The Fully Mindful with Melissa Chureau
The Fully Mindful podcast explores what it is to be fully mindful and present in our everyday lives, uncover our worth and discover our purposes. Host of TFM, Melissa Chureau is a neurodivergent lawyer, mindfulness teacher, and embodiment and breathwork coach. On TFM, Melissa interviews inspiring creatives, wellness leaders, and social disruptors about how they have discovered their purpose(s), authentic wellness, and the value of their work on the world at large.
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The Fully Mindful with Melissa Chureau
From the Arctic to Advocacy: Law, Sobriety & Movement with Dawn Winalski
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What do Arctic Alaska, tribal law, trauma-informed yoga, and sober running have in common? Dawn Winalski. In this episode of The Fully Mindful, Dawn—attorney, consultant, yoga teacher, and long-distance runner in recovery—shares her inspiring path from growing up in the shadow of a contentious custody battle to becoming a fierce advocate for Indigenous communities and a champion for mental health in the legal profession.
We dive into how running in the Arctic helped her manage stress, how sobriety became a turning point, and how she found purpose through community, movement, and service. From courtroom to recovery, from isolation to connection, Dawn's story reminds us that healing can happen when we listen to the body, follow the breadcrumbs, and keep showing up, mile after mile.
Find out more about Dawn:
Website: https://www.winalskiconsulting.com
Instagram: Winalski Consulting
Find out more about Go the Distance:
Website: https://www.gtdgothedistance.org
Instagram: GTDGotheDistance
Find out more about She Recovers:
Website: https://sherecovers.org
Instagram: SheRecoversFoundation
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Welcome to the Fully Mindful Podcast. I'm your host, melissa. I designed this podcast for you. I'm so happy you're here. We are talking about what it means to live with more intention, creativity and authenticity, so we can make aligned connections. I'm a neurodivergent lawyer turned coach who found the healing power of breathwork and the powerful impact of mindfulness as we navigate this wild and beautiful ride of life. Here at the Fully Mindful, we dive deep with inspiring guests, share solo mini-sodes that are packed with tools you can apply immediately, and I mix it up a bit with tangents and sidebars where my friend and host of the New World Normal podcast, debbie Harrell, joins us for some down-to-earth, sometimes random but always meaningful conversations. If you're ready to breathe, reflect and grow, you're in the right place. Let's get fully mindful. Well, hello everybody.
Dawn Winalski: Attorney Serving Indigenous Communities
Speaker 1Today on the fully mindful, I'm joined by someone who truly embodies what it means to integrate purpose, service and healing Dawn Winalski.
Speaker 1Dawn is an attorney, a consultant and a certified yoga teacher she does it all who has spent over a decade working with indigenous communities, tribes and Alaska native organizations. Her path has taken her to Arctic Alaska where she served as assistant borough attorney for the North Slope Borough, and it's also where she began sharing the practice of yoga with local communities and it's also where she began sharing the practice of yoga with local communities at a college there. But Dawn's story doesn't stop at law and yoga. She's also on a personal path of recovery, openly sharing her story with alcohol and what it's meant to find healing through connection, movement and mindfulness. She now lives in Portland, oregon, where she teaches at Portland Community College and is deeply involved with GTD, go the Distance, a movement-based community for people in recovery, and she recovers support group for legal professionals. In this conversation we're going to talk about walking away from what no longer serves us, moving toward a more integrated life, and how service, community and movement can be the medicine.
Speaker 2So let's get into it, Welcome Dawn. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 1Yeah, so exciting, and I should let the audience know that Dawn is also a personal friend of mine, so this is like super awesome because we actually know each other in real life, which is really cool. We met through an organization, a lawyer organization, but we're also on the recovery path together. So, yeah, I guess to dive in what inspired you to go to law and specifically to work with tribal and indigenous communities.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was a very circuitous journey. I started out in undergrad as a scientist, a marine biology major, and then slowly started taking classes like in sociology and economics, and realized that I really wanted to do more environmental science and policy work rather than just be in a laboratory or be very specific like science focused person. But also at the same time, like through high school and college, my parents went through a very contentious custody battle. At one point there were four lawyers involved and we were in and out of court all the time and I'd like to think I separated that part of myself. I think as I got more and more involved in environmental policy and realizing like, oh, there's these other tools of law that I'd like to use, I think part of me also wanted to kind of go back and help that child self understand the process that I went through and be able to like advocate for people like myself that were in similar situations, that didn't know how to navigate the legal system.
