Ep.68 How to Let Go of Anxiety In The Body

If you've been to all the doctors, tried all the things, and your anxiety still won't budge, this one is for you. Maybe the reason nothing has worked is that you've been trying to think your way out of something, but maybe it's not a thinking solution, maybe your body has been holding on to something the whole time, and you need to heal through the body.

About This Episode

I sat down with Jenny Cohen, an author, a speaker, a cancer survivor, and a dancer who believes movement is your birthright to heal. She used dance to stay alive through her cancer treatment, and what she shares in this episode is something I have lived in my own body for years.

Anxiety is not just in your head. It lives in your body. And when you have nowhere to put that energy, it doesn't disappear. It builds.

We talk about why your anxiety is the messenger, not the enemy. We get into why your body will go to extremes to get your attention, the difference between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind, head up versus head down, and what's actually happening when emotion releases as crying, shaking, or going completely still. Jenny also shares the dead simple daily practice that helped her, and the one question she asks her body the second symptoms show up.

If you're a high functioning woman holding it all together while quietly crumbling, this is your permission slip to stop performing and start letting it move.

What You'll Learn

1. Why your anxiety can get worse the moment you stop moving your body
2. Why anxiety is the messenger, and how the more you ignore the whispers, the louder your body has to get
3. How your conscious mind and subconscious mind split, head up versus head down, and why it matters for healing
4. What emotional release actually looks like, and what to do when it happens
5. A simple daily movement practice you can start with no skill and no one watching
6. The one question Jenny asks her body when symptoms show up

Reflection

Where in your life have you stopped moving, and what might be trying to get your attention?

When was the last time you let your body do something just because it felt good, with no goal attached?

Your Next Step

If your anxiety feels stuck in your body and you need something that actually helps tonight, start here.

Grab the free 5 Minute Nervous System Reset

And if you're ready to stop managing your anxiety and start getting to the root of it, this is where one on one work comes in. That is where we rewrite the subconscious patterns underneath, not just talk about them.

Book your free Freedom Roadmap session

You're not broken.
 You're not behind.
 And you're not alone.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and meet Jenny Cohen
 01:43 When movement as a birthright to heal first came online for Jenny
 03:07 From dance to occupational therapy
 05:31 How dance kept Jenny alive through cancer treatment
 06:15 What was driving the anxiety underneath
 07:46 Overlapping conditions, depression, and unresolved trauma
 09:25 Dancing before, during, and after breast cancer treatment
 11:01 Sari shares how her own anxiety didn't show up until she stopped dancing
 12:26 Movement is for everybody, even after your shower
 13:23 Why our life force requires movement
 15:18 Why our bodies will go to extremes to give us what we want
 16:19 Why anxiety is the messenger, not the enemy
 18:30 Fixed movement versus improvisation
 22:21 The moment emotion released mid movement
 23:20 Why you never touch someone who is emotionally processing
 25:18 Conscious mind from the head up, subconscious from the head down
 30:55 Why forgiveness is part of healing
 36:53 You have the right to move, you were born with it
 37:51 The daily practice, five random songs
 39:19 Naming three things you liked about what you did
 44:26 The question Jenny asks her body when symptoms show up
 46:40 Sari's movement challenge
 48:32 Are you doing your self care in a present way
 49:49 Where to find Jenny Cohen

5 minute nervous system reset ad for midroll

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In the US, belly dance itself is this beautiful way for us to find and connect our bodies. It comes with cultures where there's often war, poverty, a lot of strife, and women would use that as a way to release tension. They wouldn't tell you that. It was a way of bonding and bringing community. We found it a way here in the States as a way to self-ashalize because the movements in the body release trauma. We don't even know that. Now there's science starting to prove that. And one thing that I really loved, I'm currently in a year-long program called the Neuroscience of Dance. And I love that I'm learning about the science behind it, the research behind it to help people understand how important it really is to move.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Fuck anxiety. It's a battle cry to all the women out there who are so tired of continuing to let anxiety keep them imprisoned in their own lives. If you wake up already exhausted, even after a fall night of sleep, most of your day taking care of everything. The kids, the work, the responsibilities, you show up with a smile, but you have it all together. And she is an author, a speaker, she's a cancer survivor, she's a dancer, and she fully believes in everyone's birthright to dance, to heal. And I really love that because if you guys have been listening to this at all, you know that I personally was a trained dancer growing up. And dance is very important in my in my life. Um, but my relationship with it um has been different from more of a performative, um, validating aspect versus just dancing because our body wants to dance, because it feels amazing, because it wants to move. And I feel like um Ginny is the antithesis of what that is, and really just inviting in dance because we enjoy it, because we love it, because it feels good, because it makes us radiate. So welcome, Ginny. I'm super excited to have you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah. So, you know, this idea that dance is our birthright to heal. Um, when did that really come online for you?

