Matt Connarton Unleashed: Teri Almquist of Wellness Hot Yoga

0:00 Speaker 1: On this Saturday morning. But joining us now live in studio, we have Terry Almquist from Wellness Hot Yoga. Welcome Terry.

0:09 Speaker 2: Not nice to be with you.

0:10 Speaker 1: I've been very excited to get you on the show because, as I've been telling people, and I was telling Jenny about this, You've got a pretty fascinating backstory and I want to get in all of that. But we should tell people up front too. So you're from Wellness Hot Yoga, which is in April, Yeah, April, Massachusetts. And for our local listeners in Manchester, it's not far. You know, you say Massachusetts, people think, wait, that's in another state, but it's right over the border. So I mean to get here, what did it take you a half hour?

0:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, like thirty minutes.

0:39 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's easy, you know, just a straight shot really on ninety three. So it's a wonderful place. And how long have you been there?

0:47 Speaker 2: We've been in that location for two years. Two years we were in North Andover started over there in two thousand and eight. I opened a yoga studio and it was just yoga back then, and then of course COVID hit yeah, and a lot of small businesses. It was devastating, and I ended up having to close that business and thought that I wasn't sure I was even going to reopen. And when I decided to reopen, my first thought was I was going to open a very small space and just teach, you know, one or two classes a week, and that would be what I wanted to do.

1:16 Speaker 2: And then this space became available that had a beautiful locker rooms and asauna already, and I saw the vision when I looked at the space of opening a wellness center. So more than just yoga were available for all these other modalities of healing. And that's really the reason I opened the studio in the first place, because I think that the body is self healing and that we have lots of tools we could use, and the more tools we have available to us to be healthy.

1:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, the better off we're going to be. Yeah. Absolutely, So when COVID hit, so so there was a there was a point where you didn't know if you were going to even continue.

1:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a point where I knew I'd always teach yoga, but I didn't know if I wanted to reopen a studio or how that was to work out. Mainly because like a lot of small businesses. It was financially devastating, and I've been very lucky that I worked out that I've had people interested in investing in a way that allowed me to reopen.

2:12 Speaker 1: Did did you at any point? You know, because a lot of people kind of took their businesses online and ways that at that time, in ways that they hadn't previously considered, including myself, you know, because I I'm a hypnotherapist and I had always kind of resisted doing sessions with clients online. I don't know why, looking back, I don't know why, because I've always been one to really embrace all the technology that's available. But I was late to the party on that and I kind of you know, and then COVID.

2:45 Speaker 1: Yeah, so terrible. But we have to always say, we have to find those silver linings where we can, right and and one of the silver linings is it kind of forced a lot of people. You know, we interview a lot of musicians on the show and they talk about it too, how it forces them to be more creative, or it did force them to be more creative and find waste to kind of work around, you know, the ways that they were used to creating music with other people and playing shows and whatnot. And so I found myself finally just sort of giving in and saying, Okay, I guess I can see clients online.

3:17 Speaker 1: Turns out it works pretty well, and people are used to it anyway, especially with you know, different therapies. People use services like doxy and you know, to do this to interact. So it turned out to be a good thing, a positive thing, learning to do that. But in your case, and I have seen people who kind of do yoga classes online. But is that something you considered or maybe you did implement some of that.

3:44 Speaker 2: Yeah, we did. We were in a really interesting position because not only do I own a yoga studio, I have been a yoga teacher for now and almost twenty years, but then you know, over a decade, and I've mentored teachers from all over the world. So I've written a book on teaching yoga for the style of yoga that I teach, which is called Bickram Yoga, I've written a book on teaching, I've mentored teachers. I travel around the world to do seminars and webinars, and one of the things I do is a monthly webinar, and I've done it on Zoom, and I've done that since about two thousand and five.

4:15 Speaker 2: Sorry, that's the wrong date. Twenty fifteen. Okay, about twenty fifteen I started doing these monthly webinars for teachers, so I already had all the Zoom stuff set up to do that. And then when the first day we were closed from the yoga studio, we had morning classes and closed and our evening classes were online. And what we did is, because my manager and I have been doing these Zoom things for ages, we actually put it out to my larger worldwide community and said, listen, you can figure out how to do this too, but let your students know that they can kinder practicing with us, and we will help you set up your own stuff and then they'll transition back to practicing with you.

4:55 Speaker 2: Just to keep these businesses going. Of course, we all thought it was going to be you know, a couple of weeks wright when it started, remember, so our thought process was, you know, we'll teach them classes online. It'll be fine. The style of yoga I teach, I don't actually have to do the class when I'm teaching it. I just stand and I kind of tell people the directions. How to do it.

5:13 Speaker 1: Oh okay, so.

5:14 Speaker 2: It's just leading through a home practice. And actually the first Saturday that we were over, my Saturday classes are always busy. I remember having like four screens of zoom people. I had like seventy something people on line from all over the world taking classes.

5:28 Speaker 1: Wow.

5:28 Speaker 2: And we continued that. We also expanded out to this more idea of also mental health wellness, so we did a lot of community events online. So we did game playing that One of the most fun things we figured out how to do is how to do scavenger hunts in your own house. So we would say, like find an item and you have to you know, do you have a Harry Potter book and you've run and you go get the book and you bring it back, you know, And that was fun. We had people from Australia and Europe and I remember women from Hawaii.

5:53 Speaker 2: And we still have online classes so all of our classes, even if people aren't local, all of our classes are audio stream yeah, through the studio, and people still practice online because the sad thing that happened to during COVID is a lot of the studios that closed have never reopened, right right, so those students don't have a place to practice anymore, but we've given them a place to practice with us, and we think of them not just as students online but also part of our community. So we try to include them and a lot of things that we do by enabling to join online with us.

6:24 Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's that's amazing, all right. So let's let's get to this. Because you so when you and I first met you, you kind of told me your whole history of of how you got here. And one of the things I noticed, and I think I even said this to you that day, it seems like like people who you know, if you want to use the term healer, people who are healers. So many of us we get to where we're able to help others because we started out needing, you know, not just necessarily wanting, but really needing a way to help ourselves.

7:00 Speaker 1: You know. That's that's how I got started as a hypnotherapist. Was you know, I started out I needed to help myself a had you know, tremendous social anxiety and a lot of things overcome that I felt were holding me back. So I learned self hypnosis and then I started, you know, and when friends would find out what I was doing, they would say, oh, can you hypnotize me? Turned out I was good at it. Then I went and got certified, and now I do it professionally. That's kind of the cliff Notes version of my story.

7:28 Speaker 1: But but I'm I'm interested in sharing your story because you yours is very emblematic of that too, where you started out needing to find solutions for yourself and that put you on this path that you're that you're still on today.

7:43 Speaker 2: So absolutely, I tell people all the time the reason I opened to yoga studio is because I honestly believe no one should live in pain, and whether that pain is physical or spiritual, emotionally that the body is self healing. But so in the nineties, I worked in the mental health field and I worked in a lot of lock psychiatric facilities, and in one of those facilities, unfortunately I got injured. I had a client who was going off of medication and had become very psychotic. Wow ended up pulling me over backwards and landing on top of me.

8:19 Speaker 2: And in the process of trying to get them off and sort of doing that, I thought I was absolutely fine. After the incident, they kept saying, do you want to go the emergency room, said no, I'm good. And the next morning when I woke up, I had really struggled to get out of bed, that my legs didn't want to work, and I was a single mom with two young kids, which was very frightening. So I go to the emergency room and when had happened was seven of the dish in my neck had herniated in the process, and so I was put in neck brace.

8:47 Speaker 2: Told well this for a couple of weeks, we'll do some physical therapy, you'll be fine. Unfortunately, my neck, like a lot of people, when it healed, healed very frozen, and that frozen neck after the even after they took the neck brace off, I couldn't move. So there was physical therapy and that didn't really help. And then I went to see some neurologists and they suggested that I have surgery at some point to probably remove the disc from my neck and put a rod in my spine to hold my to hold my head up.

9:22 Speaker 2: Over the course of several years, I was collapsing forward. But I had a wonderful neurologist at Mass General who said to me, go find anything else that you can do. Try chiropractic, try massage, try anything, and then when you you know, when you can't lift your head up anymore, when you're that, we'll do the surgery. But put it off as long as possible because there was a chance of being a quadriplegic. Any kind of massive surgery to your spine, especially your neck, can be problematic. H So he said, get your youngest out of school and then come talk to me again.

9:54 Speaker 2: So my daughter was getting older and I was at a place where I thought I'm going to have to do the surgery. I had lived with a headache for many, many years and unable to move, and so my sister said to me, come take this yoga class I'm taking. And I told her I've tried yoga, you know, with the ability to move my head and stuff, Yoga's really hard. I can't do it. She said, try this class with me. It's very different. So I went to the class, and at that time I had been in pain for over a decade. Oh, I was a packa day smoker.

10:27 Speaker 2: So people see me now and they think, you know, I don't want to say I'm very zen, but I'm that kind of I'm the yoga teacher you know, I try to live a healthy lifestyle. All of that. That was not where I started.

