Wake Up, Human
Wake Up, Human is an exploration of the native powers of the human being. This podcast examines the ways we humans have become disconnected—from our innate wisdom, from each other, and from the natural world—and explores practical strategies for reconnecting to wholeness. Drop in for information and inspiration to help us reawaken and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.
Wake Up, Human
Ep.06: Your Body is Your Own Business | A Conversation with Janis Isaman
Movement specialist Janice Eisenman shares her passionate mission to help people reconnect with their bodies from the inside out, challenging cultural narratives that equate physical appearance with personal value. Through mindfulness practices and compassionate awareness, she guides clients to rediscover the joyful, uninhibited movement we all experienced as children.
- Breaking the cycle of pain and practitioner-dependency through self-awareness
- How modern lifestyles have dramatically reduced natural movement compared to previous generations
- Understanding that compression, gravity, and unexpressed emotions get stored in our joints
- Why by age 12, girls talk about what their bodies look like while boys focus on what their bodies can do
- The concept of "cultural terrorism" - how appearance-based value keeps women in perpetual anxiety
- Developing self-compassion and mindfulness as tools for reclaiming bodily sovereignty
- Shifting focus from how movement looks to how movement feels
- Recognizing that what our bodies look like is nobody's business but our own
Learn more about Janice at mybodycouture.com where you can find information about both in-person and remote consultations.
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 6 of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm your host, shannon Wills, and in this episode, my guest and I will be getting comfortable in our own bodies from the inside out. Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human.
Shannon W.:My guest today is Janice Eisenman, the founder of my Body Couture, a one-on-one private fitness studio that provides customized movement coaching. Janice is a movement specialist who has helped hundreds of people to rid themselves of physical pain and remember what it feels like to be at ease in their own bodies. Her certifications include critical alignment and yoga therapy, stop Pilates 2, trx, suspension training, yamuna, body rolling and yin yoga. Janice has been quoted as a lifestyle expert in Reader's Digest, prevention and Women's Health, among others. She's also a writer and a frequent contributor to the online lifestyle magazine Elephant Journal.
Shannon W.:Janice is on a passionate mission. With both her work and her writing. She's speaking out against cultural narratives in our society that equate physical body appearance with personal value, pushing back against damaging norms around body image and cultural stereotypes of beauty. Through her work with physical movement, she also cultivates the psychological, social and emotional elements of healthy body awareness.
Shannon W.:Not surprisingly, my conversation with Janice centers on the theme of embodiment, shifting our focus of awareness from the external world to the internal, felt experience of our bodies. We'll talk about some of the reasons so many of us feel uncomfortable in our bodies and discuss several practices for coming back into comfort, and we'll spend a good deal of time talking about cultural narratives that lead women and girls specifically to judge our bodies by outward appearance rather than inner experience, though this discussion may certainly be of interest to members of other genders as well. Join us for conversation on these topics and more coming up next. You can learn more about Janice at her website, mybodycouturecom. That's my M-Y body, b-o-d-y couture, c-o-u-t-u-r-e dot com. And now for the interview. Welcome Janice to the Wake Up Human podcast.
Janis A.:Hi Shannon.
Shannon W.:Hi, so happy to have you here. So you are a movement specialist and you help people get out of pain and come back into right relationship with their bodies. Would you start by sharing first what is a movement specialist? How is it that you came to be doing this movement-based therapy as your life's work?
Janis A.:A movement specialist is something that most people have never heard of, because it's not a common title. It's one that I sort of made up because I sit a little bit in the center of the Venn diagram between a physiotherapist and a personal trainer, and so I have chosen to work with people who have discomfort or aches or pain in their body. But that's because that's usually the door that people come through. There's no reason, particularly that a completely healthy, pain-free person couldn't do my work. So people often assume that when we hear the word pain that it means that it's somebody who's sedentary or that is out of shape or can't move around. But the trigger for most people to take action in finding a new way to move their body is feeling out of sorts, feeling like they have something that's kind of stopping them from living their life. So I've had people that come in with back pain, neck pain, knee pain, hip pain, shoulder pain, you name it. Everything has come in the door and quite often that person has already actioned seeing another practitioner. So they've gone to a chiropractor and acupuncturist, physiotherapist. Those are all amazing disciplines and I refer clients back and forth to a lot of those practitioners. So it's not that I'm against them. But what my clients typically find is they get temporary relief that's reliant on that practitioner, and then they go back to their desk, or they go back to working out, or they go back to being with their families, or they go back to travel and that pain comes back. And then a lot of them are kind of just stuck in this cycle where they can't live comfortably in their own body without a practitioner, or they can't live comfortably in their own body and do the things that they want to in life. So when my clients come through the door, one of the first questions I ask is what is it exactly that you want to do with your body? And often the answers are super simple I want to be able to travel and get off an airplane without pain. I want to garden. I want to play with children or grandchildren.
Janis A.:I have worked with people on every end of the physical activity spectrum, from people who literally cannot get up off the floor. I had one woman who told me she hadn't been to the gym in 43 years, and I had a client who won five Olympic gold medals. Oh, wow, okay, and I get. I get other clients who are actively engaged in competitive or high level athletics and sports. So a movement specialist, in the way I define it, actually has nothing to do with how, how active we are or what we're doing with our body.
Janis A.:What it really relates to is that feeling that we had as a child. If you watch a nine or 10 year old move their body they're out on the playground simply freely moving their limbs. There's a sense of joy, there's a sense of freedom, there's a sense of capability and capacity. That is how the human body is supposed to function. I have a 10 year old son.
