Episode 18: Laura Ridenour

In this episode of Woven, Sara sits down with Laura for a thoughtful conversation about bodies, culture, motherhood, technology, nervous system resilience, and the challenge of staying connected to what is real in an increasingly digital world.

Together they explore the intersection of somatics, parenting, social media, and modern culture — asking what happens to our bodies, relationships, and attention when so much of life is mediated through screens, branding, algorithms, and constant stimulation.

Sara shares how Woven emerged from a desire to express softer, more feminine, relational parts of herself beyond her work as a body worker and somatic coach. Laura brings her perspective as a sociologist, resilience coach, and somatic experiencing practitioner, offering insight into nervous system regulation, digital overwhelm, and embodied trust.

The conversation moves through:
 — motherhood and identity
 — nervous system resilience
 — screen time and parenting
 — social media fatigue and distrust
 — somatic awareness in the digital age
 — gardening, chickens, and reconnecting with the earth
 — pleasure, embodiment, and sensory healing
 — raising children in an AI-driven world

This episode is ultimately an invitation back into the body.
 Back into sensation.
 Back into the physical world and the quieter forms of knowing that technology often pulls us away from.

If this conversation resonates with you, please consider:
 • subscribing to the channel
 • sharing the episode with someone you love
 • leaving a review on Apple Podcasts
 • commenting on Spotify or Patreon
 • joining the Woven Patreon community for deeper conversations and reflections

Thank you for being part of Woven.

To be in contact with Laura, @laura.m.ride www.lauramridenour.com

#WovenPodcast #SomaticHealing #NervousSystem #Motherhood #Embodiment #ScreenTime #DigitalWellness #Parenting #BodyWisdom #SomaticExperiencing

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Well, hello, and welcome to another episode of a Woven Podcast. Um, this is where we talk about the intersection of bodies, culture, and transformation. My name is Sarah Newberry, and I am a somatic coach, a barefoot massage body worker, and um a mother circle facilitator. And I am joined today by my friend Laura, who is also a mother circle facilitator, amongst other things, but that's where we met. So, Laura, I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell whoever's listening a little bit about you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Yeah, I'm Laura Reidenauer, and this is Jupiter, who has decided that she has to be on my shoulder. Um I am a resilience coach, a sociologist, and a somatic experiencing practitioner. I also am a consultant to nonprofits. I do sort of like fractional fundraising and support for executive directors in fundraising. And I am in Bellingham, Washington on the land of the Coast Salish people, the Lemmy tribe, and the Nooksak tribe, the Lemmy Nation, I should say. Um, yeah. And oh, we have other things in common. The mind body coaching, right? And you're also in somatic experiencing school.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Um, sort of. Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah. And um also welcome Jupiter.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Yeah, thanks. She'll probably be back again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

