Grief as a Portal: Movement, Identity, & Coming Back to Yourself with Helen Phelan

What if the grief you've been carrying in your head could only be released through your body?

What if the relationship that collapsed was actually the thing that brought you back to yourself?

What if reinvention isn't something you plan, but something your body leads you toward when you finally stop running from the pain?

In this episode I'm joined by Helen Phelan, founder of Helen Phelan Studio. Helen and I went to college together, but ended up on opposite sides of the country. What started as following her movement work on Instagram turned into watching someone navigate divorce, identity collapse, and a full creative and professional reinvention in real time, and sharing all of it with radical honesty and so much realness.

This conversation goes deep on what happens when your whole sense of self was wrapped up in a relationship, and what it takes to find your way back to who you actually are.

In this episode:

• How disordered eating and a dance career shaped Helen's relationship to her body and eventually led to her intuitive movement framework
• What intuitive exercise actually means and why pleasure is a more sustainable motivator than punishment
• Movement as a creative practice and pathway to flow state
• The identity collapse that followed the end of her marriage and what the rock bottom period actually looked like
• Why her female friendships saved her and what that taught her about where she'd been placing her sense of worth
• The role of somatic release, EMDR, and daily improv in processing grief that words couldn't reach
• The difference between circling around grief intellectually and actually releasing it from your body

Key takeaways:

• Grief that stays in the head doesn't fully process. The body has to be part of it
• The relationship ending wasn't the loss - staying would have meant continuing to lose herself
• How female friendships are just as, if not more important, than romantic love
• Movement doesn't have to be punishment. The more pleasurable you make it, the more consistent you'll be

Reflection question from this episode: Where in your life have you been trying to think your way through something your body is actually asking you to feel?

Where to find Helen:
helenphelanstudio.com
Instagram: @helenvphelan
Substack: Well Hell by Helen Phelan Studio

Free Friday Pilates Zoom class: available to Helen Phelan Studio members and Substack subscribers, Fridays at 12pm ET

Connect with Lindsey
www.lindseybournecoaching.com

Waitlist for my mini-course, How to Actually Move Through the Power Struggle https://forms.gle/PifhFf8DxwFSvAv28

If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe and/or leave a review to help the podcast reach more listeners! <3

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Relational Alchemy, a podcast exploring how the patterns we live out in love, relationships, and everyday life hold the key to our deepest healing. I'm Lindsay Bourne, a relationship and couples coach, and my hope is that each episode offers you insight, perspective, and a grounded sense of direction for the shifts you're ready to make in your own life and relationships. Shifts that move you out of fear or survival and into greater expansion, connection, and possibility. This is a space for learning how our most tender pain can be alchemized into our greatest source of growth and transformation. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Relational Alchemy. Today I am so excited to be joined by Helen Phelan. Helen has been teaching movement in New York City for 14 years and is the founder of women's health magazine Fit Tech Award-winning online Pilates platform, Helen Feelon Studio. Helen Feelon Studio classes are a blend of contemporary Pilates, functional fitness, breath work, and fascial and somatic release to help you shift your state, drop into your body, and feel like yourself, just way stronger and bolder. So Helen and I actually went to college together in North Carolina, which is how we originally know each other. And we weren't really in touch much after college. You were a year or two younger than me. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, Instagram just really started pushing your content to me. And originally it was around your movement work, movement as creative practice and dance, nervous system work. But then it started sharing more about your story, your journey through heartbreak and grief, and just identity work and being an entrepreneur and being a content creator. And there are just so many overlaps between some of our journeys and just areas of expertise. And so I'm so excited to share more about your story and the work that you do in the world. It's been really, really beautiful and inspiring to watch you grow and come up in the way that you have and navigate so much and then share it with the world and be supporting so many other women through movement and identity work. So welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Thank you. I'm gonna cry right off the bat.

unknown 2:09

Thank you for saying all that.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Yes, I'd love to just start with your story around Helen Feeling's studio, how you went from dancer to owner of the studio and just all that your studio has to offer, the services and what you're bringing to the world through this studio.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

