EP 39 The Sneaky Stuff Getting In Your Way

In this episode, we’re stepping into the second part of the VIBE Method: Identify. This is where we look beneath the surface and get curious about what’s really getting in the way. Because that thing you think is the problem? Often, it’s not the whole story. We’ll talk about why surface fixes (like changing the job, the routine, or the meal plan) don’t create lasting change, and how your body and emotions are constantly giving you useful data—not evidence that you're failing. We’ll explore how blocks can show up on multiple levels—physical, emotional, mental, and energetic—and why addressing just one layer usually only provides temporary relief. Most importantly, we’ll talk about approaching all of this with curiosity instead of self-judgment. You’re not broken. You don’t need to be fixed. You’re learning about yourself more deeply—and that’s where real change begins.

Sometimes you just want to read, so here’s a transcript of the episode:

*AI generated

Welcome back to the Wellness Ninja Podcast. I am so excited and delighted to be back in your ear holes. Welcome to episode 38.

Holy crap, that's a lot of episodes. Fantastic, fantastic. Today, we're continuing our Vibe miniseries. This is where we're going into the method that I use with my coaching clients. It's a super simplified methodology. It's not like a four-step program. That's not how life works. This is a method that I use to take people through to get at the things that are bothering them. And like help us really create some changes that they've been wanting to change.

Last week, we talked about the I. No, we didn't. We talked about the V, which is vision. Oh, guys, it's been a long week already. We talked about V, which is vision, which is about getting really clear on what we wanted to actually feel. So instead of making goals that were circumstance-based, which is problematic because circumstances are always, you know, like we only have so much control over them. They're really influenced heavily by others, by the environment around us, by a lot of factors out of our control. So instead, last week's episode, please go back and listen. If you haven't, it's a great starting point for this whole miniseries. I suggested that instead you set feeling goals. I even had a little worksheet that you could go through and sort of figure out what were the feelings that you were desiring to have right now. Go back, go on my website. You can check out the episode notes and get that free worksheet.

Today, we're going into a little bit of the deeper stuff. So it's not like goal setting isn't important. It is the base and it is the thing that I do first with people. The thing that I am most excited about and that I like completely nerd out on is the second step, which is identify. And this is about identifying what's getting in our way, identifying what the real actual problems are, identifying what's actually going on. Now, I do want to preface all of this with one of my core beliefs, which is that you are not broken. You do not need to be fixed. If you're coming in with that attitude with there is something wrong with me, I need to be fixed so that then everything can be right. I need you to shift that attitude quite a bit because I actually don't think anyone is broken.

I think we all have things that get in our way, all have things that we need to overcome and move through and heal. There can be healing. That doesn't mean that you're broken. I just wanted to start off with saying that first. So today, let's talk about how to spot the sneaky stuff holding you back, not just physically, but emotionally, mentally and energetically. And that is a key point that I'm going to expand upon in a minute. So. Also, remember that I'm going to be super simplifying things in this episode. OK, like, you know, I aim for like 20 minutes, an episode ish to keep it reasonable in people's lives.

This is something you can listen to while you're doing chores or while you're driving somewhere. Life doesn't actually work so tidily and so sequentially and so obviously. And so like X equals Y. Right. We revisit these steps. So this is a methodology. This isn't like a one, two, three, four. Bang, you're done. We revisit each phase of this methodology at different angles, different stages of life. Like life keeps on happening to us. It keeps lifing, as I say. So we have to come back and get at things at another level, another layer. It's like a continuous flow.

There's no there. There's no finish point. There's no OK, everything's all good now and it will shall remember good forever more going forward.

That's ridiculous. That's delusional. That's never been anyone's experience ever one time.

So this is where some pretty impactful work can happen. But also it doesn't have to be so deep. Like, this is why it's one of my favorite areas to dive into. It's why I became a body type practitioner, because I saw that people were getting stuck on these superficial layers of what was the problem. Myself included, not myself included myself as like the start of all this. Like, you know, oh, it's just I just need to exercise more. And, you know, it's because I'm not getting sleep. Well, then you get sleep and you exercise more and your life isn't magically fixed. So maybe that's not the problem.

This is where, like, the logical part of my brain had to kick in and go. If I'm hitting all these surface level things and it's not making the change that I want, then it can't just be surface level things. It has to be deeper than that and more complex than that. And I need a different way to look at things. And one of the ways that I encourage you to look at things is not that, like, something's wrong or that you're failing, but that, like, you just keep bumping into old patterns that were built for a different season of life. And in that season, they may have helped us, but they're not anymore.

Or maybe we were in situations where we developed patterns physically, emotionally, mentally and energetically that were never helpful for us, but we just thought they were or they were the best we could do at the time with the knowledge that we have. Today's topic is a deep one. And again, I can't I can't get into all of it in 20 minutes. I mean, I've been doing this work for over 10 years, you guys, and I still am learning constantly. Every session with every client brings out a new perspective in a way of looking at things. If you've been a client of mine, you know that almost every single session I'll be like, huh? Well, that's an interesting way to look at things. Huh? I never thought of it that way myself. So it's a continual learning process and you're you can't get it wrong because you can't get it right. You just keep trying and gain new understanding and you take new actions and you make change.

