April 1, 2025 • 31 mins
Jennifer shares her personal journey of awakening—how midlife challenges became a catalyst for growth, how she confronted adversity with grace, and how practices like yoga, mindfulness, and journaling helped her reconnect with her true self. She also explores the power of releasing shame, embracing divine guidance, and stepping into a life of authenticity and empowerment. Whether you're navigating a life transition, seeking inner strength, or simply looking for inspiration, this episode is a beautiful reminder that healing and purpose are always within reach. Tune in for wisdom, encouragement, and a conversation that will stay with you long after it ends.
Jennifer Kenney-Smith is a transformative leader and holistic healer with over 26 years of executive sales leadership in the Information Technology sector. As a Certified Yoga Teacher (500 RYT), Ayurvedic Practitioner, and Transformational Life Coach, she founded JKS Yoga & Coaching to guide others on their journey of self-discovery and healing. Jennifer’s unique approach integrates ancient wisdom and modern strategies, earning her accolades such as the Women in Leadership Impact Award (2022) and Best of Ashburn, VA Award (2023). Her mission is to help individuals and leaders align their lives with their core values and achieve profound personal transformation.
https://www.jksyoga.com/
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-refocused-radio--2671113/support.
Jennifer Kenney-Smith is a transformative leader and holistic healer with over 26 years of executive sales leadership in the Information Technology sector. As a Certified Yoga Teacher (500 RYT), Ayurvedic Practitioner, and Transformational Life Coach, she founded JKS Yoga & Coaching to guide others on their journey of self-discovery and healing. Jennifer’s unique approach integrates ancient wisdom and modern strategies, earning her accolades such as the Women in Leadership Impact Award (2022) and Best of Ashburn, VA Award (2023). Her mission is to help individuals and leaders align their lives with their core values and achieve profound personal transformation.
https://www.jksyoga.com/
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-refocused-radio--2671113/support.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You are listening to I Am Refocused Radio with your
host Shamaiah read This show is designed to inspire you
to live your purpose and regain your focus. And now
here's your host, Shamaiah Reid.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hey, welcome TOIME. We Focus Ready once again me you're
here today and just like any other time, we have
another mosy show for y'all today. If you're into yoga,
if you're into spiritual and life coaching, well we have
a perfect guest for you. We have Jennifer Kenny Smith.
She's on with us today. Go visit her website. You
can see on the screen if you're watching this on YouTube.
It's real simple, real easy. It's jk as yoga dot com.
(00:40):
She is a life coach, a yoga teacher, and she's
going to share with us not just her personal story,
but she has a professional background as well, be in
the corporate world. But answering her call, understand that there's
some pain points that she was able to address. She
has her own personal story what calls her to get
into this. So first and foremost, I would say to you, Jennifer,
(01:03):
thank you for your time today. How you doing today,
I'm amazing. Thank you so much for having me. I'm
super excited to be here. Well, I appreciate you taking
time to be with us, so kind of paint a
picture for us. I understand that a lot of people
they have what they call a midlife crisis, but you
also had a powerful awakening, So kind of tell us
(01:24):
a little bit of your personal story. What called you
to start this whole thing?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, thank you. So I found myself climbing the corporate
ladder being all that I thought I could be, and
I left a really unhealthy marriage and was still climbing
that corporate lader. It's where I found my purpose and
my meeting, or so I thought. So single mom and
looking for certainty through my work, that validation, that affirmation
(01:50):
that at a girl, and I ended up having an
altercation with my boss over something that I believed was
the right thing to do for my team and for
the company. I had been in this role in this
industry for two decades, so I wasn't new. I had authority,
so I thought, but he disagreed, and so during this altercation,
I got deeply triggered. I ended up getting out of
(02:14):
this closed door meeting where he threatened my job, told
me he could fire me, which was unfounded and unethical,
and he couldn't have. But I didn't hear it in
the sense of a powerful business woman. I heard it
in the sense of a fragile girl who had been
in a disruptive life since childhood and hadn't attended to
(02:34):
deep core trauma wounds of childhood. I was raised by
two alcoholics and then married into a very dysfunctional relationship
with my then soon to be divorced husband. This was
back in twenty eleven, twenty twelve ish. Anyway, I don't
know how to process this fear of my security, my certainty,
(02:56):
of my livelihood, of my brand, everything that I built,
and I went straight into panic. I'm going to lose
my job, I'm going to lose my house, which was
not normal. If you're not in a trauma response, it's
not a normal reaction. So what happened to the body
is I turned into high functioning anxiety, panic, panic attacks,
unable to project or speak or lead my team at
(03:19):
our team meetings or events or forecasting. I was in
a sales leadership role, so I was wise enough to
know I something had to change. This isn't working. My
boss didn't fire me, but I hated him, and maybe
it wasn't fair because a lot of the pain and
anger and resentment I had from growing up had not
been dealt with. So he's the trigger, so therefore he's
(03:40):
the target. He's now the villain of my story. And
today I won't say we're friends. I don't even know
him anymore. But he's been a huge advocate in my
own journey, like he is a proponent that forced me
into a place of going backwards in my life and
not healing and developing and continuing to grow or to grow.
(04:01):
I saw somebody recently post on LinkedIn about the toxic
work environment and leaders who are toxic are causing the
trumoil and the downfall of the entire company, And yeah,
sure I agree to a certain degree. But if it
wasn't for this experience in my life, I wouldn't be
where I am today. So the panic attacks. I was
so embarrassed to be in my work role and not
(04:24):
be able to lead and perform the way I was
there to do for the company. Go to therapy and
the therapist is tuned in enough to tell me some
anatomy of the body that's happening with this anxiety and
this panic, and she just tells me, I need to
go to yoga so I can learn how to breathe.
(04:44):
I need the diaphramatic breath. She doesn't go into rest
and digest, she doesn't talk about the nervous system or
pain or trauma. Really, she just encourages yoga, and I'm
totally resistant. I think I'm going to go lay on
a mat and listen to like sound bowls and chant owns.
And it's the last thing I want to do because
as a high per form I was also an athlete.