That's cool. Um, so one of the questions that you asked me, um, which I thought might be kind of fun to explore um on the podcast is why I created the podcast. And um I figure that once we start talking about that, we can move into a lot of other things. And if we if we get to it, we can talk about um somatics and mother circle. And if we don't, we don't, we can always do it again. Yeah. Um so but one of the reasons um I started this podcast was because I was in relationship with my own version of the yin and the yang. And um I had realized that the like young version of me was kind of driving the bus all the time um through trauma, through like capitalism, through all the things, through trying to figure out how to be a mother. And becoming a mother was one of the things that sort of asked me to slow down and pause and really look at the relationship that I had with myself. And I noticed that um, you know, I I've been a bodyworker for a very long time, like 15 years or something like that. So I have been in that realm for a very long time. It was very much what people associated me with. Um, I am also a continuing education provider, so I teach massage therapists how to massage um after they moved through their core curriculum. And um, I just felt sort of pigeonholed. I sort of felt like everyone only knew me about was about like massage and rubbing bodies. And like as I started to uncover more parts of myself, I realized that there was so much more to actually um, there's just so much more to like our life experience than stress and joy. Like that it just seemed like people kind of moved between these things, like I'm either stressed out or I'm not stressed. And granted, like that is what people come to massage for, or like I'm in pain or I'm not in pain. Um, and I just started to, as I started to explore things for myself, I started to see that like actually so much of culture affects body work, so much of um like our interpersonal relationship affects body work, and vice versa, like body work affects all those things too. So um I I started to really like incorporate these things for myself, and I was like, wait a second, my clients are only getting like a small portion of me and a small portion of like my knowledge base and what I know. And what I also learned was that when people would come out of my massage room, which is like right over there, um, and they would sit on this little Chase lounge, the the conversations that we would have were sometimes more powerful than the massage itself. And people would mention that they'd be like, This yes, the massage is amazing, great, wonderful, whatever, but like the conversation is also part of the therapy. And a lot of it was me bringing in things I was learning um via somatics for my own trauma healing, my own, like just culture work, if you will, and helping people understand um how their experience is more than just like this body in this time in this space, um, that it's actually much bigger than that. So um again, it was like the talking piece that it was like, well, how do I create this talking piece that's like available to more people? And then ba-boom, there's a podcast. And so it's been interesting because I was thinking about it today, and I think um there's been whenever I first got started, my friend Rachel was really on a couple of like the first three or four episodes, and then since then I've had a new guest every time, and it's just been really cool to see like how the conversation all intersects to everything, either like what you have to share and like what I have to share. There's always some sort of like wow, there's something really rich here. So I just feel like and I listen to a lot of podcasts. I love like hearing people's stories and hearing people speak from like a more conversationalist space rather than yeah, like facts, you know, or even like I do listen to some audiobooks too, but um, there's something about like someone talking about them, their own story that's just like really moving to me. Um, and so I guess I hope I hope to kind of bring that to people too. Um, you know, it's been kind of a not a side project, but something that I do whenever I can. And I mean, I've been put putting out episodes every two weeks, so I feel like we're doing something. We're doing something here.

SPEAKER_02 6:58

Yeah, that's great. Well done. Yeah. I have imagined having a podcast, and um, I'm really glad to be here uh talking with you and having the experience that I've imagined for a while. Yeah, it's great.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

Yeah, yeah. That was the other thing too. I was on a couple of other people's podcasts, and I was like, this was really um just such a great way to connect with people that feels different than like your average marketing, which I feel like yeah, marketing is changing really quickly right now. And um I I was I kind of like adopted into social media marketing really young, like probably 2015. I was really hot into it, and now it like feels sort of like um soul crushing to even think about opening Instagram to make a marketing post. Uh-huh. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:58

There's many different things at play.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Yeah. And like, what is that about? You know what I mean? I I feel like it I the question I've been asking myself is like, is it me or is it the world? Like, oh, yeah. You know. And I I've heard a lot of my other business, small business friends saying like kind of the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

