1. Wonder
===
[00:00:00] Nowadays, we all know everything in our physical universe is actually just made up of energy. We call it chi prana, electrical voltage. But I think really we're talking about the same stuff, which is our vital life force energy. Now we may talk about it, but less often do we talk about how we actually manage that energy on a practical level or how we turn on the tap and receive more of this vitality within us.
Most of the women and the mothers that I've been working with over the last 13, 14 years have. One thing in common, and that is this bone deep exhaustion. Mentally, emotionally, physically, while still hearing this inner whisper saying, we need to be doing something more, but how could we possibly do more when we're already so far beyond our edge?
Of what we could do in a day. What are we [00:01:00] missing? What is this inner whisper even trying to point us towards? And wouldn't it be great if there was some way that we could actually receive more of this life force energy at will? Well, it turns out that there kind of is, and that's why I made this podcast.
I'm Melissa Kitchen and I'll be your host. I have asked all of these same questions and over the decades some of the answers have appeared and I can't wait to give them to you. I will show you what I have learned as a yoga movement and body work facilitator on how we literally pull more vitality and stash it in our organs, our cells.
In our fascia, I will show you what I've learned as a breath and a kinesiology practitioner on how we bring more energy and run it through our meridians, our mind, and program it into our life. And for my moms. I would like to show you how we find the sweet spot between actually meeting our own needs.
While still being [00:02:00] able to hold a healing presence to shift emotions and blockages in our children in real time. Because when it comes to energy, more really is more So come with me as I show you how to generate it. Shift it and work with it daily. Together we are going to feel, be, and have. More energy
no matter where you're from, all around the world. It's just, it's one you need, one special vibe.
You are about to dive into the very first episode of this podcast where I talk a little bit to the three key pillars of my work being movement, kinesiology and mothering, and I'm gonna show you how I found each of them, or rather how they found me through my, my own life story and how [00:03:00] all of that has brought us.
Together here in this moment, I'm gonna show you a little bit of the neuroscience, what's actually happening in your cells and your brain chemistry. When we shift from these states of definitely knowing and actually surrender in these moments of not knowing and what actually it happens in our brains when we are in awe and how actually.
Owning that moment of not knowing is one of the most beneficial things we can do for our development and for our own transformation. And finally, I'm going to give you one of my favorite, most simple and most profound kinesiology balances called your Auricular Energy Reset. This is for my friends with jaw pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, or , impingement in movement of the spine or the neck, or through the shoulders.
It is an. Awesome immediate energy boost, and it's also really helpful as an energy studying tool before bed at nighttime. Come on in. I can't wait to share all of this [00:04:00] with you. If you want to go deeper into , any of these tools, come find me online. I'm at melissa kitchen.com and right now this month we are working through a.
30 day challenge of yoga nidra where I'm showing you how to receive more energy of sleep. While you are awake, I'll be walking you through and teaching you how to get two hours of physiological sleep while you're awake in the space of about 20 minutes. If that's something that you could use, head to melissa kitchen.com/more energy membership.
Can't wait to see you inside the first episode.
Hello friends, and welcome to episode one of Season One. It's funny because I thought that I would record this on a day where it wasn't raining and the stars were aligned and everything was exactly the right day to start a [00:05:00] podcast. , but it's been raining every day for the last 21 days, and it's still raining in this moment. And I say that because you may or may not still be able to hear the rain on the tin roof in this building, but. In this moment also, my baby's asleep in the next room and the dog is here napping on my lap, and the words I'm living by right now are to just do it messy.
So even though I haven't planned what I exactly what I wanna share and written my top three tips and all the things I really thought I would do before. Episode one, we're here and it seems like the perfect time to just turn on the mic and have a chat. So before we get started, I do wanna tell you a little bit about what I am, and I think the way I say it, there's kind of three main pillars that I braid together to create the bulk of my work.
And I do wanna talk to you about them. But before that, I think it's only fair to tell you a little bit right off the get [00:06:00] go on what I am not. Now. Before I do that, let me go back and I can explain this in a bit of a story. I've been teaching full-time yoga for the better part of 12 years now, and I can't tell you how many times I had come out of a yoga class and somebody very lovingly in the yoga studio would come up after class and grab me and say, oh my God, you should start a podcast.
I just wanna hear you talk about all the things you were talking about in there. But everyone says, right, that in order to have a business or have a podcast, you need to position yourself as the expert. So I had it in the back of my head like, sure, I would love to do that as soon as I am the expert.
