Heart of Motion
The Heart of Motion Podcast is an exploration of the heart, soul and science of movement - and what it means in our lives.
Movement connects us more deeply to ourselves, to our bodies and to the things and people that are most important to us. Beyond a fitness routine, why do you move? And what moves you? When we can look past the hamster wheel of ''fitness" - we start to realize that when we really live the lives of our bodies - life can be a whole lot more fulfilling, and a whole lot more fun!
Host Susannah Steers is your guide on a quest to understand how we can move better, feel better in our bodies and connect more deeply to our people and the world around us. Join her for some conversation, interviews with experts, and conversations with everyday people about what movement means to them. You might just find movement feels a little different on the other side...
Heart of Motion
Resilience, Healing, and Connection through Somatics with Amy Ruth
What if your body could tell you stories of resilience, healing, and a deeper mind-body connection? Join us as we explore the transformative power of somatics and movement integration with the exceptional Amy Kiara-Ruth. With a rich tapestry of expertise in dance, Pilates, kinesiology, and various somatic practices like Tai Chi and Qi Gong, Amy shares how these disciplines come together to foster a more vibrant and connected life. Discover how tuning into the felt sense of your body can enhance responsiveness and resilience, even in moments of discomfort.
Amy and I dive into the intricate relationship between trauma and movement, highlighting how trauma can manifest through guarded postures, clenched muscles, and restricted breath. We discuss the nervous system’s responses and how chronic states affect our bodies. Amy shares how movement helps in metabolizing and processing trauma, promoting healing and neuroplasticity.
Holding space is more than just a concept—it’s an art form. In our conversation, Amy underscores the importance of doing personal work to be fully present for others, drawing inspiration from traditional cultures and elder wisdom. Creativity and playfulness are highlighted as key elements in connection, leading to sessions that leave clients feeling strong, at ease, and authentically expressive.
Amy Kiara Ruth Website
Changepain Medical and Allied Health clinic
Amy's online group medical visits are supervised by a physician and so are covered through MSP. A gentle Qigong movement class on Mondays at 11am and on Fridays at 11am in 2024.
She offers two alternating series: Somatic Therapy, where we explore skills of interoception, breathing, seed movements and a Healing after Trauma series, where we explore the roles of the nervous system and body-based strategies to support more ease in the present moment.
Heart of Motion Podcast host Susannah Steers is a Pilates & Integrated Movement Specialist and owner of Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver, BC. She is passionate about movement, about connections and about life.
Through movement teaching, speaking, and facilitating workshops, she supports people in creating movement practices that promote fitness from the inside out. She loves building community, and participating in multi-disciplinary collaborations.
Along with her friend and colleague Gillian McCormick, Susannah also co-hosts The Small Conversations for a Better World podcast – an interview based podcast dedicated to promoting the kind of conversations about health that can spark positive change in individuals, families, communities and across the globe.
Social Media Links:
Moving Spirit Pilates Instagram
Moving Spirit Pilates Facebook
Susannah Steers Instagram
Welcome to the Heart of Motion podcast. I'm Susannah Steers and I'll be your host as we explore the heart, soul and science of movement as a pathway to more active, vibrant and connected living. Nothing happens until something moves, so let's get started.
Susannah Steers:One of the things I love most about doing this podcast is that I get to share some of my favorite people with you. My guest today is someone that I trust more than most when it comes to thinking through movement challenges or finding a new way into something I'm working on, either for my clients or for myself. Amy Kiara Ruth is a skilled movement practitioner and kinesiologist and a dear friend. Her education, training and experience are deep and diverse. She's a keen observer and she has an ability to hold space for people in a powerfully supportive way. I love her and I know you will too. Amy, welcome to the podcast.
Amy Ruth:Oh, thank you so much, Susannah. It's really a delight to be here.
Susannah Steers:I can't wait to share you. Your work and your training are fascinating in that they seem to bridge the gaps between science and art, clinical practice and movement exploration. There's a way all of these seem to be integrated in your work in a way that creates really beautiful possibilities for supporting people. Can you tell me a little bit more about the various influences to your work and how they come together in your life and your practice?
Amy Ruth:Such a great question and many people are often asking me what is it that you actually do, because I have such a diverse range of interests. I started as a young person in dance, primarily in ballet, and then that moved into a whole realm of other kinds of dancing, and then I was introduced to the Pilates method, which is how we first met each other yeah.
