Turo Virta: 1:07

Today's conversation is something I think many women struggle with, especially after 40. Should I push harder? Should I rest more? Should I do strength training? Should I stretch or should I do yoga? And what happens when the body you have today doesn't feel exactly like the body you had 10 or 20 years ago. For many women, perimenopause and midlife brings changes in the energy, sleep, recovery, stress, strength, and how the body feels. And sometimes the old approach is simply doing more, pushing harder, and ignoring fatigue doesn't work anymore, but at the same time, rest doesn't mean giving up on strength, and strength doesn't mean you have to punish your body. That's why I'm excited for today's guest, Liz Lazatell. Lizzy teaches restorative yoga, functional movement, somatic strength, create creativity, and healthy aging. She has been teaching yoga since 2005, and her work focuses especially on adapting movement and yoga to better serve women's bodies through different seasons of life. She is also co-author together with her mother Judith Hanson Lazader of the upcoming book Savasana, the practice of radical rest. In this episode, I want to talk about why yoga practice may need to change during many perimenopause, and why women over 40 need strength training, why real rest is not laziness, and how we can find a healthier balance between doing more and knowing when enough is enough. So, Lizzy, thank you so much for joining me. And before we get into strength rest and perimenopause, could you share a little bit about your own story and what led you into this work?

Unknown: 3:05

Well, first of all, hello. I'm so delighted. It's such a pleasure to be here with you, having this conversation, which, for me, is such a necessary and urgent conversation. And the the combination of strength and rest that I'm obsessed with that intersection. So I was so delighted when you reached out and wanted to have exactly this conversation because we think of it often in our culture as an either or. I'm someone who trains hard, or I'm someone who rests hard, or is lazy, and I am the embodiment of both of those things. So I grew up in California, and I love to joke that I've been practicing yoga since the womb because my mama Judith Hanson Lasseter has been teaching since the 1970 s, and I grew up in this context, this background of yoga, and have built a business with my mom an online community. We've been working together for 10 years, and we teach yoga. We talk about wanting to teach and empower yogis to practice from their own embodied experience, not inherited patriarchal rules, and what we know at Lassiter Yoga over the past 10 years, working with 1000s of women from around the world, mostly women, is that the female pelvis, the female body is fundamentally different than the male body structurally, biologically, hormonally, cyclically, and my mama is 79 years old. I'm 43 years old. Our students tend to fit between those two bookends, so I've had the great privilege of working with a large group of women who are ahead of me on the path, and it has gotten me really excited and really focused on what I call graceful aging, because I see the variation in what can happen in the decades to come, and I think the leverage point starts in our 30s, in our 40s,

Turo Virta: 5:09

and was there a moment was when you realized that traditional yoga practice doesn't always meet the needs of women as their bodies change?

Unknown: 5:20

Yeah, absolutely. There were many moments, and because I had such a front row seat to not just my mom, but her whole sort of cohort, her generation of teachers who were really kind of first generation. They went and studied in India. My mom studied with mr. Ayengar, and then they brought that to the United States, for example, where I grew up, to Europe. And what I saw as these teachers started to age was that they were really in conflict with there was a cognitive dissonance between what they believed was good for their health, which was just yoga, yoga, yoga, specifically yoga asana, and almost to the exclusion of anything else. They weren't interested in going to a gym. They weren't interested. In strength and resistance training, and that also just wasn't in the culture in the 1980s, 90s, even early 2000s. It was all about at least where I came from in California. It was all about just like a very thin physique, trying to starve ourselves, doing cardio, and not build muscle. So I saw these women ahead of me, and then what happened as they went through the normal changes. Mama likes to say menopause is not a mistake. The normal life cycle of being a woman, and yoga asana. I could see was not preventing them from having to have knee replacements, hip replacements, heart surgeries, all the stuff that happens in the decades of the 40 s, 50 s, 60 s, and beyond. But what I realized is that it was almost as though in the yoga world, surrounding the yoga world, there was this kind of mythology that is still just saw a very snarky Facebook comment on one of my posts, that like basically yoga is enough. It's a complete system. It's all you need, and you don't need strength training. You don't need anything beyond yoga to be healthy. And I, I believe I've witnessed it. There's the science to back it up, and I passionately believe that that thought is does us a disservice?

Turo Virta: 7:29

Yeah, because I think this is interesting because I come from professional sports and strength coaching, and even in my own training, I have learned that what worked at 25 is not necessarily what I need at 44 So, do you see something similar with women entering perimenopause?