Janis A.:He does not go to the playground and tap on his Fitbit and count steps. He does not go to the playground and track how long he is in his cardio zone. He does not go to the playground and say, just hang on. A second mom, I just got to do seven more reps and then we can go.
Janis A.:And yet, as adults, that's exactly how most of us are conditioned to believe that we maintain our body, we track, we count, we monitor and we put these kind of rules and regulations on what is good, what is bad, what's enough, what's not too much. And so I really am in the business of helping people find that same freedom that my son has on the playground, because every single one of my clients had that at one point in their life too. We might have to go back to age four. We might have to go back to age three or six or 10 or 12. But at some point in our lives we had a body that we enjoyed living in, that felt pain-free, comfortable, and that we felt really confident in and helped us accomplish what we wanted to in our life.
Shannon W.:So I find compelling your way of describing your work as helping people to remember what it's like to feel at home and at ease when they move, and so that one of the things I was going to ask you is what are they forgetting and what are they remembering? And it sounds like what we're forgetting is what it felt like to be a 10 year old in a 10 year old body.
Janis A.:Yeah, I think there's a couple of reasons why we forget. One of them is actually our generalized lifestyles. So we we sit a lot, we're very sedentary, and almost nobody that I've ever met will self-confess to being sedentary. But the reality is I have a 98 year old grandma and I have looked at my life and compared it in some way to hers. We both grew up on a farm, the same farm, and she ended up marrying my grandpa, who was the neighbor. So great, but in order for her to actually go to school, she got on a horse.
Janis A.:Wow, I did not. I got on a school bus or went in the car. Yeah, I now live in a city with my son and he has to walk even less far. I at least, went to the bus, which meant that I had to walk down this really lengthy driveway to get to the bus. My son simply gets dropped off right outside the door of the school. So in a couple of generations we've gone from my grandma riding a horse to school to me dropping my son off literally across the street from the school wow to socialize.
Janis A.:My grandma had to walk a half mile down the road to the neighbors. To socialize, I have to just lean slightly to the left, put my right hand in my right pocket, pull out my phone, yeah and move my around. And so we don't think about any of these lifestyle changes. But in less than a century we've had dramatic changes in how much most of us are using our body. What we've gone from is movement that's required to do day-to-day things such as socializing, going to school, going to work, doing the dishes, doing the laundry, just to get those basics of life done, to having machines do almost all of that. And these are amazing technological revolutions, institutions. But most people have desk jobs where they sit somewhere between 10 and 16 hours a day between work and personal entertainment, watching tv, sitting on the phone, etc. So we've really come to the place where the cdc tells us to walk 10 000 a day. That takes about an hour and a half. We're sleeping eight hours a day. Where is the rest of the time? Where is the rest of it? So most of us don't frame it in that sort of mathematical term, but that's leaving a huge chunk of the day where we're sedentary. So that's reason number one.
Janis A.:Reason number two is gravity. So we're told culturally that over the age of 35, that we're going to feel aging impacts. So we're going to feel stiffness, we're going to feel sore, we're going to feel tight, we're going to crack when we wake up. And what really starts to happen as we age is we've got biomechanic usage syndrome, basically from gravity. So I'm sitting up right now. I've got gravity pressing down on my head. It's compressing my spine, it's compressing all of my joints. When I stand up and I start to take one of those 10,000 steps, my foot is going to hit the floor. Same thing I've got forces of gravity coming up through my body, and so we do that over and over and over and over again in our lives and we're just compressing and tensing and really jamming everything into those joints.
Janis A.:There's research that shows that when astronauts go up to the moon, they get about three inches taller. So just removing that gravity is really decompressive, wow. And then we're also compressing all of our, our emotions that we're not allowed to culturally express, those head right into your joints too. So the average person is in pain because we have compression, tightness and tension in our joints and then what we do is we go to the gym and we put more compression, tightness and tension in our joints. And then what we do is we go to the gym and we put more compression, tension and tightness in our joints. So the first part of my work with almost every client is getting that body decompressed so that we have that freedom of movement and then we can build the strength back in from there.
Shannon W.:Wow, okay.
Shannon W.:First thing I thought of is I want to go into a space capsule and see what that feels like to be three inches taller and to not have that compression. The second thing that occurs to me is that this is a multi-layered phenomenon, isn't it? Because, on the one hand, we have people who grew up in previous generations I can think of my own grandparents and even some of my aunts and uncles who have lived into their 90s and they're farmers, and even though their bodies have aged, their bodies are still supple and they get around, and my guess is that they probably maintained that more youthful body to a much higher age than those of us who are sedentary would do. And even those of us who are out there getting the 10,000 steps and getting the exercise. To me, it seems we're doing it often from our headspace and from an intellectual place, rather than actually from an embodied place. When you're talking about, we're checking our Fitbit and we're counting our reps, and I question whether we're truly then engaging with our body in the natural ways that we otherwise would.
Janis A.:So when I work with clients, one of the things that I do is give them a body education, and so, yes, there is some naming of the bones and naming of the muscles, but a lot of that education is we're going to do a yam and a body rolling exercise or a yin exercise and then we're actually going to pause and I'm going to have the person tell me what they actually feel in their body.