Amy Ruth:Instructors, beginning instructors in the Pilates method. I also have a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology with a minor in education. I've studied continuum, continuum montage. I've studied lots of different forms of somatic practices, I've studied Tai Chi and Ji Gong, and then just many artistic interests in terms of singing, drumming, that sort of thing. So when I come to work with someone or to teach a class or a group or a workshop, I'm bringing all of that with me and it's kind of like a big, a big field or a big river of information and support and then I just sense in and see what arrives to meet the person in that particular moment it.
Susannah Steers:Yes, yes, I know, having worked with you both as a colleague and as a client, how powerful that is. You spoke a little bit about somatics, and it's something that I know people hear about. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that is?
Amy Ruth:Absolutely. Somatics, and so the word somatic is based on the word soma, which means the living body or the experience of having a body. So somatic practices are those in which they're supporting us to have the felt sense of a body. They're inviting us to become more at ease with having a body, with feeling that we have a body and, quite basically, the somatic practices are inviting us to remember that we're human beings. So, in some ways, the somatic practices are practices that we might have done, like many cultures have, practices that help us really feel comfortable in ourselves, help address concerns that might arrive, frustrations that might arrive, help us to address healing, and these might be practices that we do individually or in small groups or in larger groups, and so we have this now kind of very popular form called somatics, which shows up in many different arenas, and yet it's really based on ancient practices from many cultures.
Susannah Steers:Right. So it feels like it's really about building a relationship with yourself, and maybe even with yourself in relation to others in the world. Would that be true?
Amy Ruth:Yes, yes, absolutely yes.
Amy Ruth:So much in our current culture is like mind thinking dominant, and somatic work is helping us to remember that we're a body too, so we're more than a mind or body as well, and so we're building the relationship between how our mind and our body are communicating with each other, how my mind is informing my body, how my body is informing my mind, and then, of course, all of that's happening in a particular context.
Amy Ruth:So I'm, you know, at home by myself, or I'm with my family, or I'm with a group of friends, or I'm at an event, or I'm at work, and what's happening in those different settings? How am I in relationship with the environment, with the people, with the dynamics that are at flow? And so the work of somatics is helping us to receive and pay attention to the cues that are arriving in our body at any given moment in time, to support us in just being more responsive and comfortable in what is going on, even in things that are highly uncomfortable. Right Come comfortable with being uncomfortable in moments of potential conflict or tension, that we have some resource to be able to be responsive and not only reactive in patterns that may have been established a long time ago.
Susannah Steers:It sounds like that builds resiliency, in that you're able to sort of feel into what is right now and not necessarily change it maybe change it, but also just be with what is and be able to make choices, as you say, about, you know, moving forward or stepping back or changing course as we go along.
Amy Ruth:So, by being present with ourselves and trusting the information that's arriving from our body in the given moment we do, we have a bit more responsiveness, we have a bit more resilience. We might respond in the same way and yet, yeah, it's such a tricky thing because it's so easy again in our current culture, to have this goal of perfection. I'm going to respond in exactly the right way. I'm going to do everything perfectly. I will never feel, you know all the list of emotions that are considered not appropriate, and and that's not what somatics is about. It's more about like it's really about I just really feel it's about being human being in the full messiness and the full sensory experience of what it is to be a human being, right? So in one of your earlier podcasts, you were talking with a movement person and they were sharing. Both of you were sharing how movement is your first language and one of my teachers I heard this first from Karen McHose and it's sensation is our first language and all other languages are a translation.
Susannah Steers:Oh that's beautiful.
Amy Ruth:And so we forget that. We forget that sensation is our first language, right? Because maybe growing up, sensation wasn't valued, or the people that we were with didn't understand how we were trying to communicate what it was that we were experiencing. And so, you know, I feel, as has been shared by other folks one of the roles of an adult is to address some of those things that didn't get fully addressed as children, for whatever reason, sometimes just lack of an awareness and knowledge. And so how do we reclaim and reintegrate the skills that we may have developed or may not have developed, to help communicate between our body and our mind, mind and the body, so we're really becoming a more integrated person, right? Yeah, it doesn't mean that, you know. Again, there's that whole kind of like all what I call like the white wellness culture, perfect, kind of thing. You just have to think the thought
Susannah Steers:Whitewash,
Amy Ruth:whitewash indeed, whitewash, yes.
