Healing Through Movement & Meditation

I think when we take a minute, if saying that I can't, you can slow down. You absolutely can. You have to make the choice and the commitment to say that that matters enough to you to be able to do it. Otherwise, you'd just be stuck in your drama cycle over and over and over and over again.

So the first thing you can do is slow down to start getting curious around what it is that you feel. Welcome to the Thrive Her podcast. I'm your host, Amy Sanders. I'm a fitness and wellness pro, mom, step-mom, second wife, and master certified life coach.

I'm here to help you manage your mind so you can uncover the most potent version of yourself and create a thriving life you love. Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. Amy Sanders here as your host. I actually have another guest speaker.

Okay. So I've been having a lot of guests lately, and I hope you're enjoying all of them. Today. I have Angela Gentile.

She is a woman of my own heart. She's totally into the fitness world, and she's also totally into all of the emotions. She's connected the two and created a company called Sweat Remix, right? Yep.

It's Sweat Remix, but she does a lot of mindful movement with what she has built with her company. And so, Angela, I am so honored to have you here. Tell me a little bit more about your business and tell me a little bit more about how, how you came to connect the two, because a lot of people are like, I sweat and I get my workout on and that's healthy and I lose weight or whatever, but they don't realize that also it helps with your emotions and we could use the two to become healthier versions of ourselves. So tell me a little bit more about you and all of that.

All of that. All right. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah.

So Sweat Remix is a mindful wellness brand that remixes movement, mindfulness, meditation, and life coaching to really help people tap into their bodies. Release negative energy and be able to regulate their central nervous system so that they are always feeling grounded and in control of their life so that they can make aligned choices so that we are always in the driver's seat of our life, feeling confident, controlled, brave, and just totally badass. So that's really what I stand for. That's what the brand is about and how that came to be.

I will give you the abridged version of that. So I was miserable in my life. Like I was just at a job. I was a high school teacher.

I was miserable, miserable, like stressed out. Like if we talk about being in the driver's seat, I was held hostage in the trunk of my own car. You know what I mean? I was not, I was not living a life that was aligned.

That's that lit me up. And you know, I think when you're younger and you just don't know any better that you can really do whatever you want. You can actually say no to things. You're still, I was in my like early thirties, just kind of like sussing out.

Well, I don't want to disappoint anybody. Like, what do I do? So I was like, I can't leave teaching. Right.

There's this whole identity around it. So I was like, I'm going to go to grad school. That was going to fix it. Right.

So I went to grad school and I had to write. Yeah. No, that did not. So anybody who was in that place thing about like miserable with a job, I don't know.

If I just get more education. Yeah. My education, then I'll be fine. That's like what I need.

Yeah. Let me just try harder. That that'll make it work. So I went to grad school and I was like, oh my God, if I have to like grade student work and do like, I just couldn't do it.

I was so burnt out. I was like, I don't give a shit. I can't. Can't do it.

So I created a wellness program for my thesis. So my graduate thesis and my work was around how movement and meditation can impact student learning by creating like healthy climate and culture among your staff. It was a brilliant thesis, by the way, but not the direction that I actually ended up going into. So that's sort of the long and short of it.

And then that morphed into grad school's over. Hey guys, thanks so much. High five. What about your day?

I'm going to write this bad boy. And the teachers were like, whoa, we need this. So I was like, well, you guys start paying me. And they did.

So I was running like an illegal underground fitness operation in my classroom, getting paid for it, which I shouldn't have been. But I was like, yeah, this is what's up. And I knew that I had, I had something kind of cool because we were meditating. We were raging out.

We were moving. And it was very collective centering around, like, take time for yourself because you matter. And I think that that's something that I needed to hear for myself because I felt pretty worthless. Just constantly.

Giving over giving my life didn't feel like mine. And my wake up call came that something needed to shift. And I was really onto something. And I, I wasn't in the right place.

I was onto it, but it wasn't the right fit. And I got my wake up call when my father passed away and he died suddenly from an aneurysm. And that rocked my world. That rocked me.

You know, I don't, I was oblivious to, you know, I just didn't like, of course, you know, that nobody's going to live forever, but I just didn't. I didn't think. I wasn't prepared for that. So that kind of led me to be in, I was just in a cesspool of my own emotions, everything all at once, all the time.

And I, I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know how to process it. And I was going to workout classes. I was going to box, you know, cause I just had this like rage in me, but then I would be boxing and then I would just start crying.

And then I'd be in this boxing class, like on my hands and knees sobbing. And they'd be like, yo, I don't, I don't think she's okay. Like mental health crisis. And I was like, no, I just missed my dad.