I think it actually starts a little bit before I opened or started my own business. I, you know, I studied dance in college and I did dance professionally briefly when I moved to New York, but I was also dealing with a lot of disordered eating stuff at the same time. And I fractured my foot in three places and it took forever, forever, forever to heal because I was not fueling my body enough to for my body to recover. So there was kind of this shift moment where I sort of fell out of love with the dance industry. And at the same time, I was doing my apparatus certification. And I was like, okay, I get a lot of what dance gives me from this work, and it's a little bit kinder on my body. There's certainly still heavy orthorexia and body image underlying messaging situation happening in the fitness industry, but at the time it was a necessary break that I took and a little detour since I've been dancing since I was three. And then the opening of my business was really two things happened that were sort of the universe kicking me in the gut. I left working full-time at a studio after a falling out with a studio owner, and we've since made our piece together, but it became a contentious place for me to work. So I left very suddenly and took some of my private clients with me. And so that's how I started my private training business. And I had already been making content for a little bit at that point, but just for my like five followers. And then over the pandemic, obviously a lot of movement teachers had to go online. And I really jumped on it without thinking so hard in a way that I probably would have second-guessed myself way more if it weren't an emergency situation. And in fact, I had started recording content in November of 2019 with the intention of putting it on YouTube or doing something online and then totally chickened out and deleted everything. So I had to start from scratch in March 2020, which was so frustrating. But it was definitely at that time, I was not going to take the big step and take a risk on my own if the universe wasn't like these are situations that you absolutely have to do this. And I sort of operated on that adrenaline for a really long time.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

Wow. Okay. So what yeah, then what happened post-2019?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Post-2019, as I got further into my disordered eating recovery, I felt like I had to figure out a way to negotiate with fitness and the wellness industry in general that was not going to A, make me feel really gross about regurgitating some of the verbiage that had been said to me and continue to be a safe place for me. And I read the book, Intuitive Eating, when I did my Institute of Integrative Health, Nutrition, Health Coach certification. And I got really into obsessed with this intuitive eating framework. And so I started developing what I call intuitive exercise, taking the 10 principles of intuitive eating and sort of transferring it into a movement context and started talking about that a little bit online. And I feel like that is really what started to make the shift about getting a little more attention on the internet because as much as I'm in my little bubble now where I feel like I teach with a lot of like-minded people, my community in Brooklyn is very like-minded. Sometimes I'll go to a new place to try out a class and I'll be like, oh, we're still like in the 90s in terms of diet culture talk in this area. So it is still kind of not a very mainstream approach.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Do you want to share a little bit about what specific principles resonated from intuitive eating that you were able to apply to intuitive movement? Totally.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

I have an article that I wrote on my Substack called The 10 Principles of Intuitive Exercise. I can take you through the quick bullet points first. The first principle is aim to take up more space, not less. The second principle is work with your energy, not against it. Three is give yourself permission to half-ass it. Four is neutralize your wellness toolkit. Five is more pleasure equals more progress. Six is listen to what your body is telling you. Seven is be generous with yourself. Eight is there is no other body like yours. Nine, move and speak with integrity. And ten, it's just not that serious at the end of the day. So I do go into a lot more detail on each of these ideas over on the subtock, if anyone is curious. But the basic, I would say, TLDR of it is that wellness is supposed to improve your life, not become your whole life. And if exercise or food, either of the two become things that cause you stress instead of improving your health, then it's no longer a healthy relationship, even if you are technically eating the best food and doing the optimized workouts or blah, blah, blah. So it's really, there's much more of an energetic component to it for me. And, you know, I'm a human. It's I'm live as a woman in this world. So there's always body stuff that comes up, especially putting myself in tight clothing on the internet. Like it is always going to be a conversation that I have to have with myself. And I feel like now I've just developed way more tools to avoid the spiral, whereas in the past it would have taken me out.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah, I love how you talk about exercise as a devotional practice. And you had that article recently around eroticizing exercise. So do you want to talk about infusing life's force, arrows energy into exercise and what that can do for practice?

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Uh, I think a lot of us are told through the media or growing up, sports, dance, whatever it is, the exercise is punishment, or it has to be this laborious thing to be effective. And that there's also this sort of puritanical like valor involved in suffering. So that's a greater conversation in and of itself, I'm sure. And then add that to just how women are socialized as well. There's just many layers to that. But in my experience, it's always been the more pleasant and pleasurable of an experience you make movement, the more likely you are to want to do it, especially because, you know, Pilates is hard. Exercise is hard. There's no getting around the fact that it's an effortful situation and you kind of have to dig into being uncomfortable. But what are some other ways that we can make an uncomfortable situation less miserable? We can talk to ourselves in a better way. We can start to direct the inner monologue. We can create an environment that feels a little bit more luxurious, whether that's lighting a candle in your living room or, you know, investing in a studio membership that you just really enjoy being at, wearing clothes that make you feel really good, that doesn't necessarily have to be an expensive matching set, but just something that you're not picking at your waistband and feeling like you can't breathe in or you can't move freely. And just trying to pinpoint some of these sort of external factors that layered on can make exercise more of a boot campy unenjoyable experience. Yeah. And then the other thing I think, which is maybe more of a leap, more of a challenge for people, and probably a challenge for myself as well, is this idea of it being like something you do in an almost romantic way for your body, caring for your body, wanting to nourish it and fuel it and keep it safe versus making exercise just a transactional experience around calories in, calories out, instead of thinking, what is the exercise going to change so that afterwards I feel this way? I always know I'm a little more relaxed, I'm a little less anxious, I my mind is clearer. If I can prioritize that in my mind, the end state versus just maybe aesthetic changes, which is a valid reason, especially when you are socialized as a woman in this world. A lot of us have things that we want to change about our bodies. And I don't think that it's worthwhile shaming people for that. But I do think it is important to note that that's a really short-term motivation that we often burn out on. And that's why people get in these sort of diet cycles. But if you can find the intrinsic motivation that is connected to really enjoying how movement makes you feel that you're gonna have a way more consistent practice.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