Amy Ruth:So it's not about that. It's about really like again being in the full, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, the full catastrophe of living right?
Susannah Steers:You know, there is a huge wellness culture, particularly in North America. I'm not sure how that translates in the rest of the world, but we all inhabit our bodies in different ways, as you say. You know the messages going back and forth.
Susannah Steers:We're all doing in our own ways, in our own individual ways, doing in our own ways in our own individual ways, and I do think that the pathways to health that are validated now are all about optimizing. You know, finding the perfect thing and your perfect matros and your perfect fitness routine and your perfect whatever. It does seem to kind of fit in our hurry up, skim the surface. Next thing, kind of culture. I know that there is a place I hope there is a place for deepening awareness, connection to self, relationships, fundamental support, and you can't do that in a hurry. Maybe, maybe you can, I don't know. It seems to me I can't do it in a hurry. So are we in a place where it has to be either, or or do you think that there's some kind of way to integrate these places of doing and being?
Amy Ruth:Well, yes, absolutely. I always feel there's a place that we can be in an integration, as you mentioned earlier. Yeah, I really see my work as bridging these kind of two perspectives and I always see things as being on a continuum, so that we're not in a binary it's this or this.
Susannah Steers:Yes.
Amy Ruth:It's like where am I on the continuum of this relationship between doing and being, or hurry up and slow down, and it's that recognition that our bodies are always in flux, we're always shifting from one moment to another. And you know this, when we're always in the hurry up, we're always in the sympathetic nervous system tone, we're always kind of revving and going and there can be quite a lot of satisfaction from being in that mobilized, engaged state. And yet we cannot be there all the time.
Amy Ruth:If we're there all the time, then we're not able to rest properly, we're not able to digest properly, we're not able to sleep properly, and so we need times where we come out of that, even just a small amount. And so when we build the skills of paying attention, then we can start to notice okay, I feel good in this very dynamic, mobilized kind of hurry perhaps, or very fast activity, or maybe I really, like you know, doing very dynamic cardio and I feel great in that. And yet one cannot do that all day and feel fantastic. And so when is the moment when my body starts to say, oh, I've had enough of this? Not just my mind saying, oh, I'm tired, Also information. But that information might be coming from our body saying, oh, I'm ready for something else. And how then can we respond to that to shift into some other kind of activity, including rest. So that sense of can we be present in ourselves, regardless of what the activity is?
Amy Ruth:and it's a, it's really an inquiry, it's a question. It's not saying we should be present, it's really like oh, can I, can I, can I in this moment? Oh, I cannot, okay, yes, I can. So it is really bringing that kind of what I would call like an inquiry mindset for lack of a better term to what is going on. So then, when we can be in that place of curiosity, then we're always accessing a little bit more of that parasympathetic nervous system. So even as we're moving up into that mobilized sympathetic tone, we're accessing more of that rest and digest, curiosity grounded state as a support for that other state.
Susannah Steers:In your practice, you work a lot with people who are perhaps experiencing chronic pain or acute pain or dysfunction and things that really aren't working. Something has gone sideways for them in some way. For a lot of them, mainstream work has not brought relief. What do you think that they need to be able to do that that mainstream health, fitness, wellness is not giving them Like? Are there commonalities in what's showing up for them, or is it really all over the place?
Amy Ruth:Well, the experience of pain is very complex and more and more we are understanding the complexity of it in terms of recognizing that it's not just I feel pain because I have an injury. There's a what we call the biopsychosocial model of pain. So recognizing that there are many factors that are affecting how I'm feeling pain. Just the same way with any kind of illness it's there's not, like usually, one thing causing the illness. There's usually maybe one kind of trigger or key event and there's not necessarily at this point in time, a clear, you know, provoking element for their pain. So there may have been, like, a major car accident or surgery or fall, that sort of thing, and yet at this point in time it's unclear, like the injury you know in many ways from a physiological model will have recovered and yet the person is still experiencing a huge amount of pain. And so then we have to start looking at are there some ways to support that person in experiencing some movement, because we need to move, we're designed to move Are there some ways that we can support that person's nervous system in starting to calm down?
