Total Health: Cheryl Whitelaw of Peace and Power Movement Services On How We Can Optimize Our Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing

Acknowledge that your emotions are also a body event — use your body to support movement of emotional energy. When we feel stuck in our emotions, I find it really helpful to remember that emotions are designed to move through you. Like a weather system, the wave of emotion moves in, rains for a time and moves out. When we seem to be stuck in our feelings, we typically are doing something to keep them motion-less. We embed and crystalize our emotions in several ways; through thinking the same thought over and over (ruminations), through telling stories about ourselves or other people to solidify what we feel, we can embed crystalized emotions into our movement and posture habits.

Often when we refer to wellness, we assume that we are talking about physical wellbeing. But one can be physically very healthy but still be unwell, emotionally or mentally. What are the steps we can take to cultivate optimal wellness in all areas of our life; to develop Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing?

As a part of our series about “How We Can Cultivate Our Mental, Physical, Emotional, & Spiritual Wellbeing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Cheryl Whitelaw.

Cheryl is a Move More without Regrets Coach. She supports her clients recovering from injuries, trauma and life-changing health conditions like MS and fibromyalgia to learn through their movement so they can move with more freedom and less pain through life. She is an Integral Master Coach ™, Being in Movement practitioner and will soon earn her black belt in aikido and her certification as a Feldenkrais practitioner.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I grew up on the prairies under wide blue skies above rustling, golden fields; this is still the horizon that feels most like home. I am blessed to live in a city with one of the longest natural river valleys in North America so I can hike, cycle and kayak enjoying the scents and sights of the natural landscape minutes from my home.

I grew up in a family of teachers and farmers so inherited a personal legacy to seek knowledge while staying grounded, in touch with the earth. From my earliest memory, I have been drawn to explore what it means to live through my senses, thoughts, feelings and movement. I am happiest when I am moving and feeling a flow of vitality and aliveness throughout my body and mind.

As a child I asked the question, “If we can make war, how do we make peace?”

In my community, we had a history of an internment camp from World War II, with Japanese-Canadians who were forced to relocate from the west coast of Canada. The presence of Japanese cultural and martial arts was part of my childhood; my favorite place to visit was a Japanese peace park established in a partnership between city and cultural leaders to commemorate the wrongs from the war and the desire to live together in peace.

What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.

I was fortunate to have influential role models at key turning points in my life. My thesis advisor for my Masters of Education degree, Dr. Cynthia Chambers, was an interesting woman. She spent considerable time living and studying with Indigenous peoples in northern Canada and encouraged me to embrace and embody my learning within an academic environment. She also modelled how to be in deep relationship with literature in the field, showing me how to be in an ongoing dialogue with learning theory and authors. She supported me to learn how to write in terms of how to become my own author, my own authority. Each of these ways she influenced me was out of the box for a typical academic experience in writing a Master’s thesis; my thesis topic on the teachable moment looked at how transformation occurred in a learning environment. I finished my degree with more than a theoretical knowledge of how learning and transformation could go together.

The next most influential person that inspired me to pursue my career was my first karate teacher, Sensei Taka Kinjo. Sensei Kinjo was a kind, focused presence who accepted my natural level of intensity and my desire to learn without question. He was devoted to support his students to learn from the art of karate and had a following of students who found karate improved their wellbeing while living with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. He taught without ego and encouraged each of us to train for the reasons that were important to us. He showed me that healing and martial arts training could support each other and that the process of learning, with skillful guidance, was the path to transformation. He awakened my desire to know more about the mystery of how we can learn to move our bodies to create possibilities that we did not already know were possible.

My final inspiration to pursue my current career is Dr. Paul Linden from the Columbus Center for Movement Studies. I had started training aikido at age 46 and found myself training at his dojo to learn something called Being in Movement ™. Paul’s genius was to bring aikido and Feldenkrais (a movement-based learning method using positive neuroplasticity) as a way to support people to recover from traumatic events and to re-resource themselves to know that they could deal with the event that created trauma for them. When I met him, Paul was in his early 70s, living with Parkinson’s, still teaching aikido and rolling on the mat. He had applied awareness to his movement in a way that he could still his own Parkinson’s tremors at will. He has a trickster kind of humor and an expansive, compassionate presence that showed me how to connect with people who are afraid to their core and shut down in how they move and live. He showed me how to create a path with them back to their humanity, dignity and resourcefulness. He inspired me to look at my new practice of aikido as a path, one that could be used to support people who had been hurt and wanted wholeness.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?