Unknown: 7:48

Absolutely, you know, I started wearing a Whoop heart rate monitor tracker bracelet this January, and one thing that it has shown me surprisingly. So I have two six-year-old boy twins. You know, my house is a kind of wrestling Thunderdome. I'm a very active Austrian partner who gets us onto mountains in the summer, in the winter, and what I what the Whoop showed me is that my level of strain, as it calls it, like how much intensity and work my heart is doing on a daily basis is quite high, like just my normal life. Even when I think in my mind, oh, I didn't do anything today because I didn't do a workout, but it's like walking my kids to kindergarten, picking them up, walking to the grocery store. Just I don't know. I often do 10,000 steps, like in walking circles in my kitchen. Like I don't know where this all this is coming from, but the strain of my regular life is quite high, and I think that there's a difference. When I was in my 20s, my early 20s, I was living in Los Angeles, and I fell in love with Ashtanga yoga, which is a very intense system, and that served me then and served my body then, because my life was like I was in university. My parents paid my rent. All I had to do was read books and go to class and go to yoga. So I had a lot of actually what we would call now space and time for recovery, for lying on the couch with my girlfriends and watching TV, etc. I don't have that space in my life anymore because I'm squeezed between taking care of my aging elders, my partner's aging elders, my growing children, my house, my business. So, like, I think that's part of the dynamic is that as women are entering perimenopause in our 40s, our lives are almost getting squeezed and accelerated, so all of the chance for recovery built in is just squeezed out. The lemon juice is just-it's like you know that lemon is empty, and so that's why I need different practices. That I don't need a stronga yoga right now. I need a yoga practice that feeds me and serves me, like fills me back up, as opposed to. And I always say to my yoga students, like, I don't know about you, but I need more juice in my life right now, like not less.

Turo Virta: 10:23

Yeah, no, and it's it's very true. Like you start to recognize that it kind of, at least for me, it it hurts somehow by a little bit knowing that it's not anymore how it used to be, and it's still okay. I I try to turn it myself that it's actually better now. Now you know, or you at least you should be knowing your body a little better. You have lived in your body now, whatever 40, 5060, years, and it's it's it's pretty good at telling you things what is going on if you are able to listen, and that is often the hardest part. At least for me, is to actually listen your body and not your mind or or. What is like maybe you know you you still have that same kind of thing that you want to go go go, but then your body is telling that now would be actually time to take it easier. I wanted to ask like physiologically, what sense is when a woman enters to perimenopause, like not only hormonally but in the way she might experience movement, energy recovery, and stress.

Unknown: 11:33

Well, what we know is that the process of perimenopause, which is the five to 10 years before menopause, menopause is when you have had one year without bleeding. So that's actually we talk about menopause, but menopause is actually the very end phase, and this phase of the hormonal transition where the roller coaster happens. Most of the symptoms are happening in that five to 10 year period. Now, most women, the average age of menopause in the United States is 51 so that means if we count backward, that five to 10 year phase is starting in average at 41 but if you're having an earlier menopause and you can look at what your what happened to your mom as a good indicator, like you could it could be starting in your late 30s. So I think that's super interesting because as I started to talk more about perimenopause on social media, I got a lot of comments of people saying like you're way too young for that. Why are you talking about that? And I was like, well, first of all, like no, I'm not, and second of all, I am experiencing the early symptoms of and what what it is is the estrogen is slowly dropping. Now, what's interesting physiologically because you asked is that estrogen is not end organ specific. So what that means is it's not just acting on our ovaries and uterus. Estrogen affects every organ system in the body, and so as it's dropping down, we have a constellation of other symptoms which are increasing. So there's things that happen that are very common. For example, like frozen shoulder issues with the shoulder joint, plantar fasciitis on the bottom, the the irritation in the bottom of the foot. A lot of stuff going on with joints, joint pain, sleep disruption. Hot flashes is the most famous, but hot flashes is kind of just a thermoregulation issue, right? So too hot, too cold, feeling uncomfortable at your core temperature, right? So that's what's kind of that's the picture physiologically that is going on for women. And one thing that you said before about listening to the body-that's what I think is so valuable about any kind of yoga or contemplative practice like meditation is that it gives us a modality or a structured way to feel what we're feeling right now without overlaying any external demand or program or activity or reps or achievement. It's just like whether it's shavasana, which is that pose at the end of a yoga practice where you lie down still and act like a corpse, or a seated meditation, or even just you know very slow breath-based yoga movements? I love those in my day as moments where, like you said, you can sort of interoceptively in feel what's happening inside of my body in real time, and feel as though we have a closer relationship, and that the relationship is like a relationship with what's actually going on, not with what I want to be going on.

