Women In Wellness: Elodie Caucigh On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

Give yourself a little self-love — I heard about self-acceptance, compassion and self-love early on as I embarked on my wellbeing business but I was somehow too disconnected from myself to be able to feel it and relate to it physically and emotionally. I could talk about it for hours and even held a workshop in the first months of my entrepreneurship with a friend who was a life coach. Yet, it was only years later, after I had finished writing my book that I truly felt that at last, I was ready to love all the parts of myself, even the darkest ones because I have had the chance to meet and integrate them. Ever since, I have been using a little morning and bed-time routine which only takes a few seconds and you can use it too. I simply give myself a hug with my hands holding softly the opposite shoulders, there I give them a few kisses and take a deep breath. This is deeply soothing and always leaves me with a big smile and a happy heart. Simple yet life changing.

As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Elodie Caucigh.

Elodie is a French multilingual author, content creator, advertising professional, wellbeing practitioner and mystic based in Zurich Switzerland. She founded real ease in 2017 to help professionals reconnect with who they are with the use of wellbeing and desk yoga methods. Since then, Elodie has been creating wellbeing-infused prose and products which she shares on her website as she continues to explore new ways of living and working in the world. https://www.realease.co/

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?

I started my career in advertising agencies in Zurich when I was 22 years old. Back then, I was what HR professionals would qualify as an “insecure overachiever” and so I went head first into work and strongly identified with my job title. I was seeking recognition and wanted to make a difference in my work. 5 years later, I left the industry with a collection of physical aches, from a lock-jaw to precancerous cells that required surgery. From there, I took a year off, traveled to India several times where I completed my first yoga teacher training. Back in Switzerland, I was convinced it was my mission to help professionals become more aware of their physical wellbeing at work so I started over as a solo-entrepreneur and corporate wellbeing consultant, facilitating desk yoga sessions and stress management workshops in Swiss companies. Little did I know, I was still carrying the wounds of my burnout and my overachiever mentality into my wellbeing business. It took me another 4 years and a whole new set of signs of feeling unwell on the emotional, mental, financial and social levels to understand what wellbeing and being myself — independently from my profession and identification with it — really meant.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?

It was about 3 years into my wellbeing business journey and just before the first lockdown hit the whole world by surprise. I had come back from a winter break traveling through Taiwan, the Philippines and Japan. I was doubting myself and my legitimacy as a corporate wellbeing specialist because no matter how I worked and how much positive feedback I was receiving from my peers and clients, I experienced inner rebellion and tension while working in the wellbeing business. For the first time in my life, I was deeply anxious and could only witness that despite all my efforts, I was striving against the current. My business was nowhere near where I wanted it to be, I was putting myself under tremendous pressure and felt financially insecure. Coming back to Zurich after my trip, I announced to a few colleagues that I was considering dropping out of my wellbeing solo-enterprise. “Are you crazy? You are doing great! We see you everywhere on social media with your business, you are always calm, composed and serene. Elodie, you are the living example of wellbeing!” I was in shock and wanted to scream out loud for them to hear my pain. Actually, I needed to scream to hear myself. How could my inner reality and experience be so diametrically opposed to the professional image I had built and projected? From this moment I knew, I had to step down and let my unwell be seen and expressed, for my own sake and sanity first, and out of honesty and transparency for my fellow entrepreneurs and clients. This is how I started to write what became my first book “Easily You. When wellbeing works for you” and managed to slowly reconnect with myself and with my own wellbeing.

Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

My biggest mistake was certainly that I didn’t seek professional support when I left my career in advertising in 2016. I believed that by putting myself back into shape on the physical level and changing my professional context, I was all set to go again. But I didn’t take the time to inquire about other aspects of my wellbeing, such as my mental health and my emotional wellbeing. Instead I jumped into self-employment and took all my self-inflicted pressures in my next profession and since I was my own boss there, I got to challenge myself even further. I was ecstatic about thriving and hustling, I wanted to save the world of corporations with my wellbeing methods. And by doing so, I didn’t notice that this motivation, this big “WHY” of mine, was actually a call for my own awareness before I could share it with the people I was trying to help.