So. I have studied a lot and I have read a lot, and I have gotten a lot of qualifications and a lot of certifications, and I have sat at the feet of some incredible minds, and I'm gonna tell you [00:07:00] right now, I have never considered myself an expert of anything except for one thing and that one thing. Is being an expert of wonder, an expert of curiosity, and in fact not knowing, but loving that, I don't know, and wanting to research and investigate and inquire to find out everything that I possibly can about a thing.
So I need you to know that right off the bat, that if anything, what I want to share with you. Is the things I wonder about. I do not wanna sit here on each episode and come across to you like the expert of a thing. It wouldn't work because I'm not on anything. The only thing I can offer you, and in fact the switch that went off that I can't wait to offer you, is to just come in here and talk to you about all the [00:08:00] things that I'm curious about and.
All of the things that I wonder and all the research that I'm doing, which is leading me to wondering more things about that and that we can wonder things together. Because have you ever noticed that, like when you learn something, when you take a course or you do something new, you just find out like, oh my gosh, now I have all these other questions that I need answered, and wow, I didn't even know there was a book on this subtopic.
Now I need to go read that book. And then you find 10 subtopics within that. And all of it just opens up more and more little wormholes and loops and tangents that you wanna go down. Well, that's me. So all I wanna do is hang out with you and be curious about things and just sit here in awe and reverence about the majesty of the human body that we will never understand and the mind and psychology that we will never understand, and spirituality and philosophy that we will never understand.
Huh. But how wonderful to wonder [00:09:00] and to be here in awe and to stare at it in reverence of wanting to be with it more deeply and to be with it in a more present and respectful manner by coming to know it more deeply. So that is what you and I will be doing together if you're up for it. Of course, that is, I tend to meet a lot of my fellow geeks out there and a lot of my fellow curious pals out there.
So if you're one of them, you are definitely in the right spot. Okay, so now that we know that I'm not an expert on the things, but I am an expert on wanting to know about the things. And it's interesting when we break down what that actually means. Because what it means and what it does is something actually kind of magical.
I. What we'll be doing is creating new brain maps. So I want you to think about your brain and maybe you can imagine your brain as like all of [00:10:00] the electrical cables that are running through the ceiling in your house, right? There's little electrical currents that are running through each of the wires and they're connected to different wires.
And then you come in and you flip on a light, and the electricity goes through all those wires, and like magic, the light bulb comes in in that room and you can see. Well, that network in the ceiling of electricity is a brain map, or it is your neural signals and the web that they create together. We all have a specific brain map.
We all have a specific web of thoughts and beliefs and identity and patterns that have come together in a specific pattern. Now, something wonderful happens when we change brain maps. Now the fancy scientific word for this is called neural differentiation. That is challenging the neural pathways that we have built and moving them around to [00:11:00] create a new map.
Now when we kind of zoom in and we look at this on a deeper, more cellular level. When we're looking at this process of the neuro differentiation, what we're seeing are neural stem cells, and in their first form, they're really just undifferentiated cells. They have the potential to become any various type of nervous system cell.
And essentially they're going through this process of communication with what's happening in your brain and what's happening in your body's environment and your body's environment is telling your brain what it needs more of, and where now that process is called differentiation of your body, saying to your brain, Hey, I need more of these cells over here.
So you can have more of your neurons, which are the cells that are responsible for transmitting the electrical signals. You can have more of the cells that nourish those neurons, or you can have more of the cells somewhere else in the peripheral nervous system or deeper down in the central [00:12:00] nervous system.
So we know. That these cells are shapeshifting in accordance to meet the body's needs. Now the next question is, of course, well, what is guiding this process? How are the brain and the body communicating to do this differentiation and decide what's necessary? Well, it's a combination of a few things, and we could simplify it to say it's the environment.
So what's happening in the environment? Well, there's certain things like the, um, the cues like mechanical forces, what's actually being like pressed or squeezed or moved or needed. The oxygen levels, the chemical gradients in the embryonic environment that influences it. Epigenetics, which is of course that we don't change our DNA, but it's that there's certain histones.
There's certain gene activity within the cells, like a little, uh, light switch and on off on the outside of the cell, which says either turn this on, which is upregulation, or turn this off, which is downregulation. So the DNA sequence stays the same, but there's parts [00:13:00] of the gene sequence that are either occurring or not occurring, which is how it's being expressed essentially.
And then there's certain signaling molecules like our proteins and our growth factors. And all of this kind of comes together like, like a soup around the cell where the body is saying, this is what is going on, this is what I'm thinking and feeling, and this is what's happening. And it all gets layered here.
