33: Unlocking Stillness Through Movement: Addie DeHilster on Mindfulness, Meditation, and the Body.

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Narrator

Hello and welcome to Cherie Lindberg's Elevated Life Academy. Stories of hope and healing. Through raw and heartfelt conversations, we uncover the powerful tools and strategies these individuals use to not only heal themselves, but also inspire those around them. Join us on this incredible journey as we discover the human spirit's remarkable capacity to heal, find hope in the darkest of moments, and ultimately live an elevated life.

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Cherie Lindberg

Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Elevated Life Academy, and I am your host, Cherie Lindberg, where we talk about stories of hope and healing. As you know, I go across the country and I meet many, many different healers and ways of working with folks to elevate their life. And today I am here with Addie and I'm going to let her introduce herself.

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Cherie Lindberg

And Addie, you and I met through Chris McDonald. So thank you, Chris. And I'm just going to invite you to introduce yourself and share what you do.

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Addie DeHilster

Thanks, Cherie I'm I'm really excited to connect with you. And thank you to Chris for making that connection for us. Yeah, it's it's lovely to share and be with you on your podcast today. Yeah. So like you said, my name is Addie DeHilster and I'm a mindfulness meditation teacher, but also a mindful movement specialist, and I have been practicing a few different movement practices for about 25 years now.

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Addie DeHilster

I started fairly young when I was in college, out of necessity for my own, my own survival and coping, and that's really just stuck with me for a lifetime. And I found that I have, you know, relied on both the meditation practice and the mindful movement practices through, you know, many seasons of my life and have had the honor to share these with others with students for a while before the pandemic, when I lived in Los Angeles, I ran a yoga studio for five years, I community yoga studio, and now I do my work more or less online and work with individual students, with groups, whether it be meditation or movement or movement into meditation,

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Addie DeHilster

you know, and I also train others who want to lead mindful movement practices, or what I called movement based mindfulness, really just ways of using simple movement practices to unlock the benefits of meditation, especially for people who feel like maybe they can't sit still, or maybe they've been told you need to try meditation, or you need to learn mindfulness.

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Addie DeHilster

And they were kind of hesitant because they were like, I don't really think I can do that. Like whole sitting still and being quiet. I think for a multitude of different reasons. And yeah, I think a lot of people feel that way. So I really love working with that, that kind of intersection of where movement can unlock those benefits and those skills of mindfulness practices for people.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. Could you share more about certain movements and how they unlock?

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Addie DeHilster

Yeah, I can kind of go back through like my journey with different movement practices, if that would be a good template for people to sort of think about the role they can play. Like I was telling you before I started my practice in college, I was a music major, and it was stressful because it was it's like a performance environment where you're you're practicing and you're like trying to hone this craft and master this craft, and you're always in rehearsals or performances and always kind of being judged and always competing a lot with others.

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Addie DeHilster

There's a pretty grim outlook for like, your job prospects. It's just a tough, you know, it was a tough place to be, although it was also a lot of fun and very creative in other ways. But I kind of got to a point where, you know, like my junior year, I would say there was also some family stuff going on, kind of in the background that was piling up, along with the regular stresses of being a student.

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Addie DeHilster

Right. And I just kind of hit a point where I needed something and someone suggested trying yoga. So I actually listened to them, and I did. I tried yoga, and I got hooked right away. And I feel like those early practices of yoga really helped me connect to my body in a new way. You know, yoga provides some strong sensation through stretch or through effort, you know, through.

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Addie DeHilster

I was doing a pretty active yoga practice, and I think I needed that, like kind of more active practice or something that gave me like really tangible sensations to feel so that I could actually start to make that connection and start to like, really? Yeah, be in my body quite a bit more. And so I think that started me on a whole journey of things unfolding.

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Addie DeHilster

And, you know, when you start to get in touch with sensations in your body, you start to get in touch with emotions and feelings and how you, you know, get to know yourself on a whole other level. Right. And so fast forward a few years, I realized, like I needed more context for all of this. So I found mindfulness meditation and the sort of Buddhist framework and the mindfulness practices and the meditative practices helped me kind of bring body and mind more together and gave me more framework and more context to kind of interpret some of the things that I was discovering and what I was feeling and, and gaining community around that as well.