Amy Ruth:I would say and I know this might be quite controversial for many folks I would say the fact that people have to work full time while they are trying to recover from some kind of major injury, I feel is one of the biggest impediments. Or folks are having to manage a household or do child or elder care at the same time as they're trying to recover from an injury. It's just very challenging because each of those are huge responsibilities, as many folks know. And then the recovery work is also a huge responsibility. It's like having a part-time job, right? You imagine you have your full-time job of work and then you have your part-time job of elder care or household management or child care, and then you have your part-time job of recovering from pain, and that's a lot of jobs that you're managing there.
Susannah Steers:Right, it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot. Well, maybe we could touch on something that I think ties into what you were just talking about. Trauma seems to be a word that people throw around pretty easily these days. It is deeply personal and it may show up in really unexpected times and places in our lives.
Susannah Steers:What are some of the ways that you see trauma expressing itself in a body in motion or not in motion?
Amy Ruth:Well, we have one of the kind of basic definitions of trauma is an event or circumstance or series of circumstances that are too much, too fast or too soon. And some people add too early, like in terms of a developmental thing, event happened too early for the individual to respond to. So again with a too much, too fast, too soon, then we're in the rushing right, we start to go more in that revving sympathetic nervous system. So, which is not to say we can't be in the mobilized sympathetic nervous system where we have support of our resources and our ground and we're actively engaging in that.
Amy Ruth:As I have mentioned earlier, it's very satisfying to move in that mode. And, as I have mentioned earlier, it's very satisfying to move in that mode. And there's the way in which we're kind of being like perpetual the fight response. So we have that so-called flight response and the fight response and so those kind of patterns can just be kind of showing up as an underlying directive perhaps for how the person is showing up in movement or showing up in their posture. That can also show up as the fawn response, which is kind of related to appeasement, so that trying to always make everything okay, and each of those are normal states of the nervous system they each have value.
Amy Ruth:And again, coming back to the somatic role, to start to become aware of like oh, am I always operating in one of in this state, or the flight response, or the, even the freeze response? Am I perpetually in freeze or am I able to move into and out of those states?
Amy Ruth:and so that's so that when I'm working with folks that's one of the things that we're we're trying to kind of sort out and find ways to support the person is to recognize when you're in the fight response and when you're not in the fight response oh wow, I'm in a dissociated response. How do I come out of that when I have enough support?
Susannah Steers:In what ways do you think that movement can either support or just distract, uh or or. In what ways do you think movement might, might help or get in the way of um helping somebody to deal with their trauma?
Amy Ruth:I mean yes, because movement can do all of those things right we can use.
Amy Ruth:Yeah, I mean sometimes, if we are in a huge amount of discomfort, the act of paying attention is just not, it's not a possibility, right, it's too painful. So in that kind of setting we need distraction techniques just to kind of help us cope. Until that our nervous system can start to settle through external supports that way, sometimes being able to have access to the sympathetic nervous system, activities, so cardiovascular activities, lifting, you know, strength training, weight training activities, martial arts activities, dance activities that can allow us to express things in a nonverbal way, because trauma is held in the nervous system but it's expressed in our bodies, and so if we have ways to allow that to be expressed when we're being present with it, then that is supporting our own health, because all of these are designed. You know my impulse to push something away. It's a natural human impulse. There's something I don't want my muscles have the satisfaction, the felt sense of doing that pushing away, to be able then to move into what happens next, whatever that is.
Susannah Steers:Right.
Amy Ruth:Yeah, I was working with an individual who it became very clear that their whole body was very guarded and they were perpetually in this kind of clenched holding state. That's how they were like pretty much all the time there's hardly any movement, there's hardly any breath movement. Their hand is, if you look, their hand is almost always in a fist and this is how they're containing their pain and containing whatever else is going on for them. So from a movement perspective, I mean, if I was to be a work as a psychologist, then I might be curious about emotional things and go in that kind of route. But from a movement professional perspective, then we have just been playing.
Amy Ruth:What is it like to play in that range of slightly amplifying the tensing of the fist and then slightly relaxing the tensing of the fist? And so we just play in a very small range at first, just so that the brain can start to recognize, oh, oh right, this is what tensing. I'm tensing right now, I'm holding tension versus what this? Oh, I can dial down tension and then I can start to feel, oh, there's a range of possibility, intention. And then I can start to feel, oh, there's a range of possibility. And as soon as we start to create what I call a gradient.