And then that tells the cell, this is what we need you to become. Okay. So now comes the next question, which is, can we affect the environment of the cell or do we, or should we, or how do we Right. A scientist is going to tell you no, you can't directly affect that environment. Like you can't consciously just close your eyes and say, I would really, really love it if one of those neural stem cells would move to my hippocampus.
And of course, none of us, at least that we know of, can consciously do this. But a scientist will also tell you that you [00:14:00] can indirectly change the environment of the cell. Okay, so then we wanna know how
well, we need to look at what is there in the chemical bath around the cell that is creating its current formula for differentiation and what's in the chemical bath. This would be stuff like the cortisol, the dopamine, serotonin, melatonin, all that good stuff, and we need to change what chemicals the body are creating.
In that chemical bath. So your next good question is, of course, okay, how do I do that? These are very actionable things that you're probably doing already. Things like meditating, things like the way you breathe, how much movement you're getting, how you are putting nutrition into your body. How you are managing your emotions, because I don't, I don't need to tell you this.
You already know. Each of your [00:15:00] emotions come with a chemical cocktail, and the chemical cocktail of that is what is directly going into the environment of the cell. And you wanna know one other thing that really changes the way our brains go through this process of differentiation. I'll tell you, it's wonder. It's being awestruck. It is not knowing. When we know for sure we are locked in our brains pattern of what it thinks and what it feels and what it does, and how it differentiates and how it builds and rebuilds, we become gridlocked.
But I want you to just imagine this for a moment. You've just done your grocery shopping. You've got your reusable bag over your shoulder full of all your organic veg, and you get back to your car and you put your hand in your pocket to grab your car key, but your car key isn't in your pocket. So you go, huh?
Hot bird. I [00:16:00] could have sworn I put my car key right here in my pocket. That's what you do. You move your shopping bag to the other shoulder. Put your hand in your other pocket. Huh? Car key isn't in this pocket either, so you do what everybody does. You're gonna go back to the first pocket, right? Surely it's in here.
There's this gigantic car key that must have just been hidden from my fingers, but it's not there. Check the second pocket again. It's not there. And then, then comes the moment. Ah, I don't know. Where my car keys are in this moment, everything stops, right? You are completely arrested by this present moment.
You're not thinking about what you're gonna cook when you get home. You're thinking about where are. My car keys. Okay. Your brain goes through this entire crumbling process, and then it goes through this rebuilding process [00:17:00] by not knowing everything stops what it was doing before, and we're there for a moment, just exactly as things are, and then maybe in that stillness you remember, oh.
I left them in the ignition. Have you ever done that after having a baby? I have definitely done that more on mom brain at another time. But it's these beautiful moments of not knowing that break the pattern. It's these beautiful moments of actually not having the answer.
There's this wonderful study that scientists did where they took the last two digits on a monkey's hand and taped them together, and of course, monkey was able to function. Just fine. But they noticed within some number of hours that that part of the monkey's brain completely atrophied and went off the map completely offline [00:18:00] because the monkey wasn't needing to use the last finger.
And that last finger no longer became a active part of the brain, which I think is kind of the biological basis of if you don't use it. You lose it. Have they already made a cute saying for the opposite? Like, if you create it, you get to have it? Well, I, I don't know.
They should write in if you've heard one of those, but essentially that's what we're talking about. We're creating these moments of pause, of stillness, of hearing something we've never heard before. Seeing something we've never seen before. Being awestruck and letting the brain sigh, letting everything stop, changing the chemical signatures and the wiring of our brain, and letting everything that we were once just melt away.
And then sitting there for a [00:19:00] moment like, gosh, I don't know, but I'd like to hear more about that. And then we investigate and we lean in and we try on something new and we hear something else. And all of these things that become interesting and all these different possibilities and all of these new chemicals are created in these new signatures are created, and these new maps start to be built within the brain.
When we create a new map, we create new thoughts, and when we create new thoughts, we create new chemicals. And when we create new chemicals, we create new feelings in the body. And when we create new feelings in the body, we create a different posture, different behavior, and quite different physical structures in our body.
We become somebody completely different and completely new. Now, I know that from a very lived experience, so come with me back in time. I grew up in rural America. It's funny, I used to say [00:20:00] that I grew up in a small town in Idaho. And then I used to say that to my husband, and then I went to the small town that my husband grew up in, in Ireland, and I was like, oh, shit.