Like nobody knew what to do with me. And then I would go to yoga class and I would get pissed off. Cause I'm like, this energy is seeping through me and I can't sit still right now. So I needed a place where I could be both.

And what I was doing with the teachers, I kind of decided to dive in a little bit and really create like this process, the Zen Rachel process, which is what my class is built on to ground into yourself. Take a few minutes to pause, get clear and centered on what you are releasing. Like what is here? What emotions are you showing up in the space with that are like, not it not serving you anymore?

Are you angry? Are you, do you feel betrayed? Do you feel resentful? Do you not know?

That's cool too. You know, you just identifying and naming it rage. Let's move. So work it out, release it.

Like that stuff can get trapped in your body. Energy gets trapped in your body. And if we do not deal with that trauma and that negative energy. It can cause inflammation.

That inflammation can cause all kinds of chronic health concerns. So getting that under control and being able to get yourself out of fight or flight by just simply breathing and doing a workout where it's a conscious connection to your breath and your movement is where it's a game changer because now you can mimic that outside of your life, outside of a fitness class into your life when things get chaotic outside of your life so that you're not governed by the external circumstances situation. You're very grounded and very centered and able to approach this from like your highest elevated self. And then every class closes down with a guided meditation.

And that's when we heal. That's when we build conscious awareness around like what we're capable of, how strong we actually are. And it puts us in the driver's seat, right? So if we're talking about being held hostage in the car, this is where you pull yourself out and get in the drive, take the keys back, buckle up and not put the foot on the gas for your own life.

Yeah. Amazing. I love it. Okay.

So. So how would you tell someone so breath work in the last few years has gained so much more popularity, which I think is great because COVID has definitely done a number on a lot of people. And I don't know if that's part of it, but I think breath work and meditation in the last few years really has gained popularity and people are becoming more aware of their feelings, which is good. And they're looking at them, but could you tell people how and what breath look breath work?

Looks like, cause some people are like, do I just like breathe? Like what do I even do here? Yeah. I mean, well, it's kind of that's how long and how long do I, does it take?

Like how long do I got to do this for? Well, I mean, I don't think, I think that's the thing. It's not like for every person that can look different. Right.

And there isn't this like set guideline, but simply put it's being mindful and conscious of how you're breathing. And I think when we look at mindfulness, it's not, not thinking it's just turning your attention to your body. Yeah. When you are conscious of your breathing and you can deliberately say, okay, I'm taking an inhale and I'm taking an exhale.

You are now like communicating to your central nervous system or your autonomic nervous system, which regs, which regulates fight or flight or rest and digest. And when we feel triggered, whether it is a real perceived threat or a real threat, like, like we're actually in danger or something that triggers us where at one point in our life, we were in danger. Our brain can't determine that. So it starts to release cortisol.

And that's when our heart rate gets amplified. That's when we're ready to like move or like, we think we're being chased by lions. So it's time to just like activate. So when we consciously slow down and breathe or allowing like our hormones to regulate and we're giving our brain an opportunity to say, oh, okay, she's cool right now.

This is just, this isn't real. Hey guys, don't, don't worry. Like they're communicating. Oh, it's just a false alarm.

Everybody, everybody. The lion, the lion's not actually chasing her. She's a couple of crazy thoughts going on. Yeah.

This is just a Starbucks line. It's totally okay. Everybody's fine. And then your heart rate can decrease your cortisol levels decrease and you're not activated.

So, you know, when we get stressed, we kind of, we see red and we see tunnel vision and we just like rage out and there's a time and a place for that. But when we can become aware and condition ourselves. To be conscious with our breath, then we are able to zoom out and get a whole perspective of what's actually going on. Am I stressed?

Is this real? Am I safe? Can I breathe? What's actually happening?

Oh my God, I got this. Right. So we can start to have like a little bit of a buffer between trigger and reaction so that we're having a better dialogue around what's actually happening. How do we feel?

What do we need? Who's in control? Right. Yeah.

So really I, when you're asking me how you do it, just start being aware. Yeah. Just start being aware of when you do it. When you're in the car, turn the radio off, just breathe.

You got a long commute, take a minute, sit at the red light and just listen to your breath. The more you do this with anything, with anything, it just takes time. If you're training for a marathon, you wouldn't hit the pavement and run 15 miles in your first day. You would buy running shoes first, and then you would run a mile and then you would run another mile the next day.

So this is just incremental things that you can do before you sit down like cross-legged in a Lotus with your thumb and your forefinger, just breathing. There are steps you can take. And I don't think mindfulness needs to look like gongs and yoga blocks. You can be mindful when you're taking a walk.