Amy Ruth:so we start to have a gradient of experience, not just one steady state, but I can move from one state to the next. Then we can access the neuroplasticity of the brain. Then there's interest and the brain is like, oh, what is going on? And then, oh, what is going on, and then there's a possibility of something else can occur in that moment. So just as one example and you know, many people show up who've been in pain for quite some time in that kind of guarded posture. It's a common, it's one of the common patterns that show up. I mean, you also get in folks who are dealing then with underlying fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, central sensitization, all of these mass cell activation syndrome, all of these kind of syndromes or collections of symptoms that just are really showing the body is quite overwhelmed, essentially Right. Yes, so those are kind of maybe two kind of generalized patterns that I see quite frequently in my practice. And of course there a variety of movement practices allows the body to metabolize and move through what it needs to metabolize.
Susannah Steers:I love that notion of metabolizing those experiences. You know, the idea that it can move through us in a way. You know, it's like eating your breakfast provides a different kind of fuel for your body and it moves through you in a particular kind of way. And the idea that we can metabolize these experiences and how they live in us or are moved through us. You know, do they get stuck inside of us or are they able to move through and move on so that we can continue evolving, developing, experiencing in other ways?
Amy Ruth:Well, absolutely, absolutely yes. And you know, like we have a movement, impulse is also like an emotion. It's designed to be like a wave.
Amy Ruth:We have the impulse arrive we have the experience of it it gets to be expressed, hopefully, in a way that's, you know, safe, and then there's a release, right.
Amy Ruth:So, just like the wave, you know, the ocean gathers, there's a little cresting of the wave, then the wave breaks and then it moves on to the beach and then it cycles back for the next wave. And the same thing with a movement impulse, right, if I have that impulse to pull something towards me, it's going to show up as something in my body. So I have something, but usually something in my body is wanting to pull the water glass towards me or the socks or whatever, and so then if I feel like I can't access the water glass or the socks, then the impulse is stuck in my body. And that happens quite often in a motor vehicle accident setting is that, you know, there's been some impulse to either defend or to pull away or to have some kind of response in that moment of the impact interrupts that. So it's like that pattern is kind of stuck in the body and needs to find some way to get expressed. And because it's a nonverbal pattern often then we don't necessarily know what it is, and so it can take some time for that to unravel and and as we were talking about, metabolize, so that sense of that we can have digestion of an experience and then in the act of digestion, then there's there's a learning, there's a harvesting right so that we're not only staying on the on the surface where we're, we're getting to benefit from from whatever has occurred, and it's not just an intellectual exercise,
Susannah Steers:it's not a cognitive experience per se
Amy Ruth:no, I mean, we can have cognition, we can have insight, uh, and it is. It is a body, it's a body-based experience, right? I? I know many people have the you know everything happens for a reason, kind of thing, which I just think is total nonsense. But I feel like if we have the supports and resources, we can harvest something from the experience, we can take what has happened and create a medicine from our own experience and then that can be offered forward to other people as well.
Susannah Steers:Well, I think people can probably hear this just in listening to you. But I said something earlier about how powerfully you hold space because I've experienced it myself. How powerfully you hold space because I've experienced myself. That phrase is tossed around so easily but in real life especially I think as a practitioner it's not an easy thing to define and it's not an easy thing to do. Right, someone comes in, they're having an experience, you may have all these things that might be available as supports, but you have a way of just being there for whatever that person is experiencing and allowing them to have their experience, and you're not imposing all your own thoughts and notions and you may have them, but you're certainly not throwing it at people when they come in the door and there's something that is really powerful in that. So I'm curious what holding space means for you, and is it something that you work to create intentionally or does it just happen? That's just who who you are?
Amy Ruth:Well, people might think it is just who I am, and and I think at that point, at this point, that might be partially true um, holding space is something that I really work to cultivate. So for me, holding space means, uh, doing my own work so that I know where I'm at on a given day when I arrive to work with whomever. It means that I'm letting any of my personal concerns rest outside the room for the period of time that I'm working with the person, to the best of my ability. And you know, if I'm having a concern about a family member or a close friend or something that's unfolding in the world, they're always going to be showing up in my mind and in my consciousness and I can, just when they arrive, I'm like, oh, it's not the time for you Take a number, as my other friend said. So there's being able to have the practice of doing that. So practice implies that there's work and there's work involved, right? So it's not easy, which is it's like a meditation practice, any kind of practice, movement, practice, being present, practice those are things that we work at. There are things that we work at.