Like that is a really, really small town. Like when you're up on the hill, you can see the whole like itsy bitsy little town, like right there. By the ocean. , So now I don't say I'm from a small town anymore, but I'm from Idaho Falls and where I grew up, , and at that time it was small town and maybe like the, what I'm really wanting to say is it's small minded, not a big city, but it's very small minded.
'cause it's like country cowboy, Idaho
And maybe more specifically, what I mean by that is that in terms of brain maps, what everybody thinks and feels and does, it's all very the same and it's all very much locked into a specific pattern, and there is very, very [00:21:00] little room or grace for anything that is different than that or bigger than that, or that challenges that, if you know what I mean.
now. I love the place, I, I love all of it and I miss it some fierce trust me. And it was a really interesting upbringing because it is a very, US and them black and white kind of culture with the religious society and the religious constructs that are there now. I was blessed to have grown up in a family that indeed was religious.
Now it like, if I go back into my memories. I have no memories actually of my parents ever saying this or ever teaching me this, but I do have memories of this being like at church from our church leaders. And like even the church classes that I took at school, not just on Sundays, but I have a lot of memories about asking questions.
Asking questions of [00:22:00] why and what is that? And being met with a lot of force that my questions were not okay. And I'm gonna give you an example. I remember learning about the dinosaurs. In school, and I remember someone telling me that the dinosaurs aren't real. That Satan put their bones in the earth to confuse us about God's plan.
I. And I can remember asking about other religions. I can remember asking questions about what God they prayed to and what books they read and what they thought and felt. And I can remember being told that none of those books were real. And that me wondering about that was Satan influencing my mind and trying to confuse me and take me away from.
The one true God. Now, as you can imagine, for a child being told these things, what it led to was this like great inner [00:23:00] state of confusion because of course I couldn't help or suppress my questions about why and my curiosities about what was happening out there and over there, but I was constantly met with Stop that Satan is controlling your brain.
And if you were, if you were really yourself, and if you were really devout, and if you were really in this faith, you would only believe what we're telling you and what we're showing you about what our God. Wants you to do and think and be and feel. And I'm telling you now, I tried so hard. Oh my God, I tried so hard to be and do what was expected.
But it didn't work out. It didn't work out at all. I don't need to tell you anything about teenage years because you guys have all been [00:24:00] there. , Or maybe you're raising somebody who is there. Teenagerdom occurred in within me also, and that , great, like life force energy that we seemed to get during those years was enough to catapult me out of the religion, which also meant leaving the society and also meant leaving.
What I believed was, , my sense of belonging and my sense of tribe and family and safety and love and you know, all the really cool stuff that we humans want. Which then led to me leaving my hometown and then within a couple of years that led to me leaving my country. Now I'm kind of painting a picture while that being really sad, but it wound up being the greatest gift of my life.
And of course I have a lot more that I wanna talk to you about all of those things over the course of this season. But here's what I wanna say about that for now. , Not only was that like the gift of all gifts, because it really challenged and it really forced me [00:25:00] to be with each thought, is this true?
Is this mine? And how deeply was this planted and do I wanna keep it? And that weeding of the inner mind has been one of the most imperative parts of my work. And parts of my life. So now , let's just be here for a moment. At 20-year-old timeline in my life. I arrive in Australia and I want you to just imagine the brain map that was happening for me at the time, right?
So away from everyone I have ever known, every friend I've had, every family member, every place I've ever been, and like small, poor American girl, like coming to a foreign country was like. Insane. So insane. And it's so funny, actually, I came with two girlfriends and before we got on the plane we were like, do we wanna change our names?
Like nobody knows us. We could be whoever we wanted to be and we could just pick a different name right now. Okay., Fortunately, for, [00:26:00] for me and for everybody, we all just stayed with our, our real names. But it was so fascinating just noticing how all of these, parts of me that I believed I was.
Just started disappearing and it was a long, slow process of dismantling and realizing that I had all these personas and I had all these roles, and I had all these layers of these things that I thought I needed to be, and then all these like rebellious parts of me that I had put on top of oh, I definitely couldn't be that.
I'm gonna be this, but also that wasn't true. And so it was very much trying to find my way between , what am I really, and what is true really? And all the while, the chemistry in my brain is completely, completely changing. Fortunately for me, while I was in fact actually very sick and I was having seizures, but we'll talk more about that at another time.