Speaker 1Yeah, I really resonate with that. I often joke it's probably not really a joke that I got into law out of a trauma response and you know because it provides a certain amount of order, which I did not have growing up, and a certain amount of accountability, which I also didn't have growing up not that I wasn't held accountable, but other people were not held accountable for things. And, yeah, just having a little bit more understanding of that process and feeling like I was a part of that process, like you were talking about, rather than separate from it and just kind of victim of it, you could actually help people to go through the process and understand it in a very different way that you didn't necessarily get as a child, not through necessarily anyone's fault, just by virtue of how the system works.
Speaker 2Yeah, and at one point when he had four lawyers, it was like my mom had one, my dad had one, each of my siblings sort of had one, and there wasn't one for me because I was in like aging out but I also had to like testify in court, which is terrible and to not have my own advocate there to help me navigate. It was really challenging.
Speaker 1Yeah, so I could see how that would motivate you to work with communities who could use a good lawyer who could advocate for them but also probably communicate the process in a way that maybe other lawyers weren't so sensitive to communicating.
Speaker 2Yeah. So like I went to U of O for law school because of the environmental law program but was able to take classes in Indian law and then saw a job on the internet to go to Arctic Alaska to work in indigenous community and decided it was a great way to use the skills in environmental law, indigenous law and just have a totally different experience. And so I moved all the way up to Ukiavik, alaska, and spent about four years up there supporting the community there.
Speaker 1Yeah, it kind of reminds me. I don't know if you ever saw the show Northern Exposure, and I just think of Joel the doctor who was inadvertently unbeknownst to him, recruited to somewhere in Alaska to be a doctor Only he went there willingly and had probably a tremendous experience being able to do that.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was incredible. I got to work with the community on a whole range of issues, including offshore and oil and gas development. I got to work with the community on a whole range of issues, including offshore and oil and gas development. I got to work with PhD scientists and indigenous hunters, but also the regular issues you face as a community police, fire, human resources, elections, like everything came up and everything. We had an office with six attorneys, but like everything came through us.
Speaker 1Yeah, so, and when you say Arctic Alaska, you mean Arctic Alaska like way up there.
Speaker 2The northernmost city in the United States, not connected by roads to any other communities.
Speaker 1That's amazing. So how did that impact how you worked in the community and felt part of the community?
Speaker 2It was challenging, as the like an attorney in the community had to like wear that hat too, and I wasn't from there, so I was able to like make friendships, but also had to kind of keep my distance in a way because of some of the contentious issues that came up. But I did get involved Like I really started running up there and so everyone like knew me as the runner. I had to start waving to people because, after you know, people would come up to me and be like I saw you running and I was like OK, cool.
Speaker 1Well, you know, I was just like hi everyone.
Speaker 2And then I was able to connect with a few folks from the tribal college who were doing like small group yoga teaching at the time, and then they the college was able to hire some folks under a diabetes prevention grant to teach yoga classes to the community, and so I was able to get involved in that. But I also like volunteered at events at the library and all kinds of different small town activities.
Speaker 1Yeah, I have so many questions. So you said you really started to begin running while you were in the Arctic Alaska. So what's that like to run in Arctic Alaska, especially through winter?
Speaker 2So at a certain point I had to stop running. I realized. Because we're on the Arctic ocean, the wind speeds got to be pretty high, and so anything over like 10 miles an hour is not worth running Like. It's just too much, and so I'd have to plan routes so that I'd usually go out into the wind and come back with the wind at my back. There's a few running shoe stores, like in Anchorage, that are really helpful with gear advice. I think the coldest I ever ran was like negative 15.
Speaker 1Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 2But with like snowboard goggles and a balaclava and just like the whole thing. And then we had two months of darkness, for the sun didn't rise above the horizon and so during some of that I'd wear like a headlamp and like lights, as if you were like a biker, to make sure people would see me.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, that's pretty intense. You were a very dedicated runner.