(05:05):
I love to run, I like to kickbox. And what
I now know in hindsight is there was a pattern
of beating the crop out of myself. And the longer
I could feel pain that I was creating, then I
didn't have to sit in the pain that somebody else
may be created for me. So there's this idea of like,
the only way through is through, but the new translation
(05:27):
is the only way out is in. So if I
could stop replacing the disorder and the destruction that was
happening in my own personal body and my own personal
life and do the work, things could shift and things
could change. And that's exactly what happened. So I did
go to yoga. I'm a good student. I thought, if
I could get rid of this disregulation in my body,
(05:48):
I could then lead the team. I could be back
into certainty. I could get back in the good graces
of my skills and my ability to make an impact.
So yoga was hard. It wasn't an easy experience. We
didn't lay on that, so we didn't chant. We moved.
It was power of vinyasa flow divinely guided for me
to be in that room at the right time, because
(06:10):
it was the first time in my life. I couldn't run. Literally,
I couldn't run for myself. I'm on a little square,
a rectangle yoga mat. The room was packed, it was hot,
the doors behind me. The moves were fast and rigorous,
and at some point I couldn't keep up, and not
so much a place of a feeling defeated, because that
(06:31):
wasn't the energy or the emotion. But it shifted me
into a surrender, shifted me into a place of not
needing to perform. Because I promised you. I went into
that room and I was certain I was going to
be the best yoga student I'd never done yoga. How
was I going to be the best, but I needed
to feel so qualified and equipped because my sense of
purpose and love and enoughness came from all the ways
(06:54):
I had been conditioned to perform. So there's no score
for the best yoga and a yoga of course, I
certainly wasn't going to get it that day, because I
ended up that specific class in a puddle of my
own sweat and my own tears, trying to not vomit
because it was so rigorous, so hard, and there was
so much that needed to be purged from my physiology,
(07:15):
from the energy body, from the part of me that
had pretended for my whole life that I was good enough,
and deep down inside I didn't believe that is true,
so I faked it. I was a poser, I pretended,
and it all fell apart on that yoga mat, which
gave me access to me, the real me, not the
(07:36):
me that society, culture, religion, parents, my ex husband, my job,
my w two, all the external ways that validated me
in a way that I thought was special enough to
be loved. And so the yoga mat journey has been
the hero's journey. Honestly, where today, on a daily basis,
(07:59):
even twelve years later, still I have to go in
and remember who I am and recall the sovereignty and
recall the promise of God that I am worthy and
I am here for greatness, and there is nothing of
limitation or lack unless I play small enough and believe
that lie in that untruth. So it's a resonance, it's
(08:21):
a reclamation. It's a new restoration of who are we
and what are we here to do? And what impact
can we make when we're leading from strength not from
the suffering. So we shift it and that's literally what changed.
The biggest change in my life was me that I
(08:43):
found in a yoga class about twelve years ago.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
What was gainless. I'll be focus ready and watching this
online talking to our suppose to yesterday Jennifer Kenney Smith,
Yoga teacher of Life and spiritual business coach or web
stay jks yoga dot so follow up and everything you
said one thing that called my attention was a lot
of times for individuals, especially those who are higher performers,
(09:11):
sometimes we have issues with letting go. And letting go
is something that we have to do in order for
the new opportunities that are ahead of us to actually
take rout for your personal experience when you started going
to those classes and started the whole process of I
(09:32):
guess you could say getting yourself free. What was it
like for you personally to let go of the old patterns,
the old thoughts as you start to embark on this
new journey.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, it's not easy because it's in programmed in us,
it's encoded. It's everything and anything we had ever picked
up along the way of life, and also the way
that life is mirrored back to us if we acted
a certain way and we got accolades or appreciate or
just somebody's attention.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
I think about this as a woman, how I would
receive attention for men and sometimes I enjoyed that, sometimes
I didn't, and then I would know how to behave
going forward. Just like that with work. We can see
in sports how we're really conditioned and coded. So how
do you reprogram that? It wasn't just one yoga class.
It's been a really long and relentless journey. But with
(10:23):
the desire that on the other side, every time it
gets better. Every time that tightness of feeling imperfect and
not enough that loosens up just a little bit. And
with the curiosity that we are co creating. You get
to remove the shell or the cloak, the way that
we hide, and then see what else can be underneath there,
(10:46):
whether that's just a change of address or your makeup
or your shoes or your suit. Like it doesn't have
to necessarily be like this huge shift in careers. That's
something I did. It totally changed careers and completely transfer
my life. I now my own business. I left or
talk marriage is another one. And we continue to evolve
for the greater good of ourselves. And then maybe there's
(11:07):
a place in there that you're also seeing the impact
that people are saying, Wow, you're different, What did you do?
Because now maybe you look happy, you look healthier. So
there's choices we get to make. But the resilience comes
through the desire to continue to persevere through it, to
take off each layer at a time. And I'm so
(11:28):
inspired by spring. And I just taught a class this
morning on the regeneration of the earth. The flowers and
the plants and the trees. Everything is so beautiful starting
to change right now, and do we choose to stay
in that? The frequency of earth and the earth of
the winter, So it's dense it's earth and water is
(11:51):
the frequency of winter according to our beta. So it's
damp and it's dense, and that's how we hibernate and
we rest and we sleep, and everything is barren, you know,
the trees are dead. Everything just looks dead, and we
get a little bit depressed, right or a lot. And
then we look at spring and it's more vibrant, and
the trees are changing and the flowers are just out
there like flirting with us. And where do we feel
(12:12):
more inclined to be alive? It's not winter for me,
for sure, It's definitely spring. So if we can just
take the example of earth and nature and be curious
enough of like, hmm, what part of me feels dormant
or deadened or not alive or we're lacking vitality and
orvaya we call it ogious where there's a lack of
(12:32):
brightness and vitality to our life. Oh, we're all the body,
the mind, the heart, the spirit, and do we want
to maybe try something new? And then therefore to you
had mentioned this that it takes space, you have to
open up. I think you had said the letting go,
you have to let something go or at least lose
to your eat space, so the newness can be channeled
(12:55):
through you, or birth through you, or created through you,
and that's the co creation. You get to conspire for
the good shift in your life, not just the suffering. Yeah,
so I love it. I'm literally obsessed with it. I'm
kind of a junkie, not so much like the biohacker,
because I'm not trying to spiritually bypass my growth. I mean,
I'm in for the dark and the and the light.
(13:18):
But it's become a new rhythm for me of how
else can I iterate, pivot, shift, evolve, grow, rent, repeat
to never go back because otherwise it felt engaged, I
felt trapped for a long time, uninspired and just unhealthy really.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
And speaking of hacking in life, there's there's no video
game comparison because in video games you might have cheat codes.