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Addie DeHilster

And then later on, I also discovered so magic movement practices like Feldenkrais and Somatics, which helped me fine tune a lot and get deeper into the more subtle sensations in the body.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. If you could ask about Feldenkrais, I've done that. I found it really quite interesting that our habits of movement, of structure can have such a huge impact on what we think and how we do things.

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Addie DeHilster

Yeah, it's all connected, right? Yeah. Well, Feldenkrais is a very exploratory kind of practice, and it's very subtle. And you can spend a whole Feldenkrais lesson. You could be like an hour or 45 minutes, just like laying on your back and like, moving one leg to the side. And then by the end, maybe you have rolled over, right?

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Addie DeHilster

So it's not exciting to watch. It's very slow and exploratory, but what it helps you to do is to really feel more of the subtleties of what's going on in your, you know, maybe musculoskeletal system, but also your nervous system, and to sense how maybe you've got some kind of holding patterns in your structure that are connected to certain emotions or memories or experiences in inside.

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Addie DeHilster

So getting to that kind of deeper level of just being in touch with those patterns and being able to move gently with them and kind of nudge them a little bit gently through movement and work with them. It can create some pretty interesting shifts where we're able to release tension and find more space. And, you know, as that opens up as well, I think there's the opportunity for some of that to be processed cognitively as well, so that a lot of transformation can actually happen, even though it looks very subtle.

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Cherie Lindberg

Is that kind of what happened for you? You know, that doing some of these subtle movements unlocked some things for you?

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Addie DeHilster

Yeah, I think so. And I think they're they're just practices that I really love to go back to because it helps you make connections in the body and it helps you make connections in, you know, your own, like what you're going through. Like, why am I feeling this pattern again? What's happening? What's the connection? Oh, it was kind of reminding me of that time in my past when I felt like this.

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Addie DeHilster

What's the link there? You know what is up right now that maybe connects to something I've experienced before. So I think if you have some understanding of your past experience or perhaps traumas, you know, you can see the ways that they may be showing up later on for you. And, you know, they don't have to be driving things if we can kind of understand, like, oh, I see that that's coming up again.

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Addie DeHilster

So how can I creatively work with that or find some space around that? Does that make sense?

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. Help me understand. Or our listeners, what do you do? Because I know for myself, like it is really hard for me to sit in and meditate. I'm able to do it with the bilateral music. That's very helpful. And also the time, you know, my body wants to to move. And I have found qigong is, yeah, really helpful, you know, for that.

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Cherie Lindberg

But what do you do when you have somebody that comes in that you know will benefit from what you're doing but are really impatient?

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Addie DeHilster

And yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned qigong because that was the, you know, the next modality that really I have fallen in love with. And I do a lot of teaching, and I think it's excellent for a lot of like our nervous system regulation and helping to discharge some of the agitation or anxiety, sort of those kind of buildups of energy inside that feel so pressing sometimes that make it hard for us to sit still.

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Addie DeHilster

So with, with someone like that and that's like, honestly, a lot of us, you know, I would start with movement. I would absolutely start with movement and do some perhaps clearing practices from qigong or do some yoga or some perhaps breath practices that help to release some of that feeling of of agitation and restlessness and pressure inside. So there's just a little bit more space to welcome the stillness part of practice.

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Addie DeHilster

But I also think we can find those meditative skills within movements. So even if someone is like, I'm not going to be ready to sit still for six months, like that doesn't mean they can't meditate, right? We could do some simple movements. We could do a yoga pose, or we could do a really easy qigong flow where we actually use it as a meditation.

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Addie DeHilster

Like any time we could be in a posture and we can say, I will take my attention here, right? I'm going to feel my hand. All right. We're practicing bringing our mind to what we intend. That's the meditation, right? We're practicing focus and we can do that again and again in that, you know, yoga class or that qigong flow that we might be doing.

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Addie DeHilster

You know, we can also practice being gentle with ourselves through movement and practice loving kindness or compassion or bringing forward some of those qualities of curiosity, of of non-judgmental awareness. These are all aspects of mindfulness, and I think they're there in all of the movement practices. They're not always highlighted because a lot of times we go to a movement class, there's so much attention on form and technique or doing the next hard thing or it's, you know, advancing physically.