Turo Virta: 14:42

Oh, that's so good, and I think that's really pretty common. Like where like. like it's it's like I said, it it hurts sometimes, like to commit to yourself that maybe now at least for like someone who have been maybe former athlete or something and think that now it's time to push and I would like to push, but your body is telling otherwise, and and that is that is that's a it's so well said. So what is like? Because I have no experience with yoga. Like I, I personally I have tried it once or twice, but and I found it like. But it was it was for me at the time. I tried it. I maybe I should try it again, but at the time I was trying it. That's like a decade ago. But it was. It felt like this is. I need something more. I need. I don't. I'm not able to focus. I'm not. I need something like what feels harder for me at the time. Maybe now would be good time to do it. I. But that's why I'm so curious to know, like, how should yoga practice change for someone who is going through perimenopause or during perimenopause?

Unknown: 15:57

So it's a great question. Yoga is such a broad term, and of course, I can't speak for yoga in in its. Broadest sense, saying I teach and practice yoga is like saying I am really into dance, right? It's like me saying you don't know if I tell you I'm into dance, you don't know if I'm into ballet or hip hop, right? I could be talking about Beyonce or Varejnikov, right? So first of all, there's that. If you've tried yoga, you really it depends what yoga you tried, and it is so teacher dependent. The teacher, just like psychotherapy or something, it has to be a good match for you. You need to find, I think, an intelligent teacher, a teacher who's smarter than you, a teacher who has a lot of experience and humility, and knows as much as possible about anatomy and physiology, because there are some myths that we inherited from our Indian lineage, which we are very grateful for. But there was there's just some outdated concepts from 100 years ago that we don't need to continue to put that square peg into the round hole. And so that's the way we teach the yoga that we inherited is like slight variations, for example, to accommodate the female pelvis, where it's like, you know. But yoga people get real, you know, enraged about stuff like this. But slight variations of how you place the feet in the standing poses, for example, makes more space for the wider female hips and feels so much better. So, what I'm interested in when I practice yoga is a really simple goal. I'm interested in create entering into a space where I'm connecting my breath and my movement, and where I'm as much as possible inhabiting the moment I'm actually in, like in real time, I'm being here with my body and my breath, and the movements are a tool to help me to do that. And as I move into perimenopause, and what I hear from women ahead of me on the path is that what can open up is a space where we give ourselves the gift of less, actually, so fewer poses, more support, and as we started our conversation, the way that I compensate or sort of complement that is that my asana practice is becoming more supported, slower, more restful, more delicious. But I'm adding into my movement practice more strength training. So it's like I'm separating it out. And the strength training I'm doing, we teach at Lassiter Yoga. We call it somatic strength. It's really designed by yogis. For yogis, we use resistance bands. We use some dumbbells, but it's a lot of body weight. But it's we're interested in practicing strength training. You know, classic strength squat. We're doing squats. We're doing, you know, these kind of compound movements. Very functional movements for graceful aging. But what we're interested in, and what resonates so much with me is like asking myself, can my strength training become part of my yoga practice? Like, why do they have to be separate? So what I do in my home practice in the mornings is like 2030, minutes of more strength focused functional movement stuff, and then maybe I'll do 10 minutes of more real classical yoga mobility stuff, and I think that they work really well together. And that's what I'm noticing as I move into perimenopause is that I'm craving both of those things, I'm craving the intensity of the strength training, and I'm craving like going through that tunnel that you go through when you train, like or that I experience, where it's like everything else falls away. I'm just here with the breath and the next five reps of lifting the dumbbell, and then I'm also craving more of that supported, quiet. stillness rest like long shavasanas. We teach like 20 minute shavasanas where you're lying down doing nothing, being lazy, achieving nothing for 20 minutes.

Turo Virta: 20:20

Wow, because it's it's nice to hear that you are also so passionate about strength training. Obviously, that is what I'm passionate, but I'm also passionate about, especially like I wasn't always that way, but now I'm big believer some kind of mobility training, what you mentioned too, and of course then that mind that somehow to get your mind down or getting rid of that unnecessary stress, or when it's getting too much, and that is, I find very interesting what you say, and you kind of combine everything, all elements within yoga. But why do you believe that strength becomes so important for women as they get older?

