Finding Your Way Home; The Secrets to True Alignment

Polestar Pilates Founder Dr Brent Anderson on Faith, Connection and how to navigate the most challenging times with a candle of hope

• Anthea Bell

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Gorgeous Listeners, welcome to this week’s episode of Finding Your Way Home,

Today, we're thrilled to welcome onto the podcast a true pioneer in the world of movement and Pilates - the Founder of Polestar Pilates, Dr Brent Anderson.  

Dr Brent will be a familiar name to many of you - an internationally-acclaimed speaker, author, reputed expert in physical therapy & movement science, and arguably one of the most forward-thinking, community-led Pilates Educators we have. This conversation marks his third feature on the podcast; and a truly personal insight into the passions, principles and deep faith that lie behind his vision. His goal - to carry a spiritual and profoundly humanistic ethos into everything he does - to cultivate not only better movement, better health, but infinitely richer lives. 

In today’s episode, Dr. Brent and I delve into pivotal but lesser-spoken influences on human health, happiness and change. 

We learn his insights on:

  • What "coming home" truly means, and why finding that personal epicentre is so critical to everything we do in the world
  • How to gain clarity on your purpose and unique message, and move beyond the confidence barriers that hold you back
  • Dr. Brent's community-centric vision for society, and the impact of moving from an individualistic to collective view
  • The importance of an ethical and value-based compass, and the impact this has on how we act and are received
  • Dr Brent's own spiritual faith - and how this has guided every aspect of the worldwide pilates organisation he has built
  • Moving through grief, acknowledging suffering and nevertheless, finding the light of gratitude and connection that are its antidote. 

An episode filled with openness, intimacy and the soft dusting of hope - the perfect listen to guide you through your next steps in movement, self-development and leaving your unique imprint on the world.

To find out more about Brent's work:

Find him on Instagram: @drbrentpt
Visit Polestar Pilates: https://polestarpilates.com/brent-anderson/
Check out his book: https://principlesofmovementbook.com/

Stay connected with the podcast:

Thank you for listening; it means the world to us. We'd be so grateful if you could rate, review or share this gorgeous episode with someone you love. That small act brings us to new ears and eyes - it builds the movement of health and connection that FYWH is built on. 

For more information and upcoming news on the podcast, follow us on  @ab_embodiment and our website. 

And to explore working together more deeply:

  • Join our free newsletter for insights, events and self-healing resources.
  • Apply for an Early Bird place on the Embodiment Coaching Certification 2025 - taking your work as a Practitioner to a new level of depth, ease and impact. 
  • Secure your space at our beautiful retreat in Costa Rica this Autumn. 6 days of sacred ceremony, moving you into the body, into the heart and through the emotional / historic blocks that have held you back. Prepare for a depth of connection you have never felt, in one of the most magical landscapes in the world. Be with us...

Sending love, wherever this finds you,

Ax

So for me, I feel like I belong to an eternal family, which also changes our perspective on humanity, doesn't it? You know, if we believe that there really is a divine father and mother and that family is defined, then that means everybody on earth is a sister and brother. Take a moment and ask yourself, how does my heavenly mother See this person and immediately all that prejudice, changes and you realize that this is a divine being of divine nature from divine source and has potential to achieve divinity. You know, I don't talk much about it in the open area, um, of education and things. I'm, I'm very neutral in my spirituality discussions. I believe wholeheartedly in it, but my actual belief and where my faith lies of this question, you ask of being home, um, to me, home is being with my heavenly father and heavenly mother and being with eternal family. So it really shifts. the myopia of being in the daily grind of mortality

Anthea:

Welcome to Finding Your Way Home, the secrets to true alignment. I'm your host, Anthea Bell, movement teacher, mind body coach, and lifelong spiritual seeker. This is a podcast about the depth, weight, and profound healing power of connection between mind and body, spirit and soul, and from one human to another. Together with an incredible range of inspiring guests, we'll explore just what connection and alignment mean. How to get there in a world full of the temptation to conform, and how great challenge ultimately can lead to life changing transformation. Get ready for groundbreaking personal stories, conversational deep dives, and a toolkit of strategies to build not just your inner knowing, but your outer world. Let's dive in.