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Addie DeHilster

And so my preference is to practice in a simple way where there's much more space to actually explore, sort of the the, like, mental and emotional aspect of what the movement practices can allow us to do. So it is more like a meditation. So does that make sense? What I'm saying like bringing those things out of the movement.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. I mean it's making sense to to what you're sharing, you know, to me. And I'm just as I'm sitting with you, I'm just thinking of, you know, your average person that's like, well, why should I even try this? Right. And I, I just want to bring some of the neuroscience in here is that, can we do these things that you're suggesting, Addie?

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Cherie Lindberg

And we learn to focus our attention and be intentional. This is how we clear stress out of our body. This is how we're more present. You know, in the moment. This is how we can actually learn to kind of master our, our biochemistry because you're you're not in sympathetic dominance, you're more in the parasympathetic and you're learning how to be here now.

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Cherie Lindberg

So I just wanted to make sure we highlight some of these benefits. Why you would want to even I'm.

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Addie DeHilster

A white person to and I really get it when people are like I'm in pain or I'm anxious, why would you want me to pay more attention to that? That sounds terrible. But the reason it works is because it gives us more agency and more choice. We don't have to necessarily pay direct attention to those anxious sensations or those feelings.

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Addie DeHilster

But as we start to observe the broader context of our body or what our senses are experiencing in the present moment, all the sounds, all the sights, you know, we get grounded here. It helps our nervous system settle down, and then we start to notice, like, okay, there's this thought pattern that keeps coming up. I could get curious about it rather than feeding into it, and I can start to see what's going on when it's coming up, so I can make a different choice or so that I could work with it in a different way than I usually do.

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Addie DeHilster

And that's where the change starts to happen, because we're starting to identify less with those habitual patterns of mind and get a little bit more, you know, control, if you will, over what we place our attention on, get a little more, you know, choice going. So yeah. So it makes that sounds simple, but it's actually very profound and anyone can do it well.

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Cherie Lindberg

And what I'm hearing and I think we're in an epidemic in our world is slowing down. Like what you're suggesting is when we slow down, we become aware of choice. We become aware of the program that's running in the back that we don't even know. We don't slow down. Then we're subject to all of these natural reactions that just take over.

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Addie DeHilster

We're going on autopilot, right? Because it's it's familiar and it helps us go faster. And that's that's kind of what we're encouraged to do in our culture. Right? Just like keep going and go faster. And the movement practices are beautiful way to introduce that slowing down. Right. Because we can tell ourselves or tell someone else you need to slow down.

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Addie DeHilster

And it's like, how? Right. I have no idea. It's going so against the grain. But you could literally take a movement, just a simple like raising your arms up in front of you and start doing it kind of fast, like meet your energy where it is, just like raising your arms up and down and then see if you can go a little slower.

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Addie DeHilster

Like just practice literally slowing that down and maybe your breath starts to match the movement. Yeah. As you're going a little slower and doing that for a few minutes, just playing with the pace of it. As you were talking about research, there's some neuroscience research about something called motor inhibition, which is like our ability to slow down or stop a movement.

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Addie DeHilster

It's kind of what keeps us from tripping on an obstacle when the cat toy is on the floor, you know, whatever it might be. But we're actually training that. And in a practice like that of just like taking a movement and slowing it down. And the cool thing about that, as we develop motor inhibition as a skill, I know inhibition doesn't sound like a good thing, but it is in this case, the ability to slow down or stop.

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Addie DeHilster

It also trains a part of our brain that allows us to slow down our emotional reactivity. So being able to slow your arms down in a movement like that actually affects the part of your brain that you need to slow down before you send that angry email out to your coworker.

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Cherie Lindberg

Right?

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Addie DeHilster

The part of you that can take a pause, take a breath, get a little more clear, and make a good choice that's aligned with your intentions.

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Cherie Lindberg

So instead of that automatic reaction that's like really quick and right off of the, you know, the emotion, you had the ability to pause and be intentional and then show up how you wanted to versus just a natural automatic reaction.

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Addie DeHilster

Exactly.

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Cherie Lindberg

I love that the flow of the arms. It reminds me of this qigong movement called fireworks, where you just, you know, go up and around like like fireworks. That feels so good to my body. It's really a lovely movement.

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Addie DeHilster

You to try to use that with any, any qigong movement, you know, just take any, any movement like that and play with pace, you know, that's just a one, you know, fun way that I like to kind of do that and, you know, practice just that concept of slowing down.

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Cherie Lindberg

Beautiful. Do you do a classes one on one. Where do you primarily work with people with movement?

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Addie DeHilster

All of the above. Yeah, I do have one on one students and that's great for, you know, people who are shy about being in a group class or they have specific questions or specific needs, like maybe there's an injury or an illness that means that they need to do their movement a little differently or need more help kind of exploring how to do that.

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Addie DeHilster

And I also have a group class that meets on Thursdays that people are welcome to join. I've been teaching qigong classes on Insight Timer as well lately. So any any of you who have the Insight Timer app, you can find me on there and practice with me. Yeah, and I have a library of recorded classes on my website as well that that people can find and do on their own time.

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Cherie Lindberg

So talk a little bit about what was it like for you, what was the impact of Covid for you?

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Addie DeHilster

And pre-COVID, I was running a yoga studio, you know, and we had a bunch of teachers working out of there and a great community. And that all shifted online when Covid happened. Of course, you know, for safety, we had to do that. And after, you know, several months of doing the zoom classes and everything, we were kind of up towards the end of our lease on the space, and it wouldn't have made sense to like renew that at that time.

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Addie DeHilster

was just that like the end of: 2020

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Addie DeHilster

So we decided to move and we moved to Washington State, and it was like a thousand miles from where we were living before the pandemic. And, you know, we love it here. So that's that's been the sort of interesting silver lining. Yeah, I would say like through these kind of stressful times and you know, since then I haven't been through a lot with, you know, my mom passed away two years ago and there was a lot going on with that.

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Addie DeHilster

And that was a time where I even though I've had this meditation practice for so many years, I felt like I couldn't sit still. There was just too much like boiling inside of me. And I really leaned into the movement practices. At that time, and especially in this phase of life, it was a lot of tea. Gong.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah.

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Addie DeHilster

And yeah. So I really get it when people say, like, I don't think I can sit still right now, I do. I really get that from firsthand experience and have used these movement practices as my form of meditation at times when that was essential for me.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. Can you share a story? We always asked for a story of hope and healing someone that you worked with. Maybe that didn't do a lot of movement, and then all of a sudden started doing movement, and then they just benefited so much from the practice.

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Addie DeHilster

Yeah. You know, what's coming to mind is I do teach a good bit in the cancer community. I have some classes at a, I have a class at a local hospital at the cancer center. And I've also had some private students over the years who had experiences of cancer. And what's been interesting with that is seeing that, you know, getting a diagnosis like that is not something anyone ever wants to deal with or have happened to them.

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Addie DeHilster

But for a lot of people, they take that experience and it becomes a portal for them to discover things like yoga or like movement or like meditation or energy work or art, or you know, something beautiful and that helps to carry them through the difficult experience and walk down that road. And then they kind of get to the other side of it and it's like, oh, I have this new passion for this thing, you know, that that helps me through this experience.

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Addie DeHilster

Thinking of one student in particular, when she first started to work with me, she didn't really have any kind of practice like this, but she was kind of coming out of her her cancer journey and someone, I guess had suggested she try, you know, doing some yoga. And at first when we were working together, it was kind of like, okay, how can I work with this scar tissue or how can I relearn to move around?

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Addie DeHilster

So the changes that have happened in my body and years later, now it's just, you know, a totally different experience. And she really practices more for the joy of it and really for feeling good in her body. And the cancer part is not really for friends anymore, but she really developed like this, this wonderful relationship with herself and, you know, her sort of post trauma journey by finding a practice that, you know, could be a good container for that kind of growth and that sort of like flourishing that could happen on the back end of a difficult experience.

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Cherie Lindberg

Beautiful. Anything more that you would like our listeners to know that maybe I haven't asked you?

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Addie DeHilster

I don't know. I mean, I could talk about all of these practices, like until the cows come home, but yeah, I, I feel like you've asked some beautiful questions, and I would just encourage people, if they have any interest in practicing mindfulness, but they're worried that it might be difficult to sit still. There are ways to get around that.

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Addie DeHilster

And if you find a skilled teacher who's willing to work with you to adapt the practices and to help you make them your own, it's really worthwhile and can help you make meaning out of the experiences you might be going through. Yeah, and find a new relationship, you know, with yourself.

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Cherie Lindberg

Yeah. And I really I really like what you said about, you know, I think in our about the body, I think in our culture where we are not I mean, more and more people are starting to learn about what does it mean to be embodied. What does it feel like and how? Yeah, somatic movements and so forth can be, you know, very helpful.

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Cherie Lindberg

But it's not something that our culture like is overly encouraging about. I hope that changes with like podcasts like this, where people can start to understand how much benefit there is because there's so many people that are so stressed out there and overwhelmed. And since the pandemic, I, I've seen it get worse, not better. And having some mindful practices I think could be so beneficial.

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Addie DeHilster

I, I agree, and I, I don't think people are aware necessarily that they can have so much positive effect on their own system, their own nervous system, or their own internal tension or emotion. You know, all of this, we can work with it. We have we have great tools and practices to use that can help us, you know, not get rid of what we're feeling, right, but create more space so we can see it from a different angle.

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Addie DeHilster

And so we can, you know, maybe calm it down a little bit.

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Cherie Lindberg

And.

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Addie DeHilster

You know, be able to to sort of understand more clearly what is happening, put it into perspective. Sometimes it's not what you think it is what you're feeling. And the only way to learn more about it is to to be able to get in touch. And movement is a really safe way to do that, because there's a lot less opportunity to get overwhelmed.

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Addie DeHilster

It gives us a lot of agency and a lot of opportunities for choice, and gives us ways to discharge that sort of overwhelmed feeling and that that excess, you know, sensation that could be coming up when we start to process some of these things.

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Cherie Lindberg

I mean, just even teaching people about their own physiology, their own bodies. Right? And that I love the language that you're using. And a lot of folks don't know that language about that. When we are anxious, when we are stressed, that is energy that's stuck in our body and that we can do these movements to clear and like, I love that word discharge.

00;26;27;06 - 00;26;42;15

Cherie Lindberg

There's a lot you can do to discharge it. So it moves up and out. So I love the language that you're using of that. And I don't think people realize that, that you can move your body in certain ways and discharge some of that energy out of your body.

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Addie DeHilster

And there have been times when that was like, my primary practice is like, forget being enlightened. I just need to like calm down a little bit here. And you know, that comes first, right? We have to work with what's in front of us and and like, find just enough space inside in order to go any further and have, you know, real insights or real changes.

00;27;05;16 - 00;27;32;25

Cherie Lindberg

Well, thank you so much for coming and sharing your story and and a movement specialist. That's really cool to hear and to hear that we have all of your social sites and so forth. So if folks want to, to join you for one of your classes, and as I've said before, if you think somebody will benefit from this, please share, because we're always trying to put out programing to teach people how to live an elevated life.

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Cherie Lindberg

So thank you for joining us today, Adi.

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Addie DeHilster

My pleasure Sheree. And yeah, if anyone has more questions or wants to get in touch or learn how you could teach and offer some of these kinds of practices, my door's open. And I just appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk about these things. And I love what you're doing over here. So thank you. Yeah.

00;27;53;25 - 00;28;28;09

Cherie Lindberg

Thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed this podcast with Addie and I, where we were talking about how simple mindful movement can reduce stress and help folks live a more mindful life. And as usual, if you found this episode helpful and that there might be somebody that could benefit, I would really appreciate if you shared it or gave it to a friend or a loved one, because we're really trying to get the word out to everybody out there.

00;28;28;09 - 00;28;41;01

Cherie Lindberg

How to live an elevated life with simple information and simple exercises that you can do. Until next time, thank you for being with elevated Life podcast.

00;28;41;03 - 00;28;59;29

Narrator

Thank you for joining us on another uplifting journey on Cherie Lindberg's Elevated Life Academy. Stories of Hope and healing. If you found resonance or connection with what you've heard today, we encourage you to share this episode and consider becoming a subscriber. Please spread the word so others can live an elevated life.