Somebody suggested you should try yoga. And I did. [00:27:00] And when I went to my first yoga class, I walked out with this feeling of being stoned, like super relaxed. And I had never had that feeling before, like just from my own chemistry. So guess what? I wondered, why is that? What has just happened? And in America, I didn't say this, I had been studying the psychology of health because I had had so many changes and so much happening within my own body and with my own mind, I wanted to understand like, why is this happening?
Why do some people get well and why are some people unwell? So while I had paused my, , psychology degree in America, because I had moved to Australia, I started practicing a lot of yoga and I started changing rapidly. So guess what? I wanted to follow that. I wanted to understand more about this practice when I came away and I had maybe just had a sweat in my body but had
totally these incredible feelings of [00:28:00] euphoria and peace and grace and presence. Why was that happening and how was that happening? So I followed my curiosity and that took me to the Himalayas. My little sister and I met there actually, and we did our first 200 hour yoga teacher training in India. And there we were.
Day one, our most incredible teacher, Rohan, was giving a lecture about the yogic philosophy. And as I listened to this beautiful man, I had tears rolling down my cheeks because he was echoing like all of the sermons that I had been listening to for my whole life, but with one key difference. He wasn't telling me that I needed to repent.
That I was because I was a sinner and I had made a mistake. He wasn't telling me that I should fear God, and he wasn't telling me that I needed to ask for forgiveness. He was telling me to stop looking up [00:29:00] and to start looking inwards because I was God and I cried. , Have you ever had those moments when somebody says something that you already knew, .
I was gonna say the truth, but there's a difference between the truth and your truth When somebody tells you your truth in such a way that it like makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up and you get , kind of like the shivers, but at the same time you let out this deep, deep sigh. It was one of those moments where I just knew.
But I also knew that I had forgotten and that I had gotten so busy and I had gotten so angry, and I had gotten so confused in all of it that I had lost this one pivotal truth that I knew was my truth was that I hate that I'm even about to say this because it becomes so tacky, doesn't it? But everything that I was looking for, I [00:30:00] already knew.
All the answers that I had, I just, if I could just be still for a second, I could remember them without having to be taught them. And that changed everything for me to stop a, like being angry about religion. And to stop trying to banish my past, but it was like this full circle moment of closure, of complete acceptance of everything that I had learned through religion, of being able to really keep the things I was trying to push away by way of the teachings and the values, but just to shift them to my truth.
That all of it was real and that all of it had a right to exist and to be taught, but that it wasn't something I needed to be afraid of, and it wasn't an ideal that I needed to live up to. It was myself that I [00:31:00] needed to get in alignment with, and it was myself that I needed to pray to and to sit with and to get to know, and to understand, and to worship.
And I'm saying worship by way of the most exquisite self-care of our bodies and our minds. So my yoga path began and I came home from India with not a lot of skills to teach a yoga class. Mind you, just with this like laser point, knowing of the frequency of yoga. Yes. So I spent a lot of time looking for like masterful teachers that had the skills that I wanted to learn and that had the different facets that I wanted to add to my bow.
And so I did. I spent a lot of years and a lot of thousands of dollars gathering certificates and [00:32:00] qualifications and upleveling. And it was the time of my life, like the time of my life, I opened an outdoor yoga studio and then opened an indoor yoga studio and got to work with , let me tell you, all of my best friends to this day have come from being able to be a part of these studios.
It's incredible actually, how when you find yourself. Within the right frequency, how just like all the right people arrive there. And I was so fortunate that that happened for me and had this incredible time teaching a lot of yoga and, , running studios and teaching, teaching trainings and retreats and all the good stuff that comes with it.
Um, and, and, and, and there was another piece that I recognized was missing. So here's what would happen. We would be on the yoga mat. We'd be in a group setting or a training or whatever it was, [00:33:00] and somebody would be in a forward fold and have this huge emotional release. Or we would be in a deep training, and somebody would have this huge spiritual awakening, body shaking or we're,, allergic to something, and then 24 hours later could go and have or be a do that and like not allergic.
And I was witnessing some wild stuff happening. So guess what? I wondered why, why is this happening? Just from moving our body on a yoga mat, why are all these emotions occurring? Why are these insane healings happening and why are all of these big currencies of energy coming through the body?
What is going on? So I continued my investigation and I continued trying to figure out why all of these things could possibly be coming together in the way that they work. Which led me into an incredible body of work, which you have maybe heard of, which is kinesiology.
Now for five years, [00:34:00] I haven't been able to succinctly define what kinesiology is, but here's my like off the cuff best ability to do that. It's your connection between your brain and your body through these brain maps that
you and I have already been talking about. And not only do we have those hard wires just in our brain, if you can imagine, remember we were talking about like the electrical.