Welcome gorgeous listeners to this week's episode of Finding Your Way Home. We are sitting down with a repeat guest someone who I hold in the highest esteem from both the professional perspective, but also from the perspective of so, living a life of deep authenticity and presence. So we have Dr. Brent Anderson with us and if you guys haven't checked out the first, two episodes that he's recorded on the podcast, I'm going to make sure you'll have the links. They are some of our most popular episodes ever. In those episodes, we talk quite significantly about Brent's trajectory he is the founder of Polestar Pilates, which is a global education, faculty, The organization from my perspective integrates this gorgeous blend of movement and functionality and profound embodiment and all the healing that that creates alongside. How do we build deeper community, deeper connection, deeper service to the world around us? Um, he's also a published author. He's a globally requested speaker, and I know him profoundly as a man of faith. Thank you very much. I'm very honored, very humbled. So my first question, and Brent and I were talking about this a little bit before we turned on the airwaves, was really what that phrase, finding your way home, meant to him personally, because it's a question I have never asked him before. I mean, that's a very profound question. Question and yet could be very simple at the same time. Um, I would think of home being in two places. One being true to yourself is home energetically, like knowing who we are, knowing what our purpose is. That could be a sense of being home. And I'll talk about that a little bit. Um, I also think of home as, uh, an eternal perspective, a spiritual eternal perspective of our beings, our energy. Um, you know, I don't think that we were, um, just started from nothing and we end when we die. I very much believe that there is an eternal aspect of our beings. Um, I believe families are eternal. I believe that we can continue. Um, and this year has been one of those years where, you know, I lost a stepfather, a mother, um, a, um, my wife's sister and brother all within like four months. And, you know, if you, I always wonder, like, how do people deal with things like that, that don't have a eternal perspective on family and energy and, you know, I think every day of my life, I feel like my father who passed away 20 plus years ago, I feel like, you know, I hear his whispers. I see myself in the mirror when I'm walking. Um, I, I say things that he said. I mean, there's, there's this sense of eternity that I think is, is very important. I, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that, but I do think that there is a sense of eternity for us. I don't think we just stop existing at death, and I don't think we start existing at birth. I think that there's an eternal perspective to it. at least energetically. So that's, that's a very deep place to go sometimes. But I want to come back to the first one. And I think this is sort of where we're talking about in this podcast is, you know, can we be at home in mortality? Can we be at home in our own bodies and in our own minds? And you think of people that have gone through, um, tremendous Challenges in their lives. Um, you know, you think of even today, like there's things going on in war and abuse and trafficking of humans. And there's really ugly things that are happening amongst our brothers and sisters. And yet some of these people are able to pull themselves out of it and to find the peace and to find their purpose after the most horrible war. Events that you could imagine in your life. And, um, I'm always impressed by that. And I think that, you know, here we are in a profession that we facilitate alignment. So that's what we do, you know, especially as Pilates teachers, especially as yoga teachers and dancers, we're always looking at alignment. And I also made the joke that, you know, when you're after a Pilates class or yoga class, you don't feel like going out and robbing a bank or beating somebody up or, you know, hurting somebody or causing pain or lying. It's, it's not in the nature of alignment. And so how do we find that alignment that we could also refer to now as being home in our own being home in our own spirit? And I think that, you know, if you go back into some, you know, Buddhist teachings, you know, Buddha asked himself those three questions, like, Who am I? What do I need? And what is my purpose? And I think that's a daily question, if not multiple times a day question. I don't think it's like you figure it out once in your life and it's done. I think that it's a continuum of us seeking to understand what our purpose is. And, and that purpose is so powerful. I'm going to throw out another psychological term, but it's internal locus of control. And we live in a world that is primarily functioning on external locus of control. And what that means is that nobody's home. They're not home. We're living in a world of distraction. We're trying to please things that really don't bring us joy. We're trying to impress people that, um, are not defining who we are. They don't define who we are. And sometimes we live in guilt and sorrow thinking and blaming ourselves for things that we did wrong, where tomorrow morning we can all wake up and just say, Hey, I'm, I'm worthy to start this new day today. Um, I'm not carrying that guilt. I, I, I realized it was not good. I hurt me. It hurt others. I don't want to be that person. And I'm going to redefine my home. I'm going to redefine who I am today. And I'm going to do my best. And if I fall short. The next day, I'm going to wake up worthy again of a new day of a new chance to define myself and be who I am. So I think it's a continual process. And I, you know, if we bring a little bit of religiosity into it, you know, those that have been brought up and, you know, Judaism and, you know, Islamic and Christian faiths, you know, there's often a lot of guilt assigned to things like sin or breaking the rules or the commandments. And, um, and I think that's a natural behavior that we have as humans. Even if you hurt somebody, there should be some kind of feeling of remorse that that was not a good thing to do. But if you really look at what I believe the purpose of those are is to help us align ourselves. And actually to bless us like as we are obedient to some of those things. And, uh, again, man and women have obviously infiltrated religiosity and have put in a lot of their, their own things for their own greed and their own power, which I am often disgusted by. But I think from you, when you really look at the teachings of these great spiritual leaders, you'll find that, you know, repentance and forgiveness comes quickly. And, you know, go and sin no more, you know, find peace, go in peace. Um, you know, I, I'm, I'm very impressed with that. I think that we don't have to carry around these burdens that hurt our very inner being for so long. And, and look, we all do it, right? I mean, if I ask for a show of hands of everybody that's listening to this podcast, we, we all have felt that. Um, some of us have even turned away from the concept of spirituality, possibly because of, uh, You know, a conflict inside of a faith or religion or family teaching or something. But, you know, I would ask that you soften a little bit and go back and think of your spirituality is, is that home where you're aligning with, with source, not necessarily fellow human beings, but with source. And I think that's really, really important for us. Am I going down the right pathway for us? Oh, I mean, there is so much in that that I could dive into. I'm trying to work out what order to take them in. So the first thing that really strikes me is that