The Menstruality Podcast - 126: Healing Our Trauma, Awakening Our Power (Kimberly Ann Johnson)

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Our guest today is Kimberly Ann Johnson, who has been working hands on in integrative women’s health and trauma recovery for a decade with 1000s of women, as a Somatic Experiencing™ Practitioner, sexological body worker, educator, and author. She’s the author of many books including The Call of The Wild, and her work has been featured in the NY Times, Forbes and Vogue. She’s a sought-after teacher it feels like an extra special treat that she opened up and shared generously about her journey to understand the impact of her own trauma experiences in her body. We explore the teachings of Call of the Wild book, about what we can all learn about the healthy predator expression of the jaguar in the journey to heal trauma. As Kimberley says on her website, “if you can learn to speak your body’s language, and transmute trauma into positive, reparative experiences in the present, if you can make the shift into acting from a stance of your deepest, truest self … everything changes.”We explore:Kimberley’s menstrual cycle journey in the years running up to menopause; how she has navigated her symptoms and what the journey has taught her about resting, movement and how to tend to herself at this phase of life. .How having a baby and navigating the post-partum period transformed her life. Kimberly’s fresh approach to nervous system repair, and how women can learn to step out of the prey role that we are conditioned into - and which puts us in a default fawn, freeze or flee nervous system response - and awaken their inner healthy predator.---Receive our free video training: Love Your Cycle, Discover the Power of Menstrual Cycle Awareness to Revolutionise Your Life - www.redschool.net/love---The Menstruality Podcast is hosted by Red School. We love hearing from you. To contact us, email [e-mail]---Social media:Red School: @redschool - https://www.instagram.com/red.schoolSophie Jane Hardy: @sophie.jane.hardy - https://www.instagram.com/sophie.jane.hardy

Welcome to the Menstruality Podcast, where we share inspiring conversations about the power of menstrual cycle awareness and conscious menopause. This podcast is brought to you by Red School, where we're training the menstruality leaders of the future. I'm your host, Sophie Jane Hardy, and I'll be joined often by Red School's founders, Alexandra and Sharni, as well as an inspiring group of pioneers, activists, changemakers, and creatives to explore how you can unashamedly claim the power of the menstrual cycle to activate your unique form of leadership for yourself, your community and the world. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I've been wanting to interview this woman since the beginning of the podcast. Kimberly Ann Johnson is a woman that you

may well know. She's been working hands-on in integrative women's health and trauma recovery for a decade with thousands of women as a somatic experiencing practitioner, a sexological body worker, an educator, and an author. She's the author of the book, The Call of the Wild, which I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that has this amazing picture of a jaguar on the front. Her work's been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Vogue. She's very much a sought-after teacher and I think that's why it feels like such an extra special treat that she opened up and shared so generously about her personal journey to understand the impact of her own trauma experiences in her body and I want to share a trigger warning here.

Kimberly does speak about her experiences around sexual assault. So if that isn't something that will serve you to listen to now, then perhaps come back to this episode another time. So in our conversation, Kimberly speaks about the teachings of the Call of the Wild book. What we can all learn about the healthy predator expression of the jaguar in our own personal journey to heal trauma. As Kimberley says on her website, if you can learn to speak your body's language and transmute trauma into a positive, reparative experience in the present, if you can make the shift into acting from a stance of your deepest,

truest self, everything changes. So let's get started with Kimberley Ann Johnson. So Kimberley, I'm delighted to be with you. We've been dancing around scheduling for months and we're finally here and I'm so happy and I've got your book the jaguar eyes from your book staring at me as I'm doing this before we get into all the millions of questions I have for you I'd love to hear a bit about your cycle experience at the moment because I was listening to a recent interview and you were saying that perimenopause is taking you for a real ride on multiple levels would you be willing to share a bit about where you're at today with that, how it's feeling at the moment for you? Yes. Uh, I think that I'm about 80% of the way through

the menopausal journey. I know some people consider that menopause is just a moment. So it's just like the moment that you haven't bled for a year. But for me, I'm just kind of considering this whole process of getting kicked out of the lunar cycle as my menopausal journey. For me, it's just started way earlier than I thought it would because my mom told me that she was about 55 and our fertility journeys have been somewhat similar. Although our lives have not been that similar because I've been solo breadwinning and probably taking on a lot of different kinds of stress than the stresses that my mom had. So my bleed stopped for the first time March 2020 at the pandemic and I was living in Brooklyn, as I mentioned, so I figured that I was just, you know, I am sensitive, and that I was just feeling that what was happening

in the collective, and then I didn't bleed for three months, and then I moved back to California for a little while, and the first week I moved back, I got my cycle again, so I thought, oh, it was just that extreme shock and freeze in my system, and now we're, you know, going into 2024. And this year, I've had something like three or four bleeds. As far as symptoms, I've had a lot less symptoms this year than I did the previous two years, which is why it makes me think I'm towards the end. You know, I had years of a lot of hot flashes. And now I'd say the majority like exhaustion to I'm not as exhausted as I was. I'm not as my irritation and frustration isn't like just on the surface all the time. My daughter reminded me, oh, remember when you just kept turning the

air conditioning on in the car and rolling down the windows. And I actually didn't remember that, which was interesting because my experience has been that my mom doesn't remember a lot. And when I, when I started remembering, I started remembering incidences when she was in her late forties, where we went on a trip together and she fought with these people on the train because they wouldn't keep the windows down because she was so hot. And so I started remembering, oh, I think she just doesn't have the whole story of how it was for her. I remember when she got plastic surgery. I remember when she all of a sudden up and went on this big trip by herself and everyone in our family is kind of like, what are you doing? Um, then I could start recognizing some of those impulses or, uh, sensations I was having.