10:38 Speaker 1: Yeah. Can I just ask you to to interject when you talk about being in pain for over a decade? My god, what was it like? How severe you learn to function?

10:50 Speaker 2: People who live in chronic pain learn to function in chronic pain. So I was working and functioning. I had trained to be a sign language interpreter and actually couldn't full time do that job because it includes holding your arms up for long periods of time, which was not possible. So I got a job at a college that was teaching sign language interpreting, so I was able to still be in my field, but not having to put that strain on my body.

11:12 Speaker 1: But you were in chronic pain.

11:13 Speaker 2: It was a chronic prain I had. I quite literally had a headache for ten years. Wow. I remember. I used to say to people who were I was trying everything chiropractic and massage, and I always used to joke that if I could find someone who could get rid of my headache, I was going to give them a million dollars. I didn't have a million dollars, but acupuncture was something that I found. It did help with the pain, which was really helpful. I've tried so I've tried all these other modalities of healing, and in the beginning, chiropractic wasn't helpful for me.

11:42 Speaker 2: Later on, as I got better doing yoga, chiropractic has become an important part of what I do to keep myself well. So sometimes you try something in a moment and it didn't work, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try it again. It could work later. So my sister took me to this yoga class and I remember going into my first class and the teacher said, you must be Kathy's sister. And I said, how did you know? And she said, because she told me you look like a turtle. My head had hutted so far forward because I couldn't really hold it up that I actually did sort of look like a turtle.

12:12 Speaker 2: And she said, don't worry, I collect turtles and all over her yoga studio with these little turtle statues. Oh really, So I really went in there, Like I said, it's a packadet smoker. Drank a bottle of wine at night to try to get to sleep because I didn't want to take painkillers. I was not in good physical shape. And it was a ninety minute hot class, and ten minutes in I thought, how do I get out of here and go have a cigarette? But the teacher was great, and she had been teaching for a long time and she's still teaching.

12:39 Speaker 2: Diane teachers at Yoga for You. She set studio down in deada mass and we got to a posture where you had to roll forward and put your head down on the floor. And I said, She said, put your head on the floor, and I said no. And she said put your head on the floor and I said no. She said, do you trust me? And I said yeah. She goes, put your head on the floor. I put my head on the floor and we don't do any really versions, but it's just rolling forward touching the floor.

13:02 Speaker 1: Yeah.

13:02 Speaker 2: I felt something move in my neck that hadn't moved in all of those years. Really, and in that moment, I had that epiphany, and I think this happens to a lot of people who are in the wellness industry. I had the epiphany that I was going to do this yoga for the rest of my life, and I was going to learn to teach the sugar. Yeah, And so I started. I live in Haveral that studio was in West Roxbury, and I would go every day to yoga, yeah, to try to heal my own body, and I progressively got much better and a year later went to be a teacher.

13:32 Speaker 1: Wow, when you said you felt something move in that moment, you felt something move like a god.

13:37 Speaker 2: In a good way relief And yeah, well, like something stretched. Nothing had moved in my neck. Everything was scars. That's what it happened, with the neck brace on everything. And now I think they do less of that when people have neck injuries. Very rarely do you see people walking around with big collars anymore.

13:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.

13:53 Speaker 2: Yeah, because I think they know now moving it even a little is better than making it immobile. What happened was I just froze. All of that scar tissue just froze up in my neck and so that's what made me lose motion. Okay, but something stretched in the back of my neck that hadn't moved, and I'm talking about this was just a tiny movement. But I had that idea of this can fix it, This is going to fix it, and so I just have to do this for the rest of my life. And I started. I dedicated myself to going, still working at the college.

14:28 Speaker 2: And a year later I left my job at the college and went off to teacher training, which at the time was in LA And it was nine weeks. I left my family for a full nine weeks and it's over six hundred hours of training. Oh wow, to be a hot yoga teacher in the style that I teach the yoga. And came back and there was no studio in the area. Still driving miles to teach and take yoga. Yeah, and then open my studio in North Andover.

14:50 Speaker 1: Wow, So you said, so to get to get to be Are you paying free now or.

14:58 Speaker 2: I am pain free now? It was funny I last month I didn't take as much yoga as I normally take, and I said to somebody, boy, like, my neck feels like a little cliquie. If I go more than four days without a yoga class practicing, I can feel like it's well, it's not pain like I could feel that it's still tight. So it's not it's not a panacea. I didn't do a couple of yoga classes and don't need to ever go back for the rest of my life. I really honestly believe that I have to do this for the rest of my life to stay pain free and mobile.

15:29 Speaker 2: And I'm okay with that. And to be honest, I came back a week ago from being on vacation and not practicing for almost ten days, and so my neck was really stiff and really like bugging me. And then I've taken four classes in four days and it was fine. It's back to where it was before.

15:46 Speaker 1: Wow, that's great comes back. And what about So you mentioned too while you were still in pain, so you were a packa day smoker. Yeah, how did you quit? Did you?

15:57 Speaker 2: That's three months of yoga practice almost every day. My first month I practiced yoga. I did over thirty classes in thirty days. So I was driving so far that I would stay at the studio and take two classes back to back. What was really fascinating was people are very frightened of the idea of especially if you live in pain. I think ninety minutes in a hot yoga room doing yoga sounds so overwhelming. You think, like I need to start with maybe a thirty minute class or something. But the way this yoga is designed is so that you are slowly warming yourself up and the heat helps.

16:32 Speaker 2: So what I discovered was if I did a ninety minute class. At the end of class, I started feeling like, oh wait, I feel mobile enough now that I could actually do a class. So I started staying and doing two classes back to back because the first class was just really all warming up for me and then the second class. The way the class is designed, the first almost well it's the ninety minute class, so almost the first hour is what we consider the warm up. It's and then you do yoga, which it's done on the floor, so you spend all this time warming up slowly.

17:04 Speaker 2: So I would do a whole class is a warm up, then do the warm up of the next class, and then do the yoga. And that's what really changed everything was to be able to I'm not advising that everybody do two classes, but with a severe injury, that was the thing that worked for me and people. But like I said, people are intimidated with this idea of a ninety minute yoga class in the heat. That's going to be really hard because I'm injured, I'm sick and whatever. But the way the class is designed, it's therapeutic.

17:29 Speaker 2: So you do the little bit that you can do, and then over time, as your body improves, you do more and more and more.

17:35 Speaker 1: Okay, So what am I?

17:38 Speaker 2: Oh you asked about clinting spoken. Oh, you got three months into the practice. I had taken a class and then I took a second class. I used to go between. This is a terrible thing to admit. I used to go between the two classes. There's a break, I would go outside, have a cigarette, come back in and take the second class. I was quite literally at the end of two classes, sucking wind, laying on the floor, struggling to catch my breath. And I realized either I had to stop coming to yoga or I had to stop smoking.

18:06 Speaker 2: Wow, these two needed to go. I smoked. It was my daughter's birthday. As a matter of fact, I smoked my last cigarette, drove home, smoked a cigarette on my ride home. Never bought another pack of cigarettes. Yeah, yeah, and it was and it was fine. I made the yoga and the replacement. The other thing I think too, that three months was enough time for me to start to emotionally love myself again. And when you love somebody, you don't want them to smoke. When you love somebody, you don't want them to do these things that aren't good for themselves.

18:33 Speaker 2: I think that journey for a lot of people, and I've watched it over the last twenty years, watching the journey of people fall in love with themselves and stop doing those things that are harming themselves and easily not struggling to do it, making those habit changes because they love who they are, they love the way they feel, and so it makes it easy.

18:53 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's funny you're talking about like smoking between classes. It reminds me of a uh I remember in high school, like going to going to the gym with friends to lift weights and you seeing people like, uh, not not a lot, but every once in a while, you know, you might see somebody they get done doing a set and then they go outside and they smoke a cigarette. And I remember talking with my friends and about this and saying, you know, to me that that looks like it's like driving your car over a cliff, but deciding intentionally, but deciding to put your seat belt on right before you do it.

19:28 Speaker 1: It's like, you know, you either care about your health or you don't, and but you know, you obviously got to a point where you had to make that choice. And and I think, unfortunately, I think for most people, it's not it's not stark enough. I think people, you know, I see that's the number one thing that I see people for for hypnosis is to quit smoking. And I think for most people it's not a stark choice because the are not they're not staring it in the face. The problem. You were staring it right in the face because you got to that point where I either got to do yoga, which is helping me tremendously, or I can keep smoking.

20:12 Speaker 1: But I can't do both. Whereas most people it's like, Okay, well, I'm doing this terrible thing. It's going to ruin my health eventually, but today I'm okay, Today, I don't Today, I don't have lung cancer. Today, I don't have emphysema. You know, today I don't have heart disease that I know of. Right as far as I know, today is fine. So I'll just I'll keep smoking and then tomorrow comes. And it's like.