Speaker 2Yeah, I did it in part because everything at work sometimes was so stressful that it was nice to take that break and just go out for like three miles and sort through my thoughts and then at some point it became a challenge of how cold can I go?
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, and then you said you also began teaching yoga at the local college there as part of a grant. So how was that to be able to bring yoga to that community?
Speaker 2It was really cool we were able to do like once a week, for I think it ended up being like a year, year and a half that I did it, Even days when I was in the worst mood, walking over there just to see the same consistent students who all got to take the classes for free because of the grant, which it was amazing and to just then host yoga at the high school. We did a couple of classes with the football team because we did have the football team up in the Arctic. I also did events at the library or other community wellness events. So some consistent adult classes but also teaching kids, you know, kind of silly frog poses and things like that, to start bringing that practice to the whole community.
Speaker 1And had you gone through yoga teacher training up to that point, or was it just something that you had learned and were able to bring to the community?
Speaker 2At that point I did an online teacher training because, being so remote, it's hard to, you know, get in person classes After I. In between, like I took a sabbatical when I was up there but right before I moved back to the lower 48, of sabbatical when I was up there but right before I moved back to the lower 48, I did the RIT 200, like full teacher training.
Speaker 1How was that, after having done it online and then going and doing it in person?
Speaker 2I felt like I knew a lot, so I was able to ask questions about why that person who was teaching it, why she'd use a specific tact or things I had tried and that did or didn't work for folks that I had been teaching, especially because I had worked with a wide range of people, not necessarily your typical yoga stereotype lots of different yoga bodies which I don't think everyone gets a chance to work with, and so I think I brought that perspective in of like well, how might you teach this differently?
Speaker 2Which also later on I ended up taking a lot of like trauma informed yoga classes, which really resonated because of that experience of like oh, not everyone's going to be comfortable in Shavasana, or people who automatically notice, like people hate having, like our studio had mirrors which I don't love and like a lot of people don't love because you end up spending too much time like focusing on yourself and not the practice.
Speaker 1Right and so.
Speaker 2It was interesting how many things I had already picked up on intuitively from my experience teaching that then came out in the training.
Speaker 1Yeah, I could see that, having taken some of those same courses, that it really makes a big difference in how you go about teaching, and certainly different than a lot of classes I've taken from different yoga teachers. We used to do a lot of Ashtanga yoga not terribly trauma-informed, it's really great yoga but a lot of teachers will do hands-on adjustments for people even without express permission to do so. I've experienced that in a couple of studios and that's not always comfortable for people. It's a very specific way of doing things and like there's one right way to do it rather than multiple ways, so that could be really different for people. Yeah, I much prefer the ones where you can have options and it's just kinder and gentler, and I too don't like the mirror, so I appreciate that.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. I had a few days myself where, like I would get there and just because I knew the teacher was comfortable saying, like I'm having a very rough day, I just need to be here when I wasn't, you know, when someone else was teaching, I just need to be here and I may just sit in child's pose for like 20 minutes and have that conversation.
Speaker 2But now I'm able to bring to my students and say that upfront of like, you're here and all you need to do today is child's pose. Like, please do it. I don't take it personally that you're not following along. I want you to make this your own space.
Speaker 1I think it gives people that sense. Not that they need permission to do it, but it just makes them feel a little bit more seen and heard for what their needs are, yeah, yeah. So all the while, while you're doing all of this, there's this thing called alcohol that's involved at some point. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with alcohol and your path toward recovery?
Alcohol and the Path to Recovery
Speaker 2Yeah, let's see, I probably found alcohol in college. Like most many people in the United States. I always had a lot of friends who, just you know, would use it recreationally and you know, through law school I don't think I realized how bad my anxiety was. I was at a place where, you know, we would have parties and we'd go out a lot and then folks were often surprised at how well I did in classes, for how much I was out. But I think it just is a tool I use to help manage anxiety.
Speaker 2And when I was in Alaska, the community itself is damp and so it means you can bring alcohol in and you can have a permit to bring it in and have it shipped up to you, but there's no stores or bars or anything locally and I think that kind of gave myself a break in a way. So it wasn't, you know, drinking at night at home and just access. Yeah, like, access was limited and it would have been weird anyways if there was a bar in town, given how much pressure I was under as, like, one of the attorneys for the community. And then when I got back to, after I left Alaska and moved back to Oregon, it was just a really, really hard transition for as stressful as it was.