And so it makes me think it's not just me, but um no, I think I mean, as a sociologist, I've been tracking social media and the way that we interact with it and how it informs our identities and also informs how we communicate in person for a really long time. And then I also used to have a marketing role umoting promoting local food, but you know, a behavior-based um social marketing in terms of like the original social marketing in terms of behavior change um-based marketing. And I think that there's, you know, one, there's a lot, like around the time that you're talking about was the rise of like around 2015 was the rise of like real intensification of everybody having to have their individual brand and a lot of that promotion to younger people. So you have a whole population of people who grew up with the idea that um you have to have your own brand and like brand identity and what it means to be online is very different than you know, and Instagram at that time was was still very photo-based and there were no videos. And so, but the last couple of years in particular, I think that culturally, globally, there's um, well, the last 10 years has been this intensification where the majority of people are actually have smartphones. And then with the addition of AI, there's a lot of there's a lack of trust. And then there's also the stuff that comes up around our our identities of like, you know, what who am I and how do people know me, and the idea of like belonging on top of all of the other things that we might be trying to do, like reach new audiences and get people interested in our work. So a lot, so much is up. Um, but I think the most significant change in the last year in particular has been the a lack of trust. The experience of I don't know if I can trust that this this what I'm seeing is real or what I'm seeing is actually a real human. That part we could, you know, have many conversations about, I think is really important in terms of being able to like notice in your body what you trust, and then having mistrustful experiences, like where you might have enjoyed going online, and a lot of people get a little dopamine hit and has a lot of value in your like taking a break and taking a look at social media. And I really, you know, I think that it the work around the nervous system and somatics and your own sense of self is even more important now, like your sense of coherence as you go into those spaces and then come back into reality of like what's actually here. And I just was in a place where a whole bunch of stuff was coming at me, war and genocide and desire to take action, something you really identify with, and something that you don't trust, like all at once, is a very intense experience for any one human, let alone the thousands of us that are having those experiences, you know, maybe multiple times a day, if that's your regular habit.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Absolutely. I think, you know, I think we we both have um young kids, and I think that it's interesting to hear their experience of the internet and AI and that sense of like mistrust and staying in your body. You know, there's a lot there where it's like I I mean, as a somatic person, I'm always trying to teach my kids about noticing when they're in their body and when they're not. And uh yeah, I think there's that's part that's becoming part of their vernacular too, where they talk about AI slop and like well, that was a cool video, but you can't trust you can't like believe everything you see on the internet. That was a conversation between my my 12-year-old and my nine-year-old the other day, where they were both talking about a video they watched, and it was like the older one was telling the younger one, like, not everything you you see is real. And my my nine-year-old being like, What? Like, of course it's real. It was like a video, and it's like, oh no.

SPEAKER_02 13:01

I mean, you know, what sociology has always tracked like what we perceive to be real, is is actually like our brain doesn't have a way to actually know without other levels of discernment, without being taught, but naturally we everything we perceive is real. And so there's like early on in in you know, research around video games and how it impacts people, and you know, this is like 20 years ago, there was uh there was this part about people saying that essentially the research did impact your attention. You know, the amount of how quickly something flashes to change is now super intensified. If you count seconds between screenshots, you know, or on a video on YouTube or even a movie or a television show, they're timing it so that you they keep your attention as much as possible. So it goes down and down and down, right? But also the researcher on video games early research showed that what people still what people perceive online does have an impact of them. What they're doing on a screen does impact some level of your response in the real world. And at that time, you know, there was anyway, that's a whole tangent. But um, you know, like now it's even I think more intensified because adults are having a hard time navigating all of these decisions around whether, you know, what you're gonna do when you pick up your phone or what you're going to see. And then we're expecting children and who don't have prefrontal cortexes who do not have the ability to make those types of decisions to like you know, hear you try to figure it out. Like we're handing them these uh incredible tools, you know, before they're actually able to manage those things. Yeah. And I I'd say uh as my kid I was 12, we're a lot the majority of our attention at home is about whether or not he's gonna get to play a video game or watch YouTube. And it pisses me off. I just it's makes me so mad because it's like I there's so many other things I want to do with you. And there's so many other things that we want to give our attention to. Um yeah, and then fortunately the only way that I can gain any sort of traction around that conversation is to take it away completely. I just have to be like, nope, it's just not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

You know, even all the way over here in the middle of the country, we're having the same, it is the same conversation too. And yeah, to your point, and I just sort of want to highlight this again, is like even the adults are struggling with this. So, like, how can we even guide children if we're struggling ourselves, you know?

SPEAKER_02 15:58

And I really wonder, so like my kid has a you know, uh, he has a therapist who specializes in his particular brain, and um apparently that therapist's opinion is that it's as long as you're doing it with them, that it's okay. And I'm like, yeah, but how many people that is not happening these days? Like I think that some of that guidance around like what's okay for kids is coming from people who don't have the context of what is actually happening in the houses. And I'm like, it does that still apply if I also am addicted to the internet, if I also am staying up past my bedtime because I want to watch the next reel and I got totally sucked in. Like, no, I don't, I don't actually think that the adults in the room can actually manage.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