20:38 Speaker 2: It's also addictive. It's also that physical addiction to it as well, and I think being in the yoga of sweating and all of that helped with me. I started playing even before I quit, I started playing these games of you know, I'm gonna wait till I I would drive from the yoga's yoga, I wait till I get to this point before I have a cigarette. I'll wait till I this I'll wait till I get in my car in the morning, instead of how having a cigarette in the morning when I get up. So it started sort of playing these games to put off how much I was smoking, you know, but but I hadn't really gone less than I was still a packa DA smoker.

21:11 Speaker 2: And it was funny because I was somebody I knew I was an addict. I knew I was an addict when I was quite young. I started smoking at thirteen.

21:17 Speaker 1: Most people, most people do that. That's that's probably average. Yes, in my experience, I.

21:22 Speaker 2: Always think if we could keep kids from smoking until after high school, then they're not going to be that many smokers because you have to get addicted young. And so it was. It was an addiction for me, but it was also a mental addiction. So I started playing that game. I started breaking that. But the sweating they getting in there doing something hard and knowing that I could do something hard, and that made it easier to quit smoking because in my head that was going to be hard right, And there's never really been a time.

21:54 Speaker 2: There's only once that I've I've had the urged cigarette, which was in a stupid moment when my daughter actually had been diagnosed with cancer. It was her first treatment at the hospital and I had stepped outside just to like get to marriage. Somebody was smoking and I thought, and I thought, I don't sitting outside of cancer center cigarette. But it's that sort of like it's still that somewhere in my head. It's still that crutch, sure, you know, somewhere, So I don't think it ever goes away. But you have all these coping techniques.

22:22 Speaker 2: And that's what all the wellness stuff that I offer is. It's just tools. And even about the book I wrote is called The Toolbox, Tools for Teaching Bickram Yoga. It's just tools you're putting in your toolbox. And I tell people, if you smoke, it's okay, come to yoga anyway. The smoking doesn't get in the way of the yoga. The yoga might get in the way of your.

22:39 Speaker 1: Smoking, right, which is a good thing. Which is a good thing.

22:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's just another tool to put in your toolbox. So letting go of the blaming yourself and thinking I can't because I'm this, I can't be this. We are unique, each, unique and open human beings that can be lots of things at once, not to open our minds. You can be a smoker and someone who does yoga, right right, that's perfectly okay.

23:03 Speaker 1: Well, the thing with smoking too is and you know, smokers, a lot of smokers in my experience, don't like to hear this because it takes away some of the excuses. But it's it's the addiction part of it. Obviously, the physical addiction is real. Nicko geane is highly addictive, But the psychological addiction is what's really the big problem. Because the physical addiction works itself out of you in a relatively short period of time. Oh yeah, you know doing something like yoga where you're sweating, sweating out those toxins and everything.

23:36 Speaker 1: The physical addiction you can get if you can just get past that, that takes days. That part of it. It's the psychological.

23:43 Speaker 2: That moment of wanting a cigarette was I probably hadn't smoked in twelve or fifteen years. Wasn't a physical addiction exactly.

23:51 Speaker 1: It was that something in your brain.

23:53 Speaker 2: It was something in your brain when like, this is how we relieve stressed, This is how we There's still that thing, yep, but it's just that it'stead idea of in that moment of stress, also searching outside of yourself for the answer as opposed to looking. And this must be some of the stuff you teach in hypnosis. When you have that anxiety, when you have that urge to smoke, you can't go outside yourself for the answer. It's not there. That's what all those things are, and so you have to go inside right to find it.

24:19 Speaker 2: And that's in your mind and your body and your spirit and your soul, whatever that is for you. That turning. And I think we live in a world that turns us externally. Advertisers and I know you have great advertisers on your radio show. Advertisers very often, especially if you pick up like a women's magazine, want you to feel bad about yourself to sell you something. And so I can make you feel bad about you know, your lips should be fuller, your hair should be a different color, your thing, I can sell you something.

24:46 Speaker 2: I always telling my students, I want to make you feel good about yourself, so I can sell you something. And that's what I do.

24:52 Speaker 1: Right, right, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. Now what is so what is Bickram yoga and how is that different from I don't know if regular yoga would be the way to put it, but what is what is Bikram yoga? Exactly?

25:06 Speaker 2: Sure, Bickram yoga has been around for a very long time. Bickram Chowdery is the guy who started it. He's a controversial person and so a lot of us no longer use the term Bickram yoga. But Bikram yoga describes a very specific style of yoga. So we do a set of postures in a specific order every single class, so the class never changes. We also don't play music. The lights are on, bright bright lights. Really yeah, the lights, the bright lights, no music, a teacher talking for ninety minutes. I talked for ninety minutes and just tell you what to do with your body.

25:41 Speaker 2: That lets you there's a lot of philosophy to that, and we'll get to that, but that helps let you actually turn your brain off. Okay, it's hot and it's humid. When Bickram started teaching yoga to Western so Bickram's backstory, as I know it is, he went to the ghost College of Yoga and Physical Education in India, grew up there and was a weightlifter. Actually, he was into powerlifting and that kind of stuff. And he got injured and he asked me, you'll take me back to my teacher, my guru, and he'll help me get well.

26:10 Speaker 2: Because he understood that yoga could heal the body, and he became a yoga therapist. And in the process of being a yoga therapist, So if you were sick maunt and you went to see Vishnugos, his teacher, and you said, you know, my shoulder hurts and my neck hurts, and he would say, okay, do this yoga pos and this yoga pos, and Bickham's going to teach you how to do it. Bickrams started thinking about what if we took a group of yoga poses, then no matter what was wrong with you, one of these was the right one to fix your body in yoga therapy.

26:37 Speaker 2: And he put together a series that's fit together so that every posture prepares you for the next posture, and every posture works to the entire body. So when you're done with the class, you have done one hundred percent of your body has been worked out.

26:50 Speaker 1: Okay, nothing, they.

26:51 Speaker 2: Say, inside out, bones to the skin. So every muscle, every organ, every cell of your body has had something done to it to help it improve its health.

27:01 Speaker 1: Okay.

27:02 Speaker 2: The room when he went to Westerners try to teach it that he foundly couldn't move, and so he added in heat humidity. So there's a lot of hot yoga around, but not all hot yoga. All bickrim yoga's hot yoga, but not all hot yoga is bickerm yoga.

27:17 Speaker 1: Okay.

27:17 Speaker 2: Other yogas have added in heat for the same purpose. The heat is designed for a couple of reasons. Our room is much hotter than a lot of other hot yoga classes. People freak out when they hear the number. But it's one hundred and five degrees with forty percent humidity. Okay, but that's less than ten degrees over your body temperature.

27:34 Speaker 1: Okay.

27:34 Speaker 2: So one of the things we know that happens is when you heat the body is that fasha, that connective tissue softens, so that makes you more flexible. Scar tissue is made out of that fasha, so you can start to stretch scar tissue. For me, that's what was happening that first time I felt something was I had heated my fasha, that scar tish with my neck enough that it actually started to stretch. Okay, and it is that non stretching material that's kept me from being mobile.

28:02 Speaker 1: Okay.

28:02 Speaker 2: So that's how the heat works. The heat also focuses your mind really quickly, so that people come in and they do their very first class in ninety minutes. They've thought about nothing but what's going on in that room.

28:14 Speaker 1: Interesting.

28:15 Speaker 2: There's no way to worry about your gas bill or whatever while you're in that room, because you become very focused.

28:22 Speaker 1: And that's partly because of the heat.

28:24 Speaker 2: That's partially because of the heat, partially because the lights are on bright and the teacher's talking the whole class. Okay, there's no room for sort of your mind to wander off. We call it a ninety minute moving meditation. For some people, sitting and quiet in their mind is really really hard.

28:39 Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yeah.

28:40 Speaker 2: And you must notice through the hypnotherapy too, people who just have that racing mind.

28:43 Speaker 1: Yep.

28:44 Speaker 2: We talk at a I wouldn't say at a high rate of speed, but we don't stop talking the entire class. Yeah, and so there's sort of no room for you to separate outside the room from what's happening.

28:56 Speaker 1: Well, you're doing a form of hypnosis.

28:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we kind of off.

29:01 Speaker 1: I mean, you probably don't call it. You don't call it that, but that's definitely Yeah.

29:05 Speaker 2: It's creating this a thing to focus on, and meditation is having a single item to focus on and then losing that focus and then coming back to the focus. That is meditation. That's mindfulness. So we're teaching mindfulness in the process. But this Western idea of the light slow in the music on is a lot of distraction for the mind. Yeah, and people always ask me, can you add a music I can't because I'm not going to distract your way from the most important person that you're working on in that moment, which is you.

29:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, and so that's what we do. There's a giant mirror in the front of the room, so you have to see yourself. Vickraam was once asked why is there a giant mirror in the room, and I loved his answer was, it's not enough that you suffer. You have to see yourself. But when you think about seeing yourself suffer, what is when we see suffering as human beings? Our first response is typically compassion so when you see yourself suffer, you become more compassionate with yourself, and then you become more compassionate with everybody else.