There's there's really no cheat cos It's it's basically like
as soon as you have a great day, there's there's
gonna be another day around the corner where it's gonna
be start running and the sun's going to disappear for
(13:58):
a little while. You talk about spring, because when you
think about how changes, how seasons change, it's something that
is coming. You can't control it. It's just coming. It's
going to happen. So I think that leads to my
next question, where when you think about just self love,
(14:20):
a lot of people talk about, especially in a professional world,
business owner, or whatever your case, maybe self love, making
time for yourself, encouraging yourself, not being so harsh on yourself.
Still have discipline, obviously, but at the same time, practicing
(14:41):
self love and compassion is something that we need to
kind of show ourselves at the same time because it's
easy to be caught up in the rat race. I
gotta do this, I gotta do that, But if you
run on e you can't help anybody. So able to
also practice what do I need at this moment, because
(15:06):
if I don't take care of myself, it's hard to
take care of everybody else.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Yeah, one hundred percent. So that took me a little
while to figure out that something was even void in
my life. I was so I believed the hype like
I was it. You would have saw my Facebook and
been like, she's living her best life ever, because that's
what I would have told you. And I had a
mantra like I'll sleep when I'm dead, like I'm crushing
it and it was just a facade. But I didn't
(15:31):
know until I started doing the deep inner work to realize, wow,
I'm not happy. And so I had to go from
the fake happy, the false sense of identity, to the
deep discovery and unveiling the truth was I was deeply hurt.
I was deeply traumatized, and I needed a lot of help.
And I've had a lot of therapy and a lot
of coaches and a lot of teachers, and I encourage
(15:53):
everyone listening, like once you peel off the lid and
you start to see that truth, that maybe there's some
something's not that you're broken. I think we have parts
of us that feel shattered and maybe mangled, but we're
not broken. We just need to find the way to
heal through the brokenness the things that have felt fragmented.
So before I got to self love, I had to
(16:15):
find and witness the part of me that actually hated myself.
There was a deep self suffering, there was a deep loathing.
There's a deep separation of self identity because it was
all fake. It was all a facade just to pretend
that I was good enough so nobody could actually see
the pain and the little girl that was really deeply traumatized.
So once I realized, and I remember witnessing it one day,
(16:36):
opening a door and saying, my reflection, you're effing disgusting,
and that was my truth at the time. And then
I'd start to witness it. So we become the observer
of these moments instead of just you know, ten feet
ahead of ourselves. So I started to see, well, whose
voice is that? And why what did I do to
deserve that kind of language of myself. I wouldn't speak
(16:58):
to my children that way, and I wouldn't speak to
the people I love that way or my best friends.
So where did I Where's it coming from? And it's
a repetition of a pattern of something that we've learned,
usually from commercial consumerism. We've been taught because if we
feel like crap, we'll go buy things, like, you know,
(17:18):
clothes or supplements or retreats. And I'm not saying retreats
aren't great, but you may not need all this stuff.
You know, how much of what we identify with what
is beautiful today is all external. It's very superficial. It's
very sad to me because spent most of my life
living there looking for the next thing to find my
(17:40):
appreciation of myself or approval. So in the moments where
I'd hear myself saying these very unkind things, started to think, well,
if this isn't my truth, because we are born in
the expression of God and he doesn't make mistakes. And
then the perfection that I witness, For example, if I
look at an animal and I'm like, wow, that's the
most beautiful life. Two German shepherds like the most exquisite animals,
(18:04):
and they're not flawed and they're not broken. So why
do we see ourselves in such a disorder, in such disdain?
And so I started playing with that, Well, what if
I could be kinder to myself? And the steps for
that is just some mirror works to catch your gaze
in the mirror, And could you allow yourself to just soften,
to not need to be something that you're not or
better than you think you're supposed to be. This perfectionism
(18:26):
that's just the thief of all joy. Honestly, it's not
even a realistic way to live. So if you could
just soften and lean into just find one thing to
enjoy about your reflection. So if I had a good
hair day, I'd be like, oh, your hair looks really nice,
or my eyes looked pretty that day, or I didn't
look big like I thought, and I was like, Okay,
(18:47):
it's not so bad. So it went from hate and
disgust to it's not so bad too. Now I can
be like, oh, my god, a beautiful guirrel, beautiful sister,
beautiful woman, What a gift you are to the world.
And I can live in that frequency of just honesty
and love and radiance because that's who I now emulate
(19:10):
and that's who I now live with. And it sounds
so external, but it's this becoming as we transgress the
untruth and these lies that have been taught to us
so we can go buy more stuff, so we can
live in the pain, so we can never fully express
our sovereign being, our beauty that just is innately in us.
(19:33):
So that then from the hate and the disowning of
myself to the reclamation of myself, to the worthiness of myself.
And now, I mean, I don't want to sound narcissistic,
but I think I'm a gift and I think I
have beautiful love to express and expand and to share
with other people. That are ready to receive it, and
that feels very whole, no longer broken. It feels very
(19:57):
joyful and satisfying and rich, abundant. And I think before
any of that was pain and suffering and this false
sense of ego telling me that I was enough, although
deep down inside I wasn't, or at least that's what
I felt. Yeah, So it happened to pockets and then
shifts over a long time, and if I ever get
(20:18):
one of those I don't feel great days, I hit
it with compassion. Well, maybe I didn't have enough sleep,
or maybe we didn't honor ourselves in a way, maybe
we're dishonoring to ourselves. But it's never a long day
of that disdain, and it's never weeks or months anymore.
It's maybe a five minute and then I catch it
and I'm like, hell no, that is not my voice.
(20:39):
I know who I am. So I think it's part
of knowing who we are and coming back to that
script and that memory.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
I was just about to say it. When you think
about how people identify what they want to be, well,
in some cases you can be in position where our
season in your life where it's like, okay, hold up,
time out. This is not what I actually want. So
(21:09):
when you're talking about that, that moment of shift, you
actually have to be in the present moment to say, Okay,
let's not worry about ten minutes from now. It's not
worried about what happened ten years ago. What can I
do in this moment? Because at that time you're able
to not just begin the shift in your life, but
(21:31):
you get to what I would say, I start identifying
what is you want to be?
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
And I like to think because I heard this before,
I don't know the original source, but someone said, we
look out into the world as a reflection of what's
going on in sawu. What it's going to say, wait,
time out? Well about the bad news, well about all
the chaos? What about all the best stuff? Not that part.