Janis A.:Do you feel looser? Do you feel longer? Do you feel lighter? Do you feel like one side of your body is different than the other? Please describe that and we actually put words to that experience. Most people have never, ever done that, and so it's a self-education in. What does this feel like? What's the benefit of this exercise? What does my body feel like? Did I know my body could feel this way and really getting that self-awareness? And that actually hands a ton of empowerment back to the client, because we're going through a whole process that we've never, ever had done for us. So knowing what movement should feel like really reinforces the benefit of doing that kind of movement, and then we can also know what movement doesn't feel good for our body.
Shannon W.:It reminds me of when I began practicing yoga, probably 20 years ago, and I had grown up playing some sports and I had been a dancer and I thought that I knew how to move my body. But it was only when I started practicing yoga that I think I started experiencing my body from the inside rather than from the outside, actually feeling what you're talking about, the alignment, the openness, places that are open or closed, places that are misaligned, which is very different than are my feet in the right place for the ballet pose? Yeah, is my arm, my hand on the bar, my fingers in the correct placement? And at this point in my life, after so many years of these practices, I will just be sitting on my couch and I can feel I need something in my hips, I need something in my shoulders, I need to swing my arms, and it's a visceral feeling that it literally feels like I have to get up off the couch and do that movement in order to get myself back into a feeling of being more harmonious.
Janis A.:Yeah, and I think that that is actually a wonderfully phrased summary of what I am trying to deliver to clients, because when we have that inner knowing of how our body could feel, we will take action without a practitioner, without a set of instructions, without a video, without having to go to a gym. We just do the movements that our body needs and our bodies were really meant to do a lot of diverse movements. So most of what we're doing in a gym setting is going to be in that frontal plane where we squat down or we hunch forward or we crunch forward, but we're not doing a lot of the movements that the body was meant to do. So before we started recording, I mentioned that I sit on the floor, sitting on a floor, they're shifting, there's moving. The hips are not in this stagnant unit directional plane, are not in this stagnant unit directional plane. And again, if you think about the way that humans lived for a long time, we weren't sitting at chairs with ergonomic setups and keyboards right in front of us in this frontal plane. So we had that knowledge of what to do with the body. But we also had activities that just tested the body and where we were twisting, we were squatting, we were pushing, we were pulling.
Janis A.:What I find fascinating we have strong human mechanisms to tell us when we're hungry We'll have cravings for certain kinds of food. We have strong human mechanisms to tell us when we're tired and thirsty. We have strong human mechanisms to tell us when we're tired and thirsty and we can gauge those with a lot of ease. We know when we're a little tired. We know when we're exhausted. Think about the human vocabulary just to describe yeah. Yeah, we have nothing typically in our body as that same alarm for I need to move.
Janis A.:And I thought about this. There is no answer that I'm aware of. It doesn't mean it's not out there, but I think that because historically we had to invest somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 85% of our calories that we ingested to go acquire more food, that biologically we didn't actually need that mechanism to move. We needed it to drive us to go get the food and get the water and to make sure that we slept, but we didn't have a biological driver that said I have to move. So the only biological driver that we actually have is pain and at that point actually kind of driven off the cliff where there's now something wrong.
Janis A.:So it's a little bit different than hunger or thirst, because pain in the body Usually, yes, we have to address it, but it's not the same thing as just taking a sip of water or laying down and having a nap. Pain is quite a strong signal that we've got something that needs to be addressed in the body and a lot of people wait for that pain signal to take action. But where we want to be is the place that you described be is the place that you described. We want to be in a place where we're sitting on our couch and just wanting to do that little spinal rotation because we can feel that our ribs are tight. Or we want to be in the place where we're sitting on the floor and thinking I just need to extend my leg and do that natural movement. And it shouldn't be this huge thought pattern any more than hunger or thirst or sleep is, but just reconnecting to that piece of us where we have that sense and that inner knowing of what to do with the body.
Shannon W.:It seems totally plausible that, evolutionarily speaking, we did not need that type of mechanism for movement because we were moving all the time, so we didn't need anything to tell us to move. We're already moving. And so here we are, in these sedentary modern lifestyles, in dire need of these types of mechanisms and we don't have them Correct Biologically. So to be able to frame that intellectually so that people can understand that, it might actually help people to understand why they're not feeling that they need the movement and then why they need to come into their own embodiment so that they can do that for themselves.
Janis A.:Right, and I think I cannot underscore how important it is to be able to do it ourselves. So, although I do this for a living, I actually am not a huge fan of people needing an instructor and needing a gym and needing a lot of guidance to do this. Because, again, if I look at what a child does, we don't need to send children to facilities in order to move their body. It's almost a human right to be able to move the body freely.
Janis A.:And of course I think that there can be classes at the gym that we enjoy. Of course I think there's community and benefit to actually belonging to a facility. But I think that where a lot of people really do struggle is they don't necessarily even enjoy that experience, but then there's nothing given to them as a replacement. And so I'm trying to be David fighting Goliath, giving people that experience of having that sense of freedom, openness, joy of movement, connection to the sensations in their body, having a vocabulary for those sensations, having that increased body awareness. And that way they're free.
Janis A.:And if they want to go to a gym or facility or a class and be in that environment, great. But if they don't want to, their body is with them all the time and they can make other choices. And our body is how we experience the world. This is where all five of our senses are. So all of our touch, all of our taste, all of our smell, all of our sound, everything that we experience as human beings, is coming through this body. And yet it's the one thing that most of us don't know how to take care of.
