Heart of Motion

Meditation as Medicine

• Susannah Steers • Season 2 • Episode 5

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In a world increasingly fraught with stress and anxiety, finding balance and peace can sometimes seem unattainable. This episode of the Heart of Motion podcast dives deep into the potent intersection of movement, mindfulness, and health, featuring expert insights from Siobhan O'Connell, a seasoned physiotherapist with 40+ years experience. We explore how chronic stress influences our overall health, shaping our bodies and minds in detrimental ways. Siobhan shares her journey of discovering the mind-body connection, revealing how integrating ancient wisdom from meditation with modern science can open pathways to healing that extend beyond traditional practices.

Listeners will learn how meditation, often misconstrued as an esoteric pastime, plays a crucial role in counteracting the effects of stress while promoting overall well-being. Siobhan explains how mindfulness can revolutionize our understanding of healing and wellness, leading to transformative changes in the way we approach our health. The episode culminates in a guided meditation, offering listeners a tangible experience of the serenity that can be cultivated through such practices.

Join us as we uncover the layers of our personal health narratives, highlighting that within us lies the capacity for self-healing and resilience. Whether you seek to understand the science behind stress or are curious about meditation's profound benefits, there's something here for everyone.

 Let's embark on this journey together and reclaim the joy of movement and connection in our lives. Join Siobhan O'Connell for a Meditation as Medicine workshop on Saturday, March 15, 2025 from 2 - 5 pm at Moving Spirit Pilates Studio in North Vancouver! Registration details below. 

Connect with Siobhan O'Connell
www.meditationasmedicine.ca 

Instagram: @meditation.as.medicine

Meditation as Medicine Workshop
Saturday, March 15, 2025
2:00 - 5:00 pm
Moving Spirit Pilates Studio
#205-38 Fell Ave.
North Vancouver, BC
$65.00 + GST
Click here for more info and to register

Want to learn more?
Siobhan recommends checking out the following resources:

www.deepakchopra.com
www.drjoedispenza.com 
www.drdivi.com

Send us a text

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

Susannah Steers:

Welcome to the Heart of Motion podcast. I'm Susanna 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:

I'm going to hazard a guess that most of the people listening right now are feeling buffeted by life lately. Between work, family, finances, health and all the things we need to navigate there, we're also watching some pretty dramatic world events unfold. There's a lot of noise around us, lots of things creating stress at the deepest levels and, whether we acknowledge it or not, that stress is affecting our health. In November, on a previous episode, we talked a little about that stress and how it might affect our nervous systems and our movement. Today we're going to dig a little deeper and talk more about how that stress can be the root cause of all kinds of illness and ways that we might be able to shift that for ourselves.

Susannah Steers:

My guest today on the podcast is my friend and colleague, Siobhan O'Connell. We've known each other for a long time and I think we've been on similar but somewhat different paths in pursuit of whole person health since we first met, way back when. Siobhan is a registered physiotherapist with 46 years of experience with the human mind and body in a whole variety of settings, and she understands now more than ever how important the mind and the spirit are to the health of the body and all its relationships. She's now working to bring forward the best of the 8,000-year-old wisdom tradition of meditation with current quantum science to help all of us to understand the intelligence that underlines our creation, our health and our capacity for self-healing. Siobhan, welcome to the podcast.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Thank you, Sue. There's no place I'd rather be than here today.

Susannah Steers:

Well, you know the body and all its relationships. You are speaking my language. I have to ask you're an orthopedic physiotherapist. What has brought you from an orthopedic physio practice to a place where you want to explore and deepen your understanding of the mind-body connection to the health of the body, like how do those two go together?

Siobhan O'Connell:

The short answer is that, since I was a very young physio, I was very aware of the fact that we were taught a lot of techniques and things to do for people and to people, but that the effectiveness of those techniques was very much dependent on the mindset of people and who got better and who didn't. So my curiosity was tweaked a long, long time ago, but our culture didn't allow for too much exploration in that area at that point in time. And in 2014, I was at that point in my career where I could really listen to my curiosity path, and my curiosity was all about how does the mind interact? Like, what is the story? And, like many, many people, meditation and mindfulness were starting to show up, and I did the apps and I did the workshops and I did various books. Like you can fill your left brain with books and information, but you don't really get the experience until you go to your right brain, right, yeah? So I made the decision. I said where do I have to go and who is the top guy in the world for this? And it was Dr Deepak Chopra, and it still pretty much is.

Siobhan O'Connell:

And I went to a beautiful retreat that he hosted, called Seduction of Spirit in California, my husband and I both actually went together. It was a splendid outing and we got the full goods, the full eight-day long experience. And Deepak is such a phenomenal teacher because he gave us the history, the philosophy. Where does meditation come from the origins? He gave us the science. He gave us the history, the philosophy. Where does meditation come from the origins? He gave us the science, he gave us the research, he gave us everything, but, more importantly, he gave us the experience. So I was so hooked. It was just a beautiful, beautiful experience, though the entire week was so well developed that I went back and forth to the Chopra Center for many years and finally they offered a teacher training in 2017. That was going to be the last live training, so I thought I'll do that. Because I won't do it, I'm not a great online student. So I've been teaching and certified since 2017.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So that was kind of the beginning of it and then integrating it with the physio practice. It was finding the portal, like finding the conversational avenue that I could kind of introduce this to my patients. And that wasn't a hard thing to do because in the study of meditation as it's taught today and as I learned it from Deepak. There are two streams, shall we say, and the first stream is very much about the physiology of stress and the second stream, of course, is the spirituality side of it.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So, on the stress side, deepak was very, very crystal clear on the fact that we are, as you referenced, in an epidemic of stress at the moment. We hate to use that word because it's so activating, but we are, and it seems to get more existential every second day. And what I really learned from him very powerfully was that we are actually born into peace in our bodies. We're born to be peaceful. We're born into our parasympathetic nervous system, which is about rest, relaxation, creativity, happiness. We have more brain cells devoted to the experience of joy and happiness than any other thing in our bodies actually. So that is our natural resting state. And, yes, we have the option to kick out into the sympathetic part of the nervous system, which is the fight flight, and God bless it.

Siobhan O'Connell:

It's a powerful thing when we need to fly out of a building that might be on fire, or people felt it the other day with the earthquake, and in that moment where you feel threatened, many, many bad things happen in the body, for good reason, but for short term. So blood pressure goes up, people start sweating, immune function goes down, digestion shifts from the belly to the legs because you might have to escape. Blood starts to thicken immediately in anticipation of a wound. So phenomenal, elegant, exquisite response, but very, very energy, expensive. And we're understanding now that people today are experiencing that eight to 10 times a day, every day, months, weeks, even years. And the net effect of that is that people, are us, all of us are creating cortisol, which is the stress hormone. Lovely to have a little spike when you need it, but when it's up an elevator for days, months, weeks, years, it's underpinning autoimmune disease that we're seeing diabetes, cancer, arthritis, even dementia. All of these things all come due to an unchecked stress response in the body.

Susannah Steers:

Wow, I mean, I see it often in the studio. You know, in terms of people's movement, in that they're not breathing well, that their muscles it's almost an armored state. You know, the sympathetic muscles are all hyperactive and ready to go and those deeper sympathetic or parasympathetic associated muscles, whether it's the diaphragm or the deep abdominal wall or some of those places that are a lot more about the support and sustain, are just not doing their job. So as a physio, you probably have people coming in to see you with a bad shoulder or a pain in their back or something in their foot. How are you introducing meditation when people are coming in with something they want fixed?

Siobhan O'Connell:

Well, I explain to them that their physical situation is attached to a much bigger intelligence of healing in their bodies. The injury that they got yeah, you know they might have a torn shoulder or whatever it is In the moment of injury or stress that the body we talk about fight. We talk about flight, but we also talk about this thing called freeze, and that's very much, I think, what we see in both our works, where they are frozen and they can't move, but they also can't breathe and they also can't sleep and their mind is going a million miles a minute. They're going to the past, they're going to the future. So the first thing we have to do is acknowledge that the body can heal, but it can't heal.

Siobhan O'Connell:

If you're in a state of freeze can't happen right. All the blood is in the amygdala, which is the reptilian brain, can't come to the frontal brain where all the good stuff happens. So the first thing we have to do is start from the inside out. So I typically would start with an explanation of just that kind, depending on where the person's mind is at, to receive that kind of information. But I'll do that. First, set the stage. It's almost like you're going to set the scene and then on that scene, can we deal with a shoulder, can we deal with the breath, can we deal with the recovery plan and the rehab plan? So that's typically kind of how I would approach that.

Susannah Steers:

I love it. It makes me think of the saying the body will do what it can with what it's got in the moment it's in to help you heal. And that again brings it right down to that moment, to what is happening right now.

Siobhan O'Connell:

But if that goes on indefinitely and we try to rehab somebody's neck or shoulder and they can't breathe and their minds are still in turmoil because they're going back to the car accident or they're going back to the point that they missed, that lost the match, that created a whole bunch of emotional drama for them, you can't really get a thorough healing established in that kind of situation.

Siobhan O'Connell:

But what I'm finding more now is that, especially with the news and the amount of media that we're exposed to by choice, we do it because we think it's a actual thoughts, and this is such an interesting thing because we have the idea that we are our thoughts. But what we learn from meditation is that we're not our thoughts, we're the observer of our thoughts and the thoughts which are coming at us from the second. People turn on the radio in the morning and I have a good friend who turns on the radio, opens two newspapers and their phone going. All this is happening first thing in the morning. So getting all the information from all these different places. But the amygdala, which is the reptilian brain designed to deal with stress, into which all of this information from all these sources is going, the amygdala is not designed to actually tell the difference between the stress that a person is reading about is happening in Gaza or overseas, or happening to them. The amygdala can't differentiate.

Susannah Steers:

And it's filtering all of this.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Exactly. It just doesn't. It just produces fight, flight, freeze in response to all of it. It can't tell the difference, but people aren't aware of that and all of that creates this thought loop cycle. So we know that we have about 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day, every day. Mostly they're the same thoughts you had yesterday, they're the same thoughts we're going to have tomorrow, and very few of them are focused on the present moment, here and now.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So, whether it's mindful movement that I experienced when I work with you, which I absolutely adore, or whether it's a meditation practice just here in my own home, the first thing that has to happen is I have to leave the past and leave the future and be here now. That's the first thing and that's kind of what mindfulness is. So mindfulness, if you will, people often ask what's the difference between mindfulness and meditation. It's a form of meditation, but it's just bringing your attention to the present moment, and the breath, of course, is the portal for that. That's the way we can access that at any moment in time, but it's kind of can access that at any moment in time, but it's kind of essential that we do because we're understanding that our nervous systems being so overstimulated, they're exhausted and this chronic overproduction of cortisol causing all this disease states is actually reversible and we have a lot of science and research to show this now Quite exciting, profound and ever increasing amounts. There's lots there.

Susannah Steers:

Okay, wait there. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're so, you're sick. So here am I. I have almost 59 year old woman, you know, menopausal. All the things have happened in terms of my, my life experience and my physical health and all of the rest of it. There is an opportunity for me to shift, yes, my cancer risk or my Alzheimer's risk or my like. That can happen, even this late in the game.

Siobhan O'Connell:

It can happen any moment, at any time that you choose to take the time to go from out there to in here, to reset, to shift. I call the nervous system. It's like a house with two rooms. You know. There's the quiet room. That's where the good stuff happens, where the healing happens, and not just healing. I'm going to get more specific with that.

Siobhan O'Connell:

We know now that with that practice of going inward, that not only can we set up the body for healing, we can actually change genetic expression. There's studies were done, some about five or six years ago by the Chokework organization, and they showed that one of the consequences of stress is that at the end of our genes we have a little um. The end the tip of the gene is called the telomere. The telomere produces an enzyme called telomerase. Under conditions of chronic stress, telomerase production actually goes down and the gene starts to come apart. It's like a, it's like a lace unraveling. But with the practice of meditation we we go in and we give our nervous systems that regenerative rest, telomerase production actually goes up and genes can heal and repair themselves.

Susannah Steers:

Wow, it's a different kind of rest. It's not the kind of rest that people often think of oh, I need a break, I'm going to go home and just read a book with a cup of tea, or I'm going to watch TV for a while. This is a very different kind of rest that is restorative at a level that just reading a book is not going to do.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Reading a book isn't enough. No, I mean, reading a book is nice, but you're still focusing on some other story that there might be drama, trauma and death. And you know, god knows what's in the fiction that we're reading. It's giving the mind and the nervous system a complete rest so that it knows what to do. You know God bless Mother Nature. You know she sent us into this world to cope with stress and to survive and do the things we have to do. But she also gave us the tools with which to recover from stress and to heal and repair ourselves from the inside out.

Susannah Steers:

As a kid, when I was growing up, my associations of meditation. I had some older brothers and one of them was into transcendental meditation and this was something with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and at that time I thought, okay, the people who were doing this meditation stuff are either sitting on a yoga mat going om or they've got the flowy robes around them and it was very much sort of a hippie image in my mind. And then a little later in my life I did a little bit of Vipassana meditation with a Buddhist monk and that was wonderful. And then a little later in my life I did a little bit of Vipassana meditation with a Buddhist monk, and that was wonderful and he obviously brought with him some Buddhist teachings. And then a different kind of meditation that I did with a guy named Dr Les Femi. It was very much. It was called open focus meditation and it was really about, again, attention and bringing attention and altering brainwaves by what you were attending to.

Susannah Steers:

But I think that there's still quite a woo. You know, meditation is a little woo. It's not something you can quantify and say this. I mean, maybe now, maybe more you can, but it still seems like it's a little bit woo. There's still some sort of do I have to be religious to do this? Is it associated with kind of weird hippie stuff, or can you speak a little bit to that? Like it does still seem a little more mainstream, but there's still a little bit of a woo attached to it.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Yeah, I agree with you. I think the language of around meditation has to be cleaned up a little bit, and I kind of fall between two pieces here, which is that it is a mystical practice. When you go into yourself quietly and you really listen, you're in your own awareness. You're listening to your own, the rhythm of your own heart, your own breath. It's a profound. It's a profound experience and not one that we're trained to do. Right, our focus is always very much out there and our focus when we're in trouble is always very much out there. There's somebody for this. I need to talk to this person about this. Whatever, and God bless us all, we all. That's what we do and we are doing it all. But one of the things that I really like to teach people is that all of this is actually in you yourself. You just it's the, it's a practice.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Now, the style of meditation I learned at the Chopra Center is is transcendental meditation. It's the exact same philosophy. It's a thousand years old and it's it's considered to be the. It was a philosophy of life. It was never a religion or anything formal. It was just the way people lived a thousand years ago on the banks of the Indus River anything formal, it was just the way people lived 8,000 years ago on the banks of the Indus River. So fast forward thousands of years and we have all kinds of religions and all kinds of spiritual beliefs and all kinds of meditation practices, largely because humanity is humanity and we like to tinker with things and we like to put our own stamp and brand on things. So there's meditation where you can walk, you can, you know, you can look at a candle. You have to empty those meditation styles where they require that you empty your mind completely, and I think that's where the woo comes in. It's like what the like? This is very unachievable. But what I love about TM and the style and the Chopra meditation, which are the same, is that they fundamentally understood, as did the original teachers of all of this work, which comes, as I said, the Vedic tradition, and they understood that the human mind is a mess the Buddhists call it the monkey mind, and you're never going to stop it and you shouldn't try to stop it.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So what we do is we use a mantra, and a mantra is a Sanskrit word, a beautiful word from Sanskrit. So, if you think of le main and traverser, we even have language that comes from Sanskrit. So a mantra is a tool that takes you by the hand to cross over. I never knew that. Yeah, and it's always a gentle, vibrational sound from nature. It's nothing that well I don't know Sanskrit anyway but the words and the vibrations that we use are extremely soft and soothing to the nervous system.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So we don't just sit in a chair and close our eyes and hope for the best, because that's not going to last long. Traffic is going to go by and you've got things going on. And so we teach breath work and we give a mantra. And the purpose of the mantra is that you slowly and quietly repeat it to yourself so your mind has something gentle to allow it to withdraw with. And over time, when your mind starts to fall in love with that process of withdrawal and the peace and the deliciousness of that experience, the mantra just goes away.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So it's like training wheels on a bike while you train your mind. So when the thoughts come up, you say, okay, I've got to pick up the car at half two. Okay, fine, I'm just going to come back to my mantra. So we look at the thoughts like clouds drifting along the sky on a sunny day. We want to stay in the sky but not get busy with the clouds, and the mantra helps you to do that and we set a timer. I teach people how to do that and how to just be gentle. The mind is like a muscle, so we start with maybe 10 minutes, 12 minutes. The science and the research says optimal is about 20 to 25 minutes. Twice a day would be ideal, twice a day okay.

Siobhan O'Connell:

And that's the type of meditation that causes the brain to actually change. So we shift activity from the reptilian brain to the frontal lobes. This is where intuition lives, creativity, memory. The frontal lobes, actually in people who meditate, start to change and they get bigger and more developed and the fight-flight-fear part of the brain actually shrinks. That amazing. Even the mind. Like any other muscle in the body, even though it's not a technical muscle, it behaves the same way. If you give it what feels good to it, it loves it and it just just absorbs it and it just gets better and better.

Susannah Steers:

It's interesting to hear you say it in that way. You're taking yourself to a neutral where the neuroplasticity has an opportunity to go. It's not already pre-directed in one direction that you're so used to traveling that it's hard to shift from that. It's like you're opening up a window and creating an entirely new potential for your brain and your body to adapt in a very different way.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Except for one small little thing which, again, I think in our society we're so crisis-focused all the time that, again, speaking to the elegance of the human system, we are hardwired. We do have this quality called homeostasis, which is the body's ability and desire built into our DNA to be in balance and be in health. You know the body is hardwired for good digestion and you know movement and thinking and creativity and all of these things. That is our hard drive. So when we get distracted with faulty software and we start putting funny patterns in the software and you decide I need to make some changes, that hard drive will always want to take over and help.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So it doesn't take very long. That your point about your neuroplasticity. Once you start doing something that brings the body back into its highest functioning, the body loves. It's like, oh, I got this, let's go for it. Like, just give me more of that thing, because this feels really good. And so we're always working with the body's ability to heal and repair, which is built in Like that's not up for discussion, that's what it is, it's what it does, which is why I think neuroplasticity and we're so excited to learn more about that, because we're just working with the incoming tide of the body's self-repair capacity.

Susannah Steers:

We talked a little bit about the woo and we're talking about neuroplasticity and it's kind of hard to measure the benefits of this empirically, maybe unless you're looking at a body from birth to death. I mean, I remember reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's book Little Catastrophe Living many, many years ago when he talked about some of the challenges that he had of setting up his first mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the U of Massachusetts and that was to treat sick people. That program was 1979. But it seems like it's still a pretty fringe idea in a medical setting.

Siobhan O'Connell:

You're right, but it is changing and thank God that it is because people are finding they're certainly looking at alternative ways to try and try and help themselves and there are, as I said, an increasing amount of studies that are coming through and of course it's not overly difficult thing to study from the point of view that when we circle back to chronic cortisol overproduction, chronic inflammatory states causing pain, disease, you know, especially in the autoimmune world, that when you start to change a behavior that's driving cortisol, you're going to see a significant drop.

Siobhan O'Connell:

In the subject of an object, of pictures of how people are showing up, it actually doesn't take very long. So we're having more and more studies. I did have a referral from a cardiologist just about a month ago for a gentleman who had a heart attack and said well, you know, meditation is. The studies are starting to show that changing your mind is really going to help change your body, especially with the stress related information, and so that was a first. That was kind of exciting. There are certainly some rheumatologists around the city that are certainly understanding that stress side of it. It's just quite hard for people to find a meditation teacher honestly, and especially if you go shopping and there's a Buddhist here, and there's this and there's this and it's a hard to navigate.

Susannah Steers:

So especially if you don't really know what you're doing.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Where do you start? And, like Buddhism, is its own whole belief system with very similar, many, many overlaps. So what I really enjoyed about the Chopra process was that it's coming from a medical perspective and giving, and it has certainly helped to give me language with which to make the process of meditation relatable and functional for people and they start to feel better very, very, very quickly. It doesn't actually take long to make the changes. So I think we're on the cusp of a whole. I mean, you remember 20 years ago when acupuncture was kind of a dodgy, weird like really, and now everybody has acupuncture. So things change actually quite, quite quickly and I think we won't even be having this conversation in another 10 years. Wow, because the the focus on looking inward and getting tools from within ourselves is, uh, is is just gaining in interest and popularity and, again, evidence-based as well.

Susannah Steers:

So where is the research happening, is it? I mean, I guess we're talking about quantum science as well as traditional science yeah, it's coming's coming from.

Siobhan O'Connell:

A lot of it is coming from quantum for sure, because we're understanding that what we're actually changing is our. We're changing our energy field. We're changing our own energy when we meditate and we are understanding now more and more the old way of looking at the. Just to put it in a small way. You know, we're coming from a place of Newtonian law in physics where there was cause and effect and there was gravity and that happened, that ball dropped and that caused that. Now we've shifted into this quantum world where we realize that we're exploring more and more to do with molecular and atomic energy. We're understanding more and more that everything is composed of energy, like it's not up for discussion Everything is energy.

Siobhan O'Connell:

If I took every cell in your body and I laid it out on a floor 70 trillion cells I'd find that between one cell and the next there's a gap, and in that gap is light energy. Why can't we see it? Because as humans, we only see less than 0.01 percent of all the light that's actually on the spectrum to be that we're aware of. So this is going back to the veiling tradition. They call this the maya, the illusion, like we think that this is all there is, when it's important and it's physical, but it's only a tiny.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So when, if you really want to get esoteric, like when we're meditating, we are getting, we are moving into the, the, the field of consciousness, the quantum field that created everything. So, um, it's. There's a much bigger, bigger piece to that. But you know, with for somebody who's interested in meditating, they don't have to be having that type of conversation necessarily, unless they really want to do that. But on its most simple level, it's about down-regulating your own nervous system, bringing you back to the parasympathetic, the peaceful, quiet room in the house and away from the chaos and the stress, so your body can heal and repair and reset itself.

Susannah Steers:

It's funny just hearing you say that in the quiet room in the house. It brings me calm, and I know just watching your face when you were talking about the deliciousness of sinking into that meditative state. I'm curious what you've noticed. I mean, you've been practicing this now for a while and you're teaching it. This is clearly something that is super important in your life. What changes have you noticed? For you.

Siobhan O'Connell:

I noticed my sleep has really improved. I noticed my general, my relationships have improved. I'm not as hot and reactive, maybe, as I would have been in the past. I tended to make a lot of decisions very quickly and just always feel that I had to be kind of ready for the next crisis that was going to happen and be ready to respond and do make the right decisions, and it's made me just a lot more peaceful and calm and I think the decisions I'm making are more creative and multidimensional than they were before.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Physically, I feel better in my own body, I think, because I was also had a business for a long time and you don't realize until you come out of that how much that was actually costing you physically. There was never enough time to really exercise or do my lovely Pilates work or anything, so it's just been a huge shift all around for myself. But I've seen those shifts in my patients as well too, who experience it in terms of reduced pain, less dependency on medication, just less. More enjoyment of life and at the end of the day we're here to enjoy life and enjoy our bodies and enjoy our minds. So while we can talk all day long about the physiological benefits. In the end, we just want to feel good, we want to enjoy our day and our relationships and be in joy and in fun, and that's what I believe is what we're here to do.

Susannah Steers:

I love this so much. My team and I have adopted a theme for this year and it's for the whole year at the Pilates studio and that theme is presence. We felt that amidst all the various things that people can do for their health, finding and embodying their own presence is probably one of the most important, most powerful things they can do, and while we don't obviously include a specific meditative element to our classes, we do our best to encourage that sort of embodied presence, that mindful state throughout. You know, people get better movement skills. They, you know, more comfort and capacity in their bodies.

Siobhan O'Connell:

And yeah, and I love that you, I mean your, your business is called moving spirit. Well, the origin of spirit is spirit, to in latin, which is breath, right, yes, and to be in breath is being in profound contact with yourself. You know in a deep way, you know what I. What I say to my patients too and I know I've heard it at yours is be here now, don't be in the past, don't be in the future. We have this precious time. This is your investment, like this is your time when you're going to really sow and reap. You know benefits at deep levels in movement and it's a profound thing and I think people really need to be realized and realize that that's a huge thing to be here now, to be present and sometimes it's a bit of a hard sell at first.

Susannah Steers:

You know, when people first come to our studio, you know they're sort of like yeah, I'm here to move, let's go, let's go, I want to get that it. And, yes, all of that will happen, but be here now. And so once they get through that and start to experience what that feels like, then they come to depend on it.

Siobhan O'Connell:

It's like oh, I need this hour for myself, mm-hmm yeah, but then through your breath work, which I learned from you 30 years ago, I, and forgot for about 25 of those. But now I'm back. You know, sometimes you realize you sow a seed with somebody you know and you mightn't see it in that year or that day, but you plant something deep like that and it never goes anywhere. It just, it just appears when it's time for it to come back. And uh, came back for me in a big way from what I learned from you way back at that time. And you can do it anytime. That's the thing.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Once you have that within you and once it's been reactivated and you start to see and feel the value of it, it doesn't matter if you're in an airport or supermarket or sitting in the car waiting for a kid. Like you can have that be here, now, present moment which takes you from the chaos of the outside world into your own inner terrain. So it doesn't always have to be a formal practice of sitting with your eyes closed in a mantra. It can be a movement, it can be in moments that you take for yourself. That are the reset moments. So I think us just taking control back of our nervous systems is a really important thing.

Susannah Steers:

Well, there is that saying that you know everything we need is within us, and it's hard to maybe believe that when we're out running around chasing all the things and finding the experts and listening to all the social media stuff and all the noise that's coming at us. But it's interesting when you do start to deepen into that self, that lovely room. You're talking about how your resources sort of appear, that deeper sense of things, and again, not just for healing but, like you say, for joy, for that inner wisdom our sense of being able to just slough off the things that, oh yeah, okay, that thing that looked like a bright, shiny object over there really isn't relevant.

Susannah Steers:

I don't need that.

Siobhan O'Connell:

No, definitely, your object over there really isn't relevant. I don't need that. No, definitely, your values change definitely.

Susannah Steers:

Your values change. Yeah, Siobhan. How do people get started? It's hard to find a good teacher. I am speaking to a wonderful teacher and I would love to know what your advice is for someone who's just starting out Well.

Siobhan O'Connell:

I think that learning meditation is a bit like learning Pilates. Honestly, it's a very personal experience. When I first saw you 30 years ago, my body was in a certain place, my beliefs were in a certain place, my nervous system was in a shambles, and the beauty of those initial sessions that we had together so long ago was that I thought I started with the right ingredients in, with the right words and the right experience to set me on the course. And I think meditation is the very same way. I find I've tried teaching classes and groups and it just doesn't seem to work Well. People you know have you know, they have stories, they have conditioning, they have some people you know grow up with really different, varying religious experiences and it's much easier to teach somebody one to one, who's to find out like where are they coming from, what is the backstory in your nervous system, in your mind and in your conditioning and your beliefs that got you to this place, and then kind of starting with that fresh, fresh slate. So my own preference is to teach people one-to-one At the moment, because I'm a registered physio. A lot of my teaching comes through somebody who has neck and back pain and they say. Oh, by the way, I'd also like to learn some meditation and as long as I can incorporate meditation teaching into a physical program. It's still covered, actually, as physio, which is nice because again, physio is moving to that place that we understand that physiotherapy is a bit of an oxymoron. There's no such thing as physical therapy. You can't achieve success in the body unless you bring the mind on board, especially when you're dealing with chronic pain, inflammation, autoimmune diseases and cancer, all these things. So my preference is myself to teach my people one-to-one, and we have three or four sessions and in that they get the education, they get the experience, they have a mantra and then they have the kind of the rules of the road about when to meditate and how it looks and is.

Siobhan O'Connell:

This is can I do it at bedtime? Nope, um, do I have to be vegetarian? Nope, do I have to do all these things? So I just kind of demystify it and just make it a practical thing. It's like brain hygiene at its very most fundamental. Honestly, I love that brain hygiene, or it can be a more elaborate spiritual practice, if that's where you are. But I just like to have the information and the training myself that I can kind of cover the spectrum, depending on just like we would do with a movement program or any other kind of treatment program. It's nice to be able to isolate it and then once you kind of have that basic, then the world's. I mean, I have endless resources and places I can send people, but typically, like myself, people don't do well, who just try to learn online or try to learn from an app. It just doesn't, it doesn't stick because they don't really understand the full value of it.

Susannah Steers:

I think that's a big part of it so, and sometimes I wonder too about that energy transmission when you're with someone you know I always find I'm a much better teacher in person than I am over over the waves, and I don't know if that's just that physical presence. You're sharing space, you're sharing breath, you're sharing a contact that you don't.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Well, we know. I mean, you were talking about the quantum field a few minutes ago and you know, we know that the quantum field is energy, it's all there is. We know that each individual, one of us, has our own personal force field right which goes eight feet around the body. We know that there's a color and waveform to it. We know that those colors and the waveform has been measured with infrared photography is the same as how the chakras are stacked up, which is the same as the rainbows that appear in the same color form. So this just reminds us every day that we are part of that energy field.

Siobhan O'Connell:

So when we meet one-to-one, I think it's achievable online. It's much easier to do something online when you've met the person and you kind of have made that real energy, that pure energy connection. But it's all about the energy, absolutely 100, and especially in the teaching world, as we both know, is that we show up with our hearts first. It's not the brain and the facts and the story. It's like heart to heart, like who are you and where are you at and how can I, how can we, in compassion, kind of help, help, help each other to to move forward. That's a hard thing to do online. I find I'm not that good yet that I can do that that well. But in person is good.

Susannah Steers:

But to your point, once people have the basics and they understand what they're doing, then it's got you know lots of resources out there yeah, I am thrilled to announce that Siobhan will be presenting a Meditation as Medicine workshop at Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver on Saturday, march 15th, from 2 to 4 pm. So if you're interested in checking that out, please visit movingspiritca, and if you head over to the MATS series and events page, you'll see all the details and you can register there if you like. And you can also learn more about Siobhan and her work by going to meditationasmedicineca. I'll put links in the show notes to all of this stuff. Siobhan, I wondered if, as we close out our conversation, would you be able to lead us in a short meditation.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Absolutely, we will end with a to our point that we were just chatting about being present moment awareness, and we will just do a short breath-based meditation to bring us into the present moment and into our own body's beautiful, elegant, super intelligent energy system. So the invitation is to sit back in your chair wherever you find yourself, close the windows of your eyes and just let your body get soft, feel it melting. The invitation is to imagine a ribbon of golden light that starts in your belly and that ribbon of golden light is going to follow your spine, from your pelvis, rippling up towards your head, rippling past your kidneys, rippling past your stomach, your heart, your lungs, bringing the breath up to your space between your collarbones. Bring the breath up to the space between your eyes, third eye, continue that ribbon of light all the way to the crown of your head. Let it pause there and feel the energy of the light just flooding all the parts of your brain, feel it encompassing every organ, your head and your neck. And as it comes back down, it's like it's gently washing over all your organs.

Siobhan O'Connell:

It comes back down, it's like it's gently washing over all your organs, nourishing them, healing what needs to be healed, calming what needs to be calmed, and just bring that ribbon all the way down again to your belly, all the way down to your pelvis where you started, and we'll just repeat that one more time with breath. So, as you inhale, draw the ribbon up. Repeat that one more time with breath. So as you inhale, draw the ribbon up, adding the widening of your lungs, feeling that expansion front to back of your rib cage. Draw the ribbon up, up, up, at the peak of your breath, on a full inhale, see that beautiful golden ribbon, a ball of light at the crown of your head, and with a long, slow, unhurried exhale, allow that ribbon of light to ripple its way down, all the way down onto your pelvis where you started, just knowing that you've nourished yourself. You've had a minute in the present moment, giving your nervous system a little break from the outside crazies. Given yourself a little gift that you can give yourself any time with your breath. Thank you.

Susannah Steers:

Thank you so much for escorting us into that beautiful space that we can carry with us. I so appreciate you coming and spending some time with me today.

Siobhan O'Connell:

Siobhan, it is always a pleasure, pleasure too, sue, thank you. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.

Susannah Steers:

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.

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Susannah Steers

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