distinction that you're making between God and Source. And it's a linguistic distinction, but the same as we play with linguistics in the movement space. Words are really important given the connotations that they carry and even the emotional energetic body response that someone can have to one particular word. So those that are listening that thought that this podcast was about authenticity and movement and a deep connection, we're talking about exactly the same thing. When we're talking about religion, we're talking about mankind's best attempt to consecrate and gather into understanding something that is, by definition, completely un understandable. But it comes to my mind, Anthea, as you're talking, is ritual. Like, we are hungry for ritual, even if that ritual is a Pilates class. Yeah. Ritual could also be routine, right? And when you were talking there was this flavor. You used the word obedience at one stage, and the word that came up for me was discipline. Discipline does not have to be a problem or something to retaliate against. And I think a lot of us have been taught discipline within power dynamic at school or in family or whatever circumstance it might be that have created a distortion in how we're able to view that concept. So when we jumped on, you know, you said, God, it's been a year. And, and you were sort of referencing this big change you've had in your physical body and in the emotional landscape of your nearest and dearest. And one of the things you mentioned to me is like, I'm in shape. Uh, my pain is,, has really dissolved significantly. I've lost weight, like. That speaks to me of the discipline you've taken to come back home. Significantly. And you know, Joseph Pilate's second guiding principle was whole body commitment. Thank you. Which was defined as self discipline, right? And having a work ethic and to be able to achieve whole body health and whole body health was having a physical body that's capable of allowing the mind to achieve its potential. So I think it's very important that we, you know, we sometimes get so caught up in our Pilates training, thinking that it's repertoire, it's an exercise, it's a, core exercise. It's going to firm up my buns and make my arms look really good. And yes, it's going to do all those things. But Joseph Pilates, you know, guiding principles, whether he was being philosophical or not, it was whole body health, whole body commitment and breath and breath being the inspiration, right? So when we look at words that are very special words, right? Uh, the idea of inspiration, and this is something I want to talk about with you, is that when We experience alignment. There are a number of factors that bless our lives. Um, it doesn't mean we're not going to have trials. It doesn't mean there's not going to be tragedy. It doesn't mean that there's not going to be war and political things, and there's not going to be storms and floods. That's going to happen, right? There's going to be death in our families. There's going to be injustice in the world when we have that internal locus of control. I know who I am. I know what my purpose is. I know where I'm going. Um, it's amazing at how we tap into, you know, where we use words like the kashik field in Hinduism. So we think of this field that is timeless and has all knowing, right? Sound familiar? So if you're in a Judeo Christian Islamic faith, that would be God. Um, if you were in more of a esoteric faith, it would be the universe, universal energy, knowledge. But I love the term used in Hinduism with the Akashic field. I'm not an expert in this. I just, I'm, I'm very interested in commonalities. Even like when we did our Pilates, uh, when we were building our Pilates education business 35 years ago, um, Elizabeth Larkin, I would go around and meet with all of the different elders and interview them and gather the information they had. And we looked for the commonalities between the Ron Fletchers, between the Kathy Grants, between the Carola Triers and the Romanas and Lolita and my favorite Eve Gentry. And we gather that information. And from there, the collective. The collaborative component of what was in common was what we built post arm. And I think a lot of times, you know, this is where in, in our own personal lives, we look at this ability of how do we, you know, how do we align ourselves? Um, where, you know, if you think of, um, the heart chakra, right. The heart chakra, uh, has four sutras. And the first sutra is peace, and it makes a lot of sense, like, I'm, I'm, I'm choosing to be a peaceful person. I'm choosing inside like I want to be peaceful. I want to have peace. I want to experience it. I don't want to feel hate. I don't want to feel anger. I don't want to feel resentment. Uh, I don't want to have regrets in my life. I want to be peaceful. And it's funny that the second one, um, is harmony. And if you're in music at all, harmony is not all of us singing the same note, right? At all. We're all singing different notes or playing different instruments. And I like to think this more as like this huge orchestra. And we all could be people in our own diversity, in our own perception of choosing to be peaceful. The challenge now is how do I be peaceful in harmony with others that are different than me? And how do I find the the commonalities between us, right? And those commonalities and that alignment is what I believe taps us back into what I was talking about, like the Akashic field. And this is where we're inspired. This is where we're creative. This is where we have true love, where we really express love with ourselves and with others. You know, the first and great commandment or second great commandment in Christianity is to love your neighbor as yourself. Well, if you hate yourself, if you don't know self, then you can't really even begin and why be obedient at all, right? It's like, um, you know, first we have to love ourselves. And I think in Pilates, we do that so often. We create this sense of self esteem. We, we create this sense of self confidence of self love of appreciation. And it's not an aesthetic thing. Please don't make it an aesthetic thing. Please don't make Pilates aesthetic. Yes, we look better. I'm looking pretty hot right now, you know, but don't make it an aesthetic thing. That's a nice byproduct of it. Make it about what we feel inside in our bodies. Do we feel more aligned? Do we feel more aware? Do we feel the ground? Do we feel the air? Do we feel and smell the smells of nature around us? Do we feel the warmth and the love and the energy from the people around us that we love? Do we feel that vibration, right? And it's in those states that we are energized and we are most likely to be inspired. And to be buoyed up, to be lifted up in the challenges that we're facing in life. So it's, it's like saying life's not fair. If we get caught in that language in our head, this is not fair. It's not fair that I got this charge. It's not fair that I got a ticket. It's not fair that, you know, I have to pay taxes. It's not fair that, you know, somebody left me, it's not fair that, you know, this and that, right. But John F. Kennedy, he said, you know, when it comes to being fair, Life's not fair back in 1963 before I was even born. And I think that's very true. Life's not fair. When we have that internal locus of control, it doesn't matter. Bren, there's a brilliant, um, book, which I'll put into the show notes, everyone, which, uh, I read actually only recently, I gather I'm quite late to the trend, but it's called The Gap and the Gain. It's a good one, hey? Yeah, it's a good one. So for those that haven't come across it, the basic premise is that, and it speaks to this concept of locus of control, that you have the choice at any one