Speaker 2I knew everyone and I knew I had a lot of support. And then I got back here and just kind of moved around a lot, tried a few different jobs nothing really worked ended up in a relationship that wasn't great and just like slowly started drinking more and more great.
Speaker 1And just like, slowly started drinking more and more. So many do right and, like you said, it's used as a bit of a solution really, because it helps medicate the problems right.
Speaker 2Yeah, you're like, I'm stuck in this job I don't like and this relationship I don't like, so I guess I will just drink tonight. Seems like a good idea in the moment.
Speaker 2Yeah, especially when you can't see your way out of anything else. But throughout Seems like a good idea in the moment, like supervised treatment and you have supervised UAs and the whole thing for three years and seeing people come out on the other side and how like much better their lives were and how happy they were was really helpful for me. One of the attorneys I worked with in Alaska talked openly about her struggles with addiction and her experience with AA, and she'd occasionally share news articles on Facebook and books she was reading and then I think between like around 2019, 2018, there was sort of a change in language around addiction of like you don't you know it wasn't necessarily a problem drinking for drinking to be a problem. I had already gotten to know all the folks at the Oregon Attorney Assistance Program, which was really helpful to have those contacts. There was more dialogue about mental health and the legal profession, and so it was already on my radar Maybe I should take a break, and so I started reading more quitlet books and really exploring the idea.
Speaker 1Yeah People know who are listening like that's exactly right, like you don't have to get to disaster or the bottom to make a decision that drinking isn't working for you anymore. You don't have to go there and I think that absolutely became more of the message, probably right around the time that you started getting your little breadcrumbs so you don't have to come close to death or get a DUI. Certainly, those things can happen, but you don't have to go there in order to decide that it's. It's not how you want to live your life anymore.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, like 2020 with the pandemic, realizing how much worse my anxiety was, how much worse the hangovers were from alcohol, which I think is also being in my 40s at that point is something that happens with perimenopause I was able to then start kind of the journey towards sobriety at that point.
Speaker 1Such a rational decision. I remember way, way, way back. I've been sober for a while now, but I remember one of the first times I was trying to get sober and I had a lot of anxiety as well I think a lot of us do and I was definitely managing that, with alcohol for sure. But I also went to a psychiatrist and he asked me well, how much do you drink? And I lied, I said, oh, you know, maybe maybe a couple of drinks a day, like at most, but probably less than that. And he was like, okay, because you know antidepressants and anxiety medications, don't you know? They interfere with that and it's exacerbated by. I was like, oh, I'm fine. And so then he prescribed me Paxil.
Speaker 1And let's just say you're absolutely right, it does not go very well together. I learned that the hard way, but I think a lot of us do. I think I was probably in a bit of denial, so I didn't I don't know that I well, maybe I outwardly lied to him. I just was scared that he wouldn't give me the thing that I thought I needed. You know. So good for you for making a more reasoned decision about deciding to go on this path. Now, did you decide? I mean, did you explore different options for community for helping you maintain your sobriety?
Speaker 2Yeah, the first community I found I just read Laura McCowan's book we Are the Luckiest she, like in March 2020, was one of the first, I think, that started online Zoom meetings just for you know, one of those that's going to happen for a couple weeks and then it ended up going on for months and months and months and so I joined that community to start and then, maybe in like August of 2020, I was part of this women's running group called for Wazelle. This team called the Volet and the founder of Wazelle, sally, came out with that. She was sober and started a community within our community, for we call ourselves the Sobirds but, like because Wazel's a bird and we would have like Zoom meetings. So just more talk about just like being people in sobriety and runners and not so much recovery focused and so we'd share like favorite NA drinks and how to navigate, going to like a run when there might be beer at the end of it. Yeah, but it really helps build community there In Portland, we're fortunate that we have like a couple different recovery workout groups.
Recovery Communities and Movement-Based Support
Speaker 2We started running with Run TRG and then started working out at the recovery gym. There's a group called my Sober Girlfriends in Portland that I tried out for a bit. Then I found she Recovers and I've been going to those meetings for and those are also on Zoom. I've been going to those meetings for about four years and then in 2023, I found GTD Go the Distance and I've been running with them consistently since.