Yeah, I love that. So, do you want to talk a little bit about movement as a creative practice for you? We talked a little bit about movement as your fitness journey with it, but maybe more as creative practice for you.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

Well, I think that one of the most underrated things about fitness, movement in general, it is that it's like such a clear pathway to getting into flow state. You know, people often talk about like getting their best ideas on a run or in the middle of a class. And I think a lot of that is to do is you're diverting brain energy away from overthinking and second-guessing yourself when you are involved in these motor activities. And also doing repetitive movement gets your body in a sense of flow state. There's a really good book called The Joy of Movement, which is great by I think she's a neuroscientist, but she goes into a lot of this and the concepts of mirror neurons and how group fitness specifically gets you feeling like you're moving as an entity that's larger than yourself. So all these things together, even if you are working out at home alone, will allow you to get out of your own way, I think. And I think as a dancer, it's a double experience for me because I experience the world really kinesthetically since I started dancing at such a young age. I don't really have memories before dance. And it's always been a way that I've processed things. So even if it's not a dance class, even if it's a Pilates class or even a cycling class, something that's completely unrelated, I don't really feel like I have clarity where I am myself unless I can get into my body. And exercise has been a really safe space for me, I think, and for a lot of people to practice dropping into their body, which I mean, you probably have more experience with this in your coaching work, but that doesn't always feel safe for people to get into their bodies. So having an activity and being focused on breath and alignment and what the movement itself is allows people time to slow down, which is why Pilates is the thing for me, but it's exercise in general.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Yeah, absolutely. I love the idea of what you said about when we're in our heads, we're just so fragmented. We're in all of our parts, you know, our anxious part, our worried part, just all these parts. And when we can come back to our body, it's where our innate wholeness is and it's where you can really, like you said, tap into that flow state and that creativity. But it's also, you know, not safe for everyone if they have all this unprocessed trauma or emotion in their bodies. But it's yeah, I can definitely relate to it as both a musician and also a practitioner is like when I notice myself and my coaching work just being like, what should I say? Did that land? Like it's just when I get up there, it's I am not doing my best work. But whenever I'm up there and I just take a breath and come back to my body, I intuitively know how to work with the person in front of me and where to take the questions and how to be empathetic. It's just such a difference of flow state. But I think it's there's so many different professions that you can really apply this to.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

There's also this element of ritual, I think, that has to do with the eroticizing conversation and the flow state conversation and why a daily movement practice or a daily breath practice, something that is consistent and something that is part of your routine, is part of what makes the pathway into finding flow state a little more natural because you it is in your muscle memory. You know how to access it quicker and quicker each time.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

So I'd love to dive into a little bit more of your story and this idea that you shared with me and you shared in your content and other places as well, is this idea of identity and reinvention through grief and heartbreak. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what your journey around that has been.

SPEAKER_00 14:16

Yeah. Um, you know, I met my ex-husband when I was very, very young. I met him when I was 23, and my brain fully developed over the course of that time, but it overlapped with this time where I stepped away from dance. And so much of my identity became wrapped up in being his girlfriend or fiance or wife. And I dove into that voluntarily head first. That was something that I chose, and I didn't really see the issue with it until it ended. And then I was like, fuck. Sorry, can I hear it on your content? I was like, okay, well, now my whole world feels like it's collapsed, not just in the scary financial way and rebuilding after, you know, intertwining your life with someone way, but in a who really am I and what is my community, and what is gonna make me feel whole enough on my own before I am in a partnership again, so that I don't end up in this same dynamic. Hopefully, hopefully never find that type of love again. But it was again one of those things where I feel like the universe really had its own idea of timing, and the relationship is probably over a while before it ended, and I am a very stubborn, committed person. So if it didn't blow up in such a fantastical way, I wouldn't have ever ended it, and I would have stayed stuck in this much smaller sort of shell version of myself, and it was incredibly painful, obviously. But the last two years have been, I feel like like one of those, like an infant growing through all these life stages at warp speed. It's just been a really expansive time, and obviously we're always in the process of becoming, but I feel like I've had enough time and space now to really come back to my identity as a creative. I got back into dancing, which helped a lot, but I also started thinking about my work in a more creative way. I feel like the way that I post and show up on the internet is very different even in the last year than it has been in the past. And also taking my writing more seriously on Substack and identifying as a writer, which I was always a little afraid to call myself before.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