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Oh, that's a good question. I like this. When did dance as a birthright come into real awareness in my life? I would say during my cancer treatment. I took it for granted prior to that. When I was young, my parents are immigrants from Taiwan, and dance was a luxury. They didn't have a lot of money to put me in dance classes. My my my goal that was set for me when we immigrated to the States from five, and then I was put right into first grade, was get good grades, become a lawyer or a doctor. And I do remember one brief little mini semester, I convinced my mom to put me in a ballet class, and I loved it. I fell in love with how how I could quiet the voices, and I was only maybe what, nine? I could quiet the voices in my head, always saying I wasn't good enough. I didn't do enough, I felt invisible. And in dance class, it didn't matter who was watching me, I felt seen, I think. And I never really understood the therapeutic benefits of it until let's see, um, I did that one semester ballet, and then my mom was like, Okay, well, that's good. I hope you you liked it because we're not sending you back. That was such an extravagance. And I elected dance in high school, it was one of my options, and I still remember Ruth Levine, my my first real teacher, and I took modern and ballet, and I think she put me on point too soon, didn't matter. I loved her so much. And then college, I got to take some choreography classes and dance exploration. I went to class with Deborah Messing. We were actually in dance class together, and then after graduation, I went to become an occupational therapist and I understood, oh wow, the body is this amazing thing, this amazing entity, and I did not know, it was so complicated. And even back then, we're talking about 1990s, back in, you know, when the dinosaurs were on the earth. I I remember them saying we know very little. All this knowledge that you're learning is so so little about the body, you really don't know. Right. And we've discovered more. There's more research backing the efficacy of dance. You know, it slows down dementia, it helps people with Parkinson's. However, I still remember in in college taking classes, then I couldn't do it because I was going for my master's degree in occupational therapy. And then um I remember when I was working and I actually had income, I would go to Broadway Dance Center in New York City and take classes with dance majors. So dance majors would take the hour and a half hip-hop class that I took that I could barely make it through. They would take that as a warm-up before they went on to the rest of the curriculum. And I remember thinking, wow, I really missed a window because I can't keep up this. It's really hard. And I was in my 20s and I was taking classes with 16 and 17-year-olds, a lot of them from Japan that were over here in exchange. And I still took class here and there. I got pregnant with fraternal twins. So the final thing about dance was I found belly dance, which is um in the US, belly dance itself is this beautiful way for us to find and connect our bodies. It comes with cultures where there's often war, poverty, a lot of strife, and women would use that as a way to release tension. They wouldn't tell you that. It was a way of bonding and bringing community. We found it a way here in the States as a way to self-actualize. Okay, because the movements in the body release trauma. We don't even know that. Now there's science starting to prove that. And one thing that I really loved, I found a practitioner in Portugal who I'm currently in a year-long program called the Neuroscience of Dance. And I love that I'm learning about the science behind it, the research behind it to help people understand how important it really is to move. And then finally, to get back to my first point about dance when during my cancer treatment, um, it was one of the few things that kept me alive. It was, I had 18 months of treatment, and I really could feel my body slowly dying from the treatment. It was horrible. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. I know your audience can hear that and be ready for it, to the point, you know, when I have to go in for checkups or I have to get the shots for the for the osteoporosis I got from the chemo-induced menopause and I would have to go back for checkups, I would get anxiety attacks going into the hospital. You know, I'm really good at masking, so you wouldn't know that I was going through anxiety attacks, but I would have to go and recover after going in for the doctors.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

And what was what was coming up for you then that was causing that anxiety?

SPEAKER_01 8:06

For even in brand new hospitals, so let's be really clear. When we say, Oh, I have anxiety, oftentimes it's been from years of masking and not being allowed to say that you have anxiety or being acknowledging that something is happening in your body. Now, I d done so much work with our complex PTSD therapist that oftentimes it's just this realization, it depends on the layer of anxiety, right? Because sometimes you can get anxiety from your nervous system just being overwhelmed. Right. And everything will set it off. Like literally the way your family member talks to you, because you haven't warned people I'm really sensitive today, right? It is really part of responsibility though, will lie on me. Like our family, we all have anxiety, all four of us. That's what the specialists realize. But we have different ways of it presenting, and it varies. If the world's on fire, which it is, you will be more sensitive.

unknown 9:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

Whether or not you're acknowledging it. And so for me, I'm very careful what I curate my feed to be. You know, I have the monks walking for peace right now, constantly on my feed. I walk I'll watch them and I'll cry because there's something about that that's that gives us permission to feel without being punished for it. Yeah. And then there's, you know, certain political things happening everywhere around the world, including our own country. And you want to be aware and you still want to be very careful if you're prone to anxiety and if it's also married with other corresponding things, like if you've got unresolved trauma in your body, and we're talking about any kind of trauma. If you have overlapping conditions, if you have depression, if you have unresolved tease, big and little throughout from your family or from situations that were completely out of your control, those will trigger anxiety when you're not when you're least expecting it to.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Yes, 100%. And I think that you said that so clearly too, especially in the in the way that each person, whether it's it's presenting itself or manifesting physically or emotionally, um, or you know, even chemically sometimes, right? Um, really depends on each person. And I I love, I love that. And I think that it's really important to recognize even like what type of survival mechanism we have, whether we're the the fight, flight, freeze, or fun, um, you know, what is the mask that we wear when those things do present itself. So when you were going through cancer treatment, and obviously so much is happening through your body. Um, and this is where you started finding dances, is this right?