Amy Ruth:So holding space, then, is to in my consciousness. Then I'm recognizing where I am, I'm being aware of my connection to the earth, my connection to the space, so that then, when the person comes in, I'm able to hold in my perception, in my consciousness, a very broad shape of awareness. So I'm holding a kind of very generative listening. And these are practices that I first perhaps really consciously encountered working with Susan Harper in the work of continuum and continuum montage, and these are practices of what we could call perhaps deep listening, but it's like a deep somatic listening. So, working with Susan, she often talks about listening not only to the words that the person is saying, but we're kind of listening to the vibrational tone, like the vibe. We're listening just from a heart perspective, like are we being touched and moved in some way, and so when I'm working with someone and holding space, I'm kind of using my whole body as a listening device, we could say to sense in.
Amy Ruth:If I start to feel uncomfortable, it's like, oh right, uncomfortableness is here, right, is it me, is it the other person, is it both of us? Or if I start to talk about like, what does it mean to hold space? Because it is a very um, sensory based, felt sense experience. And yet we can, we can tangibly feel it when someone else is doing it um, versus when someone is not right. If you're the person distracted or their need to, you know they're in a hurry or they just, they're just exhausted. They don't have the capacity to do that Right.
Susannah Steers:Right, yeah, well it's. It's one of those things that, again, you hear a lot in the in the wellness culture, and you know it when you're when you're in it and when you're not, you know.
Amy Ruth:It's true, and you know, I think about, like I think a lot about traditional cultures, and not only the traditional cultures of you know, where we live, in the general area where we live, which is the Musqueam, muscovite, and, and that's the people, but, like my own traditional cultures, which there's been a perceptual cut because of the immigration influence, but there are, like the grandmother energy right.
Amy Ruth:The grandfather energy or the grandparent energy, right, and just that there's a different energy with a grandparent or an elder or somebody who's really has time to be, just has time to be, and then the person has time to be, can then meet whatever is arriving Right In a different way than the folks that are needing to be in the doing mode, right, the pushing the doing. Yeah, so that's linking back to in the doing mode, right, the pushing the doing.
Amy Ruth:Yeah, so that's linking back to what we were talking about earlier, right, the doing and the being. Right. Sometimes those qualities or characteristics might be showing up in different people in the community or the family dynamic at certain times, right, so there might be certain times of our lives that we're in that state, or just certain phases at different times within our life. The seasons, seasons, yes, yeah, so the holding space. For me at this point in my life it feels very much like that auntie, grandmother energy of just really like all right, I'm here for you. What's happening? Right?
Susannah Steers:Yeah, I know you to be quite a playful person as well, so I mean, is play a part of this? There is a seriousness to holding space, to working with all this stuff, but is there room for play in all of this?
Amy Ruth:Absolutely, absolutely. Creativity and play, I feel, are just so crucial, right, yeah, I mean, we just we see it with humans who are sufficiently resourced. There's a playfulness, and we see it in animals, right as well. Right, and you know, I watch the videos of, like, the crows playing with things, or the ravens playing with things, or, you know, the bear blowing bubbles in the person's pool, right? So that's the sense of that, it's a play in creativity or natural expression, and so, and that's, I guess, the other piece of the holding space is that there is the seriousness of having a practice and there's also just the playfulness and the creativity of I have no idea what is going to arrive and can I be present with the creativity and the playfulness as it arrives, and so that for me, a really good session is that I can be in that, not knowing holding space, and then that kind of creative impulse arrives in the interaction between myself and the other person and then we go somewhere with that.
Amy Ruth:That, by the end of the session they're feeling easier, they're breathing with more ease, they're feeling a different sense of strength in themselves, and there's been maybe some laughter. Or I'm known for my sounds, known for my, my sounds. I usually joke that I went to university so I could make sounds to express like a cat, trill or or other other fun sounds of that nature.