So I'm going to be 50, uh, next year. And I would expect, I only, I mean, each bleed now I think is like, maybe this is the last one and they're not very robust. It's sort of, they feel like there's not too much endometrial tissue. It's just kind of like blood or, or lightness and then it doesn't last very long. So, um, yeah, but I made a list the other day of all of the things that have changed and it's really shocking when you read it all together. I haven't read it all together to anyone because, yeah, it's just it's pretty shocking. But I'm not someone who feels that I'm a victim to my biology or that something bad is happening to me. I did do some Dutch testing, which is like, you know, everyday-ish urine testing to see where my hormones were at. And

when the doctor read them, it was a naturopath. He said, you have like zero hormones left, which I thought was actually hilarious because I was like, wow, it's amazing. I'm walking around like with no hormones at all. Like I think there's probably some hormones, but just maybe not the ones we're talking about. And then his next line. So he started with,'s probably some hormones, but just maybe not the ones we're talking about. And then his next line. So he started with you have zero hormones, which didn't feel good to hear, but it was like, OK. And then the next line was, but don't worry, we can replace them all. So I went through an interesting journey this summer where I got sent testosterone, estrogen,

estradiol and progesterone. The estrogen and testosterone were mixed together. And then estradiol was a suppository and then progesterone was a separate thing. And in the mail with that, I got a note that said three to four hours after you use these don't handle small children or animals because it can cause genital swelling in the animals. It can cause them to have a bleed, even if they're already spayed. It can cause, you know, it was like in one other thing. And so that was really strong for me. Like, wow.

You know, OK, so animals and babies, but I have a child in my house and like I don't want to be thinking when I see someone in public that I might be hurting them in some way by touching them. Then I started thinking about my advocacy against the ubiquitous use of hormonal birth control. And I started thinking about like why I feel that way about that and what the research is that I know. And then I just got really surprised when so many people in my midst who share similar philosophies on physiological birth and non-intervention in women's health, unless it's really necessary, are just like, yes, HRT, like you have to do it. This is feminist. This is like why suffer in this idea about suffering that comes with PMS and comes with birth a lot of the time. So in that time,

I have been having a lot of pretty extreme vaginal symptoms. I'm a sexological body worker. So I've done a lot of work in my pelvis. I've done a lot of work with other women's pelvises. And I was really shocked that like this was happening to me. Like I was having painful sex and my tissue was tearing and my pH was really changing. And I was smelling in a way that I was like, God, I've never smelled even my armpits, just like so much more BO. And so I, and I was about to get married. So I was like preferring to have more comfort if I could. So I got all those meds. And I also learned like, well, what does this bioidentical thing mean?

Because that sounds good. And then I learned that it's just the same. Like it's just a rebranding of the same thing. So I was like, okay, interesting. So in the summer, I had two weeks of teaching at a farm in Canada. I co-wrote a book with Steven Jenkinson called Reckoning, and he and I have been working with each other. So I went there to teach a training called Mothering the Bones, and then I did a training with him, which is on a farm. I wasn't driving, walking around,

eating food from there, doing work I love, feeling super engaged with the people that were there and not being alone a lot. And then I went from there to Brazil where I got married. And I was also with a lot of people that I love and, you know, doing things that were meaningful. And so when the doctor gave me the hormones, he was like, you know, take these in the three weeks, you're going to feel amazing. And then he said, I said, well, how long would I be on them? And he said, well, like 10 years, but I also have clients in their seventies that are still on them and they feel amazing. And I just was thinking like, okay, I I'm a pretty radical non-interventionist just that's how,

and I know that in some ways that's a privilege because I haven't had any major health problems that would make me question that. Uh, so I just took five days of the Estradiol, the internal suppositories. But I started feeling I was like swimming in a river there. And it just didn't feel right for me to be bringing that into that ecosystem. And I didn't take anything else. But at the end of those six weeks, I felt incredible. And I realized that for me, I it was like the lack of stress, the being with people. Because in my usual life, I have one child and I work at home and I have a mostly online business right now.

So I'm just pretty much by myself with a screen a lot of the time. And so during that time, I was with people. I was doing meaningful work. I was with people. I was doing meaningful work. I was outside. And since then, I haven't felt like I wanted to take any of the hormones. Now, I have a podcast. You probably know that. It's called Sex, Birth, Trauma. And I've had women on the podcast.

Actually, they're both from the UK, Kate Codrington and Catherine Hale, to talk about their menopausal journeys. And in Catherine's case, she was also a non-interventionist and her symptoms were so extreme that she was willing to use hormonal replacement therapy. And it was, it's, I think she would say it saved her life. Like it made her go from a non-functioning person who had insomnia and like couldn't sleep at night and couldn't do anything to someone who could be present. So I'm not a fundamentalist.

I'm not an orthodox. Just for me, that's how it's been so far. But this is my first time going through it. I don't have a lot of people that I talk to about it. And I definitely don't have a lot of people to talk to that live similarly as I do that are older than me and have already gone through it. So I'm just really paying attention and paying attention to a lot of my work with Stephen

Jenkinson has been about elderhood and our cultural relationship to youth and our cultural absence of eldering. And just the thought of putting myself, you know, I live in a home with a 16 year old who's in the emergence of her fertility and I'm on the waning of the fertility. What would that mean to take the hormones to put myself in the same place as her? And what does it mean as a mother to her, but also as a, I'm not really too concerned actually about like the public figure part of things, but just who I want to be in the world.

So that's where I'm at right now. I had a bleed like two weeks ago or something, surprise. And I've been really present to, like I've had the things like the menopausal apron, which is like the weight gain in the front and around my hips and, and real extreme sensitivity with that too, not emotional, but just like the tissue being really sensitive. But I have had a sense that as it's happening, I used to be really into ice immersion. And that just became too stressful for my system when, and I know it's supposed to be stressful, but it's supposed to be a good kind of stress. And for me, it just wasn't, it was just

too much. And so it was a lot like the postpartum time where things that used to work and used to make me feel good, weren't working anymore. And so I had to really, really reevaluate resting and what kind of movement I could do that would be helpful. And I feel I could feel that it was like puberty, like, OK, yeah, I'm gaining weight in these places and it's redistributing. But I don't think this is the end of things. I think this is like a transitional phase and I don't know where it's going to go. But that's that's been my sense of it. Wow.