SPEAKER_01 10:58

I was dancing prior, and then during my breast cancer treatment, I was actually running off to do dance events during my treatment. My my oncologist would be like, where are you off to now? It I never asked them for permission. I would just told them, okay, so after my radiation is done, or or after in the middle of my chemo, because it was 16 cycles every other week, it started end of July and ended end of December. And then during the middle of that, I started another infusion that lasted a year all the way through the next year. And so um it was vital for me to be in the space of dancers. But when you're in a space where people are dancing, there's actually energy being generated in the room. And whether or not you're physically dancing, you can feel it. That's why people watch dances, they can feel the and the dancers alchemizing the space, and it changes you on a frequency level we're not even fully yet aware of. Now, real true good dancers, I know you know this as a dancer, for me anyways, in a performance, a true giving dancer is actually receiving the energy from the audience members, and in their dancing, they're alchemizing it, they're changing it and then giving it back. So there's exchange back and forth between a dancer and their audience members, and also between the dancers themselves, if there's a group of them more than a soloist, right? And I noticed when I was in those spaces, I would be able to almost rejuvenate my will to live. For me, it was vital for me to be in those spaces.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Yeah, I love that. And as I hear you talk about these spaces and the way that you have approached dance, right, from this sort of vital life force versus, you know, so many other ways. And maybe it is um, you know, the belly dancing in general. I always say, like, one of my one of my favorite places to dance is actually where there's no mirror at all. Um, because then there's no comparison, there's no judgment. You're just doing it to literally be somatic and move this. And this was one of the biggest things that I think I look back now at my childhood and you know, growing up with the house being chaotic, the dance studio was my place to move a lot of my energy and and my anxiety didn't really show up until I actually stopped dancing because it didn't have a pathway to alchemize to get out of the body and all of these things. And then hearing you use it in this way of kind of this, I wouldn't say escape from what you're experiencing, but it's a tool, it's support. It's helping you, your body's getting depleted by all this chemo to cancer to kill all those cancer cells. And at the same time, you're refueling it back with this dance and in this way of like just because it feels good versus needing to to make it a performance or any sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

Yes, let's be realistic. Everybody, if you happen to play the radio and you get out of the shower and it's a good song, you're dancing naked after your shower. Let's be honest. There's something you're releasing at this moment, at least if you listen to your intuition, right? And at the very least, you're singing, which a di which is a dance of your vocal cords. We are always moving, whether or not you're physically moving or not. If we go down to our atoms, we are vibrating at a frequency. All the time, if you were really, really to look into science, we're our our perception of boundaries like skin is very rudimentary, right? Because we're all just well, dance is like the joke in our in the communities. I know where we're meatbags flying through space. We're vibrating, right? We're vibrating meatbags flying through space. Our life force requires movement. That's it. When you're still, right? And I went, even when you're sleeping and you think you're resting, there's so many systems happening to recover. Uh, when you're sleeping, especially with anxiety, your brain will will kind of walk get washed over to release the cortisol that's been building in your brain. Right. And if you're having difficulty sleeping, one of the things that I've had to really explore was, you know, do I have sleep apnea, which I did, right? And um do I have a hormone balance, which I did. And when you're having uh difficulties with things like sleep or managing mood, think of it more as a warning signal from your body. The body is not your enemy. The body is the only entity that's been with you from the day you were, from before you were born. Your body itself is is a separate entity because we have brain cells in our heart, brain cells in our gut doing very elaborate, complicated complications, uh communications, excuse me, between them and your brain, right? So because your body's trying so hard to give what your brain, what you think you want, even to its own detriment. I mean, you look at ballet dancers. I mean, who in their right mind wants to be on their tippy toes and then do doing ridiculous stretching and and and um finding tiny um, what is it, being so controlled that you can lift your legs so high up in the air, right? Because your mind's like, oh, this is beautiful. I want to achieve this. And your body goes, oh yeah, let's do it. Oh my gosh, this hurts. Are you sure? Yes, I want that. Okay. Or marathon runners, who in their right mind just goes, Oh, I'm gonna run 26 miles in one day as fast as I can against a bunch of other people. Yeah, not right. Our bodies don't actually go in that direction. Our minds think we want this, our bodies will destroy itself to give you what you want. So if you're getting warning signals like anxiety, because your body keeps core, your body remembers everything, that means some system is overloaded. Right. Body can't manage it. It's asking you, please, you need to step in.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yes, I love that. I love this because I think this is so important because I think that a lot of people that struggle with anxiety, and definitely me, um, let me not project on everyone, but my own situation um was that it was this like monster that was controlling my life, right? But once I was on the other side of my anxiety, I could realize that it was truly just the messenger of everything that had accumulated up to that point in my life that I wasn't dealing with, that I wasn't allowing myself to feel, so many things. And um, yes, I love how you said that. Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Yeah, anxiety is um, it's it's like the canary. It's a canary in the coal mine. And for some people, anxiety is like the third canary. Some people, it's the first canary. So if you're feeling something, something's going on, you know, um, our bodies are very intuitive. You can ask your body questions like, um, is this person safe? And your body will know immediately without you even actually needing to do a background check. I have people who can do that for you, by the way. Who can find every single thing about whether or not this person really is safe? Okay. And you can also just ask your body with a simple apply kinesiology and be like, is this body like a muscle test and be like, is this safe for me? Like, can I drink this mushroom coffee? You know, things like that. Um some people with food allergies even can ask, well, well, can I have this fish in another form? Like my son's very allergic to fish. The answer's always been no, you can't have fish. It doesn't matter if it's baked or fried or stir-fried or like steamed. You just can't have it. Sorry, you know? So it's really important that you see your body has a ally in this. Because your body will help your brain, which sometimes it can be a chemical reaction, right? Of your anxiety, your body can help you process that.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Yeah, absolutely. Love that. So let's talk about a little bit of. So you kind of have formed into this more belly dancing type dance, is what I'm gathering. And with that, you know, I'm thinking, you know, most of our stored survival emotions live within our gut and lower all the way down to, you know, our pelvis, our pelvic floor, all of these things. And so doing belly dancing is really allowing that energy to move and kind of break up and bust up some of those, you know, limiting emotions that are living and survival in that part of our body. So tell me a little bit more about how that's that's maybe even worked for you.