So yeah, that's the overview of your writing on Substack. It's really great. Thank you. I didn't know you identified as a writer. I mean, it makes sense now, obviously, to see your writing, but I didn't know that about you before. Talk just a little bit about what it shifted or alchemized in you. It sounds like a big coming back to yourself, to your life force, to what was important to you, to what you wanted to create in your life. But like what, how did you use that experience of the ending of the relationship to really come back to yourself? Because, you know, I feel like there's so many different ways that breakup could go. It could really help us hold up a mirror to all the ways that we've self-abandoned and shrunk and, you know, played out all of our wounding and limiting beliefs, or we can stay really stuck in that place and just feel victim-y. So I'm just curious what allowed you to really use it as an amazing transformation moment.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

I think it was like pure desperation, honestly. I definitely wallowed for probably two or three months of just absolute rock bottom. And then I got to a point where, and everyone I think has their own process with this. I got to a point where it's like, I've I can't feel like this anymore. And I wanted to get out of the house. So I just took myself to a dance class every single day. And I am very fortunate that one of my best friends in the city owns a dance studio. So she was like, I put classes on your account, you don't really have a choice, you're coming to class. And my community really, oh, the women in my life saved me. So I feel very grateful that even though I did isolate myself down into this relationship, I still had enough of a foundation laid of a community that I felt like I really had people to rely on. And I think that is maybe the biggest lesson of this whole thing is to think of my female friendships as just as, if not more important than romantic love. Whereas that's just not how I was brought up to think about partnership.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Yeah. So I'm curious, my work is so much about relationship patterns. I'm helping people take maybe a relationship that didn't work out or a relationship they're in where they feel super anxious or super avoidant, or any number of things. And I really help them trace that back to attachment wounding, to nervous system work, to limiting beliefs, insecurities, fear, shame, all of that. I always believe that we attract partners that help us face these parts of us that we haven't faced before. They help us heal parts of us that are wanting to be healed and liberated in us, you know, and it's not to blame or shame yourself. How did I end up in this, you know, maybe it's sometimes an abusive relationship or a really unhealthy dynamic, just as a way to create meaning and context for why did this relationship come into my life? Why did I ignore the red flags? Why did I shrink so much? Why did I self-abandon so much? But then the breakup process often becomes a beautiful way to alchemize those parts and those beliefs and all those things. So I'm curious what your journey of that was around connecting dots, or just it was it a pattern for you? Was it a part of you that just needed to be tended to?

SPEAKER_00 19:36

I think for me, it was a lot of shocking revelations about the dynamic all at once. I had had my blinders on because I had a specific idea of how I wanted the relationship to be. And I was not open to seeing what the reality of the situation was. So as I was forced to dig into some of the details, yes, I identified a million ways that I abandoned myself in order to keep the peace or create closeness. And that was really confronting because I never considered myself as like a people pleaser or a fauner. I have a big outgoing extroverted personality. And in my mind, I was like, okay, these people who end up in um narcissistic abuse situations are timid doormats. And the more I learned about it and the more I worked, you know, with my therapist and read 800 books about it, the more I realized that, you know, often people get in these dynamics because they do have a bright light and there's something in another person that is sort of drowning and pulling that person down, and then it ends up neither person is their best selves in the dynamic. So I've I felt a lot of shame around that, and that was probably the harder thing to deal with than I mean, I was heartbroken that this person I thought I would spend my life with was not the person that I thought he was, but I was even more embarrassed that I allowed myself to be treated in certain ways. So that was probably the longest running thing that I've been working on, and certainly uncovered some anxious attachment and yeah, need to make people happy around me. And I think a lot of that is very also entrenched in my dance training and that I was taught from a very young age that there's always more I can do to be better. I'm literally performing for accolade and accolades, and there's also a lot of beautiful things about growing up in the dance world. So that's not to say that it was entirely toxic, but as a grown up now, I can definitely see that there was so much of my Spongy little brain that was taking that and using it to see the world and see my partnerships.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