I feel most fortunate to have my own aikido teacher, Sensei Brad Schultz, from Abundant Peace Internal Martial Arts School as a guide, as a business collaborator and a friend. The first time I saw Brad in action, I was waiting off of the aikido mat while the kids class ended. One very active little boy was racing on and off the mat; dojo etiquette asks each person to bow when they leave the mat. I watched Brad call the boy to him and say very simply, “Let’s bow together.” They bowed and the boy raced off to his parents. I realized I was in the presence of someone who did not need to correct his students in order to support their learning and growth. He is equally part warrior, spiritual practitioner and wellness through movement teacher. I have trained with him for 9 years and am working towards my black belt. Week by week, he helps me to hone an integration of the capability for force and the capacity for peace and harmony. He is helping me grow into the person who can answer my childhood question, “If we can make war, how can we make peace?”

Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or take away did you learn from that?

One of the early mistakes I made in my career was submitting an article to a fairly prestigious publication, getting back several pages of editorial feedback and not making the revisions. I took the high amount of feedback as a sign that the article wasn’t good enough to be published. Several months later, I got an email asking where the article was. I had moved on to another role at the college I was working at so did not have the article any more. I learned the hard way that when someone takes the time to give you what feels like an overwhelming amount of feedback, I should take it as a sign that I am doing something worthwhile, to accept and learn from the feedback.

Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

There are many; if I were to pick just one, I would pick A Light on Transmission by Mitsugi Saotome. One of the surprises of beginning to train aikido at age 46 was the incredible feeling of joy I feel when on the training mat. I have been active a lot of my life, enjoying karate, Tai Chi, hiking, working out at the gym, Pilates, kayaking. I enjoyed them all but none have created this reliable sense of joy within me in the way that Aikido generates it.

What I like about the book, A Light On Transmission, is that the author describes the practice of Aikido as a spiritual practice that connects us to a greater unity. His words point to experiences I have had without knowing what words to use to describe what I have felt. I have learned to remember experiences that I can’t describe or explain and to use reading as a way to explore the possible connections between what an author describes and what I personally experience. This is one of the things I value about the aikido martial art tradition; that it holds the capacity to train and experience phenomenon that I didn’t know was possible on the mat and to study and learn off the mat to create a more wholistic and whole-person knowing.

Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?

My favorite Life Lesson Quote is from the poem, The Sunrise Ruby by Rumi.

Submit to a daily practice. Your loyalty to that is a ring on the door. Keeping knocking and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there.

This resonates with me because there is a kind of daily grind that comes with long term martial arts practice. I have often felt periods of resistance, even resentment at the demand that training can make. This quote reminds me of the joy that is inside of all the discipline and how wielding that kind of focus can create a deeper and more nourishing wellspring of wellness than a more superficial, every day kind of happiness.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

One of the exciting projects I am currently working on is the launch of an online Wellness through Movement membership site. This is a collaboration with my Sensei Brad Schultz. Out of the pandemic and the pivots we both had to make in our businesses to move classes and coaching online, we talked about a way to make what we call the internal technologies of aikido, Tai Chi and Feldenkrais practices more accessible and available to people online. An example of one of these internal technologies is how we can learn to use our mind or our awareness to enter into our bodies and create changes in our physical tissues. We are offering the membership and online classes to support people who have a movement practice, like yoga, Pilates, running or martial arts who value learning how they can apply these internal technologies to keep training and to deepen their practice to support greater wholeness and wellness.

OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. In this interview series we’d like to discuss cultivating wellness habits in four areas of our lives: Mental wellness, Physical wellness, Emotional wellness, & Spiritual wellness. Let’s dive deeper into these together. Do you have a specific type of meditation practice or Yoga practice that you have found helpful? We’d love to hear about it.

My current favorite type of meditation practice is whole body breathing. While I have done different forms of meditation practice, I am working with meditation as a way to cultivate a supple body that is a responsive instrument of my intention. Whole body breathing is focusing globally on your whole self and putting my intention to breath into every part of myself.

Thank you for that. Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum physical wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

Habit 1: Create physical demands on yourself every day.

Our body and mind change based on what is required of them within our environment. A lot of what is identified as aging has more to do with allowing the physical demands, we place on ourselves to dwindle. This can be as simple as ensuring you do basic movements every day — bending over to tie a shoe or balancing on one foot to put on a sock.

There is a lot of focus on optimizing or hacking physical fitness in the environment of a gym or workout space. One of the ways this approach to optimum physical wellness fails us is that it is a pretty predictable environment. We need physical activity that also creates interest and engagement of our senses, rather than zoning out on a treadmill or stationary bike. A really simple example of a physical demand that most people can do is to switch to cold water in the shower after using hot. Exposing ourselves to the cold water is a stimulating change that causes our blood and energy to flow. Challenging your balance each day by standing on unstable surfaces or standing on one leg helps keep your overall balance system active and engaged.