Shannon W.:It brings to mind that old phrase give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. And teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime. As a movement specialist, you can be the trainer who teaches the client to fish, so to speak, right. And then, once we have those abilities, once we've learned for ourselves what this feels like, we can choose whether to go to a gym, whether not, to whether we can take care of something on our own, or whether we need to go and ask for some help with it.
Janis A.:Yeah, exactly so. It provides that same freedom that we have with our other biological functions. We can go to a restaurant to eat. We can cook at home, we can go to a grocery store and take takeout, but we have a range of options there that is not given to most of us with our bodies, and we want that because we want to be able to be in a position where we can choose to go do yoga, or we can choose to run, or we can choose to just do a couple stretches on our floor.
Janis A.:We can choose to turn it into an hour, we can choose to make it five minutes, but where we have the sense and the knowingness of how to maintain our body, what is required, what is too much, what is too little. And we are actually getting that information from inside because it's based on how we feel, not what it looks like, not what a plan on the internet is, and not what a professional told us. So, because of that disconnect, most of us do need someone like me or actually me to actually help bridge that gap from where we are to where we actually could be. But I believe that it is possible for every human being on this planet to have it.
Shannon W.:Yeah, there's some real sovereignty, isn't there, in that, by learning how to be in our own bodies, we actually can have control over how we use our bodies and we can use them the way that we want and not relying on others. Yeah, and.
Janis A.:I think that the other overlying piece and this especially seems to impact females and women is there's such a strong concern about our aesthetics and what our bodies look like that we have been trained culturally that that's what matters, and the feeling of our body gets left behind, gets left behind. So the research that shows that boys and girls at age 12 will answer the same survey questions about their body and their relationship to their body Girls talk about what their body looks like. 12 year olds. Boys talk about what their body does and what it can accomplish, and so by the time we go through puberty, girls and females in our culture have lost that connection to what our body does and what our body can accomplish.
Shannon W.:So young to lose that connection.
Janis A.:And then we're looking for instruction from someone else for the rest of our life on what is okay in our body, what is enough, what is too much, where is it too much, what is right, what is wrong, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, and how can we disguise all of these purported flaws. And so I have a lot of female clients coming to me with what they deem to be aesthetic flaws. Quite often they're actually functional flaws, so there'll be a sensation that's off in our body. Two really common examples something to do with the abdominal, something to do with the bum. Quite often people feel like they're the words that get used are flabby, gross, untoned, things like that and it's actually because the musculature in that area isn't working properly.
Janis A.:But there will be this really strong negative relationship to that area of the body, relationship to that area of the body and because by the time we're 12 years old, it's just been driven into our head that it is about this external appearance. The woman standing before me is grabbing at that skin, making funny faces of disgust, talking about that body part like it's a you know a vehicle part that has failed them. There's this whole narrative and none of it tends to relate to the function of the body. I often get that very same person who has gone to yoga class and the whole focus again is on the appearance of the posture. And so there's another cycle there of chasing. I want to please the teacher, I want to make it look right. There's mirrors at the front of those rooms. We're often looking at ourselves in the mirror, potentially comparing ourselves to other people in the room, so then it actually exacerbates. That whole cycle of this isn't good enough. My tummy's flabby et cetera, et cetera.
Janis A.:I can't do the posture right, so I end up doing a lot of work around and stripping all of that, because I don't have any mirrors in my facility. There's no music. No other people in my facility.
Shannon W.:It's just it's one-to-one completely, but just really diving underneath what it feels like versus what it looks like it's so important because if we don't have the ability to feel that out, how will we know where the line is between working on our bodies for our own selves and working on our bodies for others? And I guess my question would be is is it as simple as removing the mirror, is it as simple as working on how we feel versus how we look, or is it more complicated than that?
Janis A.:It's not actually more complicated than that. Interestingly, I would have intellectually believed that it was much harder than that. Now, in fairness, I'm not working with a populace that has active, disordered eating habits, for example, so I'm not working with people that are undergoing active eating disorders or any other active addictions or anything like that. So we're talking about a set of people that have what I would call generally female, socially acceptable habits of speaking negatively about our bodies.
Janis A.:So it actually tends to be in our culture, a connection point among women to say to each other oh yeah, I need to lose 10 pounds, and then that's a whole conversation. Amongst females it's a connecting topic, the same way that golf or hockey or sports might be amongst men. Yes, it is, and so it's fascinating to me that when we take somebody who has been caught in that kind of cultural loop and we break that way of thinking by simply dragging them inside the body and saying, what does that feel like? We can actually break that quite quickly. So A I do bring that languaging to their attention, because self-compassion is actually a huge piece of my work. I did not grow up with that as part of my inner narrative, so I grew up with everything that I have just described, that my clients have.
Shannon W.:So there's a reason I do what I do and so many of us did grow up with that as well, so we can relate yes, for sure.
Janis A.:So we teach what we want to learn and I often will bring it to my client's attention. It's not my languaging. I do not say to my client oh, you would look amazing if only your stomach didn't look so disgusting.
Shannon W.:Oh no, I hope never.
Janis A.:And I don't.
Janis A.:I don't think that way, but clients will say that to themselves and I often will point that out to them and they actually will stop and say, oh yeah, I would never let anybody else talk to me like that.