30:00 Speaker 1: Yeah.

30:00 Speaker 2: So this bicram yoga was said. It's this series of postures that have put together, done in a heated room with a specific set of directions, and it's designed so even if you can do very little, that every single posture is broken into tiny little pieces and you never have to do the whole posture.

30:17 Speaker 1: You can do just just to the first step, okay.

30:19 Speaker 2: And after you do the first step, if that's all you can do, six or seven classes in, you're gonna find oh hey, I can do the second step. Okay, Now I can do the third step. So all these little steps that all the postures put together help you get there. Because I have to tell people all the time, yoga's not about yoga. Yoga's about creating a better quality of life because you practice yoga. So what the postures look like don't matter.

30:41 Speaker 1: Okay.

30:42 Speaker 2: What matters is you're doing the work on your body and your mind to make your life.

30:46 Speaker 1: Better, okay, and that's our goal. Interesting, yeah, because I would imagine a lot of people who come to you, they can't, like well, probably most people, they can't just do all the postures right off the bat right.

30:56 Speaker 2: I don't know that I've ever met anybody in my twenty years in this business who could do all of the postures in the theories beginning to end completely.

31:05 Speaker 1: I mean, I imagine if you happen to encounter someone who's unusually flexible, you know, maybe they could do it, but that's probably pretty rare.

31:12 Speaker 2: But there's a balance of strength and flexibility. And so what I find is people come in. The majority of people who come in are strong but not very flexible. They're looking for more flexiblity. I love when people say to me, I can't do yoga, I'm not flexible. I tell them that's like saying you can't take French lessons because you don't speak French. If you don't speak French, you should take French lessons if you want to learn to speak French. If you're not flexible and you want to be flexible, go to yoga to learn to be flexible.

31:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's harder for students who are very flexible. Actually, and I tell my classes all the time feel bad for them when the flexible people come in because it's easy to build more flexibility with your strength than it is to build strength with your flexibility. But the way our postures are designed, everybody gets what they need. So we don't have a beginner and intermediate and advanced class. Everybody in the same class. Okay, so I've you have people who it's their very first class in the same room with people who have taken thousands of classes.

32:07 Speaker 2: You have people who are incredibly flexible in with people who are inflexible. You have people who are very young in with people who are very old. Your people at my studio. We have people who sit in chairs. We have people who have to sit on the ground for the whole class. We have amputees, we have hip replacements, knee replacements, people you know, and everybody's just doing what they can. And that is an amazing experience that we all work together. So it doesn't matter how much or little you do.

32:32 Speaker 2: We don't separate people into groups. Everybody's in there together. I had a class this morning. My younger student was probably a college student. We have an older woman and I'd love to talk about more. Her name's Elaine. She's eighty eight years old. She's been practicing for fifteen years. She comes every single day. Yeah, and she was in the She comes in class and we have thirteen year olds and her in.

32:52 Speaker 1: The same exact class. Yeah.

32:54 Speaker 2: So everybody's just doing what they can do. The practice doesn't change, but you do.

33:00 Speaker 1: So Elaine. So she's eighty eight, she's eighty eight. She's been doing doing yoga for fifteen fifteen years, I would imagine, so she's probably a lot more flexible.

33:10 Speaker 2: Than most eight.

33:11 Speaker 1: Yeah.

33:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, she didn't come in flexible though. When she started. She had high cholesterol not controlled, high blood pressure also not control.

33:19 Speaker 1: Oh and diabetes.

33:22 Speaker 2: And she they wanted to put her in the hospital to get her on medication to control her high blood pressure. Yeah, because she was struggling with you know, it's too high, was too low. It was going back and forth. And she was caring for her husband with dementia and she didn't want to leave him the hospital. So she wasn't taking care of herself. She was taking care of him, but not taking care of herself. You don't get on the airplane, they say put your mask on first. Yep, exactly, got to take care of yourself first.

33:49 Speaker 2: But she wasn't doing that. Her kids convinced her to come and take three classes. She could not stand for the whole class. She couldn't kneel on her own knees, and she was really struggling just to be in the room. And so the first class she came in, she did the breathing exercise that we start with, and then she laid on the floor and just laid down for the entire class and did the breathing exercise at the end. And then her kids convinced her she had to do three classes before she could give up.

34:17 Speaker 2: So she said she went home even after just laying on the floor for an hour in the heat, took a shower and she felt better, kidding, And then she came back the next day, and she came back the next a couple of days later, and I think that got her hooked. After she practicing a short time, and she's still not doing much of the class. She's doing a lot of just laying down, which is perfectly fine. In our class. You can lay down if you need to get some air. Stip out, get some air. Come back.

34:40 Speaker 1: She's getting the still getting the heat.

34:41 Speaker 2: You're still getting. Yeah, this and I want to get to like the studies on heat and depression are really fascinating. Really, yeah, how being in heated environment lifts depression for a lot of people. But I want to finishing lad story. So she started coming. We also did a little challenge where we asked people to do ten classes in a row or twenty class row, thirty class and you got ten dollars off her, twenty dollars off her, thirty off your next month. Yeah, And she said, I can't do it, and I said, what can you do it?

35:08 Speaker 2: She said, I can do three. I said, okay, we'll do three in a row. And then she did three, and then she did five, and then she did the ten. Yeah, she did the thirty, and she decided she was going to keep coming because she was feeling so good.

35:19 Speaker 1: Wow.

35:20 Speaker 2: So she did sixty classes in sixty days. She started yoga seventy two years old, and I tease her, now I gave her and when she turned seventy five, we gave her the gift of free yoga for the rest of her life.

35:31 Speaker 1: Yeah.

35:31 Speaker 2: I had known she was going to live this long and might have waited till she was eighty, but she's still coming. And so then she started just coming almost every day. She's seen up and downs in her life, through COVID, through you know, illnesses, through the death of her husband, through you know, just things that happen in life. The yoga has been the thing that she can come back to over and over again. Wow, that grounds her and yeah, she's she's independent, she's strong, she's flexible. Good for her, and she really does.

36:02 Speaker 2: We talk a lot, We spend a lot of time together, and she will tell you a lot of it is too, is the community that we have. That's why it was important when we were on Zoom for me to have the community. We know that there are people who struggle with mental health issues. Yoga is very helpful and then to lose that in the process of a pandemic and lockdown, to give them still this community to come back to and be part of, even if they can't practice yoga online, to be able to come and check in with somebody and say I'm here.

36:30 Speaker 2: I think one of the greatest diseases in the United States and the world is actually loneliness. And when you look at overeating, smoking, all of that, Yes, the depression, loneliness is a huge part of that for a lot of people. Yes, and so by having everybody in the same room, you have a community that we start building, people of all different ages, all different We have doctors that practice next to janitors, Like it doesn't matter when you're in the room in a little outfit wedding. It doesn't matter what you do for a living, or what your education is, or what your income level is.

37:06 Speaker 2: It's kind of a great equalizer. Elane spends a lot of time going out for breakfast after class or whatever with people of all different ages, and so she's kept that social group going even at the loss of friends and who are her age. I think that happens to a lot of older people. They lose their social group and then they have no way to rebuild it. So we have people that range in all ages and they all work together, which I think is really helpful. So much of what we're doing in yoga is not about the physical postures that we do, and so having that community is really important and having people of all different ages and stuff.

37:43 Speaker 2: We know that there's a lot of studies that have studied the depression and going into saunas and going into heated environments, and there was actually a Harvard study. I wish I had more information than I could, but people can. Just if they googled Bickram yoga Harvard Depression study, it'll come up. They had people doing two classes a week and they self reported huge changes that they were far less depressed during yoga, even compared to people who are taking medication. We not only offer yoga, though, we also have other modalities of healing, so we have float tanks, we have a sauna, we have red light therapy, massage therapy, we're adding in skincare, we do meditations, and all of these things work together.

38:27 Speaker 2: So some people just coming into a sauna it can be really helpful for helping depressions.

38:32 Speaker 1: That's particularly interesting to me because I probably haven't told you this. Some of my listeners know because I'm pretty open about this stuff. But you know, I've by entire adult life and probably going back to when I was a teenager, I've struggled with depression unmedicated because I'm stubborn and terrified of side effects. But it's definitely and I've never been formally diagnosed, but I believe it's, you know, just it's clinical depression because you know, I can get depressed for no reason, so that's probably you know, I'm pretty sure it's a chemical imbalance, and it's definitely in my family.

39:04 Speaker 1: But I love My favorite time of year is summer, and I actually like the heat, like when it's ninety degrees outside, you know, and people are you know, i'd prefer a dry heat, but even the humidity doesn't really bother me. You know, I'm running around well, you know, you've seen me pop in at your place in Havel when it's you know, ninety degrees and I'm out running around all sweaty, but I'm fine and bother me. And I always I've always kind of assumed that part of why I like summer so much, it is my favorite time of year is because there's more sunlight, and I think the more sunlight helps alleviate depression.