Susannah Steers:So well, it comes back right back to being human together, doesn't it like? Yes, aside from all of the roles and all of the things, it's just two people together, working together and maybe figuring out a problem on the way or not. Yeah.
Amy Ruth:Yes, absolutely kind of build the skills that we can access all of the different ways of knowing. So then I can have a sense of like, oh right, this person really needs like a very basic strength training kind of focus and that will be the best thing for them, right? Or like, oh, this person, like to have a really regimented program, is not going to One person. I'm like, okay, let's see what it's like to do three minutes every morning of one movement. Pick a movement, see what you want to do every morning. We just get in the habit of doing some. It might be like a breathing pause or it might be a stretch or might be strengthening. Yeah, Right.
Amy Ruth:Yeah.
Susannah Steers:One of the things that I get interested in among many. You know, we talk about you and I talk about fitness in the world and health and a lot of things, and women of a certain age are having a moment. I'm hoping it's more than just a moment. You know, finally, the stages of moving through perimenopause and menopause and into aging, for women is recognized as something that's a real journey. You know, it's not just women going, you know, hitting 45 and starting to go crazy. There's biological processes, there's physical processes and it's all relatively new in that, you know, in the late 1800s women didn't live to this age a lot of the time. And then we talk about, you know, male privilege in this research world and la la, la, we can go into all those places.
Susannah Steers:But what I am really interested in now is, I guess, some of the ways that science is telling us this has to happen at this age. If you're going to live older, you need to be lifting heavy, you need to be doing X, y and Z, and there are all these things and yes, and again we're coming back to a yes and question, right? So the other side of that is the journey. There is a metabolizing, there is a metabolic thing that happens. There are hormonal changes that physically shift. But I'm curious about your thoughts about how we can support perimenopausal, menopausal, moving into postmenopausal times. How do we support women with movement, with understanding, in ways that they're not maybe hearing from their personal trainer or their doctor may be?
Amy Ruth:Yes, as you were talking, I was thinking about and this is how I work in this kind of associative way. I was like talking about how, when I first was introduced to some of the concepts around Ayurvedic medicine, they talked about these seven tastes, right, and I was like what Seven tastes? What are these seven tastes? These seven tastes, right? And I was like what seven tastes, what are these seven tastes? And I was like, oh, there's like tastes like astringent and tastes like bitter and things not only just sweet, sour, salty kind of, and and so for me, again, that comes back to the variety of the types of exercise and activity.
Amy Ruth:And so, as human beings, we're designed to like, we're designed to move in a variety of ways, and I feel like each of us has our kind of home base in the types of activity we do. Some people thrive in more restorative activities, some people thrive in kind of moderate intensity, some people thrive in higher intensity activities, and yet can we include something from each of those activities in our day, in our week, in our month? And so I really think about cycles of time. So the cycle of a day, the cycle of a week, the cycle of a month are just some examples, and so I usually invite myself and other people to consider like am I getting enough strength training in this cycle of the week, for example?
Amy Ruth:Or am I getting enough restorative time in that weekly cycle? Am I getting enough of the strength training or the cardiovascular or the coordination or the balance? And when we impose a fixed idea of what things should look like for somebody else, then we're not being true to their experience and so again we can say this are really helpful, this is a really helpful array of activity to do, and for your body what is best? Yeah, how do you know? And so then that comes back to the paying attention to sensations and paying attention with somatics in the body is then I'll know. I'll know like, right, I am not getting enough cardio or I'm not drinking enough water, because my body will start to let me know because I am paying attention, and if I'm not paying attention, my body is going to let me know, but I might not know how to listen.
Susannah Steers:Yeah, Cause you've been pushing for so long, right? Yeah, yeah.
Amy Ruth:Yeah, yeah, and so yeah, and so it is, and again we're. It's that always that back and forth of you know, we are a body in a context. The context is our home environment, our community environment, our work environment, our cultural environment, and sometimes that environment is not conducive to us really paying attention. We feel we have to be in certain ways, or we actually do have to be in certain ways in that environment, and so how do we work with where we're at that way in terms of the particular environment that we're in, the context that we're in, as well as what is going on for us?
Susannah Steers:It feels like kind of a radical self-care. You know, in the context of our current or maybe just mine, you know, in the environment I find myself in, that sometimes feels like radical self-care.