Wires up in your ceiling. I want you to imagine that they're coming down through the walls of your house and they're in the floors of your house, and that electricity moves everywhere. Well, that would be like how your central nervous system comes outta the brain and , runs down through the spine and runs through all of your organs, and runs through all of your muscle tissue, and runs into all of your cell tissues.
Now that electrical current is signaling every cellular process within the body. When all of that is functioning well, the body is in harmony. We call that flow. Uh, we have energy. Everything's, everything's great, right? [00:35:00] But when there's a block somewhere in the electricity, or like if the circuit breaks, you go into the room and you try to flip on the light switch and the lights don't come on, that happens in the body too.
And we call it pain. Or we call it inflammation. So kinesiology goes into the body and it's using like ones and zeros. It's a yes or no kind of response from the body. Is there a break in the circuit here? Is there a break in the circuit here? And then when we find, yes, the voltage of energy isn't coming through this particular loop, then we ask the body, okay, great.
What do we need to do to fix that? And then we do so. The, the mechanism of how all of that occurs is, again, gonna be another chat for another day, but it's enough for, for you to understand for now that what we're doing is making electrical life force flow through every part of the body on a cellular level.
Hearing a definition is one thing, but I think we can understand things deeper than thinking when we feel them in the body. So if you want to feel [00:36:00] what kinesiology means by way of kind of changing electrical circuits in the body, if you wanna like have an experience of that, then go find a wall. If you are driving, then maybe you just like safely pull over and you actually could do this.
Sitting in your car if you're going for a walk, can you walk over to ve nearest tree or car or wall or something? Okay, we're there. So now lean back so that the back of your pelvis, the, the back of your two hips, lean back against the wall and the back of your two shoulders. Lean back against the wall.
Bring both arms out in front of you and High five yourself soap. Two palms together, kind of like Charlie's Angels style. Now we wanna get a barometer for how far you can twist your upper spine. Twist your fingertips over towards your left or your arms, your torso over towards your left, and just go as far as you can go.
Your right shoulder may come off the wall and that's fine. Just don't let your right hip come off the wall, which means you won't be rotating from the [00:37:00] pelvis. You'll really have to feel just how far you can rotate through the ribcage, which is it's trickier. Now, keep both eyes open and just notice what your fingertips are pointing at, so you have a mark.
Then go towards the opposite side. So rotate fingertips are going over towards the right. And now notice how far can you rotate without your left hip coming off the wall. Okay, so you're just moving from the ribs.
Now, let your hands come down along your sides. We'll begin the balance now that you have some, some data to work with. This is called an auricular energy reset, and the auricular are in your ears. So if you could bring your fingers up towards your temple and feel where your ear, your upper ear just begins where it meets your temple.
Can you feel how that upper rim of your skin is folded over? Well now with your fingertips, imagine that you could unroll that EarFold. Yeah. So let's do it together. Turn your cheek over your left [00:38:00] shoulder. And bring both of your hands onto your right ear. Okay, so head is looking left and hands are on your upper right ear.
Now, very firmly with your fingers, try to unroll your ear from the upper ear to the middle of the ear down to your lower ear lobe quite firmly. Do that two more times, starting at the top, unroll to the middle, down to the bottom of the ear lobe. And then last time, starting at the top. The middle, the ear lobe, same side.
But now turn your head farther to the left and unroll your right ear. Three times from the top, middle to the bottom, the top, middle to the bottom, and then last time now opposite side. Cheek turns over your right shoulder, and both hands come onto your left ear so very firmly with your fingers. Imagine unrolling your upper ear.
Flap your middle [00:39:00] ear down to your ear lobe. Two more times, upper, middle, lower last time. Nice big pull on the lobe. Stay on the same side, but turn your head farther right and then do that again. So you're unrolling the left ear. To Cool. And then the last time. Okay, now let's see. If you were somehow able to change the electrical impulse from your ears through to the rest of the nerves, lean back against the wall.
Extend your arms, palms, touch and twist. Let your torso come over to towards your left fingers. Reach and maybe you move. Move towards that first marker. Are you at it? Could you touch it? Do you go any farther? Come back through to the center and then twist over towards your right and just let your, your torso go as far as you can.
So again, you're keeping your left hip, but left shoulder can move. [00:40:00] Do you make it to the marker? Are you at the same point or do you notice you go farther? Interesting. Right now I've never done this with somebody yet who hasn't been able to significantly pass that first mark in how far their body was able to rotate.