Speaker 1Can you say a little bit more about SheRecovers before we get into GTD?
Speaker 2Yeah, sherecovers. They have an organization based in the US and one in Canada. There you have two meetings a day and it's just. Recovery is very broadly defined. It can include alcohol, mental health, eating disorders, grief loss, workaholism and kind of the premise that we're all recovering from something. And you can come to these meetings. There's usually a coach who leads them with just some sort of prompt for the day and you can talk about like that topic or just share whatever's on your mind. And it's been really great to just build connections with people throughout the country and I even traveled up to Canada last year to meet some folks and I actually found them because they have a small group for legal professionals and it provided just a different way to meet other attorneys and paralegals and legal professionals broadly. That was kind of different than some of the attorney AA meetings that I had found in the beginning.
Speaker 1Yeah, I wondered how I have not yet been to one of those meetings for the legal professionals, so I wondered how that went. Like. What do you, what kinds of topics do you focus on? Is it general, just generally recovery, and you just all happen to be legal professionals or is it more specific to recovery issues that could come up within the legal field?
Speaker 2The group has been really shifting over time. Our meetings recently have been pretty small and we've been trying to figure out what are the needs for the community. We have 300 people in a Facebook group but not many people are able to join the calls. When we do have them, they've been more small groups where we've been able to have three or four people, which I think is intimidating. If you're a new person to join and suddenly feel like you know there's no anonymity at all, you feel like you're on the hot seat to explore what it is to be an attorney in recovery and some of us got into recovery late in our career. Some people actually got sober before and then went back to law school. To have all those different perspectives for me has been really helpful.
Speaker 1I can see that being really helpful because there are definitely things that come up in the legal field, like other fields. It's less focused on alcohol as a way to communicate with people after work, but it's definitely got some specific issues related to it in terms of the pressures, the various kinds of pressures and the types of pressures not that other jobs don't, but they have specific pressures that it's helpful to have people who understand that on the same call. I could see that being really helpful.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, Do you attend the other? She recovers meetings or mostly just the ones for legal professionals.
Speaker 2I mostly attend the main meetings. They're bigger and we're at kind of a once a month pattern right now with the legal professionals ones, as we figure out how to get more people involved or, at some point, whether to just sunset the meetings.
Speaker 1I hope you get to continue. I wonder what that's like. You said that the general meetings you know broad definition of recovery, which I think is great. I have been in 12 step, which is not that and tends to, and some of the groups that I've gone to are I don't know. I don't want to say stricter, but just have a narrow definition of you know not who can come everybody can come but what the focus is. So it's generally focused on recovery from alcohol. Addiction is the 12 step that I belong to, and so I wonder what that's like to be among people who have different things that they're recovering from, whether it's a mental health situation or an eating disorder. Or how is it to be in a group with people who have different things that they are recovering from?
Speaker 2It's been really helpful for me to kind of understand the reasons or like the root causes of addiction, especially trauma. I learned a lot about CPTSD and like resources on navigating that, because that's because of all the chaos in my family, that's sort of the root cause of things for me, and then to just share like today was really hard and here's why and here's like the tools I was able to learn to help navigate it. I also learned a lot like I've read a lot about self compassion but had such a hard time applying it. And like reading the books and just like this is all great but it doesn't actually apply to me, kind of feeling. And then just to sit in meetings and hear people share about like either shame of things they've done or just struggles of what they're navigating, and feeling so much compassion for everybody else and like oh my gosh, you like you're, you're not a bad person, like I love you, you know.
Speaker 1So like kind of random strangers who I've gotten to know over the years but finally helped me realize like, oh, that's actual compassion, and how can I share that on myself? We have to pull ourselves up by the bootstrapped and always get things done, and we've been sort of acculturated to believing that if we're nice to ourselves, that somehow we'll be less productive or we'll slack off or whatever, which it's all ridiculous, right. That's not true at all, and it's easier to see it when you see the compassion that you feel for somebody else when they're going through something. It's like, oh right, your heart opens for them, so why not me? Yeah, and you kind of exercise that muscle of compassion, so then you can turn it on yourself and actually use it on yourself. I love that, yeah, and I bet you've seen that also in just a transition here in Go the Distance, gtd, the runs that you do with that particular group too. I'm sure you've developed even more compassion for others and compassion for self.