Unknown: 21:04

Well, there's so much research now. About muscle, like I was even listening to this Dr. Gabrielle Lyons in America, who practices what she calls muscle-based medicine. So it's like these emerging ideas that muscle is a kind of savings account, an investment in graceful aging, and it naturally declines starting in our 30s, and so it's like the more muscle. The same with bone, by by the way, as well. So it's like the more muscle and bone we're building in our earlier decades, it sets us up for a better experience as we age. And like I said, my mom is 79 she's turning 80 next year, it's like I'm in very real terms experiencing and seeing, you know, and envisioning myself. How do I want to live when I'm in my 80s? Like, what's the level of independence? What's the level of function and mobility I want to hold on to? And then just doing very simple math backwards, like, oh, okay, well, then I'm gonna need to do start doing some squats now. Like,

Turo Virta: 22:11

oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. It's it's it's it's interesting how how quickly things are declining, and it's not that. Then if you you see people like in their 70s, 80s, 90s, and how posture changes if you see that there is no muscle, and if you see comparison with the same age people who other one is not doing a lot of strength or or or sports in general, and another one is have been doing strength training, mobility stuff and how the posture, how less likely it is to have some kind of health issues as we age, and this is I'm because I'm you are obviously you are more like yoga teacher. What do you think the traditional yoga? I'm I know that there are many yoga teachers who are like that's why I really love you because you are so different than most of them because you are like other ones that yoga is the only way to do it and that's basically the biggest religion you don't need anything else and and I wanted to ask you that do you think the traditional yoga alone is enough to maintain strength as we age.

Unknown: 23:30

No, I don't think yoga is enough. Yoga asana, traditional yoga asana, wasn't designed for that. That's not what it was meant for. It's it's a it's a system for entering into a state of presence. It's a system for joint mobility. It's a system. I mean, there's a lot of controversy. I mean, there's a lot of controversy about what I'm about to say, and reactivity about what I'm about to say. But there's not a lot of controversy about whether or not it's true. Mark Singleton has written a book called Yoga Body about the history of where a lot of the movements, like the sun salutation that we know in yoga came from, and a lot of it came from Swedish gymnastics. It has a very nationalistic heritage in India in the early 20th century, wanting to you know buff up the young Indian men and make them stronger as a way of showing that the nation was strong and ready for independence. And so there was this kind of mishmash of these physical postures with the the the real you know direct lineage of the I would say sort of philosophical history of yoga, which is very old, and the texts are very old. But the physical postures that we've kind of woken up to or inherited now. I don't think that the that the asana, which is the physical posture, the asana is not the yoga. We get so attached to like yoga people get really attached to like these specific physical postures, and I think that's too myopic, too narrowly viewed of what yoga is. Yoga, one of my favorite definitions of yoga, is that it's a state of being and the practices associated with that state. So I'm after the state of being, and I'm open to letting the practices evolve as I age and evolve, and the argument that I always make is that in my lineage, so I studied from with my mom Judith Hanson Lassiter, and she studied with BKSA Ingar, and he studied with Krishnamacharya. So that's a very specific, direct lineage inside of yoga. Those men in India were living in a male body. They had servants. They had wives. They had secretaries. They had like a totally different infrastructure around them. I'm in a female body. I don't have any servants. I don't have a wife. Like I'm running my house, I'm. I always call myself the catering department. Like I'm cooking whole food every day for my kids. So it's like I just think I honor where it came from, but it just doesn't make logical sense to me that I need to be like attached exactly to those specific movements which worked for those men having that experience, and then if I get to where I am and I think like, oh, monster walk with a resistance band to train my glute medius, like with my breath, this is really serving me right now. Like, why I can't include that into my yoga space and practice and teaching. Like I just there's you know the yoga police is not going to come for you.

Turo Virta: 26:59

Oh, that's so good. That's so good because I I which but I see what I see a lot of in fitness like and I I have to commit I if now I I think I love yoga. Like I love the even I'm not practicing it myself, but I love the what it brings actually, why people are doing it and why it's so beneficial. But if when I started, like I was in 30s, let's say 30s, I would say that yoga no, that's for nothing. And in in the in the fitness world, what do you think that people mostly or sometimes they misunderstand about yoga and rest?