Janis A.:So there is actually a lot of power in noticing and naming, where we actually can start to, as adults, break a little bit of that cycle that was actually given to us when we were 12 years old or 11 years old and we were shamed by our classmates or by a parent or a teacher or somebody else. Maybe we were looking at magazines and we developed this inner narrative as children because what we were looking for was social and cultural acceptance. I think that all of us can just flash back to some moment, probably when we were a teenager, that pit in the stomach when you feel that social rejection and how much we wanted to earn that. As adults, we know that when we feel that sense of rejection, we just move on, we go find our people somewhere else and we set it aside typically, but as teenagers most of us were in a school or some other environment where that felt pretty close to death.
Shannon W.:Yeah, it does.
Janis A.:And the human condition is meant for tribal living. So we have really, really, really strong inbound mechanisms to actually be socially accepted. Historically, if we were living as a tribe on Serengeti and Shannon, the rest you and the rest of the tribe abandoned me I would die. I would die. And so much as we talk about and focus on money and career and self-actualization and self-love as being the underlying driver of human beings actually social and cultural acceptance is, we will do anything to get it. We will completely throw ourselves under a bus and devalue ourselves and give ourselves away to not feel that shame from someone else. That is really strong when we're teens.
Janis A.:As adults, most of us can actually start to learn some of these practices of self-compassion, of choosing other people, of creating different ways of managing these narratives. So I find that a lot of times when I get women into my space, a lot of this is kind of old news. This has sat in their body since they were 12 or 14 or 16. And it is having a compassionate practitioner who teaches them to have that compassionate narrative, who brings that to their attention and then focuses on what that exercise feels like without a mirror. One of the corner other cornerstones of my work is that I don't know what somebody's body should look like before they start the exercise. So, just as my face is different than your face, my bones are different than your bones. Yeah, so I can't tell you what angle your leg should be at when you're in a pigeon. I don't know where your knee is going to go, I don't know where your ankle is going to go.
Janis A.:What I care about is that you feel that stretch in the glute, that combination between letting go of what it looks like and where that instructor or that teacher figure in your life which for my clients, is me that I say you know, draw something on the piece of paper as opposed to draw a house on the piece of paper, and it has to have a chimney and the chimney has to be square. That's really freeing for a lot of us because it takes us back to that creativity again of being like a child. Put your body in a position that kind of vaguely looks like something ish that I'm doing, but where you feel it in your glute. That's actually the hardest thing for people to override. The quote unquote. Am I doing it right?
Shannon W.:Yeah.
Janis A.:Yeah, that one is really strong. So, interestingly, when we kind of have these body insecurities not having a mirror, instant having that person to provide compassion instant we eat that up. But the am I doing it right? That one's really hard, really really hard. So I noticed that that one will come back and come back and come back and come back, long after we've kind of given up some of the other things.
Shannon W.:We're so conditioned in our society, though, to have the right answer, aren't we? And we're so conditioned in our society, though, to have the right answer, aren't we? And to do it right and not to fail.
Janis A.:But I think that one comes back to that human drive of don't get abandoned, don't get left on the Serengeti.
Shannon W.:Oh yeah, that's not just our modern society, is it? No, that's human nature. Yeah.
Janis A.:And so we want to especially when we're in front of another person, a practitioner, someone else at a gym heck the mirror at the gym, a DVD in our living room. We are unconsciously actually trying to generate that approval.
Shannon W.:And that is something else, though, that it's so beneficial to know. If we're feeling that way, if we're hesitant to look like we don't know something, for example, or if we're feeling vulnerable doing something new in front of someone else, that's a source of compassion for ourselves a little bit. If we can understand that this is my nature, it's because I'm meant to live in community and this is just me taking care of myself and trying to protect myself and be able to maybe speak to ourselves and tell ourselves that everything is okay.
Janis A.:And I think, having that shared humanity piece, just knowing that every other human feels the same way and we may have it more acutely at certain times or about certain behaviors or in certain circumstances, but every human can universally relate to what I'm talking about. Every human knows what it feels like to have that pit of rejection in their stomach, or that sense of shame when we've failed, or that hesitation or embarrassment that the teacher might see you or that you might fail or that you're going to do it wrong. That is a universal experience, and so that is actually something else in the self-compassion area of my work teaching people to hold that. We name it, we recognize it and we create that collective humanity around it, because that's normal. You and every other human being have felt this.
Shannon W.:Mm-hmm. Speaking of universalities, I was especially moved by an article you recently posted on Elephant titled Four Easy Steps to Take Back your Power and Overcome Body Insecurities and overcome body insecurities. That article itself, I think, speaks to a very common experience of young people, and especially young women, related to the very things that we're talking about. You start the article by relating an experience you had in middle school involving a boy, and it's a formative experience that you've never forgotten. It's very much related to what we're talking about. Can you take us back for a moment to that article? Tell us about the experience and the aftermath, and then we can just go from there.
Janis A.:Yeah, it was one of those moments in life that was a microsecond long, that literally stayed with me to date the rest of my life. Yeah, I was in junior high and a boy literally made eye contact with me and made an animal noise directed at me and his buddies, his male friends, started laughing and we just spent time talking about kind of social approval. So I can recognize this as an adult. I did not recognize it as a child, but he generated social approval with his male peers and at my expense. So in junior high school I was a little bit overweight I was never a large person, but I was slightly overweight and so he saw that as an opportunity to mock me, to put me down, to shame me, and I remember that, hitting my body like a knife to my heart.