So a lot of identity around performing for people. Yeah. Yeah. What about the not enough stuff? Because the shame, not enough are like so hand in hand for me. But I'm curious, yeah, like how you've worked with the shame of just this experience and if that was also a part of your relationship dynamic as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Yeah, the not enough stuff certainly very, very present. And I think that, yeah, goes hand in hand with the idea of auditioning and rejection. And it was a lot of, I think, relying on my community to help me identify what was gaslighting and what was fact in the relationship, as much as anything could be fact. You know, there's so much perception of each person involved in any dynamic. But I was so much more likely to take responsibility for things because that gave me a sense of control. And I wanted to make everything good because I know how to do that. And that made me feel more secure. And if the other person wasn't meeting me there, then at least I could take control of the situation. So I think it turned into a lot of overfunctioning. And I had to step back and get really clear on where someone, even in dynamics that I've had since my marriage, where there have been issues with capacity of another person to meet the need that I would like and my own role in creating those dynamics as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:33

What did your somatic work help you release and alchemize? And you, you said how much about the shame, but I'm just curious. Yeah, that I mean, so much of that lives in your body, I'm sure. What was that like to really parse out and release?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Um, lots of lots of crying. I feel like every time I danced for six months, I cried at some point in class, which, you know, I've always been an easy crier, but I think being in such a raw state allowed me to just release the self-consciousness about being seen as emotional. And it was such a an egregious situation where I let myself let it all hang out, whereas in the past I would have pretended that I was okay. So there was a lot of like the only word I can really think of is grief and anger about feeling like I deserved things that I didn't get, and the anger at myself for letting myself be in that situation.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

And how did you process the anger?

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Um, it's ongoing. Yeah, I find anger much harder to access than sadness. And I think that that is deeply related to the performing aspect of things. But yeah, I'm doing MDR. I I do breath work and meditation daily. I try to do my daily improv, which is I'll put on one song and just kind of move. Usually it ends up being like three to four songs because once you start, then all of a sudden you're in it. And everyone, I'm sure, has a different relationship with that. But for me, it feels much more expressive of things that I don't necessarily feel articulate enough to verbalize or aware enough to verbalize. So moving my body through it is a really effective way for me to represent what's going on in my heart and my mind. That makes sense. Yeah. And there's the whole science behind completing the stress response cycle and getting yourself out of that frozen, gripping, shallow breathing state. And I, you know, I talk about that in my Pilates classes as well, that there's a big element of fake it till you make it. When you think about what a strong, confident person looks like, how they carry themselves. They're not curling into this shy little shrimp position. Their shoulders are relaxed and open and they're taking up space and they're breathing normally. So I do talk about that even in my Pilates classes about how can we move to embody what you're trying to feel, even if you don't necessarily feel that yet? And then when it comes to an improv practice, maybe I'll spend more time letting my body or a student's body feel the thing that they're already feeling. And then we talk about how do we want to move to feel a different way, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Did you uncover a lot of memories through your somatic work? Because that's a big way that I work with people is letting the body and the subconscious speak to us through imagery, symbolism, sensation. Curious what that looked like for you.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Absolutely, a ton of memories. And the other big thing was pelvic floor tension. I had been working with a pelvic floor physical therapist for a really long time. Sex had been really painful, and that vanished one day to the next. It was like my body was literally like, get this person away from you. And then it once I had space to pay attention and listen to that, it was like night and day, which was a very wild experience because it had been probably three years of dealing with insane cramps, really painful sex, and a lot of stress connected to my sensuality and femininity, and then of course how that bled into the relationship. And then a lot of memories about things that happened within our dynamic that I had rewritten in my brain in order to be comfortable with it. And as I was faced with a lot of evidence about the situation not being what had presented to me, been presented to me at the time, there was no way for my brain to make up a story about it because it was just cold hard fact that I had, coupled with the movement practice. And yeah, that was also a fun time. I did also, I don't know if you ever talk about this with your clients, I also did a uh buffo ceremony. What's that? Um, it's toad venom. So it's like a similar-ish experience to ayahuasca. It's the venom from a toad in Mexico, and but it's only 30 minutes long. And that I had had a friend who had done it, and she was like, I just felt like pure joy and connection to the universe. And I did it and I sobbed and coughed and threw up the entire time. And I kept hearing a voice being like, get the grief out of your body. And it felt like I was like pulling the grief out of my body in a really physical way. So that was a really, I feel like a Kickstarter experience. Not an everyday thing for sure, but very valuable.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Yeah. Something I've been thinking about a lot with clients and experiencing is this idea of the difference between just feeling grief and just kind of circling around it and actually like releasing it from your body. And I'm curious how you think of the difference because I feel like there's a pretty big difference.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Totally. I'm I'm certainly prone to intellectualizing as well. And I think that comes from just being an empathetic person. People, it's a natural response where people want to try and understand the situation and then see if there's any way for them to change it. Or at least that's how the control aspect shows up for me there. So something that I do pretty regularly. I am I have a cancer. So, like I said, I do I do cry easily. Um, but I read somewhere once that an emotion only lasts for 90 seconds or so. So I try to just let it wash over me and try not to write a narrative about it in my mind, which of course sometimes works better on certain days than others. And once I sit there and I sort of let let it wash over me, ideally then I will go do a breath practice or a movement practice or I'll journal. And I feel like it passes through my body a lot faster than if I were to jump maybe straight to journaling. That I have found in the past, as much as I I feel like journaling has been a huge part of this sort of self-study or understanding myself better, I am also prone to just ruminating on the page. So having guide, which is also an important part of my course that where I'm doing the improv and the semantic work is guided journaling prompts so that there's specificity in what you're writing about and it's not just another space to overthink.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