Unknown: 27:43

Well, rest for sure, I think, is misunderstood because I like to say your yoga mat is an island, so there's nothing there that you didn't bring with you, and whatever cultural and personal beliefs that we have around achievement and rest and laziness, and busyness, and all of those constructs and words, those beliefs we bring with us into the yoga, onto the yoga mat, into the yoga experience. And so, when we say, "Let's now do a restorative yoga practice, which is a practice where we take props to support our bodies in positions of comfort and ease, so that the body can heal itself, and we're intentionally triggering the nervous system to move from sympathetic fight or flight to parasympathetic rest and repair. In in in these practices, we come to it with this overlay of like resting means I'm lazy, or this isn't. I'm not doing anything, and doing is the only time when I'm valuable, or I'm too busy. I have too many other things that are too important, or there's a growing discomfort. I see it in students who are younger than me with any amount of silence, like any lack of stimulus, any separation from their phone and their Apple Watch, like right. So, which to me, of course, is like a screaming argument for why we desperately need these practices, and not just on a physiological level, which is like indisputable. That lying down, even for 20 minutes, and taking, let's say, a supported shavasana, it has major effects to all the systems of the body. It's good for our immune system. It's good for our cardiovascular system. It's good for our hormonal system. It's good for our blood pressure, our blood chemistry, digestion. Down regulation is positive in every sense, but it's also, I think, really good for our mental health and for our creativity and for our insight, I experience it all the time. Today, I took a wonderful Zoom class from a friend of mine, and at the end, we were doing a pose called Setu Bandha, which is a supported bridge pose. Your legs are straight on bolsters, supported, and then you're in a back bend, so you're bent back over the bolsters, your head is lower than your heart, and I had wrapped a strap around my ankle, so my I was doing using no muscular effort to hold myself in this position. And when the head goes below the heart, it's like a trigger to the nervous system for relaxation. So it's incredibly downregulating for the nervous system, and I'm lying there with my breath, maybe for 10 minutes, and like this, I wasn't thinking about this project with a friend, but like it popped, like the answer popped into my mind. Like we boom, you know, and it's because after an hour and a half of a yoga practice where there was just her guiding me through these movements and the breath, and I was focused on this is a real key component focused on the sensations of my body, because sensations are always in the present moment. That's why, in like seated meditation, we use the breath or the sounds or sensations. Because you can't really have a sensation from yesterday. Like it's right now. So that shifts you from a from a brainwave perspective into a different state, and that state is much closer to creativity. It's much closer to insight. It's much. It's like the subconscious mind becomes porous, and we are we can access new solutions, new ideas, new combinations.

Turo Virta: 32:05

And you already mentioned like that, why the real rest is so difficult for many many people, but why you think that sitting still feel uncomfortable, and I think that especially some high achieving women or men too are those are like by far the most common type, like who it feels uncomfortable. Like I'm definitely one of those.

Unknown: 32:36

Well, I think there's I think there's a couple things. First of all, we do sit still too much, so that's one challenge. Is like most of us, myself included, we sit too much on our computers, we're on our phones. We're sitting. We're sedent. We're too sedentary, right? We all know we need to be walking more, standing more, moving more. So that is a separate argument, which I agree with. But sitting on my couch, collapsed in a rounded position with scrolling on my phone, is not the same kind of rest for my nervous system as what I'm talking about, which is with shavasana, for example. What we wrote a book about, we call it yoga's most powerful pose. That's the pose usually at the end of the practice where you lie down, and we show in the book how to support yourself in physical comfort, specific physical comfort, using pillows or yoga bolster if you have it, and to cover your eyes and cover yourself up with a blanket. So we're creating these conditions for relaxation for the nervous system, so that we're like when you go into an elevator and you push the button, we're pushing a very specific button in the nervous system for this type of conscious rest, which is different than sleep and very different than collapsed on the couch scrolling on my phone.

Turo Virta: 33:57

Oh yeah, absolutely. But why? Why do you think that goes? There are so many women I hear that you know that they need to. They feel that they have to earn their rest, and that is like I. I would say that I could, like, I'm one of those. I'm not a woman, but I feel like that I need to somehow earn my rest.