Speaker 2Yeah, a hundred percent. I started volunteering with them in like May 2023. I actually ran into the group at an event called Running on Native Lands was how I first made the connection, and so it was sort of to come full circle of my tribal legal work and my experience in Alaska to show up at this event where there was also this running recovery group that I hadn't met yet and learned that what they do is go to treatment centers and take clients out while they're in treatment for runs or walks twice a week generally at each center. They're partnered with somewhere around seven to 10 treatment centers in the Portland area. I was able to start volunteering at this one center in particular.
GTD: Running as Recovery Medicine
Speaker 2I would go once a week and, just you know, we'd take a group somewhere between three and like 20 people out, sometimes to a track, sometimes just walking around the neighborhood, and I just had some one-on-one conversations, which for me is where I feel most comfortable.
Speaker 2I'd have one-on-one conversations with people while they were in treatment about their experience and was able to share mine. And then at each event we'd have a share, which at first was terrifying, especially having done all my recovery on Zoom and like share in front of a group of people just like either what I was going through that week or sometimes we just do like what you're grateful for was just like really hard. And then it just, you know, gets easier and easier. And so GTD has the treatment center component and then they also have community runs, and so after probably about a month of volunteering, I started going to the community runs and we meet now three times a week and usually do somewhere between like two to four miles, also have opportunities to run, walk with people and to do like a share at the end, really depending on how much time we have that day and how many folks are there.
Speaker 1And this is a community run among people who aren't in treatment anymore but are living a sober lifestyle.
Speaker 2Yes, and folks who are just allies in addition. So some folks who come from treatment and graduated and continued with us, some folks who just found GTD randomly and are in recovery, and then friends and allies of people in recovery, and what do you?
Speaker 1think or what have you seen is the impact that this has on people, whether they're in treatment still or on the road of recovery and out of treatment? What impact does this have of being able to run or walk with others and have that community with movement?
Speaker 2Having the two linked together is just so important. You know, like there's so much research on how movement helps mental health and how movement and community helps mental health, but being able to like, see and build friendships even for myself with people in recovery has really made a difference, especially since, you know, I did so much of my early recovery online. But, you know, showing up once a week, knowing the same people are going to be there, and then you slowly start. You know, showing up once a week, knowing the same people are going to be there, and then you slowly start. You know, maybe going out to lunch with some people and getting to know them better, it's been really helpful.
Speaker 2We also had a group in 2023 who ran the Portland half marathon together and then in 2024, we had a group who did both the half and the full, but just generally to see people who had never run before do their first 5K or do their first mile, even, but then your first 5K together and then their first like 10K and their first job out of recovery and their second job and being able to make career transitions because you know, like for me personally, I didn't know I had the community support when I needed to leave a job and try something new. To be able to talk about it once a week was like safe to share that kind of thing. But when I was able to share that, find out like oh, I'm not the only person who has panic attacks was able to help me have support to make decisions I needed to later on.
Speaker 1Yeah, I can see that and I have only participated in I think it was a fundraiser run that GTD put on and you were one of the volunteers at and I think at that race I remember somebody getting a pair of shoes and it was profoundly moving in the sense that I believe at the time I don't know if it's still the case, but there was a sponsorship where after you run a certain number of times with GTD, you get a pair of shoes right.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Is that still happening?
Speaker 2Yeah, so if you do 12 runs with us, you get shoes. You also get like a t-shirt, a sports bra if you need it, socks and a medal.
Speaker 1Yeah, and I just remember it was this really nice presentation for somebody who that was their 12th run, I believe was that fundraiser run and it was just like this is so cool, right, like because not only is the community here supporting this person the GTD community but some allies were, so you know, the sponsors who decided to sponsor that. I believe in GTD and the benefits that it gives people in the sober community. I just thought that was very moving.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2I've gotten to see quite a few of those graduations, both at treatment and out in the community, and there's a couple of times when, like I didn't want to go to a run on Wednesday, but I knew a couple of people I'd gotten to know pretty well were graduating that day, and so it got me off my couch and out the door to go celebrate them.