Yeah, I love that. For me, it's just anchoring into a sensation in the body while grieving or while crying, while releasing. You know, a lot of the work that I do, instead of just letting people cry, which is necessary sometimes, but then when they're actually ready to do the release work, what I'm having them do is really anchor to the sensation in their body where they're feeling the anger, the grief, the shame, et cetera, and connecting with the part of themselves that holds that grief, anger, et cetera, whatever emotion, just riffing off of what you were saying about anchoring into a sensation.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

And that is what the process of improving is is I usually will try to get people moving, or when I'm doing it with myself, just get people moving and stay in motion. The same, the same concept of morning pages, just keep the pen on the page, and then introduce the idea of playing with weight and texture and resistance. And is there a color and is it flowy or is it staccato and sharp? And trying to make the movement represent what the feeling represents.

SPEAKER_01 31:38

Yeah, I love that. I do a couple movements that I incorporate. Um, I do a lot of when anger comes up, a lot of pushing against the wall. Do you know that one? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Yeah, and I've done somatic experiencing with my therapists as well. And something that I always struggled with was like sitting still and identifying it, just being like ADHD to the max, moving while thinking comes a little more naturally, or getting into again that flow state where I'm not overthinking it. The movement will be like, I'll be like, oh, well, there was something there that I was not aware, even because I was just in it. So sometimes it's revelatory in that way as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

But so in your exploration of your own relationship journey and this breakup, were you able to connect stuff to your attachment wounding too? You talked about the dance culture growing up and performative, but I'm curious if, and obviously, if you feel like sharing, but if it went deeper into just the way you grew up, relationships with your parents or siblings, etc.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's definitely an abandonment wound and I swear I wasn't getting it on a an unconditional level.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

Yeah, I've been working a lot with that with people around when we do have an abandonment wound, there's a very strong correlation between then self-abandoning as a way to stay connected later in life. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm uncoupling my own version of that as well.

unknown 33:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 33:01

I feel like it's been such a topic of conversation the last few years, obviously, because of my own experience, but I've noticed many of my female friends just living in New York and being successful on their own, having like a lot of impatience for relationships or dating in general, because it feels like we're doing a lot of this work and we're investigating a lot of this. And there's a little less willingness to get tangled up with someone who might not be, no matter how intense the chemistry and all the other compatibility might be. What has become clearer for you in this process of identity work? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, it sounds like such a fundamental, obvious thing that I wish I had always felt, but clearly didn't. But just that I am, I am enough on my own, and I'm actually more than enough, and I am I do have something very valuable to offer, both professionally and socially and romantically. And this feeling like I was sort of like lucky to be places, or like I tricked my way into things, like this idea that I I had like pulled the wool over everyone's eyes, and that's why anything good that happened to me happened. I have a lot more belief in myself that I deserve to be places. And I think that also just comes with getting older too and having more experience, but it's definitely been a huge part of this process.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Sounds like a lot of self-worth work that you've done through all the yes, totally. Yeah, it's really beautiful. Do you want to speak any more to that?

SPEAKER_00 34:41

My work has been a really pivotal part of the self-worth thing. And I think pursuing dance as a performer was really challenging for the place that I was in my early 20s without a lot of self-worth. And I like to imagine that it would be a different experience now. But because I feel so confident and I believe so much in my efficacy as a teacher, that it has helped me see myself in a more three-dimensional way outside of just work. But I do think that teaching was a very healing process for me. Even just going back to something as simple as when I first started teaching group classes and having to do public speaking essentially, like six hours in a row, and feeling like I was stuttering and I was terrified to be in the front of all these people. And what did I know? And sometimes repetition is the key and faking it and embodying it, and then it comes.