Unknown: 34:24

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a prevalent idea. It's something that we are always in conversation with. That's an idea that I carry around inside of me. I call it my inner Protestant voice. My grandmother was a Protestant, and that idea of like get up, make your bed, get up early, get started in the day, go do something, go accomplish something, and that's, I think, what I try to cultivate is a certain softness with that voice because you know that's the that voice has brought the human race so far, that voice has brought me so far. Like it got me into a great university. It got me into a master's program at an Ivy League school. It got me to move to Austria and learn German. Like so many, you know, I've just written a book. Like so many sort of achievements, or you know, so many so many goals and doings, getting up early, making my bed, and like you know, doing the work. That's a that has brought me really, of course, a lot of positive things. But I think it's also never been so easy for us to work all the time, and it's because the device that I'm working on is also an addictive device. I don't do it that often, but this past weekend I did a phone-free day, and like I was honestly shocked because I have this idea. Maybe some women listening. Resonate. I have the idea, like, oh, I'm basically never on my phone, but like my partner, he's always on his phone. Like he's the problem, and I'm like basically a saint who doesn't touch your phone, which is obviously not true. But so as it like as an experiment, I did a phone free day on the weekend with my kids, and I noticed to my dismay and sadness, that I was like so much. It's such a cliche. I literally was more present with my kids, and I was more. I noticed, for example, I had this whole stack of magazines that were kind of half finished, and I thought, oh, I'm gonna sort of go through these magazines today. And I read five magazines one afternoon. Like I had so there was so much sort of spaciousness available when I wasn't just like checking my last Instagram post obsessively of how many likes I got, right? So I think that that's what I try to cultivate is like a little bit of a softness with the idea of having to earn rest. And with women, we have this wonderful cyclical nature. So, paying more attention to it's one shift I've noticed in perimenopause is that my cycles have become more dramatic. So, I'm very aware when it's like before my period now, and just saying, okay, these couple days I'm going to be softer with myself in terms of my physical practices. I'm the whoop has also really showed me that my heart rate variability before my period goes way down, and so it's like okay, these are days when I'm going to do gentler physical practices. Another thing I like to think about, and this has was a total shift as a is is thinking about. I like to get up in the morning and come down here to my yoga space, and then I do my movement practice. I sit for 10 minutes of meditation, and then I do about 30 minutes of movement before I go empty the dishwasher and make my coffee and make the kids' breakfast. So this is like my six to seven a.m. time. It's my time, but and so what I think about is that space that 30 minutes of movement is kind of like a placeholder, and I'm focused on trying to get to to have that 30 minutes. Let's say five days a week, right? But what happens inside of that container, I don't need to be so strict about, and I can let that be more responsive to how I'm actually feeling that day. Like, did I go on a big hike the day before? Okay, maybe I'm gonna just do some foam rolling, you know. Or am I gonna take a big yoga class? Am I gonna take that yoga? Like this morning, I was gonna take my friend's yoga class later, so I didn't really need much movement. So I just did a meditation, or you know, like what is it? So, and also thinking about in this space of 30 minutes, I'm doing something positive for my body. Whether I'm foam rolling, whether I'm strength training, whether I'm doing classic yoga, whether I'm doing restorative yoga, like it's it's all adding up to my graceful aging program.

Turo Virta: 39:09

No, that that is it's so smart. I believe honestly, like it's and it's not, it's not. It don't have to be exactly like you can you can change it every single day. Like some days it's going to be something harder. Some days when you feel like you need something else, but it's it's some pillars what your body actually needs, and I know because we you you mentioned already like a little bit about that evening like when people actually think that they are resting anguish. I I see all the time people who say that I I rested all the evening, but actually they were scrolling, answering messages, watching something while thinking about work, and mentally they never switched off. So, is that really rest in your opinion?

Unknown: 40:00

No, no, it's not. It's like stimulation masked as rest, or stress master stress. The physical body is perhaps limp, but the mind is still stimulated, and the nervous system is still stimulated. So these these that's what we call conscious rest in restorative yoga. And one thing that really helps is like for me, literally putting it on my to-do list. So I will have one or two big tasks I need to get done the day. I'll write it on, and then I'll write shavasana. And it's like when I finish this and this, then I'm gonna go and do 20 minutes, even