You can be mindful when you're cooking. You can be mindful when you're just sitting in the car, you know, like it doesn't necessarily need to be going to a yoga studio and lighting some sage. That doesn't, that doesn't have to be it. Which is a very good point.

You can do it anywhere. Anytime at any moment. So a question for you here, I want to get into the, you know, the movement piece in a minute, but what about the person who is in full trauma mode? They have just experienced something totally traumatic, like death, like infidelity, like, like something that's just now they are in fight and flight all the time, or they're like the hypo either one, you know, like firefight or freeze.

What about those people who feel? Like they can't even get back to homeostasis. Ooh, I think sometimes the best thing you can do is just acknowledge what you feel, you know, and it might not be that you're taking action steps immediately because sometimes it's just getting a handle because if you can start naming what you feel, because you're like, what if they feel betrayed? That's huge.

That's an identification around what needs attention. But if you're not even there yet, if you can't even name it, if you're just like, I don't know what it is. That's the journey. The first thing you can do.

It's not really like a, like an action step. It's just sort of getting quiet and slowing down. That's the key. Like pull yourself out of the environment that is causing you distress, whether that is you go sit in your car for five minutes or you take a walk or you're in the grocery store and you're just like walking around a little extra, you know, whatever you can do to carve out some time to remove yourself from the situation, just to get clear and start getting curious.

I think that's the, that's the journey point for anything is to really get curious around what it is that you're feeling. Beyond what anybody did. Cause I think I'm a big fan of radical responsibility. Yeah, me too.

Nothing happens to us. It happens for us, you know? So if you're catching yourself, why me? Why did this happen to me?

I will invite you right now to switch your language and switch your, you know, vernacular to this happening. What is this happening for? What am I supposed to learn? Cause I guarantee there is something that's calling you to change course and to redirect.

So this is happening because maybe there was a misalignment. Maybe there's something greater. Maybe there's a lesson that you need to learn. Maybe this is hitting the wound that you finally need to heal.

So I think when we take a minute, if saying that I can't, you can slow down. You absolutely can. You have to make the choice and the commitment to say that that matters enough to you to be able to do it. Otherwise you just be stuck in your drama cycle over and over and over and over again.

So the first thing you can do is slow down to start getting curious around what it is that you feel. Number one. Yeah. Love it.

Just start, start there. And I would add, be okay with that. You might be in this trauma for a little while. Guess what?

You actually probably will be. It's not an overnight thing. No. And I think when we go through any kind of major traumatic thing, it always is some form of grief, right?

When our expectations and our reality collide, right? It's not how it should be. And then we're, we're forced up against what is, and we're not pumped about it. This isn't what it should be.

This isn't what we want. And it's always some form of. Of loss and grief. And I think when we look at those stupid, like the stages of grief, it's stupid.

Like they exist, but they don't exist linearly. Like it's not, we go from A to B. And then once you arrive, you like wash your hands of it and you say, all right, I'm good now. It's they're cyclical.

And sometimes they can happen every 30 seconds. Yeah. Yep. And they sneak up on you and, and you'll be doing nothing.

And then all of a sudden you feel the, the anger, you feel the bartering, you feel the, you know, what, I don't even remember what some of these are. Cause I don't subscribe to a lot of this, but you know, when you go through the cycle of it, you're like, oh, okay. And forgiveness and acceptance. All right, cool.

But then you're like, but no. And then you're right back to where you started. So it can, it can feel chaotic, you know, like, yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Yes. I love your per just your perception on all of this. Let's also talk about the movement that happens, like how movement can help with your emotions and how you've combined the two.

Right. When you're, when you're intentional, right. When I'm telling you to slow down and you're like, what do I feel? I feel betrayed.

Okay. That's powerful. It is powerful to name it because now you can, once you can identify it, you can now move with it. Right.

It's not controlling you. You get to do control it. So when you're saying, this is what I feel. And you're like, that doesn't work for me.

Anytime that you're moving. And when you're exhaling, that's what you're releasing. That's what you're calling out of your body. That's what you're trying to make space from, you know?

So I think when you can get really cognizant and aware of what you want to let go of, and start moving your body and activating your body. Cause if you feel betrayed, what do you want to welcome in instead? You want to, you want to welcome in empowerment. You want to welcome in loyalty and love and honor, respect for yourself.

How can you show up with your movement? That is an alignment with that. Cause if I love honor, respect, and I'm loyal to myself, I'm sure as shit going to crush this workout. I'm going to do all of these movements in a way that make me feel connected to the love, to the loyalty, to the respect I have for myself.