(21:58):
What I mean by that is how you treat people,
how you see people, how you see the outlook of life.
It's a red alignment of what's going on with you.
You're angry, most chances, you'll be very rude angry to others.
But if you're a little bit more understanding, then there's
(22:22):
a time of place, right, there's time to be a
little tight, frustrated, but you will catch yourself because you
don't identify with that's the way I ought to live.
You identify with the more positive, like, Okay, what can
I actually do to make this better? What can I do?
Because sometimes you want to add all these different complicated equations,
(22:46):
right like if I do this and I set the
tone and all this, then I might have a perfect week.
It's not like that. Even if this week goes out
of whack, I have enough experience where if I made
it back then, then what says I can make it now?
Like you have a different attitude to conflicts or you know,
(23:12):
issues that pop up because when you think about adversity,
a lot of times it serves as a catalyst for
personal growth. And if we can have your touch on that,
because when you think about what you had to go through,
it's almost sometimes necessary or to prepare you for the
(23:32):
weight of the success that you have to carry it today.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah, and I think to be open and finding the
other people that inspire you, because we don't have to
do it alone. Because the adversity is part of the
evolution of this identity you just mentioned, So we call
it identity evolution because once we evolve into that next
version of ourselves, something new will be or triggering. For example,
(24:03):
after I started my business, I was looking at opening
a yoga studio, a healing center, and it totally fell through.
The guy that owned the space sold it to a
New York broker, and then they didn't want to work
with me. They had other plans. And it was at
the exact same crossroad of when I retired. When I
quit my corporate job, and then I had no backup
(24:26):
plan that was nothing. So I quickly shifted and started
working mostly in the coaching space. But what would we do?
What would I have done if I didn't keep moving forward.
It was not a failure, it was just a shift.
We need to be aware that life will when we're ready.
The next thing will open, and it might not be
what you think the next phase. A year later, I
(24:48):
realized I needed to stop drinking alcohol. It wasn't something
that I was messy with, but it was limiting me
in a way that I didn't feel my best. And
I also I known at this truth in my life
that I can't have just one. I don't know if
anyone else listening can relate to that, but I tried
to only have one for many years, and one turned
into three and then I'm like, I can't manage this,
and so that had to exit my life, which then
(25:09):
opened up more space for deeper healing. Here's what happens
when you don't have alcohol or advice to numb with,
you usually shift that then to sugar. So and I
had to look at like my food, my food intake,
and where am I still numbing even though I'm telling
the world I'm an authority in spiritual healing, Well, what
about me? I'm still the biggest student of my life.
And life then continues to offer us. I was going
(25:32):
to say, trip us up, it will it's it's not.
No one promised us easy, and if we look back
through ancient scriptures, it certainly hasn't been easy for most
of civilization. But we think based on what Facebook tells
us and what movies tell us, it's all everything is awesome,
everything is easy. So we want to be aware that
(25:53):
when we set the intention to expand, to grow, to shed,
to become happier, more joy well, it is work. And
on the other side, though, is the joy because the
hard stuff does fade away. When you had mentioned the
people that are being in this you know, the mirror effect.
It's also the law of frequency and vibration an attraction.
(26:14):
If I'm in a really crappy place, I'm going to
get more crappy experiences. If I'm in a more joyful state,
I'm going to have more experiences of people that show
up that will resonate in that frequency too. So as
we shed the old patterns of it has to be
hard and I have to live in suffering, and we
open up too, and I'm ready and willing to see
(26:34):
things a different way. And then the new inspired action
comes in place. And then the resources, which maybe people
are coaches or guys, show up and that's the next level.
So we start to climb up this ladder of ascension,
this ladder of improved frequency, higher frequencies. But it isn't
always straight. Healing is not linear by any stretch. It's
(26:58):
when we think it should be, or we think we're promised,
that is when there's the resistance and then we think
we're owed this. I mean, how many people have been like, God,
you did this to me, or your husband, or you
did the it's their faults, Like blame and shame is
not going to get us anywhere. We need to come
back to what is our part, what is our responsibility,
and what can we do going forward to be aligned
(27:20):
to what we want. We get to decide, we get
to choose. This is the life and it's prime time.
There's no more address rehearsal. I think most of your
listeners are probably at that midlife like it's time to
let's f and go light it up, do the next
best thing with compassion, with kindness, with love, with connection,
and let everything else fall away.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Once again, this not real focused ready in watching us
online talking about guest today Jennifer Kenney Smith yoga tea shirt,
life and spiritual business coach. Go to website jk as
yoga dot com. That's jk as yoga dot com. Last
time I said, before we close this, I heard this
the other day and it was during March Madness and
(28:06):
they're talking about coach talking to his teammates or his
players to say, and the coach was talking about the
philosophy of one day, Uh, just try to get one
percent better every day because a lot of times the
excitement hits us and we're like, okay, yeah, we're about
(28:28):
to change, You're about to shift, you about to do
all this. It sounds great and then boom a storm comes,
especially doesn't actually announce its coming, It just boom, come out,
come out of nowhere. That testes us, and that test
is going to be like, all right, are you gonna
get better? Are you gonna get worse and worse until
(28:50):
you just put yourself in the cave and you're not
ever going to hit your fullest potential because we missed that,
that that opportunity just one percent better? Like what can
I do right now to do better than yesterday? It
doesn't have to be like let me hell all wrong,
Let me be fifty percent better than me be eighty
(29:11):
percent better? Know what can I do with one percent?
Because that gives you not just grace, but also gives
you opportunity to learn from everybody that are good in
your circle. Because sometimes we're meeting with frustration, we want
to exclude everybody. So you're wrong, you're wrong, and you're wrong.
(29:32):
But I'll stop it here and let you take the floor.
When we point someone told me I'm sure there's an
old proverb somewhere there's three more fingers point right back
at you. Or you started shifting the blame, and stuff
happens think about how can I just get better one
percent better day.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Yeah, I'll pull that threat a little bit too and
offer that. In yoga, the word praniyama it means breath practice,
a breathing practice in yoga philosophy, that we are assigned
a certain amount of breaths per lifetime. So just think
of that for a second. We breathe twenty five thousand
times a day, completely unconscious. It happens automatically, not necessarily
(30:14):
dropping in with gratitude, Thank you for this breath, Thank
you for filling my lungs with life force. Thank you
for giving me the ability to connect and love and be.