Thank you for sharing in so much depth there. It's really beautiful. And I know our audience will really appreciate it. Alexandra and Shani, who created Red School have written a book called Wise Power, and they see menopause as yet a multiple year transition on the physical level, but also emotional, spiritual, and it's always so meaningful to hear from a woman who is actually going through it and how all of the different nuances are showing up so thank you I'd love to ask you about the content like jaguar jaguar jaguar energy in the context of this but we'll get there we'll get there because really first for anyone listening who doesn't know you and your work and I imagine most people listening do because we've

had many people requesting to have you on the podcast and that I wanted to have you from the very beginning so but for those who aren't familiar could you share a bit about your journey from the fourth trimester work well even before that the yoga the rolfing the fourth trimester all the way to call of the wild yeah you know in retrospect you can connect certain dots that you don't know are connected at the time but the way I'll just say how I got into yoga which I think is pretty common is that like you and one of my teachers would say you know you don't go to yoga when you're just feeling your best, right? You don't find spiritual practice when you're, you know, at the top of your game. So in my case, when I have red hair, which is, I guess, more common in the UK. And these days, I have a nephew with red hair who is doesn't get teased at all. And it's like, cool. But when I was in school,

it was something that I got teased a lot about freckles, red hair. I had glasses. My parents put me in a Kelly green jumpsuit the first day of fifth grade. So I got the nickname froggy and I also was really brainy and I skipped a grade. So I was a little bit out of step socially because I was younger than everyone. And because I was really into school, I just loved school. I loved, I loved doing more, getting more homework and so unusual for most kids. So of course, and I remember my mom saying like, I just didn't know what to say to you because you were so innocent about it and you really loved it, but I knew how the rest of the kids are going to react to that. So, you know, I came from that. I kind of compensated for the lack of comfort socially by being even smarter and just putting all of my eggs in the smart basket,

I guess you could say. And in high school, I never had any dates. I never got asked out. I didn't think that I was particularly attractive. I live in Southern California. So my aesthetic is not common here. When I went to college on the East Coast, it was a totally different thing. In the first week of school, I got asked out on three dates and I just couldn't believe it. And I didn't really know what to do. I was so confused. Is it okay to do that? What does that mean about me? How should I choose? I just started school. Maybe I shouldn't get a boyfriend right away. Maybe I should try to make friends. And I just didn't really know how to navigate. I didn't have any practice with that. And pretty early on, I was sexually assaulted by another student.

And it changed my ability to be present with school. So I'd always loved it. I went to a great college. I worked really hard so that I could get into this one college. And then I wasn't doing well. I wasn't getting good grades anymore. I wasn't able to go to class. I was having trouble socializing. But I didn't really well. I wasn't getting good grades anymore. I wasn't able to go to class. I was having trouble socializing. But I didn't really know what was wrong.

I didn't really understand what was happening. So I went away for the summer. I came back. And then I confided in someone and they said, you know, that's a really big deal. And like, you should go and tell the student council type of thing. So I went there and they said, oh, you should go to this group therapy. And so I thought, okay, I guess I should do this. And then they were like, this is serious, you should file a complaint. And so I was kind of like, well, I wouldn't like this to happen to other people, but I don't really think I want to do this, but okay. So then I filed a complaint. Then once I filed a complaint, it was like, this is really serious. And so you

should take this to the school court. And I was still like, I don't really know. It's he said, she said, I don't, this doesn't usually go well, but you know, keep in mind at the time I'm 17, I graduated from high school when I was 16. So I was 17. And I was just being kind of guided by people who were saying this is what you should do not just for yourself, but for other people. So I ended up having a court case. And it ended up being a no decision. So they said there wasn't enough evidence to decide which had never happened at the school. And it felt like a complete waste of energy because for months I had been, you know, tested to prepare for my testimony and all of this, it was a student jury. So all the,

it was people that I knew that were like my TAs that were on the jury. And I ended up leaving school. I ended up not being able to do it. And I came back to where I'm from, which is San Diego. And on the same street where I live, there was a yoga studio and a climbing gym. And I was, it wasn't a climbing gym yet, but it was like an REI type of place that had a climbing thing. So I said, okay, I feel like I should try some things that I'm afraid of because I was feeling like I can't take care of, like, I just felt like the world didn't make sense anymore.

I thought that I was a good person and that if I was just a good person that, that nothing bad would really happen to me, which showed that I, you know, came from a pretty sheltered environment, but that's why I went far away to school was because I knew I was from a sheltered environment. And I tried yoga and it just so happened that it was an amazing teacher who stayed my teacher until she died in the early 2000s. And I was like, I need to be of service. I need to go somewhere where I'm not because I was just obsessing about myself. I was just thinking about myself and me and everything was happening. It was driving me crazy. So I went to Thailand and I volunteered at a refugee camp. And from there, I went to India and continued studying. And I used to be a dancer. So I had been dancing at school. So then I went back to school.

I transferred and finished my undergraduate degree, finished my dance career. And then I graduated first in my class in college. And everyone was like, so are you going to, are you going to go to the think tank? Are you going to go into politics? Are you going to be a lawyer? I got a degree in social policy. And I'm like, no, I'm going to New York to dance. Like I'm like, I want something just different. I don't want to do this brain thing anymore. Like I want to just, I don't want to be known for this. I want to just do what I love doing. And about a year into waiting tables and auditioning in New York, I had like checked all the boxes. I auditioned for Debbie Allen. I auditioned for the Rockettes. My roommate was a Rockette. I really wanted to dance for Ron Brown Evidence. He's a black choreographer. He doesn't hire white dancers. I was like, this is just never

going to happen for you no matter how bad you want it. So I sort of said, okay. And I went to India again and I decided to just devote myself to yoga. So I did yoga and taught yoga full time for about 10 years. And somewhere in that journey, after a couple of years, I heard about Richard Freeman, who lived in Boulder, Colorado. He was a legend. Everyone was like, Richard, Richard. And then I so I didn't even think he was a real person. Like, I thought he was like living in a cave somewhere. And then I found out he lived in Boulder, Colorado. And I was

like, Oh, I can actually go meet this person. But I thought it was too weird to move somewhere to just meet the teacher. So I learned about rolfing school, and I had already been rolfed. And it was the most significant bodywork experience I'd had. And I could tell that rolfers knew something about the body that other people didn't know. So I thought, okay, I'll be a better yoga teacher if I go to Rolfing school. So I went to Rolfing school and it's in Boulder. And then I met Richard and I ended up teaching at that studio for five years. And yeah, so that was like the better part of my twenties. I taught yoga and I did body work and my life was organized around my next trip to India. And I loved every part of yoga. I loved

chanting. I studied Sanskrit. I studied, um, scripture. It met my intellectual need. I love to sing. I'm good at languages. I, the body part of things was a revelation to me. And I had excellent teachers, as I mentioned. And then a serendipitous thing happened and I ended up in Brazil. After a guru experience that was very complex and layered and very fracturing. So I didn't want to do yoga. I was like, I'm done with yoga. I don't want to do that anymore. I went back to grad school for education. I tried to get a job in the public school system teaching. I did not get a job even being like a valedictorian in my undergraduate class. And I was going to take a huge pay cut from teaching yoga to education.