Habit 2: Listen to your body and learn from your movement.

Starting a martial art like aikido at age 46 meant taking on some serious conditioning work. At the beginning, I felt dizzy when I practicing rolling; I only had the kind of flexibility needed to jog and work out at the gym. Training more seriously at this age means that when I feel creaky and cranky it is a sign, not to stop, but to increase the amount of support I give to myself.

Listening to my body is also a process of using my awareness to create clean movement; alignment and body mechanics to avoid injury and wear and tear on my joints and tissues.

One way I listen to myself when working on flexibility is to allow my body a soft opening into movement — listening for when my body is ready to move into deeper squats or lunges. It also means listening for my contact with the ground, how I am aligning and organizing my body to make most effective use of the ground force, the way the earth pushes back against my feet so I can move efficiently, without strain or extra effort. Moving in this way means giving up on my need to be seen as someone who is flexible and fit to some outside standard. I work from the feedback that my body gives me on what it needs throughout a workout. I do bring my goals and intentions onto the mat; but I pair my goals with this living feedback loop. This listening to my body and my movement has been a game changer in my aikido training. In any given training hour, I might get up off the ground 40 times. Learning from my movement helps me find the most efficient way to return to my feet so I use my stamina and energy for each attack and technique with my partner. I believe this approach has taken me farther in my physical performance and helped me avoid injuries as well as minimize strains.

Habit 3: Be purposeful in how you move physically.

I find it really helpful to be clear about why you are moving and to use strategies that support your purpose. This alignment of intention and strategy helps me achieve better physical performance with less recovery stress so I can enjoy the wellness outcomes from my aikido training — high energy levels, a sense of vitality and resilience, an enhanced sensitivity to and a feeling of connection to other people, and a sense of confidence and trust in myself in interactions with others. To be purposeful in movement, I have found it necessary to distinguish between learning, practice and training so I can be clear which one I am doing while I move.

I define learning as:

1) Acquiring movement that I don’t already know how to do. This often means slow movement study that supports strengthening or growing new neurological connections between brain and body. It is helpful to take regular breaks to allow neurological integration to happen and to stay in a learning zone where I am both challenged and supported. The learning zone is one where I bring my attention fully to my movement and avoid trying too hard when I don’t know yet how to do the movement. This can require patience, persistence and a kind of attention that that is curious about what is happening, rather than an agenda to make something happen.

I define practice as:

2) Repeating movements I have learned so I can strengthen my familiarity with them. This often means touching on learned movement daily so I can become proficient and efficient in the movements I am learning. I listen for movements that feel well coordinated and easier to do. I pay attention to my breath, noticing if I can move without holding or interrupting my breathing. I practice to feel physically able and confident in what I know. I do most of my practice outside of training sessions at the dojo.

I define training as:

3) Integrating and applying movements into different contexts. This includes repetition and variation to support fuller embodiment of movement. This is a place that people sometimes miss. When I can make a movement efficiently in predictable environments or situations, I can feel satisfied that I have learned the movement. Training is about taking what I have learned and finding my personal limits of how I fail to do it successfully.

This stage can be difficult emotionally and mentally, to intentionally face how what you think you know falls short or doesn’t work. Many people prefer to focus on continuing to practice what they know so they become very proficient in predictable ways. Training helps your physical ability to expand, to become more well-rounded, more embodied. I find that I become more confident when I investigate where I can fail, that I can uncover new depths in how to move and how to find an inner sense of ease and wellness while I train.

When I learn a new technique in aikido I start with learning; doing slow movement study, making mistakes and trying out options so I can more fully and confidently know what the new technique is and how to do it. I practice what I learn, repeating movements often so I can more efficiently perform the technique and so I can remove un-needed movements. This is a process of carving away what isn’t needed until the essentials are left. I train by applying the technique in the context of different attacks, partners or speeds so I can more fully embody my ability to perform the movement.

Do you have any particular thoughts about healthy eating? We all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?

I subscribe to an approach to eating that focuses first on healthy ratios of macro nutrients — protein, fiber (or net carbohydrates) and fat. Keeping these balanced takes care of about 85% of my nutritional needs each day. I spent over 6 months studying and learning about how I like to find a healthy balance that works with my desire for a large variety of food and the kinds of recipes and food choices that help me easily achieve this balance each day. I find this keeps me focused on eating food I enjoy that is also healthy for me and keeps me away from a diet mentality that makes some foods bad. I found that this approach helped me to fall in love with food again and truly enjoy creating delicious and nutritious meals. I want to give a big thanks to Jill Cruz and her Work With Your Nature approach for guiding me into this amazing approach to healthy eating.