unknown 35:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

And you mentioned your journey through showing up online, through creating as an entrepreneur, and you talked about it almost as exposure therapy for anxiety and just helping you again embody a new identity. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about your journey with that.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Totally. I feel like I the more vulnerable I am online, the more positive the reception is. And that's so that's been very good sort of like Pavlovian training for me that it's okay to be imperfect, it's okay to show up in a human way. And I do think that we live in a culture where people are oversharing a lot of stuff on the internet too. So I try to find a balance between making sure that it's a productive share. But it has been such a creatively inspiring experience being on Instagram and TikTok, whatever, and feeling inspired by what other creators are putting out there. And feel that coming back into that identity work of feeling like I am a creative. I am making things many times a day, just being seen doing what I do. It's one thing to be in a group with like, you know, seven women in Brooklyn. It's another thing to have a video that goes viral and have a ton of people critiquing or validating what you're saying. And there have been a few moments along the way where I was like, okay, I'm not ready to have critique on this, or I'm not ready to deal with some of the vitriol that does occur on the internet. But for the most part, it has been overwhelmingly positive and has been helpful for helping me see myself through other people's eyes in a positive way. Do you struggle with anxiety? I do. I think my anxiety is, I also have ADHD. So my anxiety is very linked to feeling out of control. And it's control is a big thing for me, which is funny because Pilates was originally called Contrology. So right on right on brand. But I do feel I'm on Well Butrin for my ADHD. And because it's also a mood stabilizer, it is night and day for me to feel like I have a little bit more of a threshold in space. And I think just because I had a really bad year in 2024, that nothing is as bad as that. So I just feel a little bit okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:06

I was curious because you said it as exposure there before anxiety. So, what has been your journey with putting yourself out there in anxiety? What has been my journey?

SPEAKER_00 38:14

I was very, I think the the biggest aspect of that is probably the idea of speaking on the internet or using my voice, whether it's talking to the camera or writing on my Substack, or that started as a blog on my website before I moved to Substack. Because when I first started making Instagrams, I was just doing little videos of me dancing and videos of me doing Pilates tricks that look impressive. And there's vulnerability, I guess, in showing your body and leggings on the internet for sure. But it wasn't showing me and my soul and my beliefs and my essence in the way that writing some of the laundraform content that I have and turning the camera on my face and having my voice shown has forced me to do. So I think it has been exposure therapy for allowing myself to be seen as more than just a body, if that makes sense. I think just very much all related to the dance training, too, that there's not a lot of autonomy in the way that we train dancers. So you're essentially someone else's instrument. And I'm oversimplifying, of course, so that's not every single training situation. But I think a lot of dancers feel a lack of autonomy over their bodies, or there's a need to perform and there's a need to perfect to be seen as valuable or good. And I had a lot of hang-ups and a lot of anxiety about being seen as more than a dumb jock or more than just a physical person, and that things that I believed and thought and said were valuable. And even though I still don't have that crazy huge of an audience, but the fact that anyone is reading my stuff is very reassuring and validating, and it has helped me gain so much more confidence in it over the years.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

What advice would you have for someone who's in the early stages of a big heartbreak or massive grief?

SPEAKER_00 40:18

Oh um to move, which is the obvious answer. But there's such a there's such a strong call to lay in bed and to freeze still. And I know everyone deals with varying degrees of depression and how their body experiences that. So that's not an easy directive, I know, to make. But just getting yourself around people, and the more you can build your life up with new memories that are not within that relationship, the faster you will find that identity, that new identity of what you are in this new period of your life. If you isolate and don't get yourself out there doing new things or just spending time with your friends, it's very hard to envision life being a different way. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

Yeah. And then what do you think has been the biggest unlock in your work, working with people of bringing in the somatic, more emotional work with the physical work?

SPEAKER_00 41:28

People's tolerance with discomfort is probably the conversation that I have most of the time, whether that is an athletic experience in Pilates or the improv and somatic work where people are, and myself included, often very resistant to doing unfamiliar things. And often it's a it's way bigger and better in our heads than it is actually putting it into practice. So I'm a big just do it person and see what happens after. You mean in trying new things?

SPEAKER_01 42:04

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love that too, because I feel like that's the heart of my work too, is we all have emotions that we've been totally wired and programmed to not feel. And that creates all this stuckness and all these patterns and all these protective strategies. But so much of my work is can we just be with the fear? Can we just sit with the shame without having to solve it through our mind or dissociate from it or use a substance to get rid of it? Because at the end of the day, it's just feelings that we've named as uncomfortable or overwhelming or too painful to feel because at some time in our life they were too uncomfortable or painful or overwhelming to feel. But as adults, we can feel fear, we can feel shame when we can still feel safe within it. You know, so so much of my work is tolerating the discomfort of certain emotions.

