Are you one of those people that feel like your stress button is always on high red alert? Today’s Fit Girl Magic podcast, Dominiece Clifton, shares that practical stress management doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. It’s possible to create a holistic approach that doesn’t require you to invest a fortune.
Dominiece is the founder of Move And Still™, & Nourish Wellness Collective™, a hybrid wellness community for women entrepreneurs and working professionals.
How did you begin on this journey to working in the Wellness industry?
We typically teach what we need in life. I never imagined myself being in the wellness space because my background is in Grant Writing and Event Planning. But 3 and a half years ago I had a newborn baby and a 3-year-old. I was so stressed out after having walked away from a job for extended maternity leave, then COVID hit and it just all hit me like a ton of bricks. I was stressed at the moment, but I have lived my life as being stressed and always worrying about things.
I was overweight most of my life and wore that stress IN & ON my body. Once I started focusing on myself, which looked like really nurturing and nourishing my mind, body, and spirit every day, the weight started to fall off easier and much easier than all the other times in the past when I had just focused on crash diets and nutrition. I had this “aha moment”, I had always focused on just the physical, and it was really when I focused on nourishing all the parts of myself and healing those parts is when I saw a change.
When I focused on letting go of things that I was holding on to energetically and physically the weight came off and stayed off. This journey made me really passionate about sharing that with other people, so that is when I became a nutrition and wellness coach!
Dominiece saw this pattern in the women that she was working with. They were always stressed out, overwhelmed, busy career women who had lives so stressed out!!
Many clients come looking for a meal plan, instead Dominiece started asking how can I better support my clients? You cannot focus on weight loss or a meal plan if the house (your body) is literally on fire right now. A light bulb went off in the patterns she was seeing firsthand. With any of these things, disease, illness, overweight, violence, there is unaddressed stress in common with all of those things!
It’s time to learn as a society to manage our stress in a healthy way. You have to learn that you cannot control everything, you can only control ourselves. You cannot STRESS over things that you CANNOT control. But you CAN control yourself and how you respond to things. That mindset shift has been a game-changer for me. I had to let go of what all of my body was holding on to. I had to RELEASE IT. I had to let go of the baggage on my body. I had to release what I was holding internally.
What I always tell people is if you can relate to any part of my story and you have had a hard time maintaining or losing weight, it’s not a magic diet pill that is going to change you. You need to sit with yourself and figure out what are the emotions behind the eating. What is making me resort to this behavior? Get to the root of it. Weight loss is a byproduct of you doing the healing work. How do you get to his place? You have to find the courage to try something different. Be curious! What would happen if I did it this way?
Surrendering.
This is a big piece of that during that time I did make changes to my diet. It wasn’t just meditation, I also cut out sugar, processed foods, etc from my diet. But the only reason I was able to stick to this was because I was meditating, and I was moving my body and I was able to release it!! My body said finally! Surrender and release. So again, it’s so much more than just a nutrition plan or a diet, it is mind, body, and spirit because you have to get all of those parts on board together for lasting change to occur.
Start to ask questions as to why I believe that.
This is generational trauma for some of us. The need and desire to always have to struggle, that things need to be hard. Peel back the layers of the onions to the journey, where did I learn this with my behaviors and patterns and how I respond to stress? Who taught me this? Why am I still holding onto it? Give yourself permission to put down what is no longer yours to carry.
Meditation.
Meditation gives you the power to make different choices. It builds self-awareness within yourself. It’s not about being perfect every time. But it will give you more authority over your life. When you become more self-aware, you can see things more clearly. You can see how you respond the stress etc,
Breathwork. Breathwork helped me find quietness more so than meditation, do you find with some people it’s either or, or whatever your preference is?
Nothing is a one size fits all approach. You have to give yourself permission to play around with things and see what works for them. Play around with creating a soul-care toy box. When you think about toys it’s adventurous and fun and if it doesn’t work for you get rid of them. It’s not necessarily about fixing ourselves, tools fix things. It’s about getting curious and having fun with it. Aka a toy box!!!
I love breathwork because you get the benefits of meditation, but you are also allowing yourself to release from the body. It’s almost like getting a 2-for-1 deal. Breathwork is this beautiful healing modality that we have access to any time of the day. The breath moves throughout the body and is able to heal on a really deep level.