given moment, assuming that you have presence and assuming that you have the courage to really face the What would we say, the benefits of staying in a trance of the negative story, but you have a choice always to, to decide, am I going to live in the gap? What I feel isn't here, what I feel has been done to me, et cetera, versus to live in the gain, which is not, uh, necessarily to state that something is a positive. It's more neutral than that. What it's expressing is there is some sort of growth, some sort of learning through this experience that I can use as a generative experience to create something better for myself. The other key thing about that principle is that when we're looking for the gain, we're always tracking backwards. So we're looking at ourselves 10 years ago, at ourselves one year ago, and we're analyzing the progress, and we do this a huge amount in the movement world. It's a big part of how we trigger some of that emotional, um, redevelopment and healing that allows someone to know, okay, well I am safe now, I am healthy now, rather than staying in the story of, I'm not well, I am this XYZ label. And what they find is that the difference, depending on whether someone is living in the game or living in the gap, is enormous as far as not just healing, not just, um, the, degree of happiness that you live in cognitively, lifestyle, um, outcomes, lifestyle satisfaction, um, professional advancement, depth of connection, creativity, a huge amount comes from, as you say, being able to take hold of what is, and ask yourself what could be the positive, what could be the, the development from this. I agree. I, you know, I, um, great book, by the way. And, you know, when you, and we all went through, we had everybody on the team read that book, um, looking at even the business team and looking at what is the, the gain. And, you know, we were so focused on the gap, like we're not meeting our goals. We're not where we thought we would be. But then we look back, you know, five years, like you said, and we've made such incredible gains in every aspect of our business and of our, our wellbeing. So I do appreciate that. That's a great, um, way of looking at the glass half full versus half empty to like, you know, appreciate the things that we're doing well. We, we have no way of predicting the future. Like we make guesses. We're always doing that in business. We're always trying to figure out like what's. Where do we want to be in five years? Where do we want to be in one year? And then a COVID gets dealt to you and it's sort of like, well, it's not, you know, that's going to be a little different for us now. So how are we going to do that? And, um, you know, I want to go back to that term locus of control. And, you know, in, in our principles and Polestar, we talk about, um, the five, principles, which are breath, mobility, alignment, control, and movement integration. And to me, what's very interesting is that each of those principles can easily be adapted into mental, emotional, and spiritual components, not just physical. And when you think of things like movement or mobility, do we have the flexibility in our thoughts and our beliefs To be able to listen to somebody of a different mindset. Do we have the ability to, um, you know, change our thought when we realize that, you know what, that thought about myself really wasn't helpful. That was not, that was more hurtful. You know, you think of that book we've talked about before and yeah, untethered soul and, you know, looking at, you know, if you could take your thoughts out of your head and put them into another person, would that person be your friend? It would be somebody you despise, you know, and sometimes our running thoughts are more like the friend that we would despise. And so can, do we have the mobility of thought to be able to shift and change that, um, alignment? I mean, it doesn't get more powerful than that. But, you know, if you look at a lot of different, um, the one I often refer to is Hunism, which was the spiritual belief in the Polynesian islands in Hawaii. And, you know, you see these tribal behaviors of how they prepare their young men and young women to become the leaders of the tribe, and they would talk about having a subconscious spirit and then a conscious spirit. And then a higher spirit or the great spirit. And so they would send their young men and women out on these missions, sometimes very brutal missions, sometimes with the help of some kind of hallucinogenic who knows. Um, but they would go out and the whole purpose of the trip was to align subconscious with conscious. Because they knew if that teenager experienced that alignment of conscious and subconscious, they would be great leaders because they could tap into source. They could tap into source. And so I've been very curious about that for many years in my life. Um, you know, like how do I, how do I make sure that my subconscious and conscious are aligned? Um, and then the next principle is control. And, you know, we started off years ago talking about core control and we got rid of that 20 years ago. Um, please disregard that training that we did 20 years ago, but think of control as a way of, um, having efficiency. and discipline in being able to execute really purposeful movement, meaningful movement. And then when we look at it in, um, you know, biomechanical terms, it's how we manage load. But we could do the same thing, uh, With life, right? So we know stress is a load and we have the capacity in our bodies to manage stress. We're built to manage stress. We get stronger with stress, but when stress doesn't have a break. then it starts to manifest with things like autoimmune disease and heart disease and mental illness and those kind of things that, uh, when we, our stress levels have gone beyond. And sometimes those stress levels are not really true stress. They're things that we create in ourselves. This is why you see right now there's a huge movement like let's go out in the weather. Let's go do a cold dip in an ice plunge. Let's go out in 120 degree weather. Let's go on a hike that is a high altitude. Um, you know, and it's like exposing ourselves to real stressors, physiological stressors often helps align the emotional stressors and people are noticing that their hormonal, uh, delivery system, their endocrine system and their autonomic nervous system are starting to. Align and that they feel better and they have less fear and they have more confidence and they have more resilience To stress because they're feeling real stress In our world today. We create a very false sense of stress Um, you know, just even in our election the other day that was a little crazy and, you know, everybody was very bipolar in it and those that, you know, won the election were very happy and many people that lost the election, but some of them are very scared and I've seen him crying and, you know, very fearful for things and it's like, Um, to me, that's a, it's probably a false sense of fear. We had to go on either way. It would be a false sense of fear because I believe if we are present, if we're home, which is our beginning discussion, we will weather those storms, even with bad politics or with, you know, wars and those kinds of things that I, that we can't afford to have. Unreal stresses that are impacting our health and our wellbeing for things that we can control simply by managing the load of stress and how we control ourselves and control our thoughts and align ourselves and have that mobility of thought, and then continually going back to our fifth principle, which is moving integration, like how do we keep integrating those things and bringing them back into place of asking, who am I, what's my purpose? What do I