So if we can understand that the soul is in
this body for however many breaths that's been assigned to
your lifetime, it doesn't have to be exponential growth every day.
(30:35):
It also doesn't have to be in the belly of
despair for a long period of time. But if we
can look at the lifeline as the breath, If you
know you have a certain amount of breaths, what can
you do each day to deeply connect, to honor yourself,
to come back home, to not fight yourself anymore, and
then just be more present with more compassion. It changes
the perspective of all the doing we think we need
(30:56):
to do to be the person we think we need
to be. We don't need to do anything, We just
need to be present to who we already are.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
We can probably talk for another thirty minutes, but once
again listen, I mean focus ready watching us online talking
to our special guests, Jennifer Kenny Smith. You go to
your website. It's jakasyoga dot com. This time went by
so fast, I don't know where it went, but I
always want to say to you everything you do, thank
(31:25):
you for what you're doing for your community, but also
for today, thank you for your.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Time, thank you, and thank you for what you're doing.
You're amazing.
You are listening to I Am Refocused Radio with your
host Shamaiah read This show is designed to inspire you
to live your purpose and regain your focus. And now
here's your host, Shamaiah Reid.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hey, welcome TOIME. We Focus Ready once again me you're
here today and just like any other time, we have
another mosy show for y'all today. If you're into yoga,
if you're into spiritual and life coaching, well we have
a perfect guest for you. We have Jennifer Kenny Smith.
She's on with us today. Go visit her website. You
can see on the screen if you're watching this on YouTube.
It's real simple, real easy. It's jk as yoga dot com.
(00:40):
She is a life coach, a yoga teacher, and she's
going to share with us not just her personal story,
but she has a professional background as well, be in
the corporate world. But answering her call, understand that there's
some pain points that she was able to address. She
has her own personal story what calls her to get
into this. So first and foremost, I would say to you, Jennifer,
(01:03):
thank you for your time today. How you doing today,
I'm amazing. Thank you so much for having me. I'm
super excited to be here. Well, I appreciate you taking
time to be with us, so kind of paint a
picture for us. I understand that a lot of people
they have what they call a midlife crisis, but you
also had a powerful awakening, So kind of tell us
(01:24):
a little bit of your personal story. What called you
to start this whole thing?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, thank you. So I found myself climbing the corporate
ladder being all that I thought I could be, and
I left a really unhealthy marriage and was still climbing
that corporate lader. It's where I found my purpose and
my meeting, or so I thought. So single mom and
looking for certainty through my work, that validation, that affirmation
(01:50):
that at a girl, and I ended up having an
altercation with my boss over something that I believed was
the right thing to do for my team and for
the company. I had been in this role in this
industry for two decades, so I wasn't new. I had authority,
so I thought, but he disagreed, and so during this altercation,
I got deeply triggered. I ended up getting out of
(02:14):
this closed door meeting where he threatened my job, told
me he could fire me, which was unfounded and unethical,
and he couldn't have. But I didn't hear it in
the sense of a powerful business woman. I heard it
in the sense of a fragile girl who had been
in a disruptive life since childhood and hadn't attended to
(02:34):
deep core trauma wounds of childhood. I was raised by
two alcoholics and then married into a very dysfunctional relationship
with my then soon to be divorced husband. This was
back in twenty eleven, twenty twelve ish. Anyway, I don't
know how to process this fear of my security, my certainty,
(02:56):
of my livelihood, of my brand, everything that I built,
and I went straight into panic. I'm going to lose
my job, I'm going to lose my house, which was
not normal. If you're not in a trauma response, it's
not a normal reaction. So what happened to the body
is I turned into high functioning anxiety, panic, panic attacks,
unable to project or speak or lead my team at
(03:19):
our team meetings or events or forecasting. I was in
a sales leadership role, so I was wise enough to
know I something had to change. This isn't working. My
boss didn't fire me, but I hated him, and maybe
it wasn't fair because a lot of the pain and
anger and resentment I had from growing up had not
been dealt with. So he's the trigger, so therefore he's
(03:40):
the target. He's now the villain of my story. And
today I won't say we're friends. I don't even know
him anymore. But he's been a huge advocate in my
own journey, like he is a proponent that forced me
into a place of going backwards in my life and
not healing and developing and continuing to grow or to grow.
(04:01):
I saw somebody recently post on LinkedIn about the toxic
work environment and leaders who are toxic are causing the
trumoil and the downfall of the entire company, And yeah,
sure I agree to a certain degree. But if it
wasn't for this experience in my life, I wouldn't be
where I am today. So the panic attacks. I was
so embarrassed to be in my work role and not
(04:24):
be able to lead and perform the way I was
there to do for the company. Go to therapy and
the therapist is tuned in enough to tell me some
anatomy of the body that's happening with this anxiety and
this panic, and she just tells me, I need to
go to yoga so I can learn how to breathe.
(04:44):
I need the diaphramatic breath. She doesn't go into rest
and digest, she doesn't talk about the nervous system or
pain or trauma. Really, she just encourages yoga, and I'm
totally resistant. I think I'm going to go lay on
a mat and listen to like sound bowls and chant owns.
And it's the last thing I want to do because
as a high per form I was also an athlete.
(05:05):
I love to run, I like to kickbox. And what
I now know in hindsight is there was a pattern
of beating the crop out of myself. And the longer
I could feel pain that I was creating, then I
didn't have to sit in the pain that somebody else
may be created for me. So there's this idea of like,
the only way through is through, but the new translation
(05:27):
is the only way out is in. So if I
could stop replacing the disorder and the destruction that was
happening in my own personal body and my own personal
life and do the work, things could shift and things
could change. And that's exactly what happened. So I did
go to yoga. I'm a good student. I thought, if
I could get rid of this disregulation in my body,
(05:48):
I could then lead the team. I could be back
into certainty. I could get back in the good graces
of my skills and my ability to make an impact.
So yoga was hard. It wasn't an easy experience. We
didn't lay on that, so we didn't chant. We moved.