So I was like, okay, well, life's trying to tell me something here. Every time I've tried to get away from this, I just get like drop kicked back into it. So I ended up in Brazil. And so I would say, you know, that the first part of my life was in relationship to this, my relationship to male authority. And it got more and more refined

from that first assault. Then I had a situation with the college professor that came on to me the day after I graduated, clearly premeditated. And what do I do with that? And then having the situation with my guru that like had all of this knowledge that I didn't even know that I wanted to learn and was willing to offer it to me. But with conditions and those conditions were sexual and kind of took apart all of my all of the things I thought philosophically. He had kind of built the house of cards. So it was very it was like a matrix that was hard to get out of. And I would have to give up the learning if I wasn't willing to trade the relationship. So then pretty soon after I went to Brazil, I had a how did I decide to have a baby the way that I did?

I joke and say I just dove off a cliff, because I was 32 when I went to Brazil. And the weekend before I left, I took a workshop with an Iyengar yoga teacher named Kofi Busia. And he's a real teacher, like he's not just teaching asana. And he's a real teacher in the sense that he the weekend started with 30 people. And every day it got smaller because people didn't want, they don't want the teaching. They want to be, they want to feel good. So he was talking to this group of people that I was part of. And the last day there was this woman that was just really, she was frankly very annoying. And she was one of those people that you could tell her whole,

like she's sighing and, you know, just making it very obvious how she's feeling about what's happening. So he finally just went up to her and said, like, is there something that you want to work on today? And she was like, well, you're asking me. And he's like, yeah, is there, you know, is there something that you want to work on? And she said, well, I'm just here working on the grief of never having become a mother. And so the whole room just kind of like sympathized with her in that moment. Like, oh. And then his response was, well, have you ever been pregnant? And she said, yeah, I've been pregnant twice.

And he said to her, he's a bit old fashioned. He said, well, you don't seem like a hussy. So these men were good enough to sleep with, but not good enough to be a father. And then he followed that up by saying, so you wanted the relationship more than the child. And the way that I that landed for me and my system was I want both. But if I do have to choose, I really want to be a mother. And at the same time, and that was something that I always knew, but I had never had a situation that was so clear like that. I had a lot of friends in their late 30s, 40s, early 40s that were desperate, that didn't

have kids, desperate to have kids, had been doing yoga for the past 20 years, focusing only on their spiritual work and therapy, their relationship to their parents. And now they were hitting their biological wall and they weren't partnered and they were having a really, really hard time getting pregnant. Like I had a friend who is a vegan who was eating sheep placenta because she was just like by any means necessary kind of thing. And so that's the waters that I was in. And I'm like, I don't want that. I just knew that I didn't, I don't want a technological journey here. I don't want a medical journey. I don't want the desperation. That's a part of this. I don't want to feel like I'm up against a time clock. So I, that's not why I went to Brazil, but when I got

there and instead of dating men in the U.S. that I was meeting that were like 40 and they didn't know if they wanted kids and they weren't sure and they needed to go therapy, the men there were just like, yeah, like, great. You know, the first time I was with my daughter's father, I said, we got to be really careful because I was living we were living on an island. And I'm like, this place is like a fertile womb and and he's like oh yeah but you'd be a great mother and I just every cell in my body was like flashing green lights because no one had ever said anything like that like yeah okay and he didn't say we'll be good parents he didn't say I want to be a father he said you would be a great mother and so within a couple of months I was

pregnant and I was totally happy about it. I was a little scared, but I was also just like, yeah, this is what I wanted. And, you know, what was what started out as a fairy tale didn't stay a fairy tale and became complicated quickly. And there was all kinds of things that I didn't see before because the green lights were blinding me. And when I became a mother, so when I gave birth, I changed my whole life to give birth. I spent all my savings to have the midwife I wanted.

I had to move from an island to a city to be able to birth at home, which is always what I knew that I wanted. When I, within 45 minutes of giving birth, my mom came in and i just said this is all bullshit like this whole equality thing we're different species like i just i just in the moment of the viscerality of what it took to give birth i just every part of my feminism got taken apart or in what i mean i mean i'm still a feminist but what it was for me at that point this idea that like that women can do anything that men can do and we can do it better and we can do it all I was just like this is crazy and after I had a baby I had no plan so I had a major birth plan and I had done all kinds of stuff to have the

birth that I wanted. But my idea of having a baby was like, I'm good with kids. I'm a great babysitter. I'm the oldest, got a lot of cousins. I'm, I'm healthy. So I just, and I, and I'm not a gear person. So it was like, I don't want to, I don't want to crib. I don't want any of that stuff. Like I got my breasts and I got a sling. What else do I need? So it was a rude awakening because I had a tear in my pelvic floor. Um, I was stitched up with material that my body rejected, but I didn't know that. So I was having all kinds of symptoms, but I didn't know why I wasn't able to get my midwives back to check me. One time, one of my midwives came and she just made me a bowl of strawberries and talked to me and didn't

even look at my vagina, which is like what I was really wanting help with. So I slowly was, my daughter's father was working night shifts and sleeping during the day. I only had people with me for about eight days after I had my daughter and then I was alone and I couldn't walk well. I was in constant pain. Then I was having milk supply problems and it was just all snowballing. And I was looking up on Google holistic postpartum care, alternative postpartum care. And all of it came up and this is 16 years ago. The only thing, and it would probably be the same right now, honestly, but all that came up was postpartum depression and postpartum depression is real and postpartum depression.