need right now to be happy? What do I need to be able to be meaningful in my community? Um, and when we ask those questions, the universe answers those questions for us. Very quickly, the question is, can we be in the state of mind to ask those questions? And I think that's probably a good place for us to go. It's like, how do we get into the state of mind to ask those questions of source? It's so profound to hear you and. You know, just on that last point, there's this feeling that in order to get to the place where you're willing to ask the question of a wider universe of sorts, when you drop down onto your knees and you ask the question, even in formal prayer, that there is an act of faith that is required in order to do that. There is a willingness to step out of the concept that you know, or that you should know, uh, and really lean into something that could provide you with a non logical, non cognitive answer. So one of the things that you had me thinking about, even ahead of this interview, was this idea of identifying your purpose. And you started off our talk by referencing this, this idea of the divine, this little gorgeous spark that lives in each and every human being, irrespective of our particular faith preference. religious leaning. I would posit that the human need for meaning, the human need for purpose, the human need for some role within the wider collective, that that's ingrained. That's my belief, is that we each have that aspect of the seeker in us. And what distorts that is sort of many things, but there are two that come the most strongly to mind for me. One is, conditioning that has you lose your belief that you do have purpose and value. And that goes into all of that storytelling of I am not enough, I'm not getting it right, I don't belong. All of the things that even we see in the movement practice when trainee teachers are terrified in the run up to their exam that they don't know the right cues. The other side of it is that we've become so attached to other human beings, as you say, into that external locus of control and to the world of commerciality and image and. Surface slash artifice that we have lost the, the memory of the humility to ask something greater, what we should do. Like what am I here to channel? And when you started, you had me thinking of you kind of metaphorically at the pulpit and you metaphorically at the pulpit of movement and me just being really aware that they're one and the same, you know, years ago, um, do Cohen is, uh, somebody that. One of our educators in Australia from the United States but there was a day where we were in a conference and I was in the middle of my PhD and, um, you know, very focused on the science, very focused on the methodology. And yet I was also a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints at the same time. Right? So it was often where I felt like I had two different hats on. I had the hat of being a bishop, and I had the hat of being a scientist. And, um, one day, we were in this meeting, and Dov came up to me, and he saw that I was perplexed with this. I think he interpreted it, and he sort of gave me license and freedom to say that they're, they're not two different things. It's it's who you are. It's, you know, like you don't have to, you don't have to prove why you have a spiritual component in your life. I could be a scientist and I could be a believing, uh, being in God at the same time and could find my peace in, in that space. And I've really enjoyed being in that combined space for the last. you know, 25 years of really appreciating how I find science continues to, um, support The things that might've been questioned 20 years ago. And as we understand energy and light and fascia, as we understand, you know, human behavior and psychology better and emotional and hormonal, it's like, there's a lot of things that start to make a lot more sense and why we want ritual, why we, you know, why that sense of being of divine nature is so important for us as human beings. You know, one of the things we did after my dissertation is we changed our training a lot because we realized it was the successful movement experience without pain that created the paradigm shift. It wasn't the strength. It wasn't the flexibility. It wasn't the balance. It wasn't the coordination. Those were all benefits of the Pilates, but it was the successful perception of a successful movement experience. And that's where I started realizing like, wow, our behavioral psych has so much to do with whether we believe we're going to be able to be successful or not. And then another great study by Peggy roller was looking at falls. And, uh, population of older adults that had all had a severe fall, uh, in the previous six months to be included into the study. And they did, you know, like, I think it was 10 weeks or something like that, Pilates twice a week with a Pilates teacher. No, no falls training, no falls prevention, just Pilates. And the hypothesis was written that there would be no change. So it's called a null hypothesis, right? One of the strongest ways to write a research question. And yet all of them not only decreased in their risk of falls and fear of falls, they came completely out of the risk of fall category and continue to be out of that risk of falls for like six months. And so going back and asking the question like, why did they have such a profound experience that changed them from being deadly afraid of falling. They've gone to the hospital with fractured skull, fractured hips, ribs, you know, horrible injuries. They had to have a severe injury that took in the hospital to be included in the study to where they were not thinking about that anymore. And they were not afraid anymore. And, you know, this Pilates teacher had created these successful movement experiences. And I also believe the social experience of being together with five other people who had had falls, and they're all having these positive movement experiences. Like I can only imagine what the discussions were after the class, you know, going out for a tea or coffee or something like that. And what we're realizing is that. When we create these experiences, uh, for individuals, we facilitate them where we're not the healer. We're not the creator of it. We're the facilitator of it. And then we trust that in the process of alignment, we trust in the process of consciousness and awareness that the individual will be inspired in their own path. They'll be inspired in their own being and they will start to make good decisions for themselves. And we've seen this over and over and over again. I've seen, you know, some women that felt that they, you know, they'd had breast implants and as they became more and more aware of their body, they realized they didn't want those in their body anymore. And they had them removed. I know people that were in marriages that were not really genuine. And so they, terminated those marriages. And I've seen others, you know, put extra effort in saving their marriages and to have very healthy marriage. And I've seen others, you know, fire their nannies so that they could be the one raising their kids because they felt like they needed to be the one influencing their Children as the mother or as the father. I've seen people change careers. So I went from being a, you know, I've seen people go from being attorneys and dentists to being Pilates teachers, um, because they find that purpose that you're talking about, Anthea. They find that connection that is their home. It's where they belong. And when we can be true to that, we find joy. I mean, that's, that's the definition of joy. That's where, you know, and even through difficult times, we'll still be joyful because we're where we know we're supposed to be. We know who we are. We know where we're supposed to be. Brent can I pick up on that last point? Because I, um, had a really beautiful experience this morning. So I sat down with a woman that I coach who is on her journey to becoming a certified coach, and she's. exquisite. She's previously trained as a, as a counselor. So she knows this world really well. One of the things that we talked about as a general theme is, I wonder how comfortable we feel with the permission to enjoy our lives, whether we feel we're allowed, because a lot of what comes back when you start digging into self limiting beliefs, especially in the coaching field is around Oh, there's going to be some sort of repercussion if I let myself relax into comfort, if I let myself relax into ease. So it perpetuates this tendency for hypervigilance, given everything you've said, and given that you're a man with a big spiritual heart, I'm curious about your perspective on that, whether we're allowed to be happy. Absolutely. I mean, you know, there's a, one of my favorite scriptures in the book of Mormon says, Adam felt that men might be and men are that they might have joy. Um, you know, life is not always about treachery and challenges and, you know, pain and those kinds of things that, uh, there's so much beauty in this world. There's so much beauty in relationships, and we're also commanded to rest. You know, and you think about it that our society is sort of taken rest away from us. And so we feel guilty if we're not working 60 hours a week, we feel guilty if we're, you know, not having our kids in every possible afterschool program that there is. And, you know, that we're not making sure that we're working, you know, two jobs that our kids can go to the school, it's like, you're missing the point even like with this last election, I won't say which way I swayed, but what I did is I wrote down the things that were most important to me and I'm what you'd call an independent, voter in the United States. So I don't align with the party. I align with issues and individuals and I go through and vote that way. So I was, um. identifying the things that are most important to me and accepting the fact that that's not the things that are most important to other people. So they're going to vote differently than me. But for me, there was no doubt that it was the well being of my family. Uh, it was the idea of Um, health and in general nutrition and those kind of things in our country that are really suffering, it was the idea of safety and security for, you know, loved ones and people that I know have been assaulted and raped and, you know, even killed, um, my brother in law that died in May was murdered in Philadelphia. He was shot 40 times on the street in the middle of the day. 55 years old, a gang came up and killed my brother in law. And, you know, it's like, um, it's when you, when you are confronted with those kind of things, um, you know, you have to go somewhere to be able to, to reckon it. And I'm not saying we're reckoned yet. We're still, we're still processing this, you know, like my mother dying was something that was much easier to process. She was at peace. She had accomplished everything. She was not in pain. I was with her. We had our, you know, all those things were beautiful. I feel her presence every day. Uh, my brother in law, different story. You know, it's like his life was taken from him, from somebody else that exercised violence on him. And so when we look at this kind of dichotomy in our world, um, you know, I, I write down the things that are important to me. I, I have a very good reason why I want safety. You know, I lost a brother in law because there was not enough police. There was not enough safety. There was too much violence on the street. And, um, you know, so when I did that, it became very clear to me on how I would vote or how I would act or things that I would say or do because they aligned with me, not the, not the media, not the propaganda, not all the, you know, Garbage that was out there on both sides. It wasn't about that for me. It was about what is in the best interest for me to be in my peaceful space for me to have joy. And that goes back to your question. Like, should we be able to have safety and joy and relaxation? And the answer that is yes. It's built into our DNA. It is built on our DNA. One of the greatest challenges we have in life today is sleeping. Sleeping is the most powerful healer and cleanser of our body, our mind, our thoughts, our dreams, our chemical imbalances. It's sleep that regulates that. We need to have rest. You're not supposed to work seven days in a row and not have a day off. We know it in tissue adaptation in physiology when we're doing strength training or we're doing mental exercise that we need to have breaks in between of a day or two days sometimes for the body to respond to the load. So having that break, having mental breaks, having vacation, having recreation. Joseph Pilates was a huge fan of recreation. Um, you know, going away, going out of town, getting out of the city, going up in the mountains and having a retreat. these are things that we as humans should be able to participate in. And, you know, that's another thing that's interesting to me or important to me is preserving nature and preserving. You know, the cleanliness of our nature and, you know, avoiding things like pollutions and plastics and those kinds of things. So, you know, those are things that became important to me. And so that's how I voted. That's how I aligned myself, uh, was based on those things that were truest to my deepest center and trying to exercise. And I'm not saying I'm great at it. I'm trying to exercise an internal locus of control. I'm trying to understand continually what my purpose is. And I can be very honest with you and transparent that, you know, there was a while like I've had some pretty bad injuries over the last, you know, 15 years and some of those injuries took away my, my hope of things that I saw myself doing and I had to go back in and ask those questions all over again. Like, what is my purpose? You know, it used to be that I would treat patients 40 plus hours a week and loved it. And after I had the neck fracture and surgery, I don't have the stamina or the power in my hands to do what I did, you know, 20 years ago. And so, you know, education became more important to me and I've opened windows up that are beyond. You know, rewarding that I just love what I do. And I love, you know, how the, the universe is continuing to mold me into something. I just want to be, I want to be that vessel that gets molded by God's hands, and mature gracefully. Um, you know, like I said, we've been around a lot of death this year and man, I do not want to die with any regrets or, you know, any hard feelings towards anybody. I, that's just not, it's not acceptable for me. And so that means I have to change my behaviors. A lot of times I have to be very forgiving. I have to, um, you know, make conscious decisions for myself that it's not worth me. Um, Even if I believe that I'm in the right, it's not worth me having that stress or that anxiety of, um, not forgiving somebody or having somebody that is resenting or me resenting somebody. More importantly, what I can control. I can control my resentment, um, and being at peace with that. That last point really makes me think of the tendency that all of us have to. make someone else into the bad other. It's a phrase that Tara Brach, who's a beautiful Buddhist speaker, uses a lot, that we, we other them and we make them bad, and sometimes we make ourselves bad. And of course, every time that we do that, we create this distance between me and you that unconsciously almost speaks a story of