That's how it works. I just really want to encourage you with that because we live in this culture of like five step plan and take this magic pill and, you know, do these right things and life will turn out right for you. And that's just not reality. That's not how it works. Okay, Heather, I think you've gone into all this enough. I hope you guys feel supported. I hope you feel you have to get it all right and understand this right away. I got four key points today that I want you to understand about identifying kind of what's getting in your way and how to work through it. One, surface problems are rarely the real problem. Like we think the problem is the job. We think it's the schedule, the relationship, the extra weight. So we do something about those things.

We change the job. We adjust the schedule. We get a new relationship. We lose some weight. The circumstances changed, but we don't feel any different or we feel differently for a short amount of time. And the same old problems come up. The same patterns like follow us. This is because of that. One of my favorite expressions, wherever you go, there you are. Like, yeah, it's why when you go on vacation with your family, you still fight and have the same problems that you had at home. You're just in a new location. You're the same people in the same relationships. You have different stress now. You just changed the circumstance, right? This is going back to that initial thing of like circumstance being the problem. Now, I will say again, super simplified, right? I'm simplifying this.

Sometimes the problem is the job. Sometimes you're in the wrong job and you need to be in a different job. Sometimes you're in a job with a really shitty boss or like an actual shitty environment. You need to get out of it. Sometimes the relationship is a problem. None of this is referring to things where you are in a dangerous situation or a situation that is like abusive in any kind of way, right? Changing those circumstances actually does change your life and make a difference.

But when we're talking about feelings of dissatisfaction, feelings of not enjoying life, feeling meh, just being frustrated all the time, sad all the time, just really not appreciating things. It's generally not the surface level circumstance that we think is the problem and that includes weight. I mean, how many of us have lost weight thinking that will fix everything, change everything and like nothing really changes. We just wear smaller clothes for a little while. That's it. And it didn't change our life in the way that we had hoped. That's point number one. Okay.

Point number two that I would like to make today is that your body, your emotions, the way you feel physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, that is data. That is not random, miscellaneous. It's not a personality flaw. It's not a moral failure.

The body doesn't do random. It is communicating with you through feelings, whether that's like how you physically feel or whether that's how you emotionally feel. That is data from the body.

Now, that's good news because that means it isn't about you as a person. It isn't about, again, needing to fix something. I mean, like you might need to address some things.

You're not getting headaches because you're broken. You're getting headaches because that's how your body is communicating with you that there's a problem. You're not getting pissed at your kids all the time because you're a bad parent.

It's because that's the way your body is communicating with you that something's wrong. That is information. That's all.

That's all it is. That includes things like procrastination. If you're finding you're procrastinating and you're avoiding, that's information to you too that there's something going on there.

Your body's talking all the time. Most of us were never taught how to listen and not even where we're just not taught how to listen. We don't live in a culture that really supports listening really well and then taking that information and doing something with it.

When I was introduced to Body Talk as a system, it took my brain quite a while to really let it understand. And it really was a letting because I fought it quite a bit because how the body talks isn't quite so nicely logical as I would prefer. The Body Talk system does help with that, giving it structure, which is why I love to use it.

But was that understanding of like, oh, I think it's X, but it's really X and Y and Z and A and B and C. And it's all these things and it's stuff from my past. It's stuff from my present. It's patternings in my family.

It's all these things that are contributing. And if I don't get past those surface level into the deeper things, the more complex things, the things that maybe I might not, I might be afraid to look into or I'm just like really not understanding, then I'm only ever going to get surface level results. This is where I'm already segwaying into my third point because they're really hooking.

I make them sound like they're individual points that are nothing new with each other. They're all intermix. But the blocks exist on multiple levels.

So the body's talking to you. It's giving you information. That information is about multiple levels.

So I'm talking physical. So stress load, sleep, hormones, illness, nervous system patterns, all the things that have to do with the physical stuff. That's usually the stuff we pay attention to first.

Once it gets loud enough, it also is on an emotional level. The feelings that you're feeling, the fear, the grief, the resentment, the old hurts, the difficulty really embracing joy. As Brené Brown says, one of the scariest emotions for humans is joy.

This is on a mental level. So our beliefs, our identity level assumptions, the meaning we assign to things, the things that follow the sentence, I am blah, blah, blah. And then we have this whole other layer, which many people are not even aware of, which is the energetic level.

This is inherited dynamics. This is the body's subtle communication system. This is subconscious patterns.

This is our interconnections with other people in our environment. The thing I like about looking at blocks from a multi-layer perspective is that then it really opens up opportunities for us to have actionable things that we can do and be working on at the same time. Physical things.

You should be going to your doctor. You should be going to physio, massage, chiropractor. All these things that help our physical health.

I have a nutritionist that I'm working with. This is because I'm hitting things from a physical level. Various kinds of therapy.

Talk therapy, other kinds of therapy. I can't think of names right now. It's not really my area.