So why is that? What has just happened? Well, we have just stimulated the electrical impulses from the nervous system via the ears through to the muscles, and this is how kinesiology works, right? We find somewhere that it's jammed up, or you experience that little jamming signal somewhere in the ribs, and then we find what is the balance, what is needed?
Where can I put a new signal or a new little bit of electricity into the system that's going to allow the electricity to flow through the rest of that circuit freely. So we're always looking for where is there a little block? Where is there a break? And what does this need in order to move more [00:41:00] freely?
And now you can kind of feel that's how kinesiology works.
I. And I found that once this body of work opened for me, I had the structure that I needed to understand and to have the tools for why we were having all these crazy, big, spiritual and electrical and wonderful experiences in the yoga room. So that opened itself into the next body of work. But then here's where comes my favorite, and that's the next chapter, which is when my beautiful son entered this world at the end of 2023.
I know I keep saying this, but I have a lot of stories to tell you. We absolutely will talk all about how he came into the world and all the wonderful juicy things from that. But it's enough to know for right now that every woman who has come before me already knows this. When you are walking to the birth altar and when you come through the portal of birth, you have absolutely no choice.
But to [00:42:00] be chemically changed, biologically changed spiritually, psychologically changed. Like every single part of you has gone through something totally different
and you are someone totally different, and that's exactly as it should be.
So many things occurred for us within that very, very potent time. But what I can share with you for now was that it completely rated the brain map that I had built, and it forced entirely new circuits to be created.
And for now, it's enough to say that on the other side of motherhood, everything had to look totally different. I. We were having all sorts of adventures with not sleeping well and not feeding well, and the day-to-day things just feeling really, really hard. And I was doing all the [00:43:00] things that I knew how to do and that I, I thought were the right things to do.
And yet, the relationship between my son and I, our connection was falling apart. Our sleep was falling apart and it was rough and. I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the incredible work of Marian Rose and the Aware Parenting paradigm, and the moment I applied just the first piece of it, I watched healing occur in my son's body in real time.
And then of course. The question came of why, and I wonder how this works. So I followed that, which led to a, certification training and being an aware parenting facilitator, which is currently underway.
Here's what I love so much about that. For the better part of two decades, I had been [00:44:00] looking at and working with adults and their bodies and their struggles and their traumas. And we were going back layer by layer through the psychology and through their past to heal and to solve and to try and rewire things that were in there.
And then suddenly I had this beautiful, tiny baby in my arms and I was just watching the healing happen in real time. Tiny little daily stresses would occur. And I knew what I needed to do to help him resolve them and move them through his body in that moment, rather than letting it lodge and become something bigger.
And of course, as we all grow, we're gonna have much work to do through the later years of our life. But I finally understood how to connect with him, how to be present with him, and how to move with him [00:45:00] through life.
That's so interesting because in kinesiology we are looking at why the life force isn't moving and what do we need to do to resolve it, and it's a stuck emotion. It's an experience, it's a thought that's become frozen somewhere in the body and isn't allowing the life force to move through, and rather than having to wait for a practitioner or a session or a balance to move it, what I love so much about the paradigm of a aware parenting was that it was exactly the same thing, but in real time with a baby or a child, rather than letting an emotion become stuck.
To sit there with present moment awareness of what the feeling is, and to just be there together until it dissolves. So it was like coming to the same center but [00:46:00] through a different door, and rather than waiting until we're 40 to try and figure out something to be with it in the moment that it occurs and whether we can move it or not, or heal it or not, that's a totally different thing because I also believe that our children all have their own work to do along their path and their own self-discovery to do along their path.
And I wouldn't take that away for anything. But it is quite incredible to be there in the depth of an emotion and the fire of a feeling without trying to dampen it, without trying to fix it, without trying to turn it into a more desirable feeling like happiness or joy. But to just like really sit with a child in the rage and in the frustration, and to just be there together, in the suck
And suddenly I just kind of felt like that was the only thing I wanted to do was be with moms and to be with kids and to support kind of like where these worlds collide, uh, [00:47:00] movement and yoga being in the body, I.
The kinesiology of clearing energy blocks and letting our life force move through us very systematically and very gracefully, and with the aware parenting of being with each other
In this like very present, accepting container without trying to silence anything or remedy anything, but to just be there together. And man, I'm telling you, that changed everything for us. So. That is who I am. And that's a little bit about where I've been. So now I wonder about you and I wonder where you've been, and I wonder what you're wondering about if you feel like you want a deeper relationship with your body.