Janis A.:Like a knife to my heart that bled into the pit of my stomach and I'm not sure if I ran or walked, but I went to the washroom, the bathroom, and hid inside the hideous 1980s teal cubicles and that was, in my view, the only thing I could do. I didn't know who to talk to. It wasn't an incident that I felt could be reported and I didn't have the tools at that age to actually know how to process that. So my solution was let's hide. So I hid with the pit in my stomach with no way to process it, which is knowing that my body weight was a sense of shame, I was not good enough, I had failed, and that this boy had actually come out as the hero of the story and the cool kid in school because he had said something that was so funny to his peers.
Shannon W.:Yeah, and in the article you continue on beyond that moment to describe the way that that then began to manifest itself in the way you lived your life generally, as far as spending an inordinate amount of time putting time and energy into your appearance yes, With the understanding that that's what you needed to do in order to avoid that type of social shaming.
Janis A.:That's right. So at that age I did not engage in any sort of weight loss program. I don't know why, but what I turned it into was I'm laughing because it just was a lost cause, but I did it anyways. I have poker straight hair, but it was the 1980s and the hair trend was hair, so I would spend I don't even know how long, but sometimes upwards of two hours, trying to get my hair into this curled, teased hair, sprayed, socially acceptable halo.
Shannon W.:Yeah, yeah, and.
Janis A.:I started putting time and effort into fashion and that actually to this day is a passion of mine. I love my clothes, but now I do it for me and not for other people. I remember taking my we had to do. We didn't really get an allowance, but we did labor around the farm and so I would mow the lawn for what felt like 10,000 hours and I bought a fancy designer sweatshirt and it cost $50. And my parents were absolutely appalled that in whatever 1980, whatever that I would spend $50 on a sweatshirt. But that to me was a marker of like I have. I'm in some designer clothes, so this is going to make up for the hole and the pit in my stomach, et cetera, et cetera. So I really channeled that into this really subconscious attempt to get body approval through my hair, through my clothes, through makeup.
Shannon W.:Which I want to say. Almost every single one of us was doing some version of that as a teenage girl, yeah.
Janis A.:Yeah, so what I actually did wasn't completely out of line. It's not crazy. I'm not telling this story. That's not relatable. That's what we did. But when I look at that now, boys didn't have to do that. Boys don't have to do that.
Shannon W.:Going back to that data that you mentioned earlier in the conversation about, by age 12, girls are consistently discussing what our bodies look like, whereas boys are discussing what our bodies can do, and so I don't know how you felt when you wrote the article, but when I read it, I found myself wishing A I wish I would have known this when I was 12 years old of course, me too and B I wish that other 12-year-old girls could know this. And how can they know this? Is there anything that we can do as women to help to force a change in the narrative that might allow girls and young women coming up behind us to not have to suffer the same effects?
Janis A.:Yeah, and that's exactly why I wrote it, because it took me from the point of that animal noise being bleated at me in the hallway until I actually really came to terms with my body and worked with all of the techniques and tools that I described, not only in the article but in my conversation with you. It was 20 years, so I share things in these little snippets and these articles and in podcasts that sound so simple, but it took me 20 years of digging and suffering and putting myself through hours of working out per day and spending money at salons, getting hair ripped off certain parts of my body and glued onto others, and inordinate amounts of time to try to get everything just right in ways that I really wish I had that time back to go travel or to get my money back and go take a course, so that 20 years of knowledge and education is really distilled down into 1100 words on elephant journal and into little hour long chunks on podcasts and with clients. Yeah.
Janis A.:And it's because I went through it all the very, very hardest way through it all the very, very hardest way.
Shannon W.:Well, and it does really last that long it does. I have a couple memories, but one in particular, about being maybe 14 or 15. And this wasn't even said to me directly, but I heard from someone that some boy had said something that was negative about my body and that he was going to go out. I must've had a crush on him, liked this boy, and he was going to go out with the other girl because she didn't have that problem, she had the better version of the equipment, so to speak, and and, and I still remember that now. I still. He probably doesn't remember that he even said it and I remember it now and it's still.
Shannon W.:I'm not saying it matters to me in the same way into the next year, from middle school into high school, from high school into our 20s and into our 30s and onward, and then they weave themselves into our lives and the people we become. So that is very real. So to be able to sort of nip those things in the bud and I know that's very, very hard but just to be able to even recognize in some way that this is something that I'm going to carry for 20 years if I don't recognize it in a different way now. For example, that boy was showing off because he needed approval. This has nothing to do about your body, but it has to do with him needing approval. But that can ring a little bit hollow to a teenage girl who's feeling distraught over what someone has said to her.
Janis A.:Definitely, and I don't think the delivery system for teen girls is lecturing or intellectual theory. I think that some of the tools that I'm offering in the article are really helping young women get into their body. Put dialogue and narrative around the sensations of their body so that they can own that in the same way boys do. Boys are always told with their bodies that they're strong, that they can throw the ball really far, and let's actually extend that same favor to girls, because actually language is a huge tool.
Janis A.:The way that we put words to things really shapes our experience of it, and so we're not going to actually create a scenario where we have instant gender equality and how we think about our bodies.
Janis A.:But I think starting to introduce those concepts to young women, where they can do yin yoga and have those moments where they feel like they're in their body, is a starting point, and it's actually a hugely strong starting point, whereas saying you know culture is wrong that's not really going to actually help us overcome that. But having that ownership over our own bodies as females is something I think a lot of women kind of get there somewhere between the age of 35 and 45 but think about that again, that is somewhere between 20 and 30 years of feeling like we're at the mercy of the patriarchy before we get there, and 20 or 30 years of focusing our time and energy on our appearance versus the things that you said, our dreams, our desires, the talents that we want to live into, um, other things that we would want to buy, other experiences we would want to have.