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Yes. Okay, so we're gonna differentiate one thing between learning a fixed amount of movement and improvisation. Okay, so when you're first exploring using dance, if you're not someone who's been trained, or even if you've been someone trained in a westernized idea of what dance is, free yourself from that concept for one second, my wonderful audience of this podcast. And just be aware that your body wants to and intuitively move to anything you hear that you perceive as music, whether you're toe tapping or swinging side to side, right? And in improvisation, the goal would be that you are in some way expressing what you're hearing, whether it's a popular Taylor Swift song, or I have clients that love the sound of waves. Running water to them is music and very therapeutic. And to go back to the theme of birds, bird song is a universal sign of safety, right? When you go through a forest and all the birds are singing, it means the forest is safe. When the birds go silent, everyone's like, okay, predators coming. Like everyone's gotta be careful. You better hide. There's no sounds, right? So be aware of that, then it opens up your awareness. Oh, so when I feel like moving, I should be moving when I hear something and being aware that we have more than the five senses of smell, taste, hearing, feeling, and vision. We have more than that. We have another one. Very few of us are taught, but we know as an intuition in some ways, it's called interoception. It's this feeling of what's happening inside your body in lifetime. So improvisation requires you to strengthen that muscle, that connection with your body. Why is that important? Because belly dancing is an intuitive way of interpreting the music. So there's one side which is the the the I'm gonna drill belly. Rolls. I'm gonna drill drill Mayans or um figure of eights in the horizontal plane um over and under. And I'm gonna practice my shimmy twists where you twist your hips like a washing machine, or you're doing them up and down, or you're doing them when you're traveling, or you're laying a uh undulation of the body up to top, and then you're doing shoulder rolls and then arms, right? So there's that skill level you want to, if you want to study belly dance, that you may want to really, really focus on. And at the same time, you want to be listening to music and taking those broken down steps and weaving them into your own interpretation of the music. Okay, the the countries that the art of belly dance comes from, and it's called so many different things in different countries. I've really focused in the past on the the region of Egypt, and you it's also influenced by like Lebanon and Israel and Iraq and Jordan, right? And if you think about it, they're all on the continent of Africa. So some of those rhythms actually come from the rest of the continent, right? And they are designed to have you, the music, be the heartbeat of the world. There's so many different rhythms that your body will resonate and want to automatically move to. So you may have all the vocabulary, but your body may be like, eh, I don't want to do that. Let's do this instead. And are you listening? Are you listening when that happens? And that's the peak use of using like belly dance, for example. Like I had this amazing uh experience one time with this woman named Aunt Rocky. She has her own book. Her full dance name is Morocco. She's based out in New York City. And we were at a camp where we were outside dancing in a little, like a little pavilion. Cement floor is terrible for your knees and hips. Don't do that. However, we were out in nature and she had us doing hip circles with steps. So you're doing step and then touch, and then step and then touch side to side, but doing little hip circles with it. And she had figured out a way to cut snippets of music so it was just doing the same snippet of music over and over. We did that 20-minute drill, maybe. 10 minutes into it, I started bawling. Uncontrolled, snot running, bawling. I'm embarrassed because I'm Asian. Why would I cry in front of strangers, right? Could not control the bawling. Didn't want to stop the dancing. So I've got eyes just dripping, nose dripping, trying to wipe it off with my arms and sleeves, still doing this hip motion. And I remember how free and light I felt after. Someone's emotionally processing, don't touch them, let them let it out. Just witness and hold the space. Because if I see someone looking at me, I'll feel I'll know they feel bad because they're interrupting my process and I'll stop my emotion coming out. Right? Just be aware of that, folks. And anxiety, you're working with bottled up emotion, you need to release it. That's one. Right. And the second thing is you can do left-hand, right handwriting where you take a dominant hand, write a question like, what was I releasing? What did I need to learn? Then put the pen in your non-dominant hand and let it answer you. That's your body's way of letting you know. Your subconscious stores everything. So you can ask yourself your own questions and get immediate answers that are really reliant. One caveat, okay? At first, your writing may not be legible. Now, if you're bot ambidextrius, that's great. If you're not ambidextrous, like I was a left-handed girl and I was made to be a right-hander. Wow. So it's very ironic, right? So my brain's a little messed up because of that, because you switch right versus left dominant, because opposite parts of your brain control the that part of the body. And when you first write with your non-dominant hand, it may not be legible. Or in the case of my son, who would not do it for two years, he was just being himself. When you did finally do left hand, right hand, his non-dominant hand answered him in poetry.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