39:42 Speaker 1: But I wonder too if maybe maybe the reason I like the heat it's not just because I'm weird, because people think it's weird. Really it's ninety degrees and you don't mind. I'm like, no, it's fine with me.

39:53 Speaker 2: I don't mind the heat either.

39:55 Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, maybe it's because it's actually helping me maybe yeah, mentally.

40:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, it probably is. They know that heat. They don't know why, but they know that being in heated environment does help people with depression. The float tank that we have we put in an open float tank. A lot of float tanks and there's some great float places up here in New Hampshire. They have cabins and they have pods which have covers and for some people that's very claustrophobic and it's very difficult for people with mobility issues often to get in and out of them. So we put in a large open float tank that has a side that you can sit on.

40:30 Speaker 2: It has a metal grab bar that allows people with mobility issues to get in and out, but also for people who are claustrophobic, they can come in and use it. There's been studies where they've studied floating compared to medication for anxiety for mild to moderate, not severe anxiety, but mild to moderate anxiety compared medication to regular floating, and the people who were floating regularly saw more improvement than people on medication and no side effects. I love Western medicine. I think Western medicine is great.

40:58 Speaker 2: There are a lot of people in the world, all this industry that detagrade pharmaceutical companies on that. I think if you have an acute injury or illness, Western medicine is a great solution. If your appendix ruptures, go have a surgery. If you have pneumonia, please take an antibiotic like there are, but it comes with side effects. What the Western medicine hasn't been able to do as well is chronic illness, chronic injury. You know, immune thing, the autoimmune disorders, chronic depression, chronic anxiety.

41:29 Speaker 2: When you have those chronic illnesses, Western medicine has tools in their toolbox are pills and surgery. They are so good at diagnosis though they have X rays and cat scans and functional MRIs and all blood tests and all these things they can do to diagnose what's wrong. But their treatment toolbox is really just pills and surgery. And for some things that's great, like say your pendix ruptures, please have it taken out. That doesn't work for chronic illness, that doesn't work for chronic injury.

41:58 Speaker 2: And I was so blessed to come across a doctor when I got injured who said, go try all these other types of healing to see what works. And what I've found is and working for twenty years in wellness lots of my students have found finding the other monaalgias is how you treat chronic illness. You can't really treat it with western medicine because who wants all those side effects. But you find the other things that work, and then you have to incorporate them and make them part of your lifestyle, even when that's hard.

42:28 Speaker 2: One of the hardest things I think for people with depression is to make that consistent to keep coming. We have students that I have said to me, I struggle with depression. So when I don't show up, I'm probably And I said, I asked them, do you want me to call you? Do you want me to call you? And just like give you a little nudge. I don't like to chase students, but I'm happy to give you a little nudge and say, hey, you're doing okay. Why don't you come in and you know, commit and take a nap on the floor.

42:52 Speaker 2: Commit. And once they're in and they're with the people again, it helps. It's not going to fix it, and they not fix it for this is the The good news is it helps. The bad news is you have to do it for the rest of your life. Bad news is you're not going to be able to do. It's not a one and done. It's like brushing your teeth. You have to do it consistently to keep healthy. And so it's that idea. You have to show up for yoga two to three times a week. If you're injured, come more. If you're feeling good, go to the beach.

43:21 Speaker 2: Don't go to yoga that day. You know, the red light therapy that we do is designed to excite the mitochondria in your cells and makes people feel better, but it also heals injuries faster. There was a recent study done. It is funded by the company that makes red light therapy panels. So I always like to premise it with that full disclosure. It doesn't make it in a bad study. It just I like to disclose where the study came from. That they found the people who regularly use red light therapy, they're not sure why it decreases inflammation in the body.

43:53 Speaker 2: They're not sure why it does these things it does, but they know it works. So they found an increase of healthy gut back here and people who were regularly doing red light So it may just be that increasing your gut bacteria that's healthy. Having we know that having a healthy gut makes your whole body feel better. Yes, so the red light therapy and it's been used as a treatment medically for people with crones and colitis for a long long time.

44:17 Speaker 1: Interesting.

44:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, so they know that it's good for your gut and their gut stuff helps the whole body feel better.

44:22 Speaker 1: Yeah.

44:23 Speaker 2: The sauna is more heat to like hang out and just relax. It loosens the muscles, but also helps with depression, helps with mental health issues. The float tank, the massage, all of this works together with the yoga to get people moving and stronger and more flexible, not only in their body but also in their mind.

44:42 Speaker 1: I feel like all of this too, you know, because when you're talking about Western medicine and what it addresses well and not so well, I think it's it's probably I assume you have people who who come to you who are perfectly healthy the want to be healthier, because I feel like, and maybe maybe I shouldn't say Western medicine so much in this context. Is it may just be a broader just societal issue that we have in America where there's there's not enough. We were talking Jenny and I were talking about this recently on the show, there's never enough emphasis on preventative medicine and and just taking care of yourself up front.

45:26 Speaker 1: It seems like our whole way of doing things culturally is you address these problems when they occur, but you don't do enough. And it kind of goes back to what I was saying too about smoking. When you know a smoker who says, well, I'm okay today, there's no cancer today, you know, and then I'll address the problem when it kind of arises. And smoking is an extreme example of that, of course, but but I think most people, yeah, they're just like, yeah, you know, when when something happens, I'll address it, but until then, I assume I'm fine, when in reality, you know, it's We had someone on the show, doctor no Who from Portsmouth who was on the show with us one day, and I said to him, the the easiest thing in the world for any of us to take for granted.

46:19 Speaker 1: The number one thing that people take for granted, I believe is their health. And he said to me, not only is it the easiest thing to take for granted, it's the hardest thing to get back once something goes.

46:32 Speaker 2: From Dolly Lama. I think it was who said he has found that people will give up their health to chase money, and then when they get old and they need their health, they'll spend all their money. And yes, that quote, so I may not have got the quote perfectly right, but that's to just yeah, that idea that we things, that we monetize things in a way that will chase the money, but we'll give up ourselves in the process. And again, yoga is about finding a balance, right, so that balance of go and work but also take care of yourself.

47:06 Speaker 2: So in our classes too, there's a section of the class on the floor, the last part of the class, but we do a posture and then we lay down and rest. But we do a posture and we lay down and rest. We do a posture, we lay down and rest, and we do back and forth. And there's some physiological things going on there, but I all think it's important you're learning in that moment. Like you have to work, but as much as you work, you have to rest. You cannot constantly go go, go, go, go burn the candle. That both ends at some point you run out of candle.

47:32 Speaker 2: That's the problem. So you have to create that balance of work and rest. And it's all about balance, and that's what we're trying to teach people. How to find the balance in their life, in their strength and flexibility in their work, and relaxation in their mind and their body. How do you find the balance. It's not that you're going to be perfectly balanced. Your right arm and your left arm will be equally a strong and flexible. That's not the balance we're talking about. But it is that idea that you figure out how to live in your body in a way that you're not abusing yourself.

48:03 Speaker 2: And again that always goes back to that idea of falling in love with yourself. Right to look in the mirror over and over and over again when you come in classroom your beginner is hard. And if I struggle to watch those students who are really struggling to see themselves, I jokingly off and say look in the mirror, and if you see yourself, I'll give you extra points. Because we can look in the mirror. Many of us look in the mirror every single day to get ready to go out the door, but we don't see ourselves.

48:28 Speaker 2: So to spend ninety minutes seeing yourself that's who you truly are, is an amazing thing to watch people create that balance to get their health back. But we do have a lot of people who are fine, they're healthy, and they're coming to relieve stress maybe or whatever. They just want to Often it's something that goes with the other activity they do. They golf, but they need to get that flexibility. They run, so their hamstrings are tight, so they need to do the yoga. And they lift a lot of weight, so they need to do the yoga.

48:56 Speaker 2: So often these are people who are athletes, professional athletes and stuff. I had one hundred mile marathon. If he used to come all the time, I think, when you discover what's big and hungry and chasing you, please let me know and we'll take care of you. But he just loved to run, but he needed that. His hamsprings have started to be a problem, so you balance it out with this other stuff. You can never measure what didn't go wrong because you've taken care of yourself, right, that's the thing, right, I can't measure that.

49:24 Speaker 2: So I often say to people, I don't know where I would be without the yoga my life. And my manager, who's lovely, he always says, oh, you'd be dead by now, And I think he's probably right. I probably would have been dead by now. But he just believes that, you know, the smoking and the drinking and the chronic pain would have led me down a dangerous slope. Yeah, and I think he's right. Once my kids were no longer my responsibility to take care of every day without the yoga, I don't know what that would have looked like.

49:51 Speaker 1: But you can't measure that interesting, Yeah, because once the kids grow up, then you know, I don't have any children. I'm not a parent, but I assume and partly I hear people talk about this too. There's that sense of what is my purpose now? My purpose was to raise my children.