if it's 11: 40:40

30 in the morning or one in the afternoon. I'm gonna go lie down for 20 minutes and reset my nervous system. So I I do think that that that and it's like culturally there are so there's so much wisdom of this actually. There's the siesta, you know. There are all kinds of cultures that have understood that, especially. After lunch, there's a dip, and we often have the urge to lie down. And then so many of us just say like,"Oh, I'm gonna have a coffee. I'll have an espresso and not let myself lie down. Also, because like our workspaces, many of them are not structured around that. And there's an idea I think that we inherited from like the factory and the industrial when so this is like a larger theory that when the industrial revolution happened and we started working in factories, like time became money, right? So somebody's value was in how many hours they could work, and we've inherited that into knowledge workers, those of us who work on the computer, we have that idea that its productivity is just about the number of hours I'm sitting in front of the screen. But that's not really the is you know as someone who has the luxury of working for myself, when I observe how the rhythm of my body actually works and my ability to be productive, I've got maybe like two blocks a day of like 90 minutes of deep focus, and that's pretty much it. So then I'm trying to structure the rest of my day to support that. So blocks of rest, blocks of walking. You know, like I love to use. My brother just visited me from America, and very you know car based life, and he was just laughing at like how I have structured my life around in Salzburg, Austria. Around like I go grocery shopping almost every day, go to the farmers market or go to the grocery store. But for me, that's like part of my movement practice. I think, okay, I'm going to ride my bike to the farmers market or walk to the grocery store, and then carry this heavy thing home, and then I'll have some steps and have some movement and be outside, and like that is a good thing for me as opposed to going once a week with my car to a mega mart and like buying everything in plastic and putting it in my fridge.

Turo Virta: 43:07

Yeah, no, I love it. I love that. That is an amazing example of real life example how to actually do it. And I, I, I'm exactly the same way. Like I rather go more often, but I, if I really don't need to, I don't go with the car. And it's, it's part of the part of the movement. It's, it might seem and sound small, but if you think it over years, it's a huge thing.

Unknown: 43:34

It's huge, and this is sort of off topic, but what I always think about with my kids is my kids who walk places with me, and or we take the bus, or we ride our bicycles. You know, they're six, but they've been biking for years now, and like when we go somewhere together like that, they are responsible. Like the getting from A to B, they're actually involved. Like if they ride their bikes with me to the old town to get an ice cream, like they have to be aware proprioception movement. I don't think it's like a ton of exercise, like the 1015, minutes. But it's like they're outside and they're steering and they're think they're like, as opposed to when I put them in the car, and like strap them in, they're a complete passenger for that experience, and they don't have any like involvement. Even riding the bus, they're involved at like getting from A to B, so I always I think of that as like trying to create more experiences for my kids where like they're actually involved with like body involved with the process.

Turo Virta: 44:38

I love it, I love it. So your upcoming book is called Salvasana, the Practice of Radical Rest. Why radical rest, and what makes radical rest radical?

Unknown: 44:51

Okay, rest is so radical for many of the reasons we've been talking about. Like it's countercultural. It's you know sometimes students say to me like, "Well, the world is on fire. There's so much to be stirred up about, or angry about in politics, in global warming, etc. And so, I have the idea that it's not giving up or turning away from those things. It's actually a form of radical resistance to say, I'm not going to contribute to this noise for 20 minutes. I'm going to do no harm, and I'm going to like deal with what's going on here. I'm going to be the change that I want in the world because we co-regulate each other as human beings, right? Physiologically, we know that. And so, if I give myself as a partner, as you know, a community member, as a mother, daughter-in-law, etc. all the roles that I have, if I give myself a chance to soften and downregulate and rest, the. Person that I am when I return to my family is so different that I'm actually like there's this word in German Australon. I'm like putting out a better energy into the world, and I I I don't just believe that. Like I see that all the time when I am rested and I feel full and whole. Then when I walk to the grocery store, like I have a really nice little exchange with the checkout girl, and I smile at her and we laugh about something. And like I think that that is radical in today's world, like to to to be more human, more menschlich in German, like to be that to cultivate that biological intelligence and that human intelligence, that relational intelligence, it is so much. You know, we always we we've heard that phrase before. You can't give from an empty cup, and I believe that for myself, and I see this in my students. Your you know main theme is women over 40. Like for women over 40, rest is a really radical idea as a way to fill your own cup.

Turo Virta: 47:28

So for. someone who doesn't practice yoga, what is what exactly is savasana?