You know, we we had that same advice by a therapist when my son, who's 12, was maybe like six or seven. And she was like, Yeah, can you play Minecraft with him? And I was like, number one, I don't want to. I just don't. Exactly, exactly. And number two, I have four too. I'm like, no, I have yeah, right. And number two, I have four children. Yeah. Like, when am I going to like this just not realistic? Yeah. You know, like I I don't know. I mean, I try to I try to create and carve out time for each one of my kids individually every day, whether it's like having an eye contact conversation or we go to an event together or something, but I am not gonna play video games with four children. It's not gonna happen because I gotta cook dinner.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Right. Same, right, yeah, and that's the reality is like that's how most of us are getting by. It's like you know, I've had to draw a really clear line that that's not what I'm going to do. And it it takes a fair amount of energy, right? It's a fair amount of like activation energy to hold that line and be like, okay, I have to make a different choice to engage with you so that you can get on a path of doing something else, and something else will grab your attention, and I'm gonna go make dinner. You know, like it's it's extra effort on my part.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Well, and I also think to talk about activation energy is like there is someone of a certain power with a certain letters on behind their name telling you that you should play with them, play online, you know, that and that holds an activation too, where like can you stay in your own body enough to be like no? And can can you stay in your own body long enough to be like, and we have to connect in a different way.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Yeah, the level of like discernment about from day to day about what your parents experience is is a lot. Yeah. And then it's I also all of a sudden feel self-conscious saying that because so many parents are feel judged if we talk at all about their decisions around, you know, kids. So I'm like, I'm not judging other people. No, no. But I have I tend to be a person that sees the like the outcome of those types of decisions really clearly. And maybe partially because I grew up in a generation that where it was very common for kids to just be like, just go outside and play and mostly be ignored and not there was no like parenting going on. Nobody was helping shape my life in a significant way. Um so I'm maybe like extra attuned to like, no, it's it's my job to it is actually my job to be your parent and help shape your life. Um, and so I don't know, I feel I feel a certain amount of strength from that. And it's certainly like part of like how becoming a mother shifted my sense of self and ability of like, oh no, this is my job. This is a part of my whole life experience that you know I otherwise wouldn't get to experience if I didn't have this child. So I've kind of taken it on as um something I take kind of seriously. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

I mean, yeah, I also feel like, isn't that I'm gonna totally mess up the words here, but like I feel like that's the millennial, like gentle parenting trope or whatever that's like we care so much and we're doing, but we're also like exhausted because we're doing so much. And then our parents are like, what's the big deal? Uh-huh, right, because their experience was so different, yeah. Yeah. And I say that as like my my parents are dead, so like my parents are not saying any of that to me, but I hear other people's saying that about what their parents say. So I hope that's what people are experiencing and conveying, or I maybe I don't hope that, but you know what I mean. I have a question for you.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

I um because both of us are connected through the work of Kimberly Ann Johnson, um, and she talks a lot about the story of recognizing the need to parent in a certain way with her child in terms of like um being in the mother jaguar role and having a little bit more of that activation energy where there was more of like her actual physical power with her child. And I recently um was reminded of that and have decided that I'm I we're just gonna wrestle more. It's like, oh, this is I was he was pulling away from me a fair bit, and as is natural, totally, but we didn't have any other points of connection except. Except for this tension that was going on around the screens. And so I was like, hey, you know, let's wrestle more. And now that that we sort of started that, he's asking for it all the time. And he's more affectionate and more connected. And we haven't, I haven't had a chance to like unpack that fully with Kimberly, exactly what she was trying to say about, you know, that story of her child having maybe more um, you know, more decision-making power than she actually could contain as a child, and that, and that it was the story was like basically if she didn't kind of help her child understand that she needed to get along in her role, then that the rest of her life was going to be harder. Um, anyway, I'm curious if you've explored any of that um with your kids.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

