTube channel. Videos of the week in Ritam Studio.

Speaker 2:

And a cracking Spotify playlist.

Speaker 1:

To move to an inspiration and provocative thoughts and ideas to continue inspiring you to practice.