Unknown: 47:34

Okay, so shavasana means corpse, and it is the pose at the end of the practice. Traditionally, it's sequenced at the end of the practice, where we lie down and we do nothing. We don't move anymore. And what we're doing is cultivating a state in yoga that's called pratyahara, and that's where we turn away from or soften away from the external senses. So we're not as much engaged in the external world, so we have all of our attention to turn inward, and it is a meditative state that we enter into. It's not sleep. We're here. We're watching. We're sensing and experiencing, and then we catch ourselves thinking, and we come back to the breath and to the sensations. We sometimes talk about it as opposed. It's different than mindfulness, which many of us know. But it's we talk about it as bodyfulness. So when we take these positions of rest, and what we do in the book, in the shavasana book, Mama and I give four different versions of shavasana, meaning four different setups where you can support your physical body into different positions, and what we wanted to do in this book because mom has written two other books on restorative yoga. This is her 12th book, and it's my first book. And her the two other books on restorative yoga were very you know targeted towards yoga teachers, yoga students who you know own the bolsters and the blankets and the blocks and all the props. We wanted for this book for it to be more accessible, and so we show, for example, something she's never shown in a book before, which we call shavasana on the couch, and we take seriously. Okay, what is it if you're going to use your couch? How can you use the pillows you already have to set yourself up in in a side lying shavasana for maximal comfort? She's a physical therapist as well, mom. So it's like we're we're actually taking the setup very seriously, and then we guide you in the book with every savasana. There's a pair of journaling questions because I love free writing practice. I teach that in all my retreats, and so after you've done your 20 minutes of shavasana, it's the perfect time to then free write based on these prompts that we give you, because it's unbelievable, like what you have access to and what comes out? That's like as you're writing it, you're like, I wow, I didn't know like that this was here. So that's what we're doing with the book. It's a, it was a wonderful collaboration with my mom, and it was like, I shouldn't say this, but it was like really surprisingly easy to write because it's a topic that both of us. She's been teaching about it for decades. I've been teaching restorative yoga for over 10 years, and so we had so much to say about. Oh

Turo Virta: 50:37

yeah,

Unknown: 50:38

you know, and like it almost was like a luxury to do a whole book on one pose.

Turo Virta: 50:44

Yeah, yeah. So time is flying, and I just a quick last questions. So, what is one thing you wish every woman over 40 understood about her body?

Unknown: 51:01

Ooh, such a good question. I think this idea that menopause is not a mistake, that the shifts that we're going through now are part of this process, and including the hairs going gray and the little bit more belly fat coming, the aches in the knees, whatever shifts that we're noticing, it can definitely be a sense of like out of control or like a hello body, what are you doing? And what I'm cultivating for myself and for my students is a making my acceptance and my love for my body bigger and bigger, and seeing this shift for me into graceful aging is like it's the positive case of what I want, where like where I want to be going, if I have the privilege of living into my 80s and 90s. Like where is it that I want to go, and not just fixating on like what I'm losing or what's wrong with my face or like all the kind of conversations that women are having about what's wrong with ourselves. It's like reframing it to like what's right in this moment? This is what's supposed to happen, and there are so many. We have this course at Lassiter Yoga called Somatic Woman, which we run once a year, and it's like we talk a lot about actually what is the good stuff that happens after menopause.

Turo Virta: 52:41

That's my next question. You have answered it already, but I still want to ask it. So, what you would say to a woman who feels frustrated because her body has changed and what worked before no longer works?

Unknown: 52:55

Yeah, I mean, turn softly to that frustration and say, "I I hear you. How human of me! I study a lot of nonviolent communication, and like that's the key phrase. How human of me to be frustrated. How human of me to long to have control over my body, and to long for a sense of permanence, and how human of me to be maybe sad and disappointed in the body that I find myself in today, so just really like softening and acknowledging without changing, just noticing softening, and if if we can cultivate any level of internal smile towards, and then just like I mean, just think of you know sadly probably everyone has like one friend. I, you know, my friends are starting. Like, think of the friend of yours who has breast cancer, or a friend of mine got just got diagnosed with the BRCA gene and had to have her breasts and uterus removed. Like, it's like let's let's like put this in perspective. Do you know what I mean? Like, I have one hair growing on my chin. My friend has breast cancer. Like I think you know.

Turo Virta: 54:10

Yeah, yeah. Oh, if you put everything into perspective, like for some, it's things are not. There is always someone who have. It still. It doesn't matter how hard your situation is. There is always someone who suffers probably even more than you do at the moment, and depends on what kind of issues you are complaining.

Unknown: 54:33

Such a pleasure talking with you. I hope. I just want to say I have to jump off, but I want to just say, you know, if you liked this conversation, this approach, our philosophy around yoga and graceful aging, we have a newsletter. I will make sure that that lands in the show notes. We send out tons and tons of free content, so that's a great place to connect. And it was such a pleasure. I'm really, really grateful. Thank you so much. And

Turo Virta: 54:58

where I will put your upcoming book also into show notes and and your social media. So thank you so much, Lissy, so much for your conversation, and talk to you soon. Ciao. Ciao.