It was power of vinyasa flow divinely guided for me
to be in that room at the right time, because
(06:10):
it was the first time in my life. I couldn't run. Literally,
I couldn't run for myself. I'm on a little square,
a rectangle yoga mat. The room was packed, it was hot,
the doors behind me. The moves were fast and rigorous,
and at some point I couldn't keep up, and not
so much a place of a feeling defeated, because that
(06:31):
wasn't the energy or the emotion. But it shifted me
into a surrender, shifted me into a place of not
needing to perform. Because I promised you. I went into
that room and I was certain I was going to
be the best yoga student I'd never done yoga. How
was I going to be the best, but I needed
to feel so qualified and equipped because my sense of
purpose and love and enoughness came from all the ways
(06:54):
I had been conditioned to perform. So there's no score
for the best yoga and a yoga of course, I
certainly wasn't going to get it that day, because I
ended up that specific class in a puddle of my
own sweat and my own tears, trying to not vomit
because it was so rigorous, so hard, and there was
so much that needed to be purged from my physiology,
(07:15):
from the energy body, from the part of me that
had pretended for my whole life that I was good enough,
and deep down inside I didn't believe that is true,
so I faked it. I was a poser, I pretended,
and it all fell apart on that yoga mat, which
gave me access to me, the real me, not the
(07:36):
me that society, culture, religion, parents, my ex husband, my job,
my w two, all the external ways that validated me
in a way that I thought was special enough to
be loved. And so the yoga mat journey has been
the hero's journey. Honestly, where today, on a daily basis,
(07:59):
even twelve years later, still I have to go in
and remember who I am and recall the sovereignty and
recall the promise of God that I am worthy and
I am here for greatness, and there is nothing of
limitation or lack unless I play small enough and believe
that lie in that untruth. So it's a resonance, it's
(08:21):
a reclamation. It's a new restoration of who are we
and what are we here to do? And what impact
can we make when we're leading from strength not from
the suffering. So we shift it and that's literally what changed.
The biggest change in my life was me that I
(08:43):
found in a yoga class about twelve years ago.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
What was gainless. I'll be focus ready and watching this
online talking to our suppose to yesterday Jennifer Kenney Smith,
Yoga teacher of Life and spiritual business coach or web
stay jks yoga dot so follow up and everything you
said one thing that called my attention was a lot
of times for individuals, especially those who are higher performers,
(09:11):
sometimes we have issues with letting go. And letting go
is something that we have to do in order for
the new opportunities that are ahead of us to actually
take rout for your personal experience when you started going
to those classes and started the whole process of I
(09:32):
guess you could say getting yourself free. What was it
like for you personally to let go of the old patterns,
the old thoughts as you start to embark on this
new journey.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, it's not easy because it's in programmed in us,
it's encoded. It's everything and anything we had ever picked
up along the way of life, and also the way
that life is mirrored back to us if we acted
a certain way and we got accolades or appreciate or
just somebody's attention.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:02):
I think about this as a woman, how I would
receive attention for men and sometimes I enjoyed that, sometimes
I didn't, and then I would know how to behave
going forward. Just like that with work. We can see
in sports how we're really conditioned and coded. So how
do you reprogram that? It wasn't just one yoga class.
It's been a really long and relentless journey. But with
(10:23):
the desire that on the other side, every time it
gets better. Every time that tightness of feeling imperfect and
not enough that loosens up just a little bit. And
with the curiosity that we are co creating. You get
to remove the shell or the cloak, the way that
we hide, and then see what else can be underneath there,
(10:46):
whether that's just a change of address or your makeup
or your shoes or your suit. Like it doesn't have
to necessarily be like this huge shift in careers. That's
something I did. It totally changed careers and completely transfer
my life. I now my own business. I left or
talk marriage is another one. And we continue to evolve
for the greater good of ourselves. And then maybe there's
(11:07):
a place in there that you're also seeing the impact
that people are saying, Wow, you're different, What did you do?
Because now maybe you look happy, you look healthier. So
there's choices we get to make. But the resilience comes
through the desire to continue to persevere through it, to
take off each layer at a time. And I'm so
(11:28):
inspired by spring. And I just taught a class this
morning on the regeneration of the earth. The flowers and
the plants and the trees. Everything is so beautiful starting
to change right now, and do we choose to stay
in that? The frequency of earth and the earth of
the winter, So it's dense it's earth and water is
(11:51):
the frequency of winter according to our beta. So it's
damp and it's dense, and that's how we hibernate and
we rest and we sleep, and everything is barren, you know,
the trees are dead. Everything just looks dead, and we
get a little bit depressed, right or a lot. And
then we look at spring and it's more vibrant, and
the trees are changing and the flowers are just out
there like flirting with us. And where do we feel
(12:12):
more inclined to be alive? It's not winter for me,
for sure, It's definitely spring. So if we can just
take the example of earth and nature and be curious
enough of like, hmm, what part of me feels dormant
or deadened or not alive or we're lacking vitality and
orvaya we call it ogious where there's a lack of
(12:32):
brightness and vitality to our life. Oh, we're all the body,
the mind, the heart, the spirit, and do we want
to maybe try something new? And then therefore to you
had mentioned this that it takes space, you have to
open up. I think you had said the letting go,
you have to let something go or at least lose
to your eat space, so the newness can be channeled
(12:55):
through you, or birth through you, or created through you,
and that's the co creation. You get to conspire for
the good shift in your life, not just the suffering. Yeah,
so I love it. I'm literally obsessed with it. I'm
kind of a junkie, not so much like the biohacker,
because I'm not trying to spiritually bypass my growth. I mean,
I'm in for the dark and the and the light.
(13:18):
But it's become a new rhythm for me of how
else can I iterate, pivot, shift, evolve, grow, rent, repeat
to never go back because otherwise it felt engaged, I
felt trapped for a long time, uninspired and just unhealthy really.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
And speaking of hacking in life, there's there's no video
game comparison because in video games you might have cheat codes.
There's there's really no cheat cos It's it's basically like
as soon as you have a great day, there's there's
gonna be another day around the corner where it's gonna
be start running and the sun's going to disappear for
(13:58):
a little while. You talk about spring, because when you
think about how changes, how seasons change, it's something that
is coming. You can't control it. It's just coming. It's
going to happen. So I think that leads to my
next question, where when you think about just self love,
(14:20):
a lot of people talk about, especially in a professional world,
business owner, or whatever your case, maybe self love, making
time for yourself, encouraging yourself, not being so harsh on yourself.