Well, I only am like vaguely remembering the story that Kimberly shares about the the physical contact but continued Jaguar stuff. So I'm kind of just going based on my own experience here whenever I talk about this. But my my 12-year-old is a fighter, he is a wrestler and he does like MMA and kickboxing. Okay, so part of it is he scares me a little bit at this point. He's like the same height as me. Yeah, but he and I have been wrestling since he was very little. And there have been times where he is obviously struggling with some kind of emotion, and maybe he can't like talk about it. He doesn't know. So he he um would ask for a certain I'm trying to think if I how much I want to share about this, but he would ask for a certain game that we would play where it was basically like I would hold him down and hold him tight, and he would try to get out of it. And um then it would become like this wrestling thing. And it was very like sensory seeking. And he's the oldest, and the little like the littler kids, he would sometimes I'm I it's the only way he knows how to connect with anybody is like physical contact, and it's a lot of like yeah, uh aggressive physical contact. So we've had to have a lot of conversations about like how do you connect with people other than this? Yeah, okay, because I can do this with you, I can do this with you, but like not forever because you kind of scare me a little bit because he's so big at this point. And like you the this is a skill you have to learn, yes, exactly. You know, you have to learn how to connect with people outside of like smacking them. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

I mean, I think I don't know, that just sort of brings me back to the like, what is it that we're here to do? Not just as mothers, but also like as humans on the planet at this time, in the sense of we need to be calling people in, including our children, including other mothers, including ourselves, um, around the like, what real skills do we actually need now when so much is changing, or when so much of our attention has been absorbed by other interests, essentially trying to sell you something or convince you that you need to be a different person than you actually are. Like, how to be in in community and how to gain these like the humaning skills, but also real hard skills. Like, I think we're in a at least in the Pacific Northwest, I'm tracking that we're in kind of an age of of reskilling, of like uh adults being like, oh, well, you know, I was learning how to like actually do some woodworking, or I'm learning how to farm, or I'm learning how to do real tangible things that are essentially, you know, hobbies, but also the value of like having a whole human experience where you can create things and and make more um value than just going to work or just being a parent, like these very narrow areas that things have gotten kind of parsed into anyway.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

Yeah, well, in efforts not to completely romanticize the past, right? Because that's easy to do.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Because I well, and I think it's easy to romanticize any time that doesn't exist right right now. Yeah, you know, true, yeah. But I remember that my grandma made quilts because she enjoyed making quilts, and she made quilts like all the flippin' time to do things because you enjoy it. And I really feel like so many of my peers, people in my same age group, we don't have hobbies. It's like social media, drinking at a bar. That's not really what I do, but or like restaurants, you know, like their foodies or whatever. Um and I just find it to be a little bit more rare to find people who actually have interest that involve creating for the sake of creating.

SPEAKER_02 27:35

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I hope. I'm I'm hoping that there's a bit of uh resurgence. I'm kind of tracking that there's also kind of a resurgence of things that were in the zeitgeist in the 1970s. Like you know, in the sense of like in the sense of um like applied technology, like appropriate size technology for your home, would be the same thing of like building a s a solar panel or having you know passive solar housing. The things that you can create within your sphere of influence, essentially, is what was going on in the counterculture of the 1970s as an outcome of 1960s. I say that in part because I literally lived in a counterculture commune, so I was tracking it pretty clearly. Um yeah, I you know, people being like, well, the most valuable thing that you can do is grow your own food. So, you know, my goal is to find a community to go farm with. Like that's a very back to the land sort of thing, or making your own quilt, or doing embroidery, or you know, making radical art that is, you know, expressive of how we want to push back against dominant culture. All of that was definitely going on. I see that happening a lot.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