That's beautiful. It's amazing, you know, and you know, hypnosis being the foundation of my work and the subconscious just ruling so much of our behaviors, our actions. And also, you know, I think that even as we were talking, you know, anxiety being this messenger of what we need to heal and process, you know, this is the message from the subconscious, also in the same way. And um I always say, like, our conscious mind is from our head up and our subconscious mind is from our head down. That is our body, right? So the conscious mind being the head and the subconscious being the body. And whether it's through writing with our hands or painting or drawing or dancing or whatever it might be, like these are all, you know, they they say writing is idio motor. And I think that as you're talking about and even using going a step further, that writing is one thing to get the subconscious out. But then, like you said, to switch the dominant hand completely, I love that. It takes a whole nother step further of like not forcing the answer to come out, but really letting it come out at will.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

Right. And one thing I I do want to just remind everyone when you're first starting to really speak with your subconscious, you know, remember its only goal is to keep you alive at any cost. That's it. Keep you safe, keep you alive. And your goal is to get it to re understand what that means. That's you. Like present you. I'm 57-year-old Jenny. My my subconscious is still protecting me back from all the traumas. Like when I was born, when I was one month old, when I was four years old, like I'm I'm relating them to events that I know of now as an adult, what I went through as a child, when I was five, right? And when I was seven, and when I was nine, all these things that your subconscious now knows, oh, these type of situations are not safe. So I'm gonna have a blanket black white way to keep you safe. Sometimes that shows up as anxiety. So you want to differentiate again with what are the ways that is manifesting itself in your life? Is it a warning? Is it a misfire? Is it a glitch in the system? Is it just um this environment is just not good for you? Like is a time to goodbye, right? Or is something happening inside your body that your body's screaming at you in some way, trying to get your attention?

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Right. Yeah, and I love that. I love that when you said, um, you know, this is the subconscious, you know, telling you that it's not safe, but also it's not safe from what? You know, as you said, like is it some is it not safe based off something that you experienced when you were four-year-old, four four years old? Because the subconscious is is grown up to the age of eight or nine. And now, like you, you know, we're all 40, 50 year old people having childlike reactions because that child never felt safe in some way. And this is just how we're navigating the world. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Yes. There's so many more uh what they call professionals on the on the internet now, social media saying things that we always knew, at least my family and I, and you know that when we respond a certain way that's not the present US, it's it's a spiral from another part coming out to protect us, right? Because that's what we know. I mean, you know, there was a I don't remember exactly who it was, but I have a face in my in my mind who would be like, you know, if you only thought of it as every single adult is the accumulation of their childhood experiences. And so you're sometimes often not talking to their adult part, you're talking to the accumulation of all their child parts and all the things they experienced as a child and trying to navigate. Because let's remember something, folks. Children have very little power unless you have a parent that knows. Okay. And then most, most parents, every single new child is a new entity. There's no IKEA pamphlet when babies are born. I don't care how experienced a parent you are, every baby that comes into this world is unique and needs their own unique needs met. Right? So it and every even um even every child born in the same family has had different parents because their parents are different people when that child arrives, right? Yes, absolutely. Just remember that, folks. Like it's, you know, um when you were a child, we were at a most powerless. And very few parents know to influence their parenting in a way that we feel more in power.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

So true. Wow, so true. And and I I say all the time, my my daughters, um, my first daughter got the version of me that was still very much in chronic fight or flight. And my second daughter got the version of me that was coming out of it and seeing the world through different eyes. And they are very different children. And to me, it's clear as day, the different mothers that they got. Um, yes, and to also not be hard on yourself when you witness that either.

SPEAKER_01 31:45

Please don't be hard on yourself. And dare I say, dare I say, from someone whose parents were very poor, very, very, very traumatized, as poor, poor people who went to Taiwan, met and thumb in love. They were very first non-arranged marriages on both sides of their family. You know, the goal for healing is to also forgive the people that hurt you. You don't have to have a relationship with them when you don't forgive them and ultimately yourself, that will also add to your anxiety. There's a part of that where it becomes a poison in you. It becomes a prison in you for you. So release yourself in some way in that. You know, every parent does the best they can. And the goal is for you to release them and release yourself in that forgiveness process.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

Yes. Yeah, I love that. So I'm having a question come up um this weekend. Um me and my girls were uh watching a Harry Potter marathon yesterday as we were all cuddled up and warm inside. And there was um a place in one of the movies where there the kids are having a um, there's a ball that's happening, and one of the professors is wanting to show them how to dance because they need to be able to show up to this ball and dance. And you immediately see the hesitation happen of like boys on one side, girls on the other, and we have to come together and like ballroom dance, waltz, or something in some way. And so what do you think that that is, right? We we see that in a lot of kids, I think, where like there's there's the the really young kids who like you put on music and they don't care. They just start dancing, right? And then maybe it's yes, in that sort of teenage um era or season where we don't we we're figuring out who we are and we don't quite know. And it's like now we have this like almost anxiety of like, can I get up and dance? Or am I gonna be judged? Or all of these things. And it's like, what do you think happens to where we really lose this ability to just dance freely as we were as children, versus the maybe constant outer awareness of people watching us or and just really moving back into that freeness of of just the body wanting to move?

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Excellent question. Harry Potter is an amazing series. And let's remember, in the context of the Harry Potter movie, a lot of the kids were all misfits, and they were then able to find their own community inside the the wizard world, at least for Harry Potter, right? Right. So a lot of these kids, whether or not they had like human parents or muggle parents, they understood that they had to mask their natural abilities if they had matched, if they were outside of the magic realm, right? Because I remember a lot of that context. If you take away from that though, and just understand also being in your teenage years back then, whether or not you had supportive parents, you were having raging hormones throughout your body and shifting and changing in in a way that you felt like you were an alien. Why would you want anyone in your personal space, first of all? Like, come on now. I still remember my daughter when she was taking, when she was in a competition dance program, and she'd be like, Mom, why do I want that boy to look at me? It's so gross. Like, why do I even want him to look at me? Like, I'm I'm friends with him. And I was like, it's chemicals, babe. She's like, Oh, thank God. I was like, it's because it's your hormones. He has pheromones, you have pheromones, and you're just reacting to each other. I don't know if you really truly like him, you barely know him. She's like, I know, mom. Like, I never like, ooh, gross, you know. She was like 11 or 10. Like, my kids are homeschooled. So they didn't understand about the rules of the opposite sex. They didn't understand about how people have boyfriend, girlfriend. Even I don't think kids should even understand that. I mean, honestly, you're too young. Your brain's barely developed. You can be good friends. There's no point in dating, sorry. Until your brain's mature enough to understand where you start, where you begin, so that you're not meshed with someone else. That's important. That's, you know, Jenny being very judgmental about that because as I've learned more about how a person starts to mature and how their brain develops, right? Children left on their own, they have a tendency to go towards the Lord of the Flies. They come up with these arbitrary rules that everyone has to follow. And the goal of being an adult is saying, oh, there are no rules, other than keep yourself safe in a way that makes sense and be good to one another. Okay. At least that's how I raise my kids. When any adult starts to learn, it's actually a different pathway than children. So if you're an adult going, oh, I want to dance, but come on, like I can't hold a rhythm. No one asked you to. There's no universal way to dance. When we first started and you introduced me with my belief that everyone has their birthright, somewhere along the line, we we internalize this message that may or may not be mean meant for you. That, oh, I don't have a right to dance because I can't hold a frame, or my feet don't point the right way, or I don't have a turnout, or I don't look a certain way, or my body type is not the right shape. I don't have a right to dance. You have the right to dance. You were born with it. When you were a little baby and someone put on music, you naturally move to it. Now, as an adult, you want to be aware that we have this self, self-established critic that won't allow you to dance because of that old frame. You know, I have an outside in approach. If your body doesn't feel safe, there's very little I can do with the subconscious. Or the person would just bounce back to something new. Um, some sorry, some back from something new, they'll always go back to what they know. Right. Right? So you're yes, this it is what it is. This is the human nature. So the goal is through little small tiny pivots, if you dance every day, you will start to unlock an intuition you didn't know was waiting for you to tune into. And the goal is if you move every day, whatever it is too, because right now I'm doing a daily challenge on Instagram. We'll do daily moves where you pick five random songs and you just rotate through each each day. Like every five days, you get a new prompt. Okay. And I give the prompt so you don't have to think about that. But you do pick your own five songs. And if you have a song, like you can on a playlist, you can just randomly pick five songs. You rotate through the five same five songs for every prompt. The goal is to get used to seeing yourself dance and giving yourself care bear stare. I look good today. It does not matter if you have makeup on. Now, if you don't have clothing on, you may not want to post that, okay? Caveat. However, the goal is to embrace and see yourself how you would give other, like a little three-year-old attention. We're not giving a three-year-old technique. We're like, oh my god, they're so cute. Look at the cute little movie. That's how you're supposed to see yourself. And you know, as an adult, if you're doing freestyle movement and I give you a prompt, it's freestyle, and then the next prompt is, oh, you're gonna dance with your feet planted. So then you learn to explore movements that don't hurt in your body with your feet planted. And then you go back and look at that video. Yes, you do. You do a pre, how do I feel before you do the whole exercise? And then a post, how do you feel immediately after you move? It's always better, by the way. The problem's just still there, but it's always you feel better because you've been moving. Yes. And then you look at the video, ah, you look at the video and you pick out three things that you like about what you did, and one thing that you would do different. Speak to yourself the way you would speak to a two-year-old. We never tell a two-year-old that's bad. We tell two-year-old, oh, let's try this instead. Yeah. Right? It's this is a lifetime exercise, though, y'all. Like I've done four or five of these hundred days of dance where you go through 20 prompts, five random songs. I started that during my cancer treatment when I looked my worst, was my weakest. And that's when I started getting standing ovations when I was performing. Across the board because I was so connected with giving myself care about every single day. And my body reveled in it.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

Right. Well, and it's it's the belief system that you're creating about yourself that feels really good, right? And you're associating the this thing of, you know, even if, even if in the beginning you can't admit that you like what you see or or or whatever it is, you know, just associating the fact, I love that you shared it, just like write something down or or share something that after, because you know it's it's literally instant evidence almost that this is changing you. And then the more that you do that with this belief system of whether you started off believing it or not, doing this care bear stare, you're gonna end up believing it. And then that energy is what is people making, you know, them have the supplaws for you because they believe that you believe in yourself because it's it's apparent, it's obvious. And I think that's what makes people so radiant is is the belief within themselves versus what they think they need to project to the world.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

Yes. Yes. When you start to be very connected, mind and body, I found that I become a very strong, clear conduit. So for whenever I perform, and I've done workshops on this because people want to know, like, well, what do you focus on when you do your your story pieces? And I'm like, well, I make myself as clear a channel as possible. And, you know, in in the coaching world, the goal is to for me, and you know, my son is a ballet major from the University of Utah. So he he he got a ballet degree. And when he first started school, he's like, Mom, I'm so behind. And I was like, No, you're not, Danny. Like, seriously. He's like, but I can't do like the tours yet, which is you know, the jumps up in the for the audience members, it's the jump up in the the men do, they jump up in the air and they turn to a full 360 and then and and then they land, right? Or they'll do like two times around in the air before they land. And he's like, I'm really struggling with that. I'm like, and so what? Like you st you you were walk off the street immediate acceptance when you took one ballet class. They saw the potential in you. No one can bring the audience ears like you. Like you, he can channel so quickly emotional reactions from the audience when he moves. And he'd be like, but I'm not doing this jump in this turn and did it. I'm like, and a completely technically perfect dancer. Oftentimes the audience can be reveling in their technique, but they don't feel anything. They don't feel a connection with the dancer. Right. There, there's no emotion emoted. Do you want to be that type of dancer? He's like, no. I was like, all right then. So understand while you're gaining these skills for you, why are you on that stage? You're there for the audience member. The goal for me in my pieces is to at least help one person watching feel less alone. I want at least one person to go, oh, she understands how I feel.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Yeah, that's such a big piece. And I even luckily, the studio that I grew up dancing at, we definitely had technique and we could be technical, but that I wouldn't say that that was our strong suit. It was in the performance aspect of, like you said, like we could watch somebody do 15 pirouettes and be in awe of that. But, you know, if that's all they're giving us, it's not that exciting to watch, you know, and it's not. It is again like here, it's like let me just show you my performance versus being connected to the emotions, the energy, right? Emotions being energy and motion through the body and everybody getting to feel and experience that. And it sounds like your son's very lucky, he has a really amazing mom to remind him of that and to keep pushing that forward.