I think something that is missing for many people is a clear perspective on what they are actually eating, the actual nutritional information for the foods they typically eat. While food logging is a pain, it can be a really useful way to better understand what nutrients are present in a meal that makes you feel good. In a diet mentality, we tend to focus on overcoming bad habits; it is an approach that keeps our attention on the habit we want to stop.

I have found it really helpful, in a very sustainable way, to bring that kind of attention to creating a positive food habit that creates the nutrition and the experience with food that works for you. It is less stressful and more enjoyable to put your focus and energy into eating foods that make you feel good after you eat them. I started by food logging for two weeks. Once I had several days of “clean” eating — eating that made me feel good afterwards; good digestion, energy level, emotional mood, I wanted more of feeling good! When I did eat foods that were not nutritionally supportive, I could feel how they did not leave me feeling as good as nutritionally rich foods. This helped me own what I was already doing well in eating habits and to focus on making smaller changes to support me to eat well. Once I had internalized this knowledge — what to eat and how it made me feel afterwards, I stopped food logging.

Can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum emotional wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

1. Feel with your heart, mind and body

I grew up in a family and a generation that was told not to express my feelings. Stop crying! Smile — be happy! Don’t mope! This emotional legacy of stifling feelings combined with my need to stay moving meant that I tended to not make time to feel what I actually feel. It was really helpful for me to think about emotions as energy that needs to move. Prior to my training as an Integral Master Coach ™ I tended to push away that energy and often ended up projecting it out on someone or something else. My unrecognized feelings became about a friend’s behavior or a problem with the computer. When I first started to learn about emotional intelligence, emotions and thoughts were always closely linked together. I would try to use practices to connect emotions and thoughts; afterwards, I always felt sluggish and tired in my body. I felt fuzzy and unfocused in my mind. I called it my emotional processing hangover. I did usually find some kind of clarity after going through emotional processing but it really didn’t feel good. So I avoided doing it unless I really had to. After my Being in Movement ™ training, I realized that I hadn’t allowed space for emotions to also be a body event. For me, there is an important step to rest in my belly and my body’s intelligence as a container to hold emotional energy so I could feel what I feel, understand what I was feeling but also so I could let it flow through me rather than get stuck in a thinking/feeling cycle. I learned how to go through my emotions with presence rather than getting caught up or overwhelmed with feelings or thoughts about my feelings.

2. Support yourself to feel; interrupt your tendency to suffer over what you feel.

One of the ways I get stuck in my early attempts to process my emotions is that once I had felt my emotions, I tended to add another layer of feelings and thoughts. So I might feel the pain of rejection when a friend cancelled a trip with me but I would add a layer of thoughts like, “I must not be very fun to be with, or I am not very worthwhile”, adding feelings of shame, self-loathing and despair to the initial feeling of painful rejection. I would get stuck in my emotions because I added thoughts that increased the initial feeling and added more feelings that created a more invasive, stickier emotional energy. Each time I thought about the pain, each rumination about the experience made it bigger, stickier and more a part of my sense of who I am. So learning to actually feel what I feel was step one; learning to interrupt the thoughts and feelings I added on was really important to decrease my suffering. Today when I start thinking and feeling these additional layers, I ask myself, “Is it true?” as a way to check on what is authentic experience — pain over a friend cancelling our plans and what is a self-created experience — that I must have some flaws or faults that would cause that event.

3. Acknowledge that your emotions are also a body event — use your body to support movement of emotional energy.

When we feel stuck in our emotions, I find it really helpful to remember that emotions are designed to move through you. Like a weather system, the wave of emotion moves in, rains for a time and moves out. When we seem to be stuck in our feelings, we typically are doing something to keep them motion-less. We embed and crystalize our emotions in several ways; through thinking the same thought over and over (ruminations), through telling stories about ourselves or other people to solidify what we feel, we can embed crystalized emotions into our movement and posture habits.

Holding our breath when we anticipate something will be difficult is one way we can embed anxiety and dread into our everyday movement. Do you notice when you are generally feeling down that your chest can sink towards your belly and spine? We can get our emotions moving again by changing our posture and movement habits. Simply lifting and expanding our chest and walking around the block can get a depressive mood unstuck and moving.

Do you have any particular thoughts about the power of smiling to improve emotional wellness? We’d love to hear it.