50:09 Speaker 2: And that purpose in combination with living in pain, because when you don't have that, when you live in that level of pain, and for some people like me, that was physical pain. For some people that's emotional pain. For some people that spiritual pain. It's chemical pain, it's that brain chemistry, whatever it is. When they don't have that reason to get out of bed in the morning, it gets easier and easier to not to stop taking care of yourself, to stop, you know, it's painful to drive the car and turn my head to try to back out of my driveway.

50:40 Speaker 2: I'm just going to stop doing it.

50:42 Speaker 1: Right.

50:42 Speaker 2: I have to do it because I have to bring the kids to school. But once they're gone, yeah, you know, and I think that's and watching people age like that, it's sad for me because I see Elaine who made a different choice. Yeah, and we have lots of students in their sixties, seventies from almost sixty, myself in their seventies eighties. We're about to celebrate Elane's ninetieth birthday in just a few years, so well, you know, there's no reason to she started at seventy two. There's no reason to think I'm too old to start, right, because I think she had.

51:13 Speaker 2: She don't tell people the reason I can come every day is because I started. I was already retired. Interesting, I could come every day because I didn't have a job in kids and stuff.

51:22 Speaker 1: Yeah, I had.

51:23 Speaker 2: She learned to take care of herself, which made her better take care of her husband. Yes, yes, so it all, you know, it all works together.

51:30 Speaker 1: I always assume Mick Jagger, you know, he's in his eighties now, but if you see recent video of him on stage, he's still you know, he runs around like he's twenty years old and he and he uh, you know, he doesn't seem to get winded. You know, he's singing and running around on stage.

51:46 Speaker 2: And I know he hasn't always had the healthiest lifestyle.

51:49 Speaker 1: Right exactly. We all know that exactly. So I just assume I don't know this, but I assume he does yoga something.

51:55 Speaker 2: And yeah, and I think you can't abuse yourself a fair bit in your twenties and thirties. I think with anyone over thirty would agree like you could abuse yourself a fair bit. The body recover is better and all of that. Once you start getting in the thirties and forty, you don't bounce back. And it's that idea. Objects in motion stay in motion, Objects at rest, stay at rest. Your one job in this world is to take care of yourself. I asked this question in class. If I told you, at sixteen, you learn to drive a car, and I'm gonna give you a car, you can have any car you want, but you can only have that car for the rest of your life.

52:28 Speaker 2: How are you going to take care of that car? How often are you going to wash it, change the oil, to take care of it, all that stuff. Most of us would say, oh, I would take such good care of that car, knowing that's the only one I'm getting. You get one body, yeah, birth, and it's got to take you from beginning to end. How are you taking care of it? And that's not for a place of guilt because you can't abuse yourself a bit for a while.

52:49 Speaker 1: Yeah, you can get away with it when you're young.

52:51 Speaker 2: Smoking, the drinking and all of that. You know, you can get away with all of that until some point where you can't anymore. And the problem is you've created the habits and the lifestyle, the patterns, the patterns that make it difficult to transition to something new. So you're right. We are hypnotizing people when I have these conversations while they're in class, sweating and I'm saying these things to them in class, I'm brainwashing. But I tell them I'm up front, it's not a secret. I'm going to brainwash you.

53:15 Speaker 2: And if I have trouble brainwashing, that's when we turn the heat up because it makes the brainwashing easier. But my goal is to brainwash you. Someone said to me, you're brainwashing. I said, we have a cult, and I said, no, we're not a cult. Cult wants to tell you what to do all the time and what to think all the time. I want you to stop thinking for ninety minutes and fall in love with yourself, because that's my evil plan of yoga, is to make people fall in love with themselves, right, because that makes the whole world better?

53:41 Speaker 2: Yes, right, yes, And that's the same when you're hypnotizing somebody and they stop smoking, you probably see it. They change how they feel about themselves. They care about themselves in a new way that getting them to stop smoking gets them to eat better, to go for a walk, more than you know, whatever it is, you see those changes. When you start just making those small steps to start being better to yourself, it builds and then it builds and it builds, and all it takes is one step. I tell you, all you have to do is walk in the door.

54:10 Speaker 2: We're going to help you do the rest, but you have to walk in the door. I can't come to your house. I wish I could. I see people in the grocery store and I go, excuse me with me. I would like you to come with me for just for an hour and a half and see if we can help you out, because it makes me sad to see people who physically are struggling. And then you see people physically struggle, but you never you can't see what's going on for the people who are not physically struggling, but struggling in lots of other ways.

54:36 Speaker 2: If you're a human being, you have trauma, you're struggling in some way, and so being able to help get that out of your way so that you're not struggling to go through life.

54:47 Speaker 1: Every day and it feels so good. It's it's like to me, I mean, it's got to be the biggest endorphin rush in the world to be able to help somebody get better, you know, it's I mean, that's what you know. To me, hypnotherapy is addictive because I just love helping somebody make make positive change, you know. It's it's uh.

55:10 Speaker 2: Someone asked me what my return on investment was in my business, but when we were transitioning from the smaller studio closing financially not in a good place, to reopening in a much bigger space with all this under wellness modalities, they were like, what's your return on investment? Well, it's Elaine, my return investment. I was a student who had kidney failure and wow, I couldn't get hi a kidney and somebody another modality, a chiropractor or an acupuncturist, had said to him, you should maybe try this.

55:40 Speaker 2: I met this woman who teaches sweaty yoga. Maybe you should go do that and like sweat, maybe that'll help, right, And and we talk about detoxic and hot yoga. You're not toxic. It does help remove metabolic waste from your body and stuff. But the students walk in, you're not toxic. You're not sitting around toxic. This guy was toxic, like he didn't have functioning kidneys to clean out his system.

56:01 Speaker 1: Wow.

56:01 Speaker 2: And we progressively watched him get better back because I asked him. I said, so you've had a kidney transplant. He said no. And I said, so you're not on dialysis of kidney failure and you didn't get a transplant. I said, how does that work? He goes, basically, I'm just waiting to die, okay, but I want to feel better. I think maybe this will help me feel better.

56:20 Speaker 1: Okay.

56:20 Speaker 2: Come eleven years later, he finally got a kidney transport. Oh my god, yeah, and he did it. Actually, he was saying the show the birthday of that place where Jennie Show is. This weekend is Saturday. My birthday is on Saturday. He got his kidney on my birthday, which was really exciting.

56:35 Speaker 1: Wow.

56:35 Speaker 2: But I watched him progressively get better and better and better and better and better and better and better over years and years and years. Yeah, just doing hot yoga and Western medicine is a funny thing because he went to his doctor, his neprologist with the kidney doctor, and they said to him, you look great.

56:50 Speaker 1: What are you doing?

56:52 Speaker 2: And he said, I'm doing hot yoga.

56:53 Speaker 1: Yeah.

56:53 Speaker 2: And the doctor said, oh, I don't know if you should be doing that. Oh really, But He's like, but you just told me how good. I look look good. My numbers look good, and I look good and I feel good and I'm living of a good quality of life. Why would you tell me that's not the thing I should be doing. It's funny that Western doctors just have this idea and also this idea of what yoga is. I think most people think yoga and they think down dog and updog and I did too. Yeah, I can't do that. I have a neck injury, I have a shoulder injury.

57:20 Speaker 2: Whatever. And we don't do any of that. It's really accessible to everybody with injuries because that's what it was designed for. It was designed for injured bodies to bring them back to health and then to let them maintain that good health into.

57:34 Speaker 1: I'm curious, and if you're just joining us, we're talking with Terry Almquist from Wellness, Hot Yoga and Haveroyl. Yeah. I was curious to ask you. You may have already answered it with what you were just saying, but maybe there's something else, like misconceptions, Like what is the biggest misconception people have about yoga.

57:53 Speaker 2: I think the biggest misconception people have is that you have to be flexible to yoga.

57:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, and you don't.

57:59 Speaker 2: I was so in fire. I hadn't moved my head in thirteen fourteen years, so inflexible. It wasn't until I actually started doing yoga that we realized I had all this problems with my shoulder too. I think in the same injury, I had probably torn a rotator cuff. When you go to an emergency room and you can't move your legs because your spine is injured, no one asks you how your shoulder feels. It's not high up on the list. And so when you have those kind of injuries, you think, I can't do yoga because I'm injured this and that may be true of and I found that true for myself.

58:31 Speaker 2: And I'm not denigraating other styles of yoga. I think all yoga is good yoga, and not all yoga is made for all bodies. Right, So if you're an injured body, you're not You shouldn't be going into a class with the first thing they start with this ham stands.

58:45 Speaker 1: Right.

58:46 Speaker 2: If you've ever done yoga and you go into a class and they're starting and you have a spine injury and they start with headstands, you're in.

58:51 Speaker 1: The wrong yoga class.

58:53 Speaker 2: Because ours is designed from a therapeutic yoga standpoint, was done as yoga therapy. Every single post is designed for people who have almost no mobility. The first step of a lot of the postures when we're standing is stand with your feet together, and for some people that's it. That's hard enough. Yeah, bring your arms over your head. There's nothing we do that's really crazy. There's nothing we do, first of all, in this particular style of yoga that's outside the natural range of motion for the adult human body.