I'm like, yeah, anyone in this circumstance would be fucking depressed. Like I'm not clinically depressed. I'm depressed because I'm hungry because my body's messed up and none of the tools that I have are working in this scenario because I'm being brought back to my own. Like I could tell, oh, I'm reliving this stage and I don't have anyone here holding me. And no perspective on how long this is going to last or anything. So I realized, oh, this is a black hole in women's health because I come from San Diego, Boulder, Colorado, the bastions of human potential movement, the bastions of alternative care. But every part of this step has been about

me not being a woman. So in my yoga practice, it was like, I'm not practicing differently, because I'm a woman. Sure, I'll take a day off if I have my period, maybe there's not a workshop, or there's not something I really want to do. But that's not stopping me. And anatomy class, we didn't learn anything different about rolfing, how to rolf female pelvises or male pelvises. We didn't learn about like, how do you work on a postpartum mom? You know, we didn't learn anything. It was just, here's the anatomy and women are different and just work it out kind of thing. So that postpartum time really showed me like, wow, my womanhood and my femaleness does make a difference.

And my spirituality is different. And my body is a part of this spirituality. And now what? Like now where do I look? Okay, I'm going to jump in here and pause Kimberly's story just for a couple of minutes. And as I share later in our conversation, I was so personally moved by the resonance I felt with several elements of the story that she's telling around her nervous system, her trauma, her relationship to the patriarchal structures that we live in. And I imagine you might be feeling it too. It's amazing,

amazing conversation. But I'm going to pause for a moment to invite you to join us for our menstruality leadership program this year it's an immersive apprenticeship to cyclical wisdom as it lives within you whether you currently have a menstrual cycle or not people describe it as life transforming and we've been sharing stories from our graduates to illustrate all the different ways that the program has supported them and today we're hearing from Dimple so I'll hand over to her and afterwards we'll carry on with Kimberley's story and teachings. Hi everyone my name is Dimple Mukherjee and I did my menstruality leadership program training in March of 2023.

And it's been an absolute game changer for me in my life and in my career as an occupational therapist and also as a coach, a personal coach. my favorite part of the whole program was just the amount of support that I got and how held I felt in this program as I was guided by Shani and Alexandra as well as the mentors. And as far as leadership is concerned, what I'm really trusting is the unknown right now as I'm in menopause and really keeping faith that when I come out on the other side, that all the deep work that I've done that is invisible actually to the world will be so much more valuable women that I've been enlisting partnerships or in peer pods with, I've created so many valuable connections and connections that really speak my language. I can truly say from the bottom of my heart that the community of women that are in these programs are just incredible souls who are doing the work that our world needs right now. And I love that I've met so many women from all over the world.

And the container of the Malastorality Leadership Program at Red School has really held me and held the sacredness of each of our lives. And I really want to thank them for that. I moved back from Brazil. I left my daughter's father. I moved back to the States. I went to a doctor. The doctor did not give me a pelvic exam and said, you need a full pelvic floor reconstruction. I clearly did not want surgery. I know enough about Chinese medicine. And I knew I knew a lot about my pelvis already. I just didn't know about giving birth. I was just like, I'm not doing that. So I had to figure out, well, then how am I going to heal myself? And like, what do I need to heal? What exactly is happening?

So I went on a journey. I got a real stroke of incredible divine intervention in the form of a job in Thailand, teaching a teacher training for yoga. And when I got there, it was the first time they hired a nanny for me. So I would teach hour and a half classes. And then I would be able to come back to my daughter for a couple of hours and then teach again and come back. But she was there with me. There was a buffet so I didn't have to cook and there was good food for her and good food

for me. There was bodywork that was affordable so I could start getting bodywork. And I went to a bookstore there. And in that bookstore, I found Robin Lim's book, After the Baby's Birth. And I found Aviva Ram's book after the baby's birth. And I found Aviva Ram's book, Natural Health After Baby. And it was a revelation because I had never seen anything like that. I'd seen all the INA books about birth, but I had no idea that after birth was a thing. So then I'm learning, oh, this is a thing. And then I'm in Thailand where there's

like down the street, there's a place where women go every day to get body work or even to stay there. And then I start asking around and I had been in India earlier and I'd been with a new mom. So I kind of was, oh yeah, I do remember this. I do remember that like all the women were there and all the women were doing this and I didn't have anyone like woman or man, like I was just alone all the time. So that research of healing myself, which took six and a half years, and then together with researching other cultures, is what became the fourth trimester. So lots of people read the fourth trimester, and they say, well, I didn't have this. And I say, yeah, I didn't either. I didn't write that book, because I had the experience, I wrote it as an aspirational guide of something that I know is possible, but that and my daughter will experience if she decides to become a mother.

But I didn't. And this is a thing that is the reality of being a woman right now is that we are in purgatory. We're in a purgatory where we know what we need. We don't have it. And so we're having to straddle that and work on behalf of future generations, and we might not see the fruits of that labor. And then, as a result of that book, at that time, I was already seeing people. So what I also realized was not only was womanhood siloed from a lot of these practices, whether it was yoga or meditation or, you know, anatomy, body work. Also the pelvis was separate because the pelvis is generally sex-based. So you get a massage, but you touch everything except for breasts and genitals and, you know, you, you drape them. And, and I realized because of the internal work that I got, oh, there's nothing really special about this. Like because in rolfing, we work in noses and mouths.

It's just that there's a legality issue and there's a shame issue. And there's good reasons for that, because we all know that abuse is ubiquitous and there's a protective element to it. But also there's a, there's a ramification for that because it tends to be like, you know, I call the postpartum time a black hole in women's health. And it's like the pelvis is also like a dark space that is unexplored. So I started, people started telling me their stories is essentially what happened because I'd had an easy female journey. I didn't have hard periods.

I think I generally have low hormonal anyway, like I've never had unwanted pregnancies. I'm not especially voluptuous. So I really felt like I had it kind of easy. And then I started talking and people were like, oh yeah, my back's been hurting for 20 years. Oh, what happened 20 years ago? I had it kind of easy. And then I started talking and people were like, oh, yeah, my back's been hurting for 20 years. Oh, what happened 20 years ago? I had a baby. Oh, and it's no one's ever helped you with it.

Oh, my tailbone's broken and it hurts all the time. Oh, what happened? Well, it broke during my first birth and they said it would fix itself in my second birth and it hasn't. And I'm still in pain. So I just would say, well, do you want me to work on you? Do you want like, let's give it a try. And then people would just get relief right away because the vaginal and anal tissue is very malleable. And so it responds really quickly to touch, to oil, to heat, to listening.