So you start. Start to now move in alignment with the person that you're becoming. It's pretty powerful stuff. Super powerful.

I love it. Hey, what else around this can you be telling our audience? Oh man, so much. And I, again, I think it goes beyond just this like fluffy, emotional, you know, move your body in alignment with yourself.

Like this is really how your central nervous system and your brain works, you know? So when you can start redesigning like your neural path, path, ways and saying, you know what, I'm not going to repeat this pattern. I'm going to be conscious about breaking some of these habits. And I'm going to show up really empowered and responsible for myself.

Like you're now like redesigning the energetic pathways in your body for you to continue to make decisions that make you feel like a bad-ass. And I think that at the end of the day is what we're all trying to do is live a life that makes us feel joy. Totally. And we're all trying to, I feel like with joy, we look for in the wrong areas and we think that, you know, we're all trying to live a life that makes us feel joy.

You know, it's something that you're going to achieve one day. I'm like, you can literally feel joy every single day. If you choose it. Exactly.

Regardless of your situation, where you're at, you really can still feel joy. It's up to you to learn how to access that and work to fill it every day. Cause life's going to life, right? Yeah.

Life's just going to do what she does around you and things are going to be not going your way and things are going to hurt and they're going to suck. And how are you going to move with it? How are you going to show up to make sure that you? Feel good, regardless of what happens outside of yourself.

Not easy to do. It's a daily practice and it's a daily awareness to say, I'm in control of my destiny. I'm in that driver's seat. So if I don't like something, I'm responsible to change my perception of it or my accessibility to it, or who has access to me.

All of those things are within my control, you know, control the fire. I can't control the loss. I can't control the death. I can't control the traffic, but I can control how I show up to face it and to meet it.

Yeah. Easier said than done. But again, that's. That's why you've said it is a daily practice and we are learning every day to how to be a better version of ourselves, how to thrive within our life and live like life abundantly.

So I do want to ask you what this entrepreneur life and path that you're on, how has that gone for you? Oh, well, you know, I'm sure my story is similar to everyone else's when I talk about the rollercoaster, right? Like, yeah, I'm killing it. And then some days you're like, I ruined my whole life with this.

So I think on the days where I feel the best and most connected to my entrepreneurial journey, because this is my path to personal development. You know, I think a lot of people who are parents can, can get these lessons. You know what I'm saying? Like there are different ways that we learn about ourselves, but this one, this tests me all the time.

So yeah, I think when I feel the most connected to it and I feel the most empowered with it is when I'm fully standing in myself. Yeah. I'm saying what I want, saying what I want. I'm not holding back.

I'm calling in the person I want to call in. I call out what I want to call out. You know, I, I don't like, I'm just a little unapologetic and I'm my best when I'm rough around the edges and I'm Angela and I don't try and sugarcoat it and like make people happy. And I'm worrying about how it's going to be received.

Like the best is when, like what you said earlier, just shoot from him. That's it. That's my business thrives. That's where I feel the best connected, you know, my energy will show up and attract that kind of energy back.

Yeah. You know, so good. Yeah. So when we speak our voice and we're being totally honest and authentic with who we are, that actually is when things start to go better for us.

Absolutely. It's, you know, but sometimes we go down a path and we're like, Ooh, and again, all of this kind of comes full circle. The more that you know about yourself, the more you can listen to the cues your body is giving you about. This isn't it.

The more that you're aware of. Like you're breathing and your heart rate and things not being right for you, the more you can kind of nip it and change course a little bit quicker, you know, gotten into like, I'm on my way to a meeting or partnership or something. And I'm like, I don't know about this. I don't know something about it.

And then like, sure enough in the meeting, I was like, Oh, that's why I'm not doing this. Yeah. Right. You know what I mean?

So like I was listening to it and I'm feeling it, but not fully like allowing myself to believe that yet until I get myself into like where it's like glaring red flags, flashing lights all over the place, you know? Yeah. So yeah. But I think it's just the more that you get to know yourself, the more that you can show up and use this process that I've created to build some conscious awareness in your body, to slow down, to name, identify, to move it out and to connect with yourself.

If you can do that in a 45 minute class consistently, when you start showing up in life with this, yo, that's where the magic happens. That's where the change happens. You know, what we do in class is just this like microcosm, just like little practice time. Right.

But when you can start applying these skills in your life, whoo, unstoppable. Totally. I love it. Okay.