The physical act of smiling affects the muscular tone through our face, neck, chest — even down to our pelvic floor. Smiling can be a habit to release tensions and reset our body to move more optimally. Try this experiment. Smile on the inside, without moving your lips or mouth muscles. Set your intention to smile and notice if anything changes in your throat, chest or belly. Putting on an inner smile can be a good way to reset yourself during an uncomfortable conversation or in a situation where you are feeling challenged.

Finally, can you share three good habits that can lead to optimum spiritual wellness? Please share a story or example for each.

1. Settling yourself and becoming quiet.

When I started my training to become an Integral Master Coach ™ with Integral Coaching Canada, we were asked to meditate daily and given a personal practice to support us to cultivate our presence as a coach. I had tried to meditate regularly for almost 10 years prior to the training. I would start and keep the practice up for 6 months or a year and then it would drop off. When I was in coaching training, my coach gave me a personal practice to sit still for 20–30 minutes each day. I ended up doing this practice for 3–4 months. Initially I would fall asleep or start reading or doing something. She knew I needed to find within me a place of settledness and quiet. That was over 10 years ago. I treat this as a kind of spiritual hygiene, creating space and time each day to settle and become quiet. For this internal peace, I can hear my thoughts and internal senses more clearly and I find myself being less reactive and more curious, more able to receive what comes in life. It is a kind of everyday equanimity that is worth this daily spiritual hygiene.

2. Savouring what you see

I worked with a client who was recovering from a trauma. My attention was drawn towards how she used her eyes. As we were working online, I had her bring her attention to a tissue box and asked her to notice how she used her eyes to see it. She described a process in which her eyes raced to find the tissue box, a kind of vigilance in her gaze as she looked for it. We explored how she could find a different way for her to look at the room, look at the tissue box and to notice how her way of looking changed the tension in her body, her posture and her breath. Our habits of how we use our eyes can create an overriding tone for how we see our world. When my client was able to rest in her looking, she became aware of more details about the tissues, about the box and the space around the box. We can be oriented towards keeping a stressful, guardedness going as we look around our world. Changing our focus to savour what we see, is a way to flip our personal switch towards calm, towards expansiveness, towards a sense of connection and belonging in our world.

3. Being present

I am fortunate to have one-on-one training with my aikido teacher to develop more internal martial art knowledge and abilities. One form this training takes is to walk in the river valley for 3 to 4 hours at a time, practicing internal martial art processes. One day, the focus for our training was to be entirely present with the placement of each foot. As we trained, I realized that I have a habit of walking ahead of myself. My mind and focus are often about 3 steps ahead of where I actually am. Once I was able to see that movement habit clearly, that I had separated my intention from my body movement, I could interrupt it and be completely with myself as I stepped. Everything seemed to change when I could just be present, moment by moment, step by step. I realized that so much of my reactivity to events and people in life for me is caused by living ahead of myself. I react when the real life I experience confronts my idea of what should happen in the next few steps. Once I remove this small gap between where I focused and where I was, I was filled with presence, fulfilled by each moment. My underlying sense of striving was replaced by an expansive, settled nowness.

Do you have any particular thoughts about how being “in nature” can help us to cultivate spiritual wellness?

There is really no substitute for walking barefoot in contact with the Earth. Once I did a walking training with my Sensei Brad; we walked barefoot for 4 hours through a wonderful nature reserve under birch trees and through peat moss deposits. Without the separating barriers of shoes, we were in intimate contact with our natural environment. This walking practice supported both an internal quietness and settledness but it also supported a wide-open expansiveness. Nearly a mile away on the path, I noticed a flicker of movement — felt it really before I saw it. A deer was crossing the head of the trail. Walking in this state of connection and openness brought a viscerally real sense of connection with everything in the nature reserve. So I find being in nature helps me to loosen up my everyday sense of separateness.

Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

The movement I desire to inspire is one of greater embodiment. Because we often live a short distance from ourselves, our minds trapped into a screen or somewhere outside of ourselves, we live in a cut off, personal world, alienated from the people and the environment around us. With greater embodiment, meaning presence in our bodies, our senses, our feelings and our thoughts, we would find it unbearable to create environmental disasters, to enact violence on others. We are able to live in a disconnected way so we can ignore the issues and problems of the world. Once we feel fully in ourselves, we are drawn to act. To fully feel and not act becomes a visceral experience of self-betrayal. I believe that this is one of the resources we have not fully expressed that could change our way of living on our planet.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)

Clay Walker, Executive Director National Fitness Foundation (US)

Allison Sandmeyer-Graves

CEO at Canadian Women & Sport (Canada)

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can visit my website at www.kindpower.ca and sign up for my blog or come to a free workshop each month.

Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.