Yeah, I do. Yeah. We um my family and I just got four chickens over the weekend. Aha, see. And yeah, and my my friend was like, why are you doing this? And I was like, you know, the the the common answer is the eggs, right? Like we wanted to have chickens for the eggs. But yeah, as I really sat with myself for a little bit, I was like, why am I doing this? And essentially what came from this inquiry was like, I want my children to have a tangible experience with animals outside of like pets. I was just having the same thoughts. You know, like I and I don't want to sound all like paranoid, but it's like if there's if there's ever a time where my kids need to need to support themselves in some way, grow their own food or whatever, I want them to at least have somewhere in the back of their mind. Remember that one time when we had chickens? Right. Or remember that time whenever we I mean, we plant a lot of gardens and we have for a long time. Uh I grew up very much close to the land, so it's very I it was for me, it was like, of course we have a garden. Like, why wouldn't we have a garden, you know? And so I want them to have their hands in things that will at least give them some something in the future if if it's ever needed, you know.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Yeah, I think that makes sense. And there's there's this sense of like, as we have very clear, less control over what's happening, you know, politically and culturally in our country. That's part of like, okay, well, what is within our sphere of like the hyperlocal? Both we can have more influence over hyper-local politics for sure, but also just like your connection to land and the animals and the food that you eat and your neighbors, those are all things that you know help us get by when we're living under fascism. Like that I think is yeah, some of that desire and the truth of what what helps.

SPEAKER_00 31:15

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

I wonder if we'll if we'll ever fully turn to like victory gardens or that sort of thing, if like the recognition of like that's really what we need right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

I mean, I can get very emotional about the planet, and I do know that like having gardens, being with the earth is better, is a better like version of life than living in like a plastic box, you know.

SPEAKER_02 31:48

For sure, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

So I feel like nothing bad could come from this like kind of gardening type life.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

It's this it is such a good antidote to the part where like you don't know what's real, right? Of like if you're going online and you're actually like, I'm actually not sure if something that I see is is might have a negative impact on me or is having a negative impact on my kid, and I just um don't know about it, you know, like all of those things, but also um it's so human to want those connections and to want to get our hands into things. Yeah. So I'm curious.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

I'm curious your thoughts on this. If if we have a hard time understanding what is real and everything that we perceive is real, you know, especially as a body worker, I put my body on people's bodies, like my hands or my feet on them. That feels so real to me. So I'm curious what you think about putting, like, you know, the concept touch grass. It's like, you know, putting your hands in the earth can bring you to a place of like what is real? Well, this is real. Yeah, yeah. And so what's the question? So the question is like, do you think that we can reconnect with what's real by touching something?

SPEAKER_02 33:23

Oh. Well, wow, that opens up the whole thing of sensation, right? Like the value of sensation. It's huge. Yes, I do. In fact, um, one of the things that I am in the creation stage around is um related uh to that is the part where um pleasure is a pathway to healing and using our senses is critical for being human, essentially, and for healing as and for connection. Um and all of the ways that we have been desensitized sometimes on purpose through overexposure and sometimes unconsciously and just habitually over time, um, we have less and less of you know our actual attention available. So bringing your like working with clients in somatic experiencing, like bringing your attention back into your awareness that you are breathing or that your heart is beating, or even you know, it's a somewhat advanced skill for interoception to like actually be able to feel your organ of your heart beating without you know putting your hand there. Um that level that creates a level of coherence that is ultimately, whoa, these words are just coming to me, but like ultimately in coherence with the entire universe. It's like sensation is the mechanism of how the energy moves, or the energy moving is the mechanism of sensation, you know, it's like it goes both ways. So um yes, it's incredibly profound sensation. And in somatic experiencing, you know, visualization actually, you know, using your senses, you know, the visual field is one of our senses, and it's a really big part of our brain. So it has the most power within our ability to shift our state, um, to use either internal imagery or to actually use your eyes to look around and like floss your ocular nerve by just looking into the corners and connecting with the vagus nerve when you when you turn your body. It's an accessible reset. And yeah, it's just this incredible. So one of the things I'm working on is this pleasure pathway around both self-love and reconnection with your innate powers and um your own ability to to like know your path to have discernment.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Yeah, I love that. That's gonna be really potent because I have to tell you, last year I was diagnosed with dysautonomia and POTS. And what I am like doing so much better today from all I've did a lot of things, and I've talked about some of them here on the podcast, but one of the things that um I that I think really, really helped, and I give my give credit to my functional nutrition doctor who you know helped me with this, but was a lot of visual cueing of like near and far to sense safety to calm the nervous system. Um so talking about that visual sensation and visu visual cues, but then um something else I noticed is with my phone, you know, like if I'm looking at something and if I'm moving, there's a visual thing that happens that makes me feel very um, I don't know, this isn't like Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, it's like it's not the it's not the um it's not the real word, I guess, but it's like it makes me feel very uneasy and dysautonomia like whenever I'm trying to like walk and look at the at my phone. It's like I've really learned I just cannot look at my phone if I'm doing anything else.