So what about if someone wants to, we have all of your information in the show notes, but do you have online classes or do you have ways that other people can connect to you and be able to participate of this amazing product, regimen, whatever you want to call it. Yes, that you've created. Yeah. So I do most of my business and most of my classes online.

So you can find it at premix. com and the weekly schedule is designed for you to take classes like in succession. So like this is what we do on Sundays. This is what we do Mondays, Tuesdays, whatever.

So it flows so that you're not burning yourself out with, you know, cycling classes every week, you know, five a day, like, like it's structured in a way that like your whole body gets taken care of with strength work, with the gym. With agility, with hit, with intensity, with stretching. So yeah. So you can find me online.

I also just opened up a very small studio space outside of Boston in Springfield, Massachusetts. Congratulations. Yeah. She's small.

She's tiny, but I'm starting to add in-person classes and hybrid classes onto the schedule. So stay tuned for that. So anyone listening in the Western mass area, I would love to see you come on. Well, I am going to Boston in a few months.

I just might have to come see you in a few months. Please let me know when you're here. We'll connect. We'll definitely.

Yes. My husband's running the Boston marathon. So that's when I'll be there for like that week. But anyway, have you ever run the marathon?

I've run lots of marathons, not the Boston I've qualified multiple times. And you never did it. I did not do it because I was married different marriage to someone who didn't really allow that. Don't worry.

Well, not okay. I'm going to say it. He ran it. But I'm not going to do it.

But I wasn't allowed to run it. Clearly there's a reason why we're not together anymore. There's a lot of boundaries and things around that, but I will say, yes, I have qualified lots of times and I have run lots of marathons. My husband right now, he's still in the marathon world.

I'm more of like a, I want my body to keep working for me for a very long time. And my back is saying no more marathons, but 13 miles or less. I'm still in. Oh, that's all.

I was like, 13 miles or less. I'm still there. I do all my other workouts. I'm all into the fitness, but the, yeah, the MRA is saying, Amy, no more marathons.

If you want to keep doing all the things you love. So that's where I am. Yeah. I don't run them anymore.

I'm like, I've done, I've tapped out. I've came. I've saw, I've conquered. I did Boston and the thank you.

I'm done. A five K a lot of us get there at some, we're just like, okay, we're good. Yeah. Cause I was like, I've done it.

I've reached the, this is kind of, I've been at Boston. I've watched people cross the finish line at Boston, but I had never ran it, but you know what? It was a lifelong dream that actually is not one now. So that's fine.

And that's also what I want to offer the audience is guess what? Your dreams can change. Totally. I know that I could qualify and go run right now if I really wanted to, but I don't anymore.

It's like not there anymore. And that's okay. I mean, look, if you asked me six months ago, if I was going to open up a brick and mortar studio, I'd be like. No crazy.

And then the opportunity presented itself. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's life changes. And you just roll.

Yeah. Like, and it's never permanent. Like I could shut it all down tomorrow if I wanted, you know? Exactly.

I love that too, that it's not permanent. So often we just start something and we think it means something about us. If we need to pivot, it doesn't actually. Didn't we learn anything during COVID?

Right. Yeah. If you asked me March 12th, 2020, Angela, you're going to have a, cause I was doing all these like renting spaces, classes in Boston. And then on March 12th, you know, or March 13th, we went on lockdown and then I switched everything virtual that weekend.

I wasn't on my radar. I never wanted to do that. And now I have a thriving online, but it's just wild. Amazing.

It's amazing. And congratulations. Yes. Okay.

As we wrap up last thing, what is one little last nugget you'd want to share with the audience as we say goodbye? Yeah. You're always in control of your life. Like you are way more powerful sometimes than you give your credit yourself credit for it.

So if there's a calling and a burning that you're maybe trying to stuff down, I invite you right now to let it be as loud and as big and as bold as it needs to be, because that's your power. And the more that you listen to that, the more joy, the more love, the more success, the more of those things that you want are going to call in. So just know that you're always in control and like, let that out. Let it go.

I love it. Mic drop. Okay. That's it.

All right, guys, we will see you. We'll catch you next week on another episode. And again, Angela, thank you so much for your time, your wisdom, everything you were able to share with us, guys, all the info is in the show notes. You can access her online.

So check it out and I will see you guys next week. Bye. Hey, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, then you've got to come check out my signature program. This is where we do real coaching and inner work transformation.

I teach you how to apply the strategies and mindset tools we talk about here on the podcast so you can unlock your true potential and create the life you love. For more info, go to amysanders. co forward slash thrive dash camp. Again, that's amysanders.

co forward slash thrive dash camp. Let's get to work and thrive together. I'll see you next week. Bye.