SPEAKER_01 44:24

Well, I'm I'm very blessed that they picked me before they were born. That's how I really believe, right? And and and I do my very best to be deserving of being their mom in this lifetime because, you know, when someone likes to come to this earth, it's not an easy task, y'all. Like it's very hard to be alive. And uh the very least I can do as a person picked to guide them is do the best I can to make sure that they, you know, they they're getting the the clearest pathway. And like I I can only be a mom for them and the mom that I need it for me. So part of the anxiety portion of it that calms me down is if I realize when I'm having any symptoms, I'll always ask, like, what part of me is set off right now because present me rarely gets stressed about anything because I've done so much internal work. And in spite of that, if something stresses me out, I'm like, okay, who's set off now? And it's usually the um the four-year-old that was left with really, really poor grandparents in a rural part of Taiwan. And kind of she felt abandoned if, you know, by a father who was in the States and a mom who had to work in northern Taiwan. Like it was very stressful for me. Because I went from full modern times to dirt floors, no plumbing, no electricity. And if I know that that's the part that's reacting to the situation, I can calm her down, get her to do where she needs to go. Because you do exercises to get parts of you that are unhealed to be in safe spaces. So then the present you who has all the tools you need can calm the situation down and ascertain whether or not, oh, is this really relevant to me? Because oftentimes, especially if as you start to move folks, you will start to feel other people's feelings. And a lot of times, people who have anxiety, we're empaths for safety all our lives. So you'll feel the room before anyone else. You'll know when something's about to erupt. And then part of your healing is to be like, oh, this got nothing to do with me. You put up your protection and you exit if you can, or you mitigate how to keep yourself safe.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

You have permission to do that. Everyone, you have permission to do that. You need to give yourself permission to do that. That's vital for your recovery and safety.

SPEAKER_00 46:37

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:38

And help.

SPEAKER_00 46:39

Yes. So one of the things I love to tell my clients and I share on this show all the time is that, you know, to get these chemical emotions out of the body of anxiety that are usually adrenaline and cortisol and things of that nature, that the anxiety is just pumping, right? And sometimes if we're in a panic attack, it just keeps going and keeps going because we keep looping. And um, I always say it takes about max 120 seconds to actually get these chemical emotions out of your body. And, you know, I always really teach with um different, different tools, but a lot of it is usually breath. But as you're talking about your daily challenge, I'm like, well, wouldn't it be fun to just challenge yourself to put on your favorite song and dance for 120 seconds to let those chemical emotions get out of your body?

SPEAKER_01 47:28

Absolutely. I love that. Do that, do that, do that. And and in addition to that, because um for me, dance became an escape after my cancer treatment. I'm being very honest because our it's really important. People know that it's full disclosure, right? We can get addicted, or at least I did. I got addicted to the release without processing it. Okay, so dancing to release your emotions, super important. And then just add another component, maybe the dominant, non-dominant handwriting, maybe um a verbal message, like on a voice note to yourself. What did I feel? What came through my head when I was dancing? Did I get any downloads? Because that's part of the healthy way of working through the emotion or why that trigger is still getting to you, or what led to the panic attack. Right. The goal, right, is to empower people so that you feel like, oh, I got this, or I can I can handle this, or this life is not for me. I need to shift in in a better direction. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 48:36

Yeah. Love that so much. Amazing. Okay. We I'm sure we could keep going on and on and on. Um if you had, Jenny, a megaphone in every household in the world, what would you want to say to everyone?

SPEAKER_01 48:57

I would say to everyone, if I could reach all of you out there, and we're getting there, we're getting close, you know. Are you doing your self-care in a present way? How much time, especially the parental units in there, because the kids will just absorb through your parents. How much self-care are you doing for yourself so you can stay present? Because if you're not doing that, you're gonna miss important things that you need to be paying attention to. Do your self-care, okay? That includes the areas of sleep, hydration, food, play. Those four things really important.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

They are. I love that. And yes, I think more parents need to hear that. So it makes me even just take a breath. You know, I have my own moments that I need to be present and take a step back, and I think we all do. So I'm so grateful we got to share all of your wisdom, all of your radiance on our show today. Um, how can anyone get a hold of you? I'll add it in the show notes too, but just what's the bless best place to catch you?

SPEAKER_01 50:14

Thank you so much for this. Um, anyone can get in touch with me through social media under Jenny C Cohen C O H E N. And you're welcome on LinkedIn and Facebook to join me for the daily challenge. And I'm having map master classes every month under Move M-O-V-E to T-O-Bloom B-L-O-O-M.com. So once you click on that, it's subsidized by a 501c um nonprofit so that the tickets are free unless you upgrade. Even the upgrade tickets are free. Just join me every month at move tobloom.com.

SPEAKER_00 50:48

Love that. Amazing. Well, I'm so grateful you were here. And I, if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them in the show notes and share this with a friend who you know would love it so we can continue just spreading love and dance and movement into the world so that we can heal. Thank you, and yeah, we'll see you guys next episode. Thanks for joining in. If this episode felt like it was speaking directly to you, share it with another woman who might need to hear this too. And please leave a rating and a review. This helps boost the podcast so women just like you can find it and find real-time support. Stay tuned for more episodes of stories and real time. Because you're more than just the identity of a woman. And when you begin to heal your life, not just changing your life.