● Helps release stress
● Helps to release past trauma
● Allows for mental clarity
● Tapping into your intuition
● Helps quiet the mind
And so on and so forth, there are so many benefits!! There are just so many benefits because it’s the act of conscious breathing.
There are 2 types of breathwork, integrated which is 8 min or fewer sessions. And meditative which is longer and deeper and helps to tap into intuition. We recommend laying down during this time. Over time a consistent breathwork practice helps you to reset your breathing patterns. Taking deep breaths begins to allow us to shit off that stress response that our bodies are constantly in and turns on rest, digestion, and restore which activates the Parasympathetic Nervous System.
Our body is always communicating with us, and we have to stop and listen to it. We have to let our bodies know that it is safe. And when we respond to stress, all of these hormones, cortisol, etc. are released into our bloodstream from our nervous system. And when this happens it shuts down other parts of our body during this response. Too much of this happening is the catalyst for disease and illness.
“The body holds the truth” is what I like to say. And our bodies are literally walking libraries of all of our experiences. And what I tell people when it comes to stress is that you might be dealing with stress today, you might be dealing with stress from last week, you might be still holding stress in your body from last month, you might be holding stress in your body from two years ago when the pandemic hit, and you might be holding stress in your body from 10 years ago! But unless you signal to your body that it is safe to release, your body’s holding on to all of that stress and doesn’t know what to do with it.
I always encourage people that healing is a multi-pronged process. Let’s approach it from the mind and let’s talk through it and understand it. Sometimes talking through and understanding is important, so we need to have those conversations. But let’s always breathe and do yoga. Go for a walk. It doesn’t have to be hard. Let it be easy, it doesn’t have to be hard. But you do have to release the energy.
Building self-awareness.
You have to start to notice that your body is communicating with you. So many people are stressed every day and don’t even notice the indicators of stress. People think they are cured, but they are never cured. It’s an ongoing process of working on things. An ongoing road trips. Most of us think that once something happens it’s in our rearview mirror, but it will pop up. And it will happen over and over again until you slay that dragon.
It may take longer for some to let go of things that have happened. It may take a couple of days or a couple of months to feel relief. But if you have been holding onto something for a while, it can also take longer. Having grace and compassion for yourself is so important in the healing and releasing process. Also understand that if you have been dealing with ongoing stress and trauma for years, your nervous system is not resetting overnight. It is going to take some time for you to feel different. Our bodies will heal themselves, but it does take time. Give your body grace, give it time to reset.
This is a journey, but this doesn’t have to be long and hard to be impactful for you. But you need to start going inward and tuning into what is going on in your body and building that self-awareness. We will always be working on this, it’s not cured with 2 pills. But we have the power within us to do this and to make a change, to feel less stressed and more at ease with life. WE CAN DO THIS! One of my favorite poems is Our Deepest Fear, and it says, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond belief.”
All right, matchmakers! Make sure you listen and check out Dominiece from the links below. Don’t forget to take a nice deep breath and do me a favor, follow her because she gives some great, nice, easy, practical advice because we all need to stop being stressed balls. Stress is not just how life is!!
What is one thing that makes you feel magical?
In this moment, owning the power that I have been so afraid to own for such a long time. I have run away from being seen because of my own traumas being heard, and I have sat on goals that have been on my heart for a long time because I’ve been afraid to be seen and heard by the world and literally just afraid of my own power. And so what makes me feel magical at this moment, is that I am finally at a space in my life where I’m open to the magic, the power that I’m holding.
And so, I’m writing a book right now and I am almost finished. I’m working through the self-publishing and printing process. But I’m writing a book, I’m launching a membership for women who are focused on really wanting to nourish themselves more in this somatic and whole way. And I’m doing all of these things that are big and scary, and it feels amazing and magical.
LINKS
Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/kimbarnesjeffersoncoach
Facebook Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/fitgirlmagic/
Website:
https://www.kimbarnesjefferson.com/
Podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fit-girl-magic-healthy-living-for-women-over-40/id1476883661
Cracking The Belly Fat Code:
https://kimbarnesjefferson.lpages.co/bfcmarch_this2023/
Dominiece Website:
https://movexstill.com/
Stress-Free Living; Dominiece Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/dominiecerclifton/?hl=en
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiece-r-clifton-288b20b3/
The School Of Healing Podcast:
https://movexstill.com/healing-podcast
Our Deepest Fear Poem
https://youtu.be/2_fDhqRk_Ro