Still have discipline, obviously, but at the same time, practicing
(14:41):
self love and compassion is something that we need to
kind of show ourselves at the same time because it's
easy to be caught up in the rat race. I
gotta do this, I gotta do that, But if you
run on e you can't help anybody. So able to
also practice what do I need at this moment, because
(15:06):
if I don't take care of myself, it's hard to
take care of everybody else.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Yeah, one hundred percent. So that took me a little
while to figure out that something was even void in
my life. I was so I believed the hype like
I was it. You would have saw my Facebook and
been like, she's living her best life ever, because that's
what I would have told you. And I had a
mantra like I'll sleep when I'm dead, like I'm crushing
it and it was just a facade. But I didn't
(15:31):
know until I started doing the deep inner work to realize, wow,
I'm not happy. And so I had to go from
the fake happy, the false sense of identity, to the
deep discovery and unveiling the truth was I was deeply hurt.
I was deeply traumatized, and I needed a lot of help.
And I've had a lot of therapy and a lot
of coaches and a lot of teachers, and I encourage
(15:53):
everyone listening, like once you peel off the lid and
you start to see that truth, that maybe there's some
something's not that you're broken. I think we have parts
of us that feel shattered and maybe mangled, but we're
not broken. We just need to find the way to
heal through the brokenness the things that have felt fragmented.
So before I got to self love, I had to
(16:15):
find and witness the part of me that actually hated myself.
There was a deep self suffering, there was a deep loathing.
There's a deep separation of self identity because it was
all fake. It was all a facade just to pretend
that I was good enough so nobody could actually see
the pain and the little girl that was really deeply traumatized.
So once I realized, and I remember witnessing it one day,
(16:36):
opening a door and saying, my reflection, you're effing disgusting,
and that was my truth at the time. And then
I'd start to witness it. So we become the observer
of these moments instead of just you know, ten feet
ahead of ourselves. So I started to see, well, whose
voice is that? And why what did I do to
deserve that kind of language of myself. I wouldn't speak
(16:58):
to my children that way, and I wouldn't speak to
the people I love that way or my best friends.
So where did I Where's it coming from? And it's
a repetition of a pattern of something that we've learned,
usually from commercial consumerism. We've been taught because if we
feel like crap, we'll go buy things, like, you know,
(17:18):
clothes or supplements or retreats. And I'm not saying retreats
aren't great, but you may not need all this stuff.
You know, how much of what we identify with what
is beautiful today is all external. It's very superficial. It's
very sad to me because spent most of my life
living there looking for the next thing to find my
(17:40):
appreciation of myself or approval. So in the moments where
I'd hear myself saying these very unkind things, started to think, well,
if this isn't my truth, because we are born in
the expression of God and he doesn't make mistakes. And
then the perfection that I witness, For example, if I
look at an animal and I'm like, wow, that's the
most beautiful life. Two German shepherds like the most exquisite animals,
(18:04):
and they're not flawed and they're not broken. So why
do we see ourselves in such a disorder, in such disdain?
And so I started playing with that, Well, what if
I could be kinder to myself? And the steps for
that is just some mirror works to catch your gaze
in the mirror, And could you allow yourself to just soften,
to not need to be something that you're not or
better than you think you're supposed to be. This perfectionism
(18:26):
that's just the thief of all joy. Honestly, it's not
even a realistic way to live. So if you could
just soften and lean into just find one thing to
enjoy about your reflection. So if I had a good
hair day, I'd be like, oh, your hair looks really nice,
or my eyes looked pretty that day, or I didn't
look big like I thought, and I was like, Okay,
(18:47):
it's not so bad. So it went from hate and
disgust to it's not so bad too. Now I can
be like, oh, my god, a beautiful guirrel, beautiful sister,
beautiful woman, What a gift you are to the world.
And I can live in that frequency of just honesty
and love and radiance because that's who I now emulate
(19:10):
and that's who I now live with. And it sounds
so external, but it's this becoming as we transgress the
untruth and these lies that have been taught to us
so we can go buy more stuff, so we can
live in the pain, so we can never fully express
our sovereign being, our beauty that just is innately in us.
(19:33):
So that then from the hate and the disowning of
myself to the reclamation of myself, to the worthiness of myself.
And now, I mean, I don't want to sound narcissistic,
but I think I'm a gift and I think I
have beautiful love to express and expand and to share
with other people. That are ready to receive it, and
that feels very whole, no longer broken. It feels very
(19:57):
joyful and satisfying and rich, abundant. And I think before
any of that was pain and suffering and this false
sense of ego telling me that I was enough, although
deep down inside I wasn't, or at least that's what
I felt. Yeah, So it happened to pockets and then
shifts over a long time, and if I ever get
(20:18):
one of those I don't feel great days, I hit
it with compassion. Well, maybe I didn't have enough sleep,
or maybe we didn't honor ourselves in a way, maybe
we're dishonoring to ourselves. But it's never a long day
of that disdain, and it's never weeks or months anymore.
It's maybe a five minute and then I catch it
and I'm like, hell no, that is not my voice.
(20:39):
I know who I am. So I think it's part
of knowing who we are and coming back to that
script and that memory.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
I was just about to say it. When you think
about how people identify what they want to be, well,
in some cases you can be in position where our
season in your life where it's like, okay, hold up,
time out. This is not what I actually want. So
(21:09):
when you're talking about that, that moment of shift, you
actually have to be in the present moment to say, Okay,
let's not worry about ten minutes from now. It's not
worried about what happened ten years ago. What can I
do in this moment? Because at that time you're able
to not just begin the shift in your life, but
(21:31):
you get to what I would say, I start identifying
what is you want to be?
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
And I like to think because I heard this before,
I don't know the original source, but someone said, we
look out into the world as a reflection of what's
going on in sawu. What it's going to say, wait,
time out? Well about the bad news, well about all
the chaos? What about all the best stuff? Not that part.
(21:58):
What I mean by that is how you treat people,
how you see people, how you see the outlook of life.
It's a red alignment of what's going on with you.
You're angry, most chances, you'll be very rude angry to others.
But if you're a little bit more understanding, then there's
(22:22):
a time of place, right, there's time to be a
little tight, frustrated, but you will catch yourself because you
don't identify with that's the way I ought to live.
You identify with the more positive, like, Okay, what can
I actually do to make this better? What can I do?
Because sometimes you want to add all these different complicated equations,
(22:46):
right like if I do this and I set the
tone and all this, then I might have a perfect week.
It's not like that. Even if this week goes out
of whack, I have enough experience where if I made
it back then, then what says I can make it now?