Janis A.:you know, I feel like we need to really, especially in that younger generation. There is so much benefit in having mindfulness as a practice, because if we have mindfulness, we are in here and now. We can be in our body, we can experience our feelings and our sensations. And I know that mindfulness sounds like a really simple concept, but it's a lifelong practice that extends to all kinds of areas of our life. But it impacts quite deeply how we see our own body and how we experience the world. If we don't have that internal sense of mindfulness and self-awareness and self-compassion, we are at the mercy of seeking that approval from the outside.
Shannon W.:That mindfulness is some of what we were talking about, about being aware of what our body feels like on the inside and what we need from the inside out versus the outside in.
Janis A.:Yes, so if there was one tool, I was I would offer young women from the age of about 10, there needs to be a daily mindfulness practice for some people that might active practice, such as yoga.
Janis A.:For others that could be meditation, but we can do any activity with a mindfulness practice. And then we need examples of compassion and self-compassion, because our culture doesn't tend to have a lot of those. What we tend to have a lot of is criticism and critique. So, again, offering a tool that's very internal so that we can have that self-compassion. It's okay to gain weight during the pandemic. It's okay to gain weight when you're pregnant. It's okay to gain weight when you're pregnant. It's okay to gain weight when you're going through an emotional period of your life.
Janis A.:It's okay to not look the same as the cultural model for what is told to us that we ought to look like. We're looking at images constantly, especially now with Instagram, of what's deemed to be a perfect body. The only thing that we really have as tools to overcome that and override that are going to be compassion and self-compassion and an awareness and acceptance that we have our own experience in our own body. Those bodies that we're looking at are having a different experience in a different body. Those bodies that we're looking at are having a different experience in a different body. I think, ultimately, what our bodies look like is nobody's business but our own. I love that.
Shannon W.:And it's so true. It is so true. But doesn't that sound radical? It does sound totally radical. That sounds radical, that almost it like it hits me as almost an impossibility.
Janis A.:But I know it's not, that's conditioning, that's like it hits me as almost an impossibility, but I know it's not, that's conditioning that's hitting me.
Janis A.:Quality in the United States, and one of the reasons for that is related to the accountability that we require or actually don't require of men when it comes to sexual aggression in our culture. Another reason is because we actually do hand men ownership over women's bodies. Women's bodies are to be decorated in a way that's pleasant for women's bodies. Women's bodies are to be decorated decorated in a way that's pleasant for men's eyes. Women's sexuality is to be paraded like it's a pageant that we're all competing for, and it's going to be very, very difficult to actually have anything but a patriarchy without recognizing that, because there isn't. This isn't something that individual males are choosing to do, it's not an individual problem. It's not something where an individual female is creating this whole system, of course is. Creating this whole system, of course and that's what makes it challenging is because whenever we're living in systemic oppression, we are getting constant oppression and we don't even realize we're living within it.
Janis A.:So what I am saying is actually radical, because it's saying we own our own body, we own our own experience experience and it's none of anybody else's business. And what our culture tells us is girlfriend, you better make this look nice for the men in your life.
Janis A.:So, it is very radical to say this is actually not the property of society, it's not the property of men. This is my business. This is the body I was born into and I'm the one who has to maintain it. I'm the one who has to go and exercise. I have to decide what to eat and when to eat, and how to sleep and how to decorate my body, and so it actually is absolutely none of anybody else's business.
Shannon W.:This reminds me of two things. One of them is more of a side note, which is that there's something that I appreciate about Indian culture and yoga and Ayurveda which has a focus on beauty, but it's a focus on internal beauty, and even if the beauty, then, is manifest externally and women are very, very much interested in beautifying themselves from the inside and the outside but it is understood that that is a woman's gift to herself. Yes, to beautify herself. And the other thing that occurred to me was talk about radical. Here's what I think is radical. It's a term that you use in your article, equating the effects of this, or the equation of appearance equals value. You call that cultural terrorism. Yes, yes, I read that. I was like bam, that's my favorite. I need to make a meme. Why did you decide to use that term? Where did that come from? What would you have us take from that context, because I want to use it all over the place right now.
Janis A.:Well, terrorism is a kind of when I actually think of the word terrorism. I don't even know what year this was, but the first time I ever became aware of that term, in the 1980s, there were a lot of plane hijackings for whatever reason that was trending, and I actually have this image that I had clearly seen in the newspaper or in an end of the year magazine roundup about the happenings of the year that there was a masked terrorist hijacking a plane. So we saw outside of the plane and it was just sitting on that runway and everybody was obviously frozen, unable to move, unable to speak and just terrified. That's the image that really sticks in my mind. Yeah.
Janis A.:And so when I talk about cultural terrorism it isn't coming from one person. When I think about how many times in my life someone has made comments about my appearance, whether it's positive or negative, it's a sea of experiences that I can't pluck one person out and say, oh, it was this incident or it was that person. Other than stuff that happened that I, other than the example that I gave in that article. So there are a few really standout moments, but most of it is kind of like being at a loud nightclub where it's just there's stuff coming at you, there's the lights pulsing and the pounding music and the sea of people and that's what it feels like. So when I talk about kind of culture doing that, it's like being the lone woman in a nightclub and people are touching you and there's sound and there's talking coming at you and you can't really sort out who it's from or there's not one perpetrator for this. So as a woman, I have just felt like it's coming from everywhere.