SPEAKER_00 42:51

Yeah. And I will say that people can use movement as a way of numbing in the same way that they can use other things, which I've definitely been guilty of in the past. So I would probably say feeling the feeling first and then doing something is probably the correct order of that, and releasing the, which is a grand statement, but trying to judge yourself less for feeling the thing and just letting it happen, knowing that the more you let it wash over you now, the faster it will process through your body. Because if you try to keep pushing it down, and if you try to be super productive and fill your life with so many things that you can't feel it, it's it is going to hit you later.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

Yeah, absolutely. I think that really the root of all the things that we struggle on with our life can be traced back to unprocessed feelings in our body or things we're unwilling to feel. So even shame is such a big one. When I really started to get to know shame and understand how to work with it, it's like all we actually do is have to feel the shame. But it's like we don't, no one wants to feel shame in their body, you know. So it's anger, it's anxiety. It's all these different things, but all we have to do is feel the shame without making it mean something about ourselves, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

Which is easier said than done. But if you just dive in, it is a much shorter experience than the pushing it down for sure.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

So my last question for you, and I know we touched on this a little bit earlier, but what did this whole breakup grief process really help you alchemize within yourself?

SPEAKER_00 44:24

I think it helped me stand on my own two feet way more. And to, I guess, better way of saying that is confidence and self-worth. And it it really, it it shined a light on where there was a big wound that needed to be tended to there and forced me into this healing process where I think that if I had stayed in that relationship, and a lot of people I think can relate to this, if I had stayed in that relationship, it would have been easy to keep pushing it down and to keep finding other ways to fill that hole. Whereas when you experience heartbreak, you're you are just so raw that you have to address it to deal.

SPEAKER_01 45:05

Yeah, and I love how you talked about too, it was a return to dance, right? In creative practice.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

Yes, yeah. I I had shut that part down a while ago when I stepped away from dance because it was kind of too painful to interact with it. I didn't even go see dance performances. And I was kind of just more afraid of feeling the way that I was feeling than I was of the anxiety of going back to a dance class. So it did for me take that sort of extreme situation to get there. And now I would push everyone to get there before there's extreme, an extreme situation. But getting back and taking also like beginner dance classes helped me establish that confidence in myself, even though I am a trained dancer. But taking beginner dance classes without the pressure of it being my livelihood or it being about me impressing other people and to just actually let myself be in my body, which is something I really struggled with when I was auditioning and was trying to get people to think that I was the best in the room. And then it allowed me to work my way up to more professional level classes and feel like I can hold my own in those again and just yeah, generally identify as a creative person again. Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

That's really inspiring, really beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 46:29

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

Um, okay, so before we end, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your somatic release program. I know you shared it a little bit earlier, but whatever you want to share in terms of the programs you run, your studio, where people can find you on social, any other offerings or service you want to share about. Totally, totally.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

So I am in the middle of a course right now called The Repertoire, which is body-based creative practices to transmute heartbreaking grief into reinvention. So it combines all the things we talked about today. Each live class starts with a Pilates strength grounding series for you to get back into your body and feel that sense of agency in your body. And then we do a journaling practice and then we translate that into improvisational work or automatic writing and poetry divination or just different ways to use accessible creative practices to get out of some ingrained thought patterns that might have been showing up for you. And that is happening live right now. So that's not open at the moment, but you can find a wait list for that on my website. I also have my on-demand platform, which is on-demand Pilates classes. The most of them are 30 minutes and under. There's about 500 classes on the platform. There's a new monthly program every month. And what else? I write my substack, which is Well Hell by Helen Feeling Studio. I talk a lot about my philosophy about intuitive exercise and how to make movement a less punishing experience and become something that you look forward to, as well as explorations in somatics and also like outfit links.

SPEAKER_01 48:16

And you do for people that subscribe to your Substack, you still do your Friday morning class?

SPEAKER_00 48:21

Yeah. Oh, yes, at 12 p.m. on Fridays. Thank you for reminding me. I do that's free for Helen Feeling Studio on-demand members. And for people who subscribe to the SubStack, there's a Friday at 12 Eastern time Zoom class. No, that's subject to change time-wise, but there will be one.

SPEAKER_01 48:37

Okay, cool. Well, thank you so much for sharing everything that you shared today. And yeah, for just being so open and transparent about your journey. I think it's really, really inspirational. And I'm sure a lot of people are benefiting from everything you're sharing and yeah, navigating right now.

SPEAKER_00 48:53

Well, thank you for saying that. Yeah. It makes it easier to talk about for sure.

unknown 48:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:59

I admire you for it all.

SPEAKER_01 49:02

Thank you. If this episode resonated with you, consider leaving a review, sharing it with a friend, or passing along on your socials. It really helps the podcast reach new listeners each week. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a new episode. And if you're feeling inspired to explore your own work more deeply, I offer both individual and couples coaching, and there's a link in the show notes to book a free consultation. You'll also find my free guide, Breaking the Pattern, which helps you understand the relational and nervous system patterns that may be keeping you stuck.