I couldn't possibly be that person. I couldn't walk in those shoes. That could never be me. And the reality for any of us that go through any kind of challenge, or even as you said at the beginning, that act in a way that we later feel shameful or guilty for is that that could always be us, that the, the pain and the, the, the fulcrum standard, let's say, All of us are susceptible to that if we go far enough down that road. And so when you're speaking, what I'm hearing is this real desire to live a very conscious life where you're awake to yourself on every level, not just on a body level, not just on an environmental level, not even just on a spiritual level, but What are the different parts of me that are here, and how well do they serve my deeper purpose? You were talking with the process that you went through with the election about choosing on the basis of what do the parties or what does that politician stand for? What have they written down on paper that they are representing? And it reminded me of this amazing phrase that I got given about ten years ago, which was to choose principles over personalities. Peace. What was beautiful about what you shared is that I can hear that as far as who you chose. You chose the principles, not the personalities. That was your metric. The reality is that in doing that, you also chose your own principles over your own identified personality. My values. Exactly. And the values are timeless. And who I think I am is an ever shifting piece and as you say, hopefully it should be because it allows you to be open enough to listen and, and, and listening and presence was maybe the next thing that I wanted to ask you about because I know that after the physical challenge you've been in, you had made a pledge and you said to me at the end of our last recording, Anthea, I'm going to go into some retreat for three months. I'm not going to travel. I'm going to be here because I need to hear for the next reality, and I'm curious for you to speak on those. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is right in the middle of all the other sort of trauma and the family that I took that time, and I did take the time, and I was fortunate to be surrounded by very good friends and Angela Crowley in the gerotonic world, um, and amazing body worker, I worked with her a couple times a week for a number of months, and, um, started working with a functional medicine doctor, and Um, got rid of, you know, gluten and dairy and sugar and, um, started running some tests and looking at other things that could be responsible for, you know, part of the, some of it's aging. Some of it is literally like metabolic changes and other things that are part of, you know, our. You know, our system here in the United States and just how food is so processed. And even though I try to stay away from it, but we really enjoyed the idea of, you know, we have our own chickens and we have our own garden and we eat our own vegetables. We don't have any chemicals that would be harmful on our property. And they haven't been there since, you know, You know, 20 years before we got the property. So we know the previous owners were also very anti any kind of harmful chemicals that would be on these 200 acres. So we've been very lucky that way. I feel very blessed. Um, and in that process I did get some medical treatment. So I had some epidurals that actually helped me with the leg pain that you saw me with in Germany. Um, and made a huge difference and that also restored some hope of thinking like, well, maybe this is just a back issue and it's not a back, hip, knee, ankle, foot, neurological, systemic, inflammatory issue. And so that gave me a lot of hope. And, uh, about electric bicycle that would allow me to grade how much assistance I needed, sort of like Pilates on a bike. Um, you know, when my left leg would get tired, I could put on a little bit more assistance from the motor, but I could still keep riding. I could be outdoors. I could feel the breeze. I could ride my bike to the ocean. Um, and every day I ride the bike and, uh, and then I stopped at this beautiful cafe that's close to my home in Miami and, And I would, you know, spend time and I get to know the people that are working there and they became friends and we're able to share and talk and socialize and the people coming in. So it built a community. So there was just a lot of things that I never took the time to do for myself. And, uh, it really was beneficial. And again, it allowed me just most recently, um, you know, I've been able to do some travel. I was in Spain and Turkey. I was in Spain and Turkey last week or two weeks ago and had, you know, just an amazing, beautiful experience being there and able to be very present with them. We had. A lot of our, you know, extended family from Russia from the Baltic States and from Turkey and from Iran and from parts of Europe. We had over 27 countries represented there with almost 320 people. And we finished in this beautiful circle, uh, two circles, one inner circle looking out and one outer circle looking in. And the circles moved opposite directions, looking each other in the eyes, um, basically thinking, I accept you for who you are as you are. And, you know, the healing that takes place in those kinds of events, like the, you know, if I was feeling any pain in the beginning of that day, there was no pain at the end of the day. And knowing that, you know, You know, the energy of love, of forgiveness, of acceptance, of humanity, of divine nature, that there's so much healing that can happen in those spaces. And I was going to go back to something you asked, Anthea, and that is that, you know, when we're asking who am I, very often the first things that come out are all the roles that we play in our life. You know, I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a physical therapist, I'm a teacher, I'm a business owner, I'm a boss, I'm a this, I'm a that. And the reality of that in, if we look at a word called stewardship. Um, stewardship is, Things that we have responsibility for, which are often these roles that we identify with. And in Buddhism, you don't want to identify with the role, the same thing in untethered soul. You don't want to, you want to be the observer of those roles. You want to be good stewards of those roles. But at any time you can lose a child, you can lose a spouse, you can lose a leg, you can lose a job, you can lose a university, whatever, you know, it's like, and then who are you if you lose that? If that's how you identify yourself, who do you become? And we see this with military, police officers, professional athletes, that their who am I is defined by the roles that they play, not by their deepest values. And so when we do these meditations in these conferences, we often want to get people to just keep digging down. It's not wrong to identify by the roles, but keep digging deeper. You know, is do you have a value of humility? Do you have a value of unconditional love? Do you have a value of creativity? Do you have a value of, you know, integrity? Like what, what, who are we really like if, if everything that's stripped away from us, Who are we, you know, and, you know, I think of the story of Job in the Old Testament that he lost his business, his wife, his kids, everything, and had to answer that question. I think a lot of times these stories are very much built to help us when we're going through our crises, but it's like, who am I? Am I still a man of faith? Am I still a man with an eternal perspective? Am I still somebody who believes in peace and unconditional love? Um, am I still a person that believes in the greater good of humanity and, and seeks for that? And those are the, when, when we get to those types of