And so I just began doing that work. I got trained as a sexological body worker, I got trained in somatic experiencing, because once I started working with pelvises, a lot of things started coming to the surface. And I felt I was able to be present with it, but I didn't exactly know how to transmute it. So I put those bodies of work together. And I in three years, I treated 800 people for either birth injuries, birth trauma, gynecological surgeries, or sexual boundary violations. And that incubation period was great learning. And my wait lists, I had practices in five cities. And my wait lists were, like, I had 120 people or something or maybe even like 200 people on the waitlist in New York and everyone's like that's amazing and I'm like no that's

terrifying like because I can't train people fast enough to work with how many women need this support so I zoomed out a little bit then me too happened in the second wave of it in October 2017. And I made a video that went viral about predator prey dynamics and how assuming that women are always prey and men are always predator and therefore prey is good. So women are good and predator is bad. And so men are bad, isn't going to change the dynamics that we're really looking to change for a world that we want to belong to. And as a result of that, at the time, I'd already taught a low back care class online and I had taught a sexuality and spiritual spirituality class online. But I was a little nervous about teaching trauma work online, which is funny now.

Right. Six years later, it's like that's all people do is teach like people do the freaking training online. People train in somatic experiencing only online. I'm like, somatic, body, body, screen, body, screen, screen, body. Okay. But anyway, at the time, it felt like a really big risk because I couldn't be there in person with someone in case something happened or see their responses.

But I gained so much in somatic experiencing school as far as just how to be a human and recognize what's happening in your system that I really felt like everyone should have those tools available to them without having to go to a long training. um there's something like 8 000 people that have taken activate your inner jaguar and then and that the first one was called activate your inner jaguar a real world understanding of your nervous system and embodied consent can we just before you get into that speak to where the jaguar jag i'm just gonna say it how i say it where the jaguar came in I love it you all I've had a lot of practice saying it your way because I said it for the entire time to talk about where the jaguar is from like where where it came into your story where it entered like where that course came from yeah by the way I haven't even had caffeine today if you can believe it because I've been talking for like a half hour straight so but there's a lot to fit in when you're trying when you're going for the life story

yeah it's super obvious how these things to connect but some people are like I don't understand how the fourth trimester like I know you for motherhood stuff and I don't understand how this relates to me it's really obvious but that's why I feel like I have to tell the separate parts yeah it's amazing I've been nodding so much throughout because there are so many points on my journey that are that relate exactly like early sexual assault at college um going into yoga fragmented experiences with gurus the whole male authority journey take propelling me into a journey into my body and my own pelvis and pelvic work and and I can just imagine that our listeners are nodding along too because

the women and people that listen to this podcast will get it they'll get the connections that you're making yes yes yes okay so how did the jaguar okay so the jaguar comes in two ways but the main way is that at a certain point, I realized I'd done a lot of therapy with women and I wasn't, I, I, it was, it was helpful. I mean, I had some incredible therapists, but I realized that on a visceral level, I was afraid of men somehow. And I had already been married and I'd, I'd been, you know, dating, but there was something that I wasn't getting to. And so I thought, okay, I need a male practitioner. And I found one, Eduardo Brito,

he lives in Rio, and he is a martial artist and a yoga teacher. And he's quite big in stature. And he kind of matched the stature of my perpetrator. So I went to him and I said, you know, I remember I was sitting across this table from him and I said, I came here to work on limits and boundaries with men. And then I just cried for like 40 minutes and I didn't even know why I was crying. I didn't even know. I didn't even know what I was going to say when I got there. But over time, he started and, you know, somatics has even know what I was going to say when I got there. But over time, he started in, you know, somatics has gotten very heady. I don't know if you've noticed that. But like, somatics is, yeah, it's bizarre to me. It's like people intellectualize somatics, but real somatics, like he had a broomstick and was like chasing me around his office with a broomstick

so that I could practice fighting or fleeing. I could practice the responses and not freezing and be in relationship to someone who's predating and can I hold my ground. So we were doing that work together. And then I went on a vacation with my daughter and we were five adults and one child. I think the adults wanted pizza and she wanted sushi. And so she ended up getting sushi. And later on, one of my friends called me and said, you're raising a really authoritarian child. And I was totally insulted, really defensive, mad at this person. But also this is a person that I loved and that I knew she was putting the friendship on the line. So she obviously thought it was really important to tell me that. So I went to

Eduardo and I said to him, you know, my friend said this, and I'm, I just was like, I'm so tired. I, I have to be the unconditional love and I have to be the discipline. And at all times, I'm being both things. And he looked at me and he said, do you know that I'm from the Amazon? And I said, no. He said, and he's saying it in Portuguese. I'm from Acre. And look at you. Look at you.

You're a jaguar. Look at your skin. Look at you. Look at you. You're a jaguar. Look at your skin. Look at your spot. So he was like commenting on like my brownish skin and my freckles. It's the females that teach the cubs to hunt. So in that moment, he wasn't, some people think it's like my spirit animal. It's not my spirit animal. It's not my spirit animal. In that moment, he was giving me an image to work with that was fracturing this thing I had that was basically saying, well, males do discipline and females do unconditional love.

And that's how I was looking at it. But it was like, no, but it's the females that teach the cubs to hunt. So he said, go watch videos of the females and their cubs and start wrestling and start copying what they're doing with your daughter. And I immediately understood because of what he and I had been doing together. And so I started physically dominating my daughter and not smothering her or not hurting her, but letting her know with my body. And the exhaustion is what a lot of women feel when you talk about boundaries, because it's they their bodies aren't used to holding healthy, sympathetic energy, which is kind of its whole own lecture on its own, which you can find on

my podcast and snippets and read the book. And the first chapter of the book is free at KimberlyannJohnson.com slash chapter uh but for the sake of what we're talking about now so it was like restoring right dominance in my relationship with my daughter and i like many people listening was raised even though i was not raised myself in an authoritarian environment um in fact my parents allowed a lot of behavior that because my mom wanted us to be able to express ourselves that retrospectively I think was not helpful at all. Like I remember my sister like yelling at my grandmother and I remember feeling so horrified to watch my sister just scream and cuss my grandmother out. And like that that was a possibility. But we see this a lot in parenting where people don't want to disrupt the like essential perfect nature of their child.