SPEAKER_02 37:54

Yes, right. I I'm so glad you brought this up. I don't know that much about dysautonomia, but we have a combination of did you know that um myopia in young adults like under 20 years old has gone up by 30%? It's actually sorry, predicted to go up by 30% because of the the distance at which most people are looking. And we are, you know, we need to be looking at the horizon and in the distances all the time. It's actually one way that you can just automatically calm your nervous system is to just look in the distance. But what's fascinating to me about that is like your eye shape will literally change based on your environment. So yeah, myopia is the inability to see close up because uh the shape of your eye has stretched. So our bodies are not only, you know, doing this to look forward to our screens, but our eyes are doing it too. And so um, so there's that, there's like this the physiology, the shape of your body that has an effect on your ability to orient, to proprioception and what's going on around you. But then I think I similarly, I had a chronic illness for intensely for um a year and a half after I had shingles. I had a central nervous system response that also gave me chronic fatigue. And I had to reorient the vestibular nerves as because of the amount of time that I was laying down and also not moving and going outside. So your actual ability to kind of calibrate what is around you is really important. So if you I think one of the things that we should be practicing with our phones is never looking and walking, because especially for those of us who are having nerve issues and sensory issues, or have had any chronic fatigue or chronic pain because of what's happening in the nerve signals, is it's just too much for our body to actually do that. And the amount of attention that you have to give your screen to look at something really small would never happen in normal life unless you were, you know, it's it's essentially some sort of fight or flight response to hyperfocus. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so you can't like you can't be hyperfocusing and also orienting, right? Because orienting is in the social nervous system, and you it's like both things can't happen at once. So um, in order to get there, you have to reorient. You literally have to reorient your body for to bring the social nervous system back online. So, like walking through the house, I'm just always telling my child, like, you cannot carry that thing around like it's a baby. Like you're reading your iPad, yes, but you have to put it down when you get up and go somewhere. And absolutely you cannot bring it into your room and you cannot bring it into the bathroom because you know, those are the places that we get stuck in that type of visual distancing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

So for all the people who are pooping and watching TikTok, get off.

SPEAKER_02 41:14

Yeah, the practice, like first there's the practice of like putting it to bed and not taking it in your bedroom. But also, you know, like I don't you've probably seen that research shows that like if you're actually on the toilet for longer than 15 minutes or something, you're more likely to have hemorrhoids and all types of digestive issues. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:32

Um, yeah, it's just not that's not good for us. You know what's so phenomenal about this is I know it sounds maybe like we're really getting into this nitty-gritty of like, look at your phone this way, not like this, and there's more rules you have to follow. But like also there's this other piece to it that's like all these things are very simple, very easy, like looking up and and out and about. I mean, I tell almost all my clients about that. It's like if you work in an office and you're sitting at a computer, like look up out and out every 20 minutes. Yeah. Because it's going to help your whole nervous system function better.

SPEAKER_02 42:14

Yeah, because research shows actually that our body needs to move about every 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's like fossal research too. Like our fascia begins to add in like more connective tissue in places that your body's like, you know, you're all hunched over, and yeah, your body's like, alert, alert, send signals, you know. And so it's like these things are still pretty simple, you know, they're still pretty easy, and you actually can have autonomy and control within yourself if you just like adopt some of these like small principles, you know. And and I I don't want to like minimize what we all have, all these little things that we have to do, so I know this is like another thing to do, but I also feel like we have so much nervous system like nervous system work, somatics, somatics, whatever. It's just there's a lot of simplicity to it, and profound things happen when we do these simple things. You know, there's like whenever I teach my um group class of somatics, and I have women come in and we're all doing somatics together, and we're all moving our bodies together. Like it's it's simple, but it is profound.