In my book I write: “Burnout is a self-orchestrated scam we do to ourselves in a last attempt to burn down every aspect of our misconstructed self. It is an internal call for awareness. A chance, at last, to rest and reset.” And this is literally what I failed to see, my burnout was a call from myself to myself, even the name of my company was symptomatic: “real ease”. I had to release my expectations, my never-ending busyness, my tendency to overpower and to want to prove myself. I had to pause, to slow down and to reflect in order to release all that wasn’t truly mine and to recognise who I was beneath all that. To reconnect with my sense of being beneath all my doing. Only then, I would find a real ease in simply being myself, fully and truthfully, and realise that I was more a creative mind than a business woman.

Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?

As much in the wellbeing tips that I taught in my sessions and workshops as well as in the well being-derived products I created over the years such as the re-set wellbeing cards, the inflight yoga video series real ease on board and now in my book, I encourage anyone to be aware of their relation to themselves through their relation to their wellbeing. Because anytime we feel unwell, tense or on the edge, no matter on which level — be it physical, emotional, mental, social or financial — we can be sure that this is a sign that we are currently out of alignment with who we are deep down. Wellbeing never lies to us, and when we experience unwell or dis-ease, it means that the way we operate, work or think, is not working for us. And we can take this as a chance to pause, to reflect, to become self-aware and to explore further: what is there, in my current situation that isn’t a match for me? Rather than trying to numb this feeling by doing more, we can ask ourselves: how can I stop doing for a moment and instead be myself here and now? As I mention in my book, “Your wellbeing is not something to work for nor to squeeze in a busy day, and neither are you!”

Ultimately, wellbeing is our natural state. It is a state of being ourselves, honestly and truthfully, to the core of who we are. And no matter how stuck we think we are, we all have access to that wellbeing state, anytime we want. So this is my message to anyone who is ready to hear it: your wellbeing is your true, ultimate and optimal state of being yourself, and it is from this state of being, in alignment with who you are, that you can learn again to live your life with greater ease.

Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.

Pause and breathe

Whenever you feel tense, stuck, self-critic, scattered or anxious — in other words unwell — take a moment for yourself. Pause whatever it is you are doing or working on, step out of the situation that drains your energy. Focus on your breath, inhale and exhale a few times through your nose, deeply inside your abdomen. This helps your nervous system switch from the “fight & flight” mode which is what happens when you respond to stress to the “rest & digest” mode which is your relaxed state. Our bodies naturally switch back and forth from one state to the other every few hours in the course of the day, but when we are under pressure and maintain a state of constant alertness and stress through our thoughts patterns, our worries and never-ending busyness, we prevent ourselves physiologically to switch back to relaxation and stay stuck in “fight & flight”. Over time, this leads to chronic stress and ultimately to chronic fatigue and other chronic conditions and occupational diseases such as burnout.

Do what makes you feel good

I mentioned before that wellbeing is our natural state of being, rather than something we ought to do and squeeze in our busy workday. Even when I was working in my wellbeing business, my partner at the time had to remind me to take breaks whenever he would see me work at my desk for more than an hour without standing up or moving my body. He was a better example of what I was teaching than I was. Every now and then, he’d close his laptop, put music on and dance in the living room or take his jacket and leave for a stroll in town or in the woods near where we lived. And he always came back with such great energy and all his creativity. It took me some time to understand that in these short moments, he was reconnecting to himself through an activity that made him feel good and brought him closer to himself. I learned from him and today, I am the first one to leave my tasks on the side for a while to connect with my state of being through an activity that makes me feel good and puts a smile on my face and this can be as simple as stretching on my yoga mat, listening to music, playing with a pet or watering my plants.

Forget about procrastination

Procrastination like distraction is one of these big scary words that make a lot of noise and which we end up fighting like a disease. But I have another take on them. I see procrastination as “auspicious rescheduling”. As I started to pay attention to the physical tensions and inner rebellion I experienced while I was working on some tasks such as planning my social media feed, I realised that there were moments that were more prone for me to work on this than others. For instance, I do better at scheduling posts and writing either early in the morning or late at night, while during the day I can easily gather information for the content I create or sort out my administrative stuff such as invoicing, paying bills or making plans and travel arrangements. With time, I learnt to follow my natural work inclinations rather than forcing myself and going against the flow.