And so they lack boundaries or they're trying to overcompensate for a really rigid environment that they grew up in or they imagine. So the Jaguar was a gift that Eduardo gave me that was like really about, okay, what is it for you to take this power? Because I was, I was exhausted and not really functioning, right? It makes you sick to basically not be able to hold your boundaries. And because it was only one child and one adult, and I saw this, I've been seeing this recently. It's just really easy to go along with what the child wants. Because especially I was already a very, I still am, I'm a very flexible person. I'm open to a lot of different things. It's, I'm like good in a lot. It's easy for me to sleep on a couch or I don't, I am a go with the flow person, but it was really making my daughter not feel safe

because there wasn't clear structure. And so then fast forward a little bit, I'm in my office. I used to practice in a dome and a woman comes in and she's wearing like lots of layers. I live in Southern California. So it's the coldest it gets here is, you know, 15 degrees Celsius or something. So it was very unusual for someone to be wearing a hat and a scarf and multiple layers. She started telling me she had just had three children that after her third, she just felt like she was almost agoraphobic. She felt so energetically sensitive. She didn't really want to go out of the house that like if anyone was

begging for money or like she couldn't not stop, but she just felt very disoriented and didn't want to sleep in the same bed with her husband. So I said, okay, I'm thinking in my mind, and we have this wolf-rabbit dynamic. And I think, okay, well, she's already rabbit, clearly. She's in camouflage right now. She wants to be hidden. So I think, okay, well, why don't you be the wolf and I'll be the rabbit? And the moment that I said, why don't you be the wolf, which would be the equivalent of a jaguar and an antelope or whatever predator prey dynamic you're going for.

She just literally became like an ice sculpture. She went into a submissive, cowering gesture and then she could talk. So she was like, this is so weird. And I was like, yeah, she's like, she's like, I feel frozen. I'm like, yeah, you're in a freeze, but it's OK. And, you know, a freeze in that moment with another person that could work through that and wait for her system to naturally come out of that freeze. I recognized, oh, it's not that women don't want to be in the predator role.

It's their system doesn't know how to do it. Because if they've been in the prey role, they're over-identified with it. You get social reinforcement for it in a lot of ways. And we've been conditioned into it, there's a whole connective tissue component. And so it became about, okay, if a woman had her default nervous system responses, either fawning, or fleeing or freezing, the repair there is in healthy fight, healthy aggression. And some people even hear the words healthy aggression and they go, I don't think that's a thing. Like, I don't even understand how those

words can go together because aggression feels scary and mean and not what someone would want to be. But that's what the work is about. And that's how I found like the most efficient way to do nervous system repair. So this Activate Your Inner Jaguar course is about finding your way into that. Is the essence of it about finding your way into that healthy aggression, into that healthy predator expression? Yeah, it's about practicing that in a lot of different ways. It's about understanding what is your part and what is someone else's part. You know, a lot of times people are like, I'm empathetic, so I feel everything. And it's like, well, that's okay. But also that can be really depleting. It can also be a way of being of deflecting. So I don't work in psychology because I'm not a psychologist. I'm

a mover. But I help people restore their self-protective and self-defensive responses so that those are already intact. And then you don't usually need to use them because you already know that you could do it if you need to. So there's a lot of basic tools of embodiment that have to happen, right? You have to be in your body to do any kind of repair. And a lot of people have spent a lot of time out of their body, even if they've exercised a lot or even done yoga. I wouldn't say I was completely out of my body, but I was using my I was, I was using my body. I was commanding my body more than I was doing the listening. I was listening in a certain track and channel, which I'm really grateful for because it, it made, I have a lot of discipline and it gave me

a lot of discernment and sharpness. And it also gave me an excellent observation skills. but it's a little different than emergence and like what is happening on an authentic level in the body I'm having such an appreciation moment for that young girl that just loved school in you and the brain that you've developed because the way you're giving voice to this is making so much sense of my own personal life experience and I imagine it's doing the same for our listeners I love your brain thank you one of the things that you share in the book in call of the wild is that a way that we can each activate jaguar energy is to follow our own body's cues for safety and as I was reading that I was thinking about this practice of menstrual cycle awareness which is core to everything that we share at Red School and how how key it's been for me in this healing of the traumas of my past and

in feeling a sense of safety particularly around the masculine in the world because literally for about 10 years I just didn't associate with men apart from my one partner I just didn't have I didn't go near men I just was like nope didn't listen to anything from men didn't engage with men and that's changed now but this this um 13 years now of of every day turning inwards how am I doing what's my body telling me how am I feeling and it's been so um such a beautiful way home into my body and listening the the question I essentially want to ask you is how can we awaken jaguar energy but as I was reflecting on that myself I was realizing that in a world which calls us to objectify ourselves and others which calls us up

into the head instead of down into the body this practice of menstrual cycle awareness that I've been in has just been calling me home calling me home listen listen listen here listen to this body so maybe my question is you know how can we begin to activate this jaguar energy like what steps could they take starting from today well when I was in the UK I'll just imagine that a lot of the listeners are from the UK um we had a moment where we were in our circle and I could tell that every time that the activation came to the emotional channel that there was just like a real suppression. And it was unusual. I mean, everywhere, I've taught in a lot of different places now, and every place has their kind of

characteristics, even within Brazil, different cities had different characteristics of how people responded to things. So of course, what I'm about to say doesn't apply to all people in the UK, and there's people from Europe that were joining. But what they said to me, without me imposing anything, I just said, Hey, what's happening, I noticed that the activation rises up, and it comes about to the level of the throat to some of you, it comes to your mouth, but it doesn't move all the way up to your eyes. And they and everyone was like, yeah, stiff upper lip, like just put on like there's this like put a smile over whatever is happening. So to me, it would be like having permission to include emotion. A lot of somatic work focuses on sensations.

What do you notice in your body? Which direction do you want to go? Do you want to downregulate? Do you want to upregulate? For me, what part of your cycle are you in? So, okay, I'm just, you know, in my follicular phase. Okay, then I, then it's, even though I'm tired, I'm going to be more active or, oh, no, now I'm luteal and I'm really about to bleed. So I'm going to slow down and rest and just allow myself to rest. That's what's been very disorienting for me about this menopausal passage is when I'm having, I don't have that lunar orientation anymore. So I used to really rely on it like, oh, okay, well, I'm feeling this way, I probably need to eat a little bit more of this. It'll help me if I do this, I had some kind of, I would call that a stage two tool. So you've got stage one being chaos, stage two being

a lot of tools, and then stage three being organic rhythmicity, where you're just in sync, and you're not having to analyze in order to do it. But I now don't have those same pillars of orientation. So I have to use other mechanisms to understand which direction to take my system. Is it better for me to lie down right now? Or that's going to make me even more tired? Is it better for me? The other day I went and threw pumpkins, there was a bunch of leftover pumpkins from the pumpkin patch. There was a herd of goats that they like pumpkin. So they invited people out to just go and smash pumpkins. And if you would have asked me, I would have said, no, I'm tired. I need to take a nap.