59:19 Speaker 2: Okay, And we do no weight bearing exercises on non weight bearing joints, meaning we're not standing on our head or our hands, we're not doing All of the poses we do are designed to work with the way the human body is actually designed to bear weight. Okay, So and you could just do that little bit. So people, I can't sit on my heels, can't. I can't get up and down off the floor. I hear that a lot. That's a common misconception. I can't do yoga because I can't get up and down off the floor. And in some yogas that's true.

59:47 Speaker 2: They're doing down dog up dog chataranga. That's a very traditional set of postures that are done in vidyasa in different styles of yoga. Yeah, we don't do that, So there's no up and down.

59:58 Speaker 1: You're up standing up for the first.

1:00:00 Speaker 2: Part of class, and then we get on the floor once and we stay on the floor till the end.

1:00:04 Speaker 1: Oh, so you only have.

1:00:06 Speaker 2: To get up once and down once. That's it.

1:00:09 Speaker 1: Oh okay.

1:00:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why it's really a different it's a different conception concept of yoga than a lot of yoga that people are sort of conscious of.

1:00:18 Speaker 1: It yeah, yeah, and do do do kids do yoga?

1:00:21 Speaker 2: We kids as young as eight can do this yoga. Kids do the only do the portion on the floor. They're already flexible. They're just made out of rubber band in bubble gum. Yeah right, And they don't have the muscle strength to hold We only hold the postures twenty thirty seconds. But some of them that's the challenge, Like it's difficult to hold that posture for twenty to thirty seconds.

1:00:42 Speaker 1: Yeah.

1:00:43 Speaker 2: For children who don't have that muscle strength, what happens is they can get very deep into postures and they can't hold it. So we don't have them do And they don't need to warm up the heat all the first part of class is warming up and the heat to get ready for the yoga practice, which happens on the floor. Kids don't need to warm up. They're already warm, they're already limber, they're already all those things. So I'm seeing less and less. I'm seeing more and more younger kids who have less flexibility.

1:01:07 Speaker 2: I think they don't run around like we used to do. Oh interesting to they don't have gym like we used to. So I see kids who have less flexibility, but they come in for the back half of class, so they usually they're usually coming because their parents come and they're interested, and they start coming because of that. So under the age of fourteen thirteen fourteen, they just do that last part of class. Once they get old enough to sweat efficiently, that's the other problem. You don't want to put a kid that age in the heated room for ninety minutes because children don't.

1:01:40 Speaker 2: Part of the reason we have the heat is to make you sweat, and that sweat helps you efficiently.

1:01:45 Speaker 1: Cool your own body, okay.

1:01:47 Speaker 2: And so we want you to be heated up so you're limber sweating so you don't overheat, which sounds counterintuitive, like if I make you hot and sweaty, you won't overheat. But as the sweat is evaporating, your body is staying. It's normal for temperature. The room is hoppy, you are not. Children can't cool themselves like that because they don't have mature sweat lamps. Children can overheat much more quickly than adults. So we don't want little kids in the room. Yeah, we don't want little and they can go from being fine to being not fine and just really fast with a delta takes a little longer.

1:02:22 Speaker 2: So as teachers, the part of the training we have we're looking for certain signs. If somebody's overheating, if they stop sweating, if they you know, there's certain things we're looking for. A certain color of the skin, they get paler or they get pinker. I always tell my teachers if you have a little a younger person in the class and they start looking like they have a bit of a sunburn on their face, they need to go outside and cool off for a minute. They're not cooling themselves. Same with adults.

1:02:45 Speaker 2: We have a delta will turn Some adults just turn very red. They'll tell you I turn red. You know. Some people are just ready like that. But we're looking for certain signs. The teacher stands at the front of the room. We stand on a podium. I wear a headset and I'm talking, but I'm looking at everybody all the time, so I'm watching to make sure everybody's okay. Kids who are thirteen fourteen, they start sweating, they can come and try the whole class. I ask parents who want to bring their kids to class.

1:03:11 Speaker 2: Does your kid wear deodorant every day? Or did your kid wear deodorant to the school dance. So if they're still just wearing deodorant, if they only really need it for the school dance or something very physical, they're probably not sweating efficiently enough. Yet a kid who needs deodorant every day to go to school, they're probably.

1:03:29 Speaker 1: Sweating efficiently okay.

1:03:31 Speaker 2: And then if you practice enough and you come a lot, then you don't need deodorant at all, because your sweat is very clean.

1:03:39 Speaker 1: Okay, it's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, oh that's very interesting. Yeah, the subject of deodorant came up recently on the show too. I forget who we're talking with, but how it's really not great for you, Like this, the regular store brand deodorant.

1:03:54 Speaker 2: Stuff is fine. To not smell is good. Yeah, we live in a social world.

1:03:58 Speaker 1: But there's like like or but you are.

1:04:01 Speaker 2: Designed to sweat to cool yourself. Sweat is actually a natural reaction to either temperature or change phys a logical change in your body, like stress and that kind of stuff. And we all know stress sweat spells different than just like every day sweat, and if you sweat regularly, this is like way too much information. The spell is actually bacteria that's growing on your skin.

1:04:26 Speaker 1: Oh, that's what the spell is.

1:04:28 Speaker 2: And if you sweat regularly, that bacteria is it's cleaned up there. And so I have to be like too much information about me. I don't think I've won the yodor In in fifteen years. Except to fly. I don't like to fly. I'm a nervous flyer. Maybe I should get a little hypnosis. I doing a retreat in Thailand. It may I'm gonna have to fly to Thailand. I usually fly with my manager, which I refer to on the plane as my emotional support. I'm going by myself on this trip. Maybe a little hypnosis will help.

1:05:00 Speaker 1: I have helped people that specifically I do fly.

1:05:03 Speaker 2: I'm not afraid of flying. I'm just I don't. I just I'm nervous on the plane. Yeah, but where to Yoda because that's nervous sweat. It's not my every day. Oh but I go in a heated room several times a day and sweat.

1:05:14 Speaker 1: Yeah.

1:05:14 Speaker 2: And I haven't won Toyoda in the years. And you've been around me. Nobody's been playing so far, No, everybody. So that constantly sweating is good for your skin and your body too. Like we talked about detoxing if part of that.

1:05:27 Speaker 1: Is that idea that yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. I have helped people with that fear of flying. I have my my only issue with see, I don't mind being Like being in that big metal tube in the air doesn't bother me at all. I don't like airports. Airports are stressful. Well like that Manchester. Have you ever flown?

1:05:46 Speaker 2: I love flying out of man.

1:05:47 Speaker 1: Manchester is awesome. That airport is so it's so small, it's easy.

1:05:52 Speaker 2: I think for me, it's on the plane. I call it big in the tube. Just being in the tube, Yeah, I don't it's a really uncomfortable thing for me.

1:05:59 Speaker 1: Although physically that it can be hard for me because my ears, especially on the descent. You know, people get the ear popping. I get the pressure in my ears sometimes gets really bad, like I've I've had I've been in intense pain. Intends to happen on the descent. Not every time I've flown, but a couple of times.

1:06:19 Speaker 2: I was a sick kid and I had a lot of chronic ear infection.

1:06:22 Speaker 1: Oh that's right, We're talking about that the other day.

1:06:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, And so I actually understand that too much pressure flying is better for me now though, unfortunately, because of I had COVID and I flew during while I had COVID and I had problems with drugs, I ended up with tubes in my ears that are pretty permanent. Yeah, but now I don't have that pressure change because I have tubes.

1:06:41 Speaker 1: Yeah that's good.

1:06:42 Speaker 2: Yeah it's good, but it's not good, you know, I'd rather not have the tubes.

1:06:45 Speaker 1: And yeah, of course, of course we should talk about too. Uh, you've got the big open house. You've got a big event that starts tomorrow.

1:06:54 Speaker 2: Tomorrow, So our capp is tomorrow. So as I said, this coming Saturday to fourteenth is my birthday, and every year for my birthday at the yoga studio, what I do is gift other people yoga because the greatest gift you can give me for my birthday is to take care of yourself and learn and learn the tools to do that. Put those tools in your toolbox. So we have an open house all next week, kick off tomorrow from seven to noon. We're gonna have healthy snacks and some healthy beverages and come and see the float tank, try out the red light, take a free suna, take a free yoga class.

1:07:29 Speaker 2: All next week yoga is free all of our yoga classes, so we teach primarily this Bickram hot yoga. We also have several Yin classes a week in the evening. Yin is a slower yoga class. Deeper stretches held for long, postures are held for long periods of time. Oh wow, it's a nice compliment to the hot yoga. Yeah, not, it's therapeutic. Good. All yoga is good and therapeutic. But if you're really badly injured, the hot yoga is the one you want to do, and then the yin is good for creating more flexible once you are generally healthy.

1:08:03 Speaker 2: Okay, So all our classes are free next week, also all month. For my birthday, we're doing twenty five dollars float therapy sessions. So it's usually seventy, we're doing twenty. We're pragnically giving it away. Come and float for an hour. In case you don't know what float is, it's a tank filled with saline solution. There's one thousand pounds of Ebsen salt in this tank, so it's high in all those minerals and magnesium. Most people know like an Ebsence salt bath is great if you're injured, if your muscle's hurt.

1:08:30 Speaker 2: It's also good for people have trouble sleeping. It's good for anxiety.

1:08:33 Speaker 1: Okay.

1:08:34 Speaker 2: By getting in a tank full of salt water, you become weightless. Yeah, So it takes the pressure off the nerves and the muscles and the joints. So people with chronic illness like fibromyalgia, oh arthritis, bad backs, pregnancy, pregnant women can float. We actually have a prenatal yoga class that we do once a week, and we have prenatal massage float and massage float and.

1:09:02 Speaker 1: Not the sauna.

1:09:03 Speaker 2: I can't remember what the other thing is. I'm so sorry.

1:09:05 Speaker 1: Well, you got a lot going on.

1:09:06 Speaker 2: I know, we got a lot going on. We do postpartum Oh, that's what I'm saying. Postpartum. The red light therapy is good. But no red lighte therapy during pregnancy, just because there's never been any studies and nobody's going to take that risk to try and study that.

1:09:17 Speaker 1: I'm sure.

1:09:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, But postpartum red light therapy helps the body heal faster, which is good for nursing mothers. It's very good. So we offer a lot of that stuff. So the massage and the float therapy are on special all month, Okay, ninety nine dollars for one hour massage and twenty five dollars for one hour float nice, and the float therapy is I want people to do yoga because I think you have to do the work to make yourself well. You can't. You were talking about medicine. Can't taking medicine instead of taking care of yourself because one is passive and one is active, and it's so easy to just do the passive thing.

1:09:55 Speaker 2: And I think Western medicine and pharmaceutical companies have sold us on this idea of you don't have to care yourself. It's better living through chemistry. Remember those commercials, Yes chemistry. So they've sold us on this side of the here that we don't have to do the work. We offer both. We have the passive stuff. You could sit in the flow tank, you could sit in the red light. But doing the work and the yoga is so important because all this other stuff that we offer was put there to help support the work you're doing in the yoga practice.

1:10:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, but everybody's welcome. You don't have to do yoga to come and use the other stuff. Just you don't have to be a member. That's often a misconception, right to be amember the yoga studio. No, anybody can walk in and do a float. Anybody can walk in and get a massage. We have five massage therapists. We offer massage seven days a week. Wow, it's hard to find.

1:10:39 Speaker 1: So yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, that is. Yeah.

1:10:42 Speaker 2: So we do days and evenings and weekends and we are open as a center and sixty five days a year.

1:10:49 Speaker 1: Yeah.

1:10:49 Speaker 2: We actually have yoga classes on Christmas and Thanksgiving and for a lot of people those are the days they needed either, because loneliness is a major disease.

1:10:57 Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting. Oh so you actually offer that, yeah somethings.

1:11:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, And some people really have said to me, I'm so grateful that I can come to my yoga before I spend the day with my family, because the family can be stressful, and families can be messy and they're you know, but when you're taking care of yourself and you come from a messy family, sometimes that's hard to back in there to be able to come on Christmas morning and then go spend time with people that you know and be okay in yourself and yeah, calm and okay in yourself.

1:11:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, that's all.

1:11:27 Speaker 2: We're messy. We clean them up right right.

1:11:30 Speaker 1: There you go, there you go. So the open house starts tomorrow and then it goes through. It's for the week.

1:11:34 Speaker 2: The whole week. The whole week is free yoga, and the whole month for the float and the massages on sale. And to cap off the end of the week, which is my actual birthday, we'll have free yoga next Saturday as well, but also in the evening the community because we do community events. We're doing a riverboat cruise down the Merrimack that goes from behind the tap in downtown heybral and then afterwards this cake back at the studio and anyone's talking.

1:11:56 Speaker 1: Oh cake, very cool.

1:11:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, So we're more than just you know, it's really community and that's that idea of loneliness is really hard, but we create a community. So especially, I think it's hard to make new friends when you're an adult, and it's hard to a lot of people lost a lot of their community during COVID and they're not working in the office anymore. They've stayed home to work. So if you're somebody who's feeling a little on the lonely side and think you need a community. Come and check us out just to meet some people and make some new friends and find a space where you can come and be chilled out and relaxed and be with people.

1:12:28 Speaker 2: Yeah, and you don't even have to be that social. We come in for an hour and a half class. You don't have to talk to anybody with them.

1:12:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, I would imagine this. There's probably some people who it's their first time, maybe they're a little shy or whatnot, and then they you probably see it right. Over time, people kind of open up and they they become more social if we.

1:12:46 Speaker 2: Try to help that along. One of the things we do at the studio is when you come in your first time, or we make an effort to introduce you to somebody who's been coming for a while, just to say like, oh, by the way, hey Matt, this is Elaney. Lane comes every day and people come down when they meet a link because she's she tells yoga every day. But she absolutely looks like an eighty eight year old lady, Like that's you know, that's what she looks like. And you started to go like, oh, she can do this, I can do this, and just didn't have somebody else there that you know their name, you know, And I always tell people we do a posture where we put our arms out to the side and say say hello to your neighbor, and if you don't know your neighbor's name, please introduce yourself after class.

1:13:24 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how we take a class and make it a community. We have people that are members of our community that do not practice yoga. We have spouses, some people who practice to come to our potlucks and our other events. We know them, and we know them. We feel like we know them well and they're part of our community. So you don't have to practice yoga to be part of that community. You just have to come in the door.

1:13:43 Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's really cool, especially you know, we live in an era where you know, there are there are online communities, and I think I think for some people that's interacting with online communities and social media has kind of supplanted what was at one time more actually going out and seeing people. So I think it's I think what you're doing when you talk about community, I think that's really important.

1:14:06 Speaker 2: And I think a lot of community is built around that, going out drinking and eating and all this stuff, and if you're struggling with those things in your life, to have another place that isn't that it's it's often very hard, especially for people, if you give up smoking and drinking that what do I do? That You often sometimes lose your social group. Yeah, and I think that in recovery, a lot of people find loneliness. They come from families that have drinking or drugs as part of their social interaction, and you know, and so to find a place where you can feel like you fit in.

1:14:40 Speaker 2: I'm not saying you have to give up smoking and drinking to come to yoga either, but it's a new place to go that isn't the old patterns. And it's all focused on being good to yourself and feeling good about yourself as opposed to hiding how you're feeling and hiding who you are and hiding all that stuff. Come and be exactly who you are.

1:14:58 Speaker 1: Right right. No, I think that's wonderful. I think that's wonderful. Well, so before we run out of time, Oh, the website.

1:15:06 Speaker 2: Website wellness hot yoga dot com. We just got a new website. I hope everybody enjoys it. All the information about the open houses on there, as well as anything about our other services that we offer. You're always welcome to call the phone number nine seven eight six eight nine nine six four two. I tell people what rings through to my cell phone, so you know, if somebody's there to answer the phone, somebody will try to answer the phone. And just stop in. It's at thirty four Miramax Street in downtown Haveril, in this beautiful new Harbor Place building across from the big giant new coming parking garage.

1:15:42 Speaker 2: Right now they've taken down the parking garage. We have quite a bit of construction going on across the street. But come by and just stop in. We have a lovely meditation You and I have sat in the meditation area chatted. We always have tea back there. People can sit, Anyone can wander and have a cup of tea, talk to us, find out what we're offering. There's no obligation to do.

1:16:00 Speaker 1: Anything, but yeah, yeah, absolutely no. I think it's awesome. I think it's awesome. Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you got here early because I knew we'd have a lot to talk about. This has been wonderful, so thank you Terry and I also want to remind people too before we go. Of course, this coming Friday night, John Poussette Dart will be at the or actually the John poussett Dart Duo will be performing at the Rex Theater right here in Manchester. And if you miss it, John called in at the top of the second hour and really enjoyed talking with him.

1:16:29 Speaker 1: And of course don't forget also one week from today and we'll talk about it. Of course next Saturday, but September fourteenth, from four to eight pm on Hannover Street, the Mosaic Art Collective proudly presents their annual full Circle the Speed of Light as they celebrate their birthday as well. And Jenny has one of one of her amazing paintings hanging up there. So proud of her. And she'll be back next week. She's a little under the weather, but she'll be here with us next week and we'll uh, we'll close out with a song in a moment, but Terry, thank you again so much, and we will uh, we will leave you with this.

1:17:07 Speaker 1: I haven't played this in a while. This is a song called Reconnection from Eons Encoded and uh, this is uh, this is a great way to uh to end the show, I think, but uh, Terry almquis Wellness, Hot Yoga and haverl. Absolutely thank you and if you missed any part of today's show, it'll be up in just a little bit w mnhradio dot org and my website Matt Connorton dot com. I'll talk to you a little bit later. Bye, everybody,