answers. In our who am I? Um, you know, we're very close to being present. That's, that's where we get present. And it's at that time. And that's why I always ask that question first. And then the second question is, what's my purpose? What's my purpose today? What's my purpose on my, this podcast with Anthea? What's my purpose with a friend I'm going to meet at lunch that needs, you know, my attention right now? What's my purpose when I was in Turkey? It was very clear to me in Turkey, it was bringing the world physical, emotional, and spiritual alignment. It's what I woke up thinking. It's what I went to bed thinking every single day while I was there. That was my purpose. And I was very clear about it. And so everything else that could have possibly interfered was, was negated. Um, because it didn't matter. I was going to be present for that purpose, and I was going to be present with my values, my values of being humble, my values of being collaborative, my values of being accountable, my values of being creative and innovative, um, and, and being loving and kind. And, and so even when things come up in a conference or a meeting and it's like somebody's frazzled because something didn't arrive on time or somebody said something stupid or something like that, it's like, because I know who I am in that moment, I know what my purpose is, it's so much easier to navigate, it's so much easier It's so much easier not to have all the weird emotions that often cause us stress and, and pain. And, um, you know, I made my decisions because of who I am and where I am right now. And, uh, that could change, but that's, that's, you know, that's home. And that's what this whole purpose of this thing is, is like, if we're doing behaviors in our daily lives that allow us to always come back to that home of who am I. What is my purpose? We don't have to be worried about the decisions we make or what gets put in our in our pathway. We'll be fine. We'll be fine. And because of my internal perspective, you know, it's like death is not the end for me. And so, you know, things that I've been working on these last couple of years has been more of, um, you know, succession plan, like, how do I be humble in a way that I can pass things on to the next generation so that the work that's so important continues and is embodied in these new generations. And not making it think like, Oh, this is Brent's legacy. No, this is our legacy. This is our work. It's a collective, it's a collaborative. Why? Because that's my value. It's collaborative. And so, you know, Polestar was not designed by me. Polestar was, I led it, but I led it through collaboration. I brought in, you know, if I have one great talent, it's attracting really talented, smart people. And they're the ones that helped me build and, and lead and drive the company to where people naturally want to be part of it. They naturally want to be promoting these things. I don't have to. You know, go through and vet people out. I know if they're coming to us, it's because they're supposed to be with us. And, um, and I can trust in that. Sometimes it fails, but it's okay. You know, I'm alright with that. It's like I live for the day and for the moment. Um, you know, you know me, I don't like anything that's not intimate. Um, You know, I don't want to be in superficial conversations. I don't have time for that. I want to get to know you. I want to know what you're feeling. I want to know what makes you happy. I want to know, you know, if there's anything that I could do to make your day a little bit better. And so, you know, that's, those are my drivers and I think everybody has them and we're all different and nobody, you can't take my drivers. You have to have your own drivers and that's your home. And that's where we come in back to that word. Harmony again, is that Anthia's drivers and Brent's drivers that, you know, if we have that understanding that it's humanity, we're going to be in harmony. Man, we can do so many great things like you're doing with your podcast and your coaching and I can do my thing with sharing alignment messages with the world. And, you know, it's like we can be in harmony, bringing good things and shining a light on, on the world that is right now in a lot of darkness, darkness, just the absence of light. We just bring our light, just shining your light. There's a, there's a wonderful speaker who quoted recently something along the lines of, given the extent of suffering, The magnitude of suffering that there is to choose from in the world at the moment. That what we need is equal magnitude of love. And that we get to enact that in our daily actions. One of the faculty that Brent has so, uh, So beautifully drawn together is a woman called Liz Bussey, who, um, has changed many a life. she is the, the educational head of Polestar Pilates UK. And I met her six years ago and I had the joy of speaking to her earlier on today, so a couple of hours ago. And I said to her very openly, you know, Polestar and You You changed my life. And I've only used that statement in two circumstances. The first was the organization that scooped me up when I almost died, and the second was five years later when I entered the vault of Polestar. And sometimes I think it's worth people knowing that because as you were describing, you know, those of us that are motivated in this way, we go about our daily lives and we look for opportunities to connect and to be intimate and to be of service. And sometimes you have no idea how much that investment touches the life of another person. And I could very openly say that I would not have the passion that I have now, had I not come into contact with this organization, and I think it's also why you don't need to attract students. the ethic of this collaborative project that you've brought together, energetically it comes through. Another phrase maybe for the listeners, and this is perhaps where we'll close, is um, this concept that it's not so much what you do as where you do it from. The where you do it from is is really important and that that can turn the same action from a negative outcome to a positive outcome from isolation to connection and love. Thank you, Antje. The collective. we've talked about a lot and we've gone right in as we do and I'm wondering If there's anything you'd like to leave the listeners with as a final parting. Uh, I think, you know, we've said so many great things today and I, I feel very edified and I think you do great work in bringing that out of individuals and watching your reels and your podcasts. I think that, you know, if I could leave. A message, you know, with, uh, with the world at large, um, it goes back to this idea of finding your internal locus of control, I just can't emphasize it enough and, and to go back to it frequently and, um, really be able to define, you know, who we are and, you know, where, where is our locus of control. And I can guarantee you that if it is internal, and even if you take it a bit further and connect it to source, that you will have joy.. You can find happiness and pleasure and external locus of control, but you don't find joy. That's a great phrase that you know, and I know that, you know it grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. The difference. I live by that statement as I suspect to you. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. What a treasure you are. Thank you so much for this time. Thank you, Anthea. Pleasure. Always. Okay, listeners, we'll, uh, catch you for another gorgeous episode soon. Take care of yourselves.

Anthea:

gorgeous listeners. Thank you. So. So. much. For your ears. I hope. You enjoy today's. today's. episode. To find. More about our. Featured guests. Have a look in the show. Notes.