Speaker 1Right, and then not only are you getting movement, but you're getting that community, that connection in that moment, which is so much of what I think all of us need. All of us humans in recovery or not recovery officially we all need that connection, more so, probably, than before. We can feel pretty alienated in the world that we live in, and so being able to get out and have that connection with people that we have something in common with or just really like is a super cool way to support ourselves. So what is something, I guess, kind of closing in here? What's something you've learned about yourself through your work and recovery that has surprised you?
Finding Courage to Quit Hard Things
Speaker 2I think I always knew I could do really hard things, but I think it was learning that I can also quit hard things or things that aren't for me anymore, and I've had to do that with a few different career paths and even leaving Alaska, and you know it's always hard. We're taught so much. You know to be strong and push through things and, you know, stay really focused and sometimes the heart is just too much and you need to take a different path.
Speaker 1Yeah, and there in that I hear self-compassion. Right Like this is hard and it's the right decision, which is an act of self compassion. If you could go back to your younger self maybe the one that was going through all those difficulties as a child anything that you would want to say to that younger self?
Speaker 2I think just reminding her that she's always had more support than she realized and you know I've done some inner child work now where I can imagine my current self going back to support her and that's been really helpful but to also just realize what other allies I've had in the community that if I had realized that I could talk to them probably would have been helpful, but they were always there.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's really important, wasn't it Mr Rogers who said look for the helpers, right? But yeah, yeah, it turns out they were there. So I don't know what's your favorite run or yoga pose right now.
Speaker 2Oh, I mean from teaching. I always like tree pose because there's so many variations so you can make it adaptable to a lot of different bodies for a run. I just did the Vancouver clover run and try. There was like a three mile and I tried to see how fast I could go. I didn't quite hit my goal because I hadn't been training as well as I had. But our focus last year, especially with the marathon, was on long distance and it's not actually my favorite. I think, if I played lacrosse and other sports growing up, that I like the variation and I like going fast and so it was fun to just kind of try it out.
Speaker 1Yeah, that is really cool. I just started doing some strides at the end of some of my runs and I thought I would hate it, because I'm just not a fast runner I never have been, I just like running. And it surprised me how much I liked running a bit faster, how empowering it felt to be able to test the limit for myself. Yeah, that was cool. So what's next for you? What's on your hope list of projects, dreams, offerings, what do you got going on?
Current Projects and Finding Balance
Speaker 2I have a lot happening In the fall. I started a consulting business. I work with nonprofits and tribes on capacity building, fundraising, some legal work and some wellness programming or wellbeing programming and really just trying to figure out what that looks like, and so that's. That takes up a lot of my time.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2And you're still teaching. I'm still teaching yoga. I coach lacrosse in the spring, so that takes up a lot of time but that's a lot of fun and so trying to like balance it as well.
Speaker 1Yeah, how's that going? The balancing?
Speaker 2Oh, some days are better than I feel like. It's like some days there's a ton of things and other days I have been really working on, like allowing myself to rest or take breaks. When it's a day that it's a lighter day, like I don't have to sit at the computer pretending to work, I can actually go a long walk or like just sign off.
Speaker 1Yeah, so important. I think that is a message, that, or a lesson I have to learn almost on the daily. I just forget that it's okay, it's not only okay to rest, it's actually good to rest, and that just for resting sake, for no other reason than just to rest that we humans need to do that and I have a tendency to forget that lesson.
Speaker 2I do too.
Speaker 1Well, if people wanted to find you what you're up to you're teaching anything more about you how would they find you?
Speaker 2My website is just my name, dawnwanalskicom, and I'm on Instagram at dawn del sol and wanalski consulting.
Speaker 1I will put those in the show notes. Anything you wanted to talk about that we didn't get a chance to cover.
Speaker 2I think we got everything.
Speaker 1Awesome. Yeah, it's amazing what we can do in one conversation. It was so good to have you. I can't wait to hear more about your next offerings and what you have going on, so we'll make sure to circle back and see what you're up to, if you're up to it.
Speaker 2Yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 1Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for joining me on the fully mindful podcast. If you got value from this episode, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review or share this episode with someone who loved this content too. Remember, small moments of mindfulness can lead to big changes in your day-to-day life. Until next time, take a deep breath, stay present and tap into your own mindfulness. I'll see you next week.