Express yourself whenever you can

There are many ways to express yourself, your opinion, your creativity, your intuition and just as many excuses not to do so. And I was a great example of that since for the most part of my life, I was a people pleaser and would avoid conflict at all costs. But if we constantly keep our emotions to ourselves, our wellbeing and our self-trust suffer tremendously. Unexpressed emotions turn into resentment, rage, and these just won’t disappear with time, instead, they settle down in our organs and block our energy channels. Chinese medicine, somatic bodywork, breathwork and yin yoga are great ways to help release emotional residues and energy blockages from the body and subconscious mind. Rightly so, the creator of Yin Yoga Bernie Clark was among the first to say “there are issues in our tissues”*. To reconcile myself with my right to speak up for what and how I felt, I had recourse to all of them and went even deeper with a shamanic practice called Kambo which uses the venom of a poisonous frog and scores amongst the most unpleasant yet powerful and emotionally liberating experiences I ever had. Yet for the sake of your comfort and wellbeing, I recommend you don’t wait and take any chance to express what is alive within you with softer methods, like drawing, painting, journaling or taking a non-violent communication course or workshop. Don’t be shy.

Give yourself a little self-love

I heard about self-acceptance, compassion and self-love early on as I embarked on my wellbeing business but I was somehow too disconnected from myself to be able to feel it and relate to it physically and emotionally. I could talk about it for hours and even held a workshop in the first months of my entrepreneurship with a friend who was a life coach. Yet, it was only years later, after I had finished writing my book that I truly felt that at last, I was ready to love all the parts of myself, even the darkest ones because I have had the chance to meet and integrate them. Ever since, I have been using a little morning and bed-time routine which only takes a few seconds and you can use it too. I simply give myself a hug with my hands holding softly the opposite shoulders, there I give them a few kisses and take a deep breath. This is deeply soothing and always leaves me with a big smile and a happy heart. Simple yet life changing.

If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I would teach the basics of wellbeing, such as self-awareness, breathing, pausing and self-expression from the earliest possible age in schools. Children are deeply connected to their feelings, to their body sensations and to their intuition, yet through socialisation in the family, in school, and later on in the professional context, we learn to think, to behave and to work in ways that may not be aligned with what we feel is right for us. Slowly, we lose that connection with our deeper sense of self and our natural wellbeing state and cover them up with patterns of thoughts and behaviours that help us survive and fit-in in society. I am not condemning our social institutions but mentalities are changing and I know we can do better by enabling future generations to start in their adult lives with a healthier relation and deeper connection with their sense of self and their own wellbeing.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

I don’t believe that there are ready-made lessons that can be transposed from one life to another since we all come with our own perspective and baggage and these shape our individual life experience. So I would invite you to list those “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” for yourself, here and now, simply to recognise how much you have already learnt on your own wellbeing journey and known about yourself. Take it as an exercise to build trust in yourself and in your capacity to know what is right and in alignment with who you are and how this already showed itself in relation to your own wellbeing. Furthermore, all experiences be they pleasant or unpleasant, are here for a reason — the former just like positive emotions are here for us to enjoy and expand, the latter just like negative emotions are here to help us transform and change for the better. All of them deserve to be handled with the same degree of gratefulness and respect. Thanks to them, you have come to be who you are in this very moment and isn’t this what life and your wellbeing is about?

Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?

Mental health because it impacts all the others and ultimately everything in life. Our mind is a very powerful tool since it shapes our perspective and projects our inner state of being to the outside through everything we do: through our speech; our interactions and our behaviours. Everything we get to experience is a direct result of that. So it pays off to start caring for your mental health, for your health, for your wellbeing and for your self in its whole, and from there you have the clarity and capacity to cater to any other cause in the world that lies outside yourself and impacts the world we live in.

What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?

My website realease.co and my instagram account @realease.mara where I share my wellbeing-infused content, quotes from my book “Easily You” and my latest prose as NFTs under the name Mara Così.

*yinyoga.com

Thank you for these fantastic insights! We wish you continued success and good health.