But I got there and lifted these heavy things and threw them down. And that sympathetic charge gave me energy. And I felt way better afterwards than I would have felt if I was just lying down. Mm hmm. than I would have felt if I was just lying down. What mechanisms are you using now without the menstrual cycle rhythm being as it was? It's just, I mean, it really just depends. I'm going to like what brings me joy. So that changes and different things appeal. But, you know, I've gone back to the Iyengar Yoga Studio, which is a type of yoga that is very structural and alignment based. And it also is very familiar. So there's a lot it's like I know the chance. I know how this works. And I can really line myself up there. And it's a place where I receive teaching because I talk a lot and I'm interviewed a lot and lead a team of people. So I really like to be led.

And so right now we're talking on December 13th 2023 and I'm actually closing my business down for a while so I just let all my employees go um and I'm going to go offline mostly unless I feel like being online and I'm not going to teach online for a while. So, you know, following the bigger cycles, too, not just the little cycles, I noticed that I was just carrying like a low level aggravation for a while. And for me, that was my soul telling me this isn't about making small adjustments. I need to make a big adjustment. But, you know, to me, this is the advantage of age where I've had radical changes of direction in my life before and I'm OK and I'm better than OK. So I'm not freaked out in a way that I was when I was 19 and my octopus arms and it's time for me to go inward for a little while

and not be in the public eye for a bit. Do you relate that and you're relating that to menopause like I'm just thinking of all the women and people in our community who are longing for or who are carving out sabbatical for themselves during this menopause transition, how vital it is for them. Yeah, I think it's not coincidental. I mean, there's a lot of concurrent things that are happening as well. But I think that there's some orchestration. I mean, if I would have orchestrated it specifically for menopause, and I would have done this a couple years ago when I was at the height of all the symptoms. But you know, it's just like bleeding. It's like, you can't organize everything in your life around your bleed, especially if you have certain kinds of work in the world, or you know, your cycle shifts, then you have to take

an internal approach to the bleed, where you're not driving yourself from the inside, but you might be externally physically doing something. What but like with a softness on the inside. So yeah, it's definitely related. And it's related to where my daughter is, you know, she's got one and a half years of high school left, and then she may choose to move out. It's related to the next book that I'm working on. I've never written a book without teaching full time and doing everything else that I'm doing at the same time. So and it's related to getting to the end of a couple of years in a row and looking back and being like, wow, I've done a lot of amazing things and I've helped a lot of people and and I don't feel victorious. I feel like I'm dragging weights

up a hill and pushing a boulder up in front of me. And I'd like to not feel that way. So it could be that I'm doing a lot and all the things I'm doing are good, but there's just too many of them. So I need a time to just take it all off the plate and, and, you know, just be in my own body this year. I've been working a lot. So about third of the way into the year, I was like, you just got to admit to yourself, you work nine to five or more because I was feeling so bad that I wasn't getting to the classes that I usually go to and doing the things

to take care of myself. And I was like, well, like taking care of myself right now is like making good food. And, you know, I do all the driving. So I drive my daughter to and from school, which is about an hour drive twice a day. And, you know, I had, there's just, it's just life and midlife for me, because I'm at the height of my career, right? Like I've written three books, I launched a mother circle training this year, I trained 145 facilitators, that that guidebook is like its own book. I've got the journal, the cards, you know, is like in earlier this year. I was like, you know, there actually doesn't have to be more than this.

Like this is actually already great. And maybe this part of my life, I don't know. I don't know what it is. I don't know if I like I will write another book, but I you know, I don't know. I don't know what it is. I don't know if I, like, I will write another book, but I, you know, I don't, it's not a rush. And, and public life takes its toll. You know, I get recognized a lot of places that I go. Social media is a just cesspool of bullshit. And so it's, you know, I've been teaching a long time, you know, I had a full time yoga teacher, teaching practice when I was 26 years old, and I'm almost 50. So it's, yeah, it just, I can just tell, you know, it was like, I kept saying, Oh, I'll take this away. And

my body was like, No. And I was like, Oh, I'll do this. And then how about until we'll do this until then? And it was like, no, cancel that, cancel that, cancel that. And then it was just like, okay, like I have to disappoint everyone. And no one's going to tell me, like no one's going to tell me, yeah, I think you should do this because there's no logical reason to do it when you make good money and you're healthy and you're in midlife, you're thriving. It's like everyone's going to be like we can work work with this and so I have to be the one that says shaga enough you know thank you the permission

that you're giving right now is huge thank you so much and thank you for everything you you do Kimberly if people have listened to this and like I must connect with this woman I must know more what are the best avenues obviously there's the book call of the wild there's the activate your inner jaguar course yep so my website kimberlyandjohnson.com uh there's a lot of free classes um on instagram I have a lot of videos. The book. Yeah, it's on audio. It's in hardback. There's if they want to come be with me in person, I'll be in Oxford in April and I'll be in Ireland in June. And I have the podcast, which has 200 episodes and they're all really great. So there's a lot of information

there awesome thank you I'll put all of those links in the show notes thank you for giving me so much time I really appreciate you and thank you personally for the inspiration that you've given me today I'm going to treasure it thanks Kimberly yeah thank you for listening all the way through to the end it was a really amazing experience interviewing kimberly it is a little bit like looking in the eyes of a big cat a jaguar you know she has this fierce love that is tangible and comes through her it was it was a beautiful experience and i hope you enjoyed it i'd love to hear how the conversation landed for you. You can always get in touch with me

at sophieatredschool.net. Okay, we're going to carry on with the seventh of our Wild Power bonus series on Tuesday, and then we'll be back on Thursday with our regular episode. But until then, keep living life according to your own brilliant rhythm.