Janis A.:If you're on a dating site, it's constant conversations about your appearance. If you are literally in a nightclub, people touch the small of your back. They're're not doing that to men, right. If you are walking down a street it's not uncommon for women to get cat called. Even me, 21 construction workers will look at you or people will say things, or you'll just feel those eyes in the back of your head and it ends up feeling as a woman. To me, like the people in that plane from that image in the 1980s must've felt like I'm frozen and sitting there and I'm unable to move. I know I don't really like it, I don't want it to continue, but I don't even know how to get out of the plane and if I stand up and start screaming I'm going to get shot. And so we just all sit here and kind of take it and we sit in the plane like good little girls and we say nothing because there's no way out. We can't get out of the plane.
Shannon W.:I think it really is that dramatic because we're swimming in it all the time. There's no escape from it, just like being in that plane. There's no opening the door and jumping out and saving themselves. But the other thing is that, just as in that plane metaphor, this creates a sense of a fight or flight type of scenario.
Shannon W.:When we're in fight or flight, we're going to do whatever we need to do to survive, and if that means focusing on our appearance so that we're included in the in-group or so that we're not treated badly, we're going to focus on that. So, just like we're in the plane and we are in survival mode, we're not thinking about what we're going to have for dinner that night or who we want to become, or what school we want to go to, or whatever. That is Same thing. If we're in fight or flight situation as a young person, we're not thinking about who we want to become, what we truly enjoy, how we truly feel, you know, because that that's being superseded by the survival instincts. So that's, that's what I'm drawing from that metaphor, that plain metaphor, and I think it's so accurate.
Janis A.:Even if it's taking up 2%, 5%, 10%, 20% of a woman's time, energy money, headspace, to-do list, that's a lot.
Shannon W.:I can imagine someone saying well, if you don't want to spend all that time on your appearance, then just don't. But it's not that simple, because when you're in a culture, that's a cultural river that's flowing and everybody's going along with that river, and you just say, well, I'm going to jump out and stand on the bank yeah it's.
Janis A.:It kind of ends up being like saying just wear whatever you want to to work and showing up in pajamas, you're probably not going to get a job that you interview for if you just decide, screw it. I'm going to do my own thing and wear your pajamas and don't even brush your hair. So I think that there are ways that we can, that we still do very much at this point have to participate in that in large ways and small ways, but bringing attention to it and actually deciding where some of that boundary is and what we're doing it for.
Janis A.:Are we doing it to be approved of by other people? Are we doing it like you mentioned earlier? There are cultures where we do that as women, to celebrate that femininity and to celebrate in the same way that. As you're looking at me now, you can see my living room. This is a private space, but I've decorated it and I've decorated it for my own pleasure and my own joy, not because it's a public space that other people are going to see.
Shannon W.:Yeah, nothing wrong and actually so many things right about creating beauty in our lives and in ourselves, but it needs to be for us.
Janis A.:Yeah, and I think that's where it gets confusing, because you're looking at me on a screen and I'm wearing makeup, and I have jewelry on and I have long hair, and there are things that look from the outside Like I'm totally rowing in the same boat and eating up that narrative and following along you are wearing a sweatshirt, though I am wearing a sweatshirt.
Janis A.:But I really do that at this point. I actually haven't seen anyone else today. So the makeup is for me because I just like it, in the same way that I like the flowers behind me, and so that's that's where we really need to get to that. If somebody doesn't like how we look, it's none of my business. It really is not. Yes, if I'm on tinder and somebody decides that I'm too fat or too white, or that my hair is too long, or that I have too many bracelets on, or that they don't like my smile or I have too much makeup or too little makeup, that has nothing to do with me and it's not even my business and it's not their business either. It's not. All of these choices really come down to the same reason that I've got flowers and books in my living room because I like.
Shannon W.:Beautiful. Well, janice, it's been a real pleasure talking with you today and I'm so grateful for your time and your wisdom, and I just have one more question for you before we sign off, and that is where can people find you in order to learn more about you or, possibly, to work with you?
Janis A.:I have all the things, but the best place to start is my website, which is mybodycouturecom. That's three words my M-Y body, B-O-D-Y, couture, C-O-U-T-U-R-E, so everywhere else I am, and links to all kinds of different media are on there. But if you want to bypass the website, you can go directly to my Body Couture on either Facebook or Instagram and send me a message or become my friend.
Shannon W.:Janice, it's just been a true pleasure spending some time with you today, and I just recognize how much of your wisdom comes from your own experience, and I always appreciate talking with someone who has come to their wisdom through their own life and then is making a real effort to share that with the rest of us so that maybe a few of us can avoid some of the same pitfalls and have an easier time of it. It's true, that's it for this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast. To learn more about Janice Eisenman, visit her website at mybodycouturecom. There you'll find information about her work, including both in-person and remote consultations.
Shannon W.:You can also visit the show notes for this episode, where I've included the website as well as the link to the article that we discussed in the episode, which has some helpful details and tips not included in the interview. You can learn more about me and the Wake Up Human podcast by visiting my website at shannonwillscom. If you liked this episode, please share it forward to someone who you think would benefit from the information. I'm doing this as a labor of love and I'm thrilled if it can be helpful to someone else in need. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode.