Restore Your Core^®, Healing Journeys, and Mothering Teens with Lauren Ohayon

Lauren: Yeah, those are great, great concepts and questions. I came into it because I’ve always been a lifelong mover. My earliest memories, like my first, we moved around a lot as children growing up. So my earliest memories were kind of soothing practices that I did via movement because I was always a mover. And I saw them as movement journals. And I would, like, put in my cassette tape at night and play Madonna, like, like a virgin and just like rock out to… That should tell you how old I am. I was born in 77.

So, you know, I really just was a mover for myself. I grew up from very early on. And then my relationship with my body, of course, as it does, it had many seasons. But I had sustained… I became a yoga teacher when I went to college. I went to college in New York City at NYU. And I sustained a really… Once I started teaching yoga, I got injured pretty quickly.

And then I was injured. I was living abroad. I had a very successful kind of practice. I’d built a practice. And I was injured and it took me a year to rehab. I herniated a whole bunch of discs in my lumbar spine. And that was really kind of like, I would say, a very formative period for me because there were so many narratives coming at me. There was the narratives of the doctor, which is, if you don’t have surgery tonight, you’re doomed. Because it was… I was in pretty bad shape.

Rewriting Movement Stories: Beyond Right and Wrong

There was the narratives of… then I went to seek, like, a bazillion different healers. So I was digging many wells looking for water, which is very unsettling. And I remember at one point this… one of, like, the founders of Alexander technique, one of, like, the first teachers, not the founders, but one of the first teachers came to me and he was like, you need to stop digging this many wells looking for water. Just dig one deep well. I was like, oh, yeah.

Lauren: So I was doing a lot of Alexander and Feldenkrais, which was very somatic and a very different way for me to be in my body. And I was also reading a lot about anatomy and biomechanics because I was like, there’s got to be a root cause to this. My story about it back then was that yoga injured me. Like yoga, I was overly flexible. I overextended and I injured my tissues. And I did a lot of Pilates to heal. It took me a year. It was like a really long year of rehab, but it was very empowering.

So there were just all these narratives flying and then I healed and it was so empowering because I didn’t have surgery. And it set me off on a path of teaching a more mindful way of moving because I still believed that my way of doing yoga had not served me and therefore I had been injured. I have since rewritten that story, but that was the prevailing story in my brain at that time.

And I would say that just kind of propelled me. I was living in Israel at the time and I left Israel and moved back. I moved back to New York and had babies and just, I started kind of formulating this method once I started having children and that pushed me into like a very new season with my body and with like disembodiment. And I was doing a lot of it at that point. Again, Hannah somatics and Feldenkrais. I was studying in New York City with amazingly embodied people, people who studied like Barteneff and Laban and body-mind centering. I was doing body-mind centering around the clock. And that really changed my life. Like all of that kind of work.

And I think that the practice that I have now just infuses a lot of, so it’s like, there’s a lot of anatomy and biomechanics information there and that’s kind of bubbling under the surface of things. But what’s really like the engine that drives me is a more kind of somatic nervous system approach to it all because the anatomy approach was very shamey and blamey and pathologizing and diagnosing and something’s broken and let’s fix it. Which is very alienating and creates compartmentalization and fragmentation in the systems. So it’s like it’s a tool, but not a rule. And we take it to be this rule.

Kimberly: So what, if you don’t mind, what was the story? What’s the rewritten story now about yoga, that our bodies adapt?

Lauren: Yeah, that we are these adaptive beings. And that I’m a hugely sexual person. And more than sexual, I’m incredibly sensitive. I’m sensual. Like when cars drive by me, I can smell the inside of their car long after they’re gone. Like I have a very strong sense of smell. And I had, I was, I think it’s a product of, well, I don’t know, but I think it’s a product of moving around a lot as a child and needing to form kind of like always reorienting myself. So I have a lot of like, sense of peripheral vision. It’s why I moved to Miami, because I can’t wear jackets, because it kind of cuts me off from being able to sense. So I need to always be kind of half naked so I can feel safe and know what’s around me. As a child, I was in a home invasion. So I’m very attuned to my senses, right?

And I’m very sensual. And I think the story that I now tell myself is that in adaptation, well, first, my body sought out practices that allowed me to lean into my tissues, like allowing me just to lean into excessive sensation. I sought out excess ranges because it was where I could lean into. I don’t know how else to describe it.

And the body adapts and creates like, like one of the ways that I try to help people see prolapse and diastasis recti, for example, rather than it being like an injury that you sustained because you were so naughty and bad, and you didn’t do the right things. I see it as an adaptation. We were, there was so much pressure and so much tension on tissue that the tissue helps us and it creates space. And that space has an outcome.

So in me, the creating space, my body was like, oh, you want that? We’ll just move some discs out of the way to help facilitate deeper extension. We will just kind of help you out, but displace some discs. And so I’ve rewritten it. So instead of blaming yoga or my body or my flexibility or my tissues, I’ve just, my body was helping me. It’s not the help I necessarily then wanted to face, but it was helping me.

Lauren: And it then created a lot of teachable moments. I mean, part of me hates it when people are like, oh, injuries are a lesson, but it’s true. Actually, there’s a lesson in an injury. It doesn’t mean we should just get injured to have a lesson. And I didn’t, I ended up having back surgery two years ago, which was amazing. And so I’m like, saved me at a time that I needed it. And once again, I had this back presentation and this time the presentation didn’t heal itself and it was bad and I needed surgery. And so I’ve stopped shaming, blaming, pointing fingers and more. Everything is a story. Everything for me is a story. There’s just a story around things. I would say that’s how I’ve reframed.

Kimberly: Thank you. Yeah. I think that what I see out in the world right now is this idea that if something is quite wrong, because we’re having some kind of a symptom, for instance, and it could be something, you know, very specific or very non-specific. There’s this idea, I think it, and it’s weird because it’s coming more from the somatic movement world, than anything else. What I’m seeing is that, if you’re doing it right, you won’t have any pain. So if you’re doing the somatics, right. And if you’re doing, you know, if you’ve dialed in your nervous system and you’ve dialed in your connective tissue, then nothing quote, unquote will go wrong. And you won’t gain weight and you’ll be thin. I see that a lot too.

And it’s interesting. Cause I’m a couple of years older than you. I was born in 74. And I’m definitely right in the middle of my menopausal transition and so many things are changing. And some of them feel really alarming. Like postpartum was for me, just like what, what of these things am I supposed to allow? And what of these things am I supposed to intervene with? You know, what is the fat that’s coming on my body? That’s adaptive and protective and really super useful. And what is either laziness or like and like how dramatic do I have to be with my interventions on what I’m already experiencing?

Kimberly: And I just think that that’s, it’s probably a question for every human being, but I think it’s definitely a question for female humans that are, you know, I found myself researching body types and menopause. Like, let me see what Ayurveda has to say about that, just like different predispositions. And how you go through this time.

And so, yeah, I think it’s important for people to hear the reframes because it can sound Pollyanna-ish if you just hear it just from that point of view, and you don’t hear the evolution of what it takes to reframe something, because you might reframe it several times and you’re not doing it from your brain. You’re not deciding it means something. Your body is showing you, Oh, now I understand. I understand why I’ve been in this freeze pattern all this time. And that body understanding will allow me to thaw it, not the cognitive understanding. It can be together. The cognitive works with it, but I think that it’s really helpful for people to hear that one can be very holistic and very organic and do everything right and still need intervention.

Lauren: Absolutely. A hundred percent. I came from very, I came from, I have been part of very dogmatic healing circles. And I have, they terrify me, they feel like cults. And I have kind of set these filters, I don’t want to say boundaries, but more filters around me, where I’m no longer kind of entertaining cult mindset. And I can see it a mile away. And it usually comes with you should, you should should, you should, you should, you should, no, no, I should not, I should not, you know, I should.

And I think, you know, yes, and I think that I have always been more organic and hands off and let nature take its course. But that’s not like, it doesn’t always work. It’s not always useful. And it can also be very misconstrued, that message can come with a lot of false equivalency. And it can create alienation. Because when we are so dogmatic about what healing should look like, we are now falling into medicalized traps. We are, but we’re just calling it something else. We’re veiling it as health and wellness.

Kimberly: A quick break from this podcast with Lauren, to let you know that we’ve extended the May early bird for the Mother Circle facilitator training. The reason is because I just didn’t have the email mojo to let everybody know what was happening. And because May is kind of motherhood madness is what I’m noticing. So I wanted to give everyone a little bit more of a chance to take advantage of that $500 discount. And you can go to mothercircle.com and you’ll see it right there. Mother Circle facilitator training. It’s a two month training for three months, including Mother Circle itself. And it is Intensive training on how to lead a curriculum of the unseen arc of the motherhood journey.

To me, it’s also a response to putting everything in mental health categories for mothers in a way that we can begin to build a mother culture. So if you’re at all interested, the people that I’ve trained already are a really phenomenal group of women. And they all said that the training was so much more valuable than they even imagined, not only from a financial perspective, but also from a personal perspective of really deepening into self-understanding and who they are and who they could be as a leader.

So go to mothercircle.com. Check out the Mother Circle facilitator. And if it’s right for you, join by May 31st if you need to talk about it and suss it out. Jessica Connelly, my co-leader, is happy to talk to you about if it’s the right thing for you. And now back to my conversation.
For so many women, there’s such an outsourcing of our power. So it’s such an understandable pendulation. Because the degree of incompetence when it comes to women’s health is so high. And the medical profession itself. And I am a doula and I do births. I used to do births at hospitals. I don’t anymore. But that has to do more with my own system and what I can tolerate and the degree to which I can feel like I’m participating in something that has all kinds of veils.

But like life’s algorithm is pushing you in one direction. It’s hard to get a myriad of opinions happening or facets. But I was talking on my Instagram just yesterday about how for the first time in my life, I went on a diet, but it’s not really a diet. I’ve just been tracking what I’m eating because I felt incredibly undernourished and I wasn’t eating enough protein because I’ve never looked at labels and I’ve never… like in order to feel safe in my body, I can’t weigh myself or look at labels. I won’t.

Which is probably a sign that somebody recently was like, well, that’s a sign that you’re dysregulated. And I was like, oh my gosh, everything is a sign that everybody’s dysregulated. Like you put up a boundary and someone bashes it. But I’ve never weighed myself or looked at labels, not even when I was pregnant, never. So I don’t know how to read a label, but I was recently feeling that I’m not getting enough protein as the perimenopausal 47-year-old and I need more protein. And I don’t eat animal protein. So I needed to figure out how I was going to get all that.

And I knew nothing and it sucked. Because I’m in the health space, but I’ve made it my mission to not know about diet and calories and fat and grams of anything. And because I knew that it would make me dislike myself possibly, and I was safer in myself, just eating, just being nourished. But then I stopped being able to be nourished appropriately. So then I had to learn.

And so I went, I did, I went and really informed myself. I read a variety of different perspectives. I listened to a variety of different podcasts. I read some books. I consulted some coaches. Like, you know, I think that people think they’re getting informed, but they’re not necessarily. And yeah, I found 1500 different perspectives and I was like, well, this is mind blowing.

Kimberly: But when I got out of it was like, I now understand what I eat and I can now ditch the counting and ditch the, I had this app and I was putting everything in the app and I was like, this really sucks. But I did it for a few weeks so that I could then make a decision to come back to this other state. And now I feel better fed. I feel like I understand food and food sources and protein sources better. I’m actually feeling so much more energized. I’m not need a power nap every day. I’m not need coffee and tea all day long to keep me awake. I’m feeling better. Whatever I do is okay.

Well, oh my gosh. So I was before I was, I thought that nuts were a great source of protein and tahini turns out they’re not. So I am getting a lot more from eggs. There’s like five things that give me a ton of protein. So one of them is like eggs, tofu, which apparently is not as dangerous as we once thought it was. I’m making my own seitan out of this bean. That’s like a super high protein bean called lupini beans, making my own lupini beans. It’s like a seven day process to get the bitterness out. It’s a whole freaking process, but I’m doing it because I didn’t want to buy the processed ones. I wanted to make it myself. And like Greek yogurt and TVP.

And then some days I’m like F protein. I just want to eat fruits and veggies. Cause that’s what I’m so used to. And I don’t want to be like constantly eating TVP and soy all day long to meet this metric that some person said is better for my chemistry. That I need 120 grams of protein a day. I know there’s probably no way to get there. That’s so much.

Kimberly: I’ve been listening. I’ve been listening to Stacy Sims and I don’t know how to do stuff either. And so I just was like, okay, well, how much is in, cause okay. 30 grams, 1530, I’m like adding it up and I’m like, oh my gosh, an egg. Do you know how many grams now you have? An egg has six grams? I’m like, that’s like five eggs. I mean, some days I know for five eggs, but that’s a lot of eggs.

So yeah, the protein requirements, I mean, I was a vegetarian for 20 years and during my postpartum that was just one of the things that had to really shift was like, I need meat. And I didn’t realize how spaced out I had been for so long thinking I was spiritual. Like, I was like, oh, this spiritual state is actual blood sugar. I’m starving. And my blood sugar is like all over the place. All the fractals are actually starvation.

I ate a bison. My acupuncturist was really trying to get me to do the meat. And I was so resistant. And so he took me to lunch. And he ate a bison burger with me. And I was full for like six hours. And I was in you know, my story in my head was like, I’m gonna get sick and my body won’t know how to digest it. My body absolutely knew exactly what to do. And I was like, wow, I haven’t actually been satiated for years. I just was. I was content. I didn’t. I wasn’t still hungry, you know.

Lauren: So I wish I could eat meat. I really wish I could. And I just it’s been so many years. But I do eat fish.

Kimberly: Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, we’re supposed to have like 30 grams of protein a meal, if not 40. I’m like, and there’s like protein powder I’m taking. I did all sorts of research to find like the cleanest, greenest protein powder that has like a COA. Like California is really strict about that. And that not only has a certificate of analysis, but gives it to you so you can see what kind of garbage is in it.
Kimberly: Yeah, I found that one that’s like super lean and super great. And I do that every day too. I’m like, I can’t believe I’m doing powders and stuff like…

Lauren: Yeah, well, I have considered doing powders, but I’m past the meat resistance. Like I love having meat stock in the morning, I make chicken broth. It’s like when I go travel anywhere, the first thing I do is get chicken feet and make stock in like the call. It’s just, it gets like jelly and you can see it and I can feel what it’s doing to my guts. And I’m just like, oh, this is good. But I the pea protein thing is ridiculous. Like it just it’s makes me feel terrible after I have it. And every time I think, oh, there’s a protein that’s like this and that. And then it’s like pea protein.
Kimberly: So yeah, it might be the power of the protein. What I’m doing is pea protein, but I don’t have that relationship with it. Listen, don’t forget, like my DNA is Mediterranean.

Lauren: Yeah. And from the…

Kimberly: So I do think some of it is also what our ancestors could tolerate.

Lauren: 100%. No, I was thinking about that as you’re saying it. It’s the people from like the Nordic regions where we needed to store fat. Yeah. So it totally makes sense.