It can be really great with that mental emotional layer. And super important. I would never tell somebody only do one thing, like only go for a massage or only go for body talk.

I think that's crazy when we live in this world that can help you look at things in this different layers and to tackle things from different perspectives. I really feel like almost everything can work. It's just a matter of what works for you right now and in what order.

So the energetic aspect of things can be worked with with things like body talk, Reiki, a hundred other different modalities that are out there that people will say have changed their lives. So when we only address one layer, we'll get temporary relief. If we can identify something in all the layers, we can create real shifts.

And I truly believe that we are a system like our bodies, body and mind, where our system of interconnected systems and we can't treat them individually. Everything affects everything else. Now, the key to this is my last point, which is that curiosity is the strategy, not judgment.

The goal, again, I will reiterate this. You will notice that I repeat myself on a lot of topics and a lot of podcast episodes and even in my social media. That's because repetition helps your brain actually learn it and take it in.

I can say it five times. You won't get it. Six times you won't get it.

Tenth time you'll be like, oh, I get it now. OK, so curiosity is always the strategy. The goal is not to fix yourself.

I will say that again. The goal is not to fix yourself. The goal is to notice, to understand, to gently make changes that support you and to renotice.

How does that change working for you or not working for you? OK, get more feedback, get more information from your body on all those levels, physical, mental, emotional and energetic. We're getting information all the time. We talked last week about the reticular activating system of the part of the brain that allows certain information in and filters out other information.

You know, when we're working on our blocks, what we want to do is we want to change those filters because we're blocking what we don't want and letting in what we don't want either. There's a interesting quote that curiosity keeps the door open. Judgment locks the room from the inside.

And that's what we want to avoid. We're not judging ourselves for these things like we might not like them. We don't have to love all the things that we find.

But we don't judge ourselves for them and we don't use them as excuses like, oh, this is because of that. You know, that's why I'm like this. Instead, we use it as information to create a path to change, to understand ourselves and our reactions better so that we can have the response that we want to.

And so that we're not reacting. We are responding. That's a much more positive place to be in a place that allows you to show up in the way that you want in life and to feel the way that you want in life.

I will just say this. Like, I have not found a system that I like as much as Body Talk for that. It really challenges myself and clients to look at things from a lot of different perspectives and perspectives that maybe at first you're like, ah, that doesn't make any sense.

I don't understand that. That's OK. Anything that you have a strong reaction to, positive or negative, is an interesting one to explore.

What we want to do is we want to bring up all the options, all the viewpoints, all the information, and then lean into and trust in our body's innate wisdom and its inner healing ability that maybe we just cut off track from. And learning how to trust ourselves again and learning how to trust our bodies again and learning how to accept help. All of that is part of this whole identifying blocks so that we can look at the whole story.

And the thing that you maybe think of the problem is very rarely the whole story. Your body, your emotions, your feelings are all trying to get your attention. They're not trying to sabotage you.

And when we look at things on all four levels, again, physical, emotional, mental and energetic, we can actually understand what's going on and make a hopeful plan instead of just trying to force change because we want to get a certain result. I don't know if you guys notice this, but that very, very, very rarely works long term. Oh, that was a lot.

I am going to assume I've challenged you a little bit. I'm going to assume that maybe some of you got like your backup a bit like, oh, you don't you don't know me, Heather. I'm just going to encourage you to just sit with that.

Just notice this week. Don't try to fix anything. Just notice something that maybe doesn't quite match the vision for how you want to feel.

Get curious about it. Maybe start asking yourself, what are some other ways that I can look at this? And I have some previous podcast episodes about this, but I also have some upcoming podcast episodes that we're going to look at. Like, what are some other ways you can look at something that's been sort of a block or a problem for you? How you can get really curious about it.

Next episode next week, we're moving into the B in vibe, which is build. And this is where we take what you're learning about what your vision is. You've identified some blocks, and now we want to turn it into doable action steps that actually fit your life.

Spoiler alert. This is not going to be like, here's your workout plan. Here's the nutrition plan.

And here's your daily checklist of things that you're going to do. Again, you can do that. That's a surface level fix for a problem or a block that isn't surface level.

We're going to dive into that next week. So I'm really excited for that. If you have any questions on this, as always, shoot me a DM.

Send me an email. I don't know. Send it by carrier pigeon.

I love answering your questions. I am so excited to have you along on this relaunch of the Wellness Ninja podcast. And I just like, I cannot express my gratitude enough for those of you who are listening, who've downloaded it, who've made comments, reviewed it.

Sent me notes about it. It can feel a little weird to talk on a podcast to no one, to get no immediate feedback. It's a little weird, you guys.

But if you know me, you know I love to talk about this stuff. So let's keep the conversation going offline. But if you are liking this new series, if you are liking the new relaunch, reviews are a podcaster's best friend.

They help the podcast get found by others. And I just so appreciate it. So you guys have a great rest of your day.

Remember to stay kind to yourself and to others. And we'll see you next week. You'll hear me next week? I'll be back in your ear holes next week? Yeah, that's right.

I'll be back in your ear holes next week on the Wellness Ninja podcast.