Amy Ruth:Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, we only have to look at the like, the Black feminist work of folks like Audre Lorde and another folks of like. Rest is resistance. Right, self-care is resistance in terms of how do we connect radical as a root? How do we connect to our root, to our essence, to our connection with the earth to be the full human being that we can be? Right in this particular context that we're in.
Susannah Steers:Right.
Amy Ruth:Right, you know, I mean that's always the back and forth, right, there's much that we can do ourselves and we need to be met by our environment. Our environment needs to meet us in order for us to have our, our full capacity.
Amy Ruth:Right, if I am a cactus, I can't be in a rainforest and thrive right yeah, if I'm a kale plant, I cannot be in the hot, hot sun and throw right right. So you know what kind of. What are my strengths and am I in the right context for those strengths? Sometimes we have the capacity to move to a different context or make changes in our environment to enable our thriving, and sometimes we do not. So, within whatever the constraints are, whether they're small or large, how do we yeah, how do we connect to our own root in terms of being able to support our well-being and then the impact that happens with other people. Right, as I start to take care of myself more, to whatever degree I have ability to, then that usually influences the folks around us to also do the same and we can gradually support each other. Yeah.
Susannah Steers:Well, okay. So I'm sure people want to know where can they connect with you if they'd like to learn more about you or work with you in some way. Where do they find you?
Amy Ruth:well, I'm working a number of different places right now. Um, I, uh, I teach Pilates mat work classes at the Trout Lake Community Center in East Vancouver. I've been teaching there for many years and it's such a delight to be continuing to work there. I also work at a Pilates studio in the Kitsilano neighborhood it's the Meridian Pilates studio. So there are a couple of days and then you were specifically mentioning working with folks who have pain chronic pain and so I have the privilege to work at Change Pain Medical and Allied Health Clinic, which is now in Burnaby individual folks.
Amy Ruth:But I also offer a couple of online classes for change. This is very exciting for me because these are called group medical visits and they're covered through MSP. So, as a BC resident, we're able to join these classes without charge. It's through the medical services plan because there's a physician who is a co-host in the classes. So Mondays at 11, I offer what I call Qigong movement, so somatic-based Qigong movement, explorations and breathing. That's an hour on Mondays at 11. And then Fridays at 11 for an hour and a half.
Amy Ruth:I offer two different series. One is called somatic therapy, so we're looking at what is somatic. Why do I want to pay attention to sensations, those kinds of things. We do a whole class on breathing, different ways to support breathing, so that breath can be a liberatory practice and not just a kind of imposed practice. And so that's the somatic therapy classes, with a four class series, and then that alternates with the healing after trauma where we look at how do we use body based practices to support coming into the present moment, to allow the metabolizing of a traumatic experience. So those are the group medical visits at the ChangePain. Those are online and on the website there's lots of information about how to sign up for those. So I feel very excited about those because they are offered without charge through MSP.
Susannah Steers:Yeah, I'll make sure to put the links to the show notes for those. So if you're listening and you want to know, check out the show notes because you'll see the links.
Susannah Steers:These days it seems to me that all kinds of people come at us with the certainty that they have the answer to what ails us. While that can be attractive when you're wrestling with a problem or, you know, just wanting someone else to solve your problems, it seems unrealistic to me that anyone has all the answers, and maybe expressing that certainty is driven by marketing strategies or whatever. But I find myself deeply distrustful of practitioners that come at me with the idea that they know exactly what's going on and they have the answers I need. Now I'll admit that's likely due to my own experiences and my own biases, but I haven't had success with that kind of approach. Amy, your deep listening and your gentle inquiry, combined with all of your knowledge and expertise, have been powerfully healing for me, and I think we need more of your kind of truly whole person approach in the world. Thank you for all you do and thanks for taking the time with me today.
Amy Ruth:Thank you so much, susanna. It really has been a pleasure to be here. I mentioned at the beginning I was excited to be here, a pleasure to be here, and this has just been a truly delightful conversation. I had moments of forgetting that we were on board, which is always a good sign, yeah, so thank you. Yes and yeah, I hope this has been a benefit to folks.
Susannah Steers:Thank you for everything. Bye for now. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Subscribe and, if you love what you heard, leave a five-star review and tell people what you enjoyed most. Join me here again in a couple of weeks For now let's get moving.