And if you feel like you wanna understand the chemistry and the science behind movement and our cells and fascia, and how our hormones, our [00:48:00] thoughts and our feelings, the emotions that come from them get lodged in our body and why that comes out and how that comes out through movement and why it doesn't through stillness.
If you're working with creating systems for your life force, ways through which energy moves through your body throughout the day, how we get good sleep at night. If you're a mom and you want deeper connection and tools for how to be there in presence with your children and all of their big emotions and feelings that are moving through them, then you're in the right place.
What I can never give you. Is the only one truth because it doesn't exist. And what I can't give you is my expert advice because it also doesn't exist. But what I can give you is a lot of empathy and a lot of love, and a lot of what I have come across [00:49:00] in my own curiosity. And then you are going to have to take all of that.
And you're gonna have to kinda snowball it up, you know, into a little, I'm doing a snowball thing with my hands, have ever made a snowball? Probably not if you are listening to this in Australia. But then you're just gonna have to hold all of that and you're gonna have to decide, is this my truth and is this something I wanna practice?
And is this something that I wanna live in for a moment and decide whether or not this is true for me? And that's one of the key things that yoga, like real yoga taught me was discriminative wisdom. One of the core teachings of yoga is that you have to look at everything with a very scrupulous eye, and you have to run it through the your own filters and put it through your own brain maps.
And if it feels like your truth, you'll know because it feels really settling and it feels really still. And at the same time, it tickles something in your mind that's like, Ooh, [00:50:00] oh my gosh, I wonder. I wonder if that could be true. I wonder how I could make that work. I wonder how I could do that. And that is something that you should follow.
That becomes the next step, which then creates the next step. And I suppose that's all I really can offer you is just one step at a time along our journeys of wonder together. So welcome. I love that you're here. I love that we're started. Let's see where we go.
Thank you so much for being here with me for , the release of the very first episode and the release of this podcast into the wild. It's been so much fun hanging out and talking to you a little bit about my story, the three pillars of my work, sharing a little bit of the neuroscience between awe and wonder and sharing one kinesiology balance that I hope you use.
[00:51:00] All the time your auricular energy reset for that beautiful big meridian gathering, uh, location of your ears. So much can be done there by way of boosting our energy immediately relieving, physi physiological pain and slowing down before sleep. If you want more tools, come find me online. I'm at melissa kitchen.com.
You can come find me on my Instagram. I'm at Melissa Energetics if you want. The benefits of sleep while you're awake now is. Such a good time to come and hang out. You can use the code Nidra, N-I-D-R-A Nidra to get 30% off of your one month membership where you are going to get all of the Yoga Nidra practices.
You're gonna get a deep dive on the neuroscience behind our brainwaves in physiological sleep. Versus when we're in these deep states [00:52:00] of yoga nidra and why actually yoga nidra can be a faster and a more potent tool to our spiritual awakening, to our personal development, and for our mental cognition, uh, while we're awake.
So come on in. I can't wait to geek out with you and share with you all about it. Head to melissa kitchen.com more energy membership and use the code nidra to get 30% off. I will see you so soon and I can't wait.
Thank you so much for being here with me for the, the release of the very first episode and the release of this podcast into the wild. It's been so much fun hanging out and talking to you a little bit about my story, the three pillars of my work, sharing a little bit of the neuroscience between awe and wonder and sharing one kinesiology balance that I hope you use.
All the time your auricular energy reset [00:53:00] for that beautiful big meridian gathering, location of your ears. So much can be done there by way of boosting our energy immediately relieving, physiological pain and slowing down before sleep. If you want more tools, come find me online. I'm at melissa kitchen.com.
You can come find me on my Instagram. I'm at Melissa Energetics if you want. The benefits of sleep while you're awake now is. Such a good time to come and hang out. You can use the code Nidra, N-I-D-R-A Nidra to get 30% off of your one month membership where you are going to get all of the Yoga Nidra practices.
You're gonna get a deep dive on the neuroscience behind our brainwaves in physiological sleep. Versus when we're in these deep states of yoga nidra and why actually yoga nidra can be a [00:54:00] faster and a more potent tool to our spiritual awakening, to our personal development, and for our mental cognition, , while we're awake.
So come on in. I can't wait to geek out with you and share with you all about it. Head to melissa kitchen.com more energy membership and use the code nidra to get 30% off. I will see you so soon and I can't wait.