SPEAKER_02 43:38

Yeah, it is exactly. And I mean, that's also nature and the body and how physiology works, or how different aspects of hormones work, or all of the little chains of effect that are all interacting together inside of the multiple systems in our body. You know, the idea that there's like multiple concerts playing at once, and when one gets off. You know, note it has an effect over here. If there's one thing that I wish everybody could take time to understand and absorb, it would be that when we're not responding to our body, like for example, just taking a simple break, it compounds over time throughout a day, throughout the weeks and months and years, to a message of stress. And so it's not just like one thing that you're doing, it's actually all the ways that you're not responding to your internal system's necessary signals that it's sending to you. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 44:39

And if if you're listening to this and you're one of the people who come to my group class, you know that I always say before every single class, please listen to your body cues. If you have to go to the bathroom, please go do it. If you need to step out, it's sending more reinforcement to your body that you're listening.

SPEAKER_02 45:00

And I also want to say it makes total sense that we are here in the place where we have to learn these things that on the one hand seem sort of rudimentary and so simple, and also are very challenging because behavior, like you know, um Moshe Feldenkrais talks about like how behavior gets formed. Like you don't, yeah, as I understand it, is you don't even have to have done the thing. You only have to know how to do the thing for you to do it that way. And so undoing a behavior that becomes very quickly, like you didn't even have a muscle memory to know, like, oh, this is how you, for example, write a check. Like it's not something that's innate, like you know what to put where and how to do it, but somebody told you how to do it. And that's all that you need for that behavior pathway to be created. It takes a lot more energy to undo the behaviors than it does to just, you know, sort of simply be told how to do it as reference for later. Um, so it makes total sense that we're here. And also think about the other ways that we learn how to live in these bodies. There aren't very many other ways that we have been taught, or there's spaces for learning how to be in these bodies. And this is our time. It's why like somatics is everywhere. It's because it's largely been ignored and now we're in a bit of a crisis around our bodies.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Yeah. Yep. And I think all of the technology in some ways is bringing us back to our bodies, you know. It's no, that's fascinating. Yeah. It's it's also like what I was saying in the very beginning of this conversation is like no part of my soul wants to make an Instagram post to get someone to buy my widget, you know. And it's it's because I'm like moving, it's like I've been so immersed in it, so that now I I I like I have to move back to the body. I have to move back to the earth, I have to move back to the sensory experience, you know.

SPEAKER_02 47:01

Right, right. Yeah, that's that's part of the great turning that we're in. I think some of what is happening is the earth is evolving and our systems need to evolve, and are the ways that we do things need to evolve, and that we need to have a big reckoning with the parts where we've just been able to ignore that, or even the parts of us that have learned apathy, like you mentioned. Like you get, you know, you have a lot of emotions around the earth, but if it feels like you can't actually take an action around climate change, then it's another sort of thing that we're we kind of put to the side, and those emotions are still living in our bodies. So we need to find ways to be working more with the earth and visiting the trees and having more of those natural cycles.

unknown 47:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:48

This was absolutely lovely, Laura. I really enjoyed where this all went today.

SPEAKER_02 47:54

We never know where it's gonna go, but it was great.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

Yeah, and we still have a whole list of things we could talk about the next time you want to join. Yeah. Sounds good. So for everyone um listening, we will also put all of the contact information for Laura if you want to work with her in the show notes. Laura, do you have anything coming up you want to share with people?

SPEAKER_02 48:16

I'm excited. I'm gonna be offering uh actually a nervous system 101 course for like working with resilience and avoiding burnout for climate activists um in California. And I am developing some courses and I do have space for online one on one somatic experiencing clients if people are interested in working virtually.

SPEAKER_00 48:38

Yeah, I love that. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today and enjoy. Thanks, you too. Bye.