Like you have a different attitude to conflicts or you know,
(23:12):
issues that pop up because when you think about adversity,
a lot of times it serves as a catalyst for
personal growth. And if we can have your touch on that,
because when you think about what you had to go through,
it's almost sometimes necessary or to prepare you for the
(23:32):
weight of the success that you have to carry it today.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah, and I think to be open and finding the
other people that inspire you, because we don't have to
do it alone. Because the adversity is part of the
evolution of this identity you just mentioned, So we call
it identity evolution because once we evolve into that next
version of ourselves, something new will be or triggering. For example,
(24:03):
after I started my business, I was looking at opening
a yoga studio, a healing center, and it totally fell through.
The guy that owned the space sold it to a
New York broker, and then they didn't want to work
with me. They had other plans. And it was at
the exact same crossroad of when I retired. When I
quit my corporate job, and then I had no backup
(24:26):
plan that was nothing. So I quickly shifted and started
working mostly in the coaching space. But what would we do?
What would I have done if I didn't keep moving forward.
It was not a failure, it was just a shift.
We need to be aware that life will when we're ready.
The next thing will open, and it might not be
what you think the next phase. A year later, I
(24:48):
realized I needed to stop drinking alcohol. It wasn't something
that I was messy with, but it was limiting me
in a way that I didn't feel my best. And
I also I known at this truth in my life
that I can't have just one. I don't know if
anyone else listening can relate to that, but I tried
to only have one for many years, and one turned
into three and then I'm like, I can't manage this,
and so that had to exit my life, which then
(25:09):
opened up more space for deeper healing. Here's what happens
when you don't have alcohol or advice to numb with,
you usually shift that then to sugar. So and I
had to look at like my food, my food intake,
and where am I still numbing even though I'm telling
the world I'm an authority in spiritual healing, Well, what
about me? I'm still the biggest student of my life.
And life then continues to offer us. I was going
(25:32):
to say, trip us up, it will it's it's not.
No one promised us easy, and if we look back
through ancient scriptures, it certainly hasn't been easy for most
of civilization. But we think based on what Facebook tells
us and what movies tell us, it's all everything is awesome,
everything is easy. So we want to be aware that
(25:53):
when we set the intention to expand, to grow, to shed,
to become happier, more joy well, it is work. And
on the other side, though, is the joy because the
hard stuff does fade away. When you had mentioned the
people that are being in this you know, the mirror effect.
It's also the law of frequency and vibration an attraction.
(26:14):
If I'm in a really crappy place, I'm going to
get more crappy experiences. If I'm in a more joyful state,
I'm going to have more experiences of people that show
up that will resonate in that frequency too. So as
we shed the old patterns of it has to be
hard and I have to live in suffering, and we
open up too, and I'm ready and willing to see
(26:34):
things a different way. And then the new inspired action
comes in place. And then the resources, which maybe people
are coaches or guys, show up and that's the next level.
So we start to climb up this ladder of ascension,
this ladder of improved frequency, higher frequencies. But it isn't
always straight. Healing is not linear by any stretch. It's
(26:58):
when we think it should be, or we think we're promised,
that is when there's the resistance and then we think
we're owed this. I mean, how many people have been like, God,
you did this to me, or your husband, or you
did the it's their faults, Like blame and shame is
not going to get us anywhere. We need to come
back to what is our part, what is our responsibility,
and what can we do going forward to be aligned
(27:20):
to what we want. We get to decide, we get
to choose. This is the life and it's prime time.
There's no more address rehearsal. I think most of your
listeners are probably at that midlife like it's time to
let's f and go light it up, do the next
best thing with compassion, with kindness, with love, with connection,
and let everything else fall away.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Once again, this not real focused ready in watching us
online talking about guest today Jennifer Kenney Smith yoga tea shirt,
life and spiritual business coach. Go to website jk as
yoga dot com. That's jk as yoga dot com. Last
time I said, before we close this, I heard this
the other day and it was during March Madness and
(28:06):
they're talking about coach talking to his teammates or his
players to say, and the coach was talking about the
philosophy of one day, Uh, just try to get one
percent better every day because a lot of times the
excitement hits us and we're like, okay, yeah, we're about
(28:28):
to change, You're about to shift, you about to do
all this. It sounds great and then boom a storm comes,
especially doesn't actually announce its coming, It just boom, come out,
come out of nowhere. That testes us, and that test
is going to be like, all right, are you gonna
get better? Are you gonna get worse and worse until
(28:50):
you just put yourself in the cave and you're not
ever going to hit your fullest potential because we missed that,
that that opportunity just one percent better? Like what can
I do right now to do better than yesterday? It
doesn't have to be like let me hell all wrong,
Let me be fifty percent better than me be eighty
(29:11):
percent better? Know what can I do with one percent?
Because that gives you not just grace, but also gives
you opportunity to learn from everybody that are good in
your circle. Because sometimes we're meeting with frustration, we want
to exclude everybody. So you're wrong, you're wrong, and you're wrong.
(29:32):
But I'll stop it here and let you take the floor.
When we point someone told me I'm sure there's an
old proverb somewhere there's three more fingers point right back
at you. Or you started shifting the blame, and stuff
happens think about how can I just get better one
percent better day.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Yeah, I'll pull that threat a little bit too and
offer that. In yoga, the word praniyama it means breath practice,
a breathing practice in yoga philosophy, that we are assigned
a certain amount of breaths per lifetime. So just think
of that for a second. We breathe twenty five thousand
times a day, completely unconscious. It happens automatically, not necessarily
(30:14):
dropping in with gratitude, Thank you for this breath, Thank
you for filling my lungs with life force. Thank you
for giving me the ability to connect and love and be.
So if we can understand that the soul is in
this body for however many breaths that's been assigned to
your lifetime, it doesn't have to be exponential growth every day.
(30:35):
It also doesn't have to be in the belly of
despair for a long period of time. But if we
can look at the lifeline as the breath, If you
know you have a certain amount of breaths, what can
you do each day to deeply connect, to honor yourself,
to come back home, to not fight yourself anymore, and
then just be more present with more compassion. It changes
the perspective of all the doing we think we need
(30:56):
to do to be the person we think we need
to be. We don't need to do anything, We just
need to be present to who we already are.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
We can probably talk for another thirty minutes, but once
again listen, I mean focus ready watching us online talking
to our special guests, Jennifer Kenny Smith. You go to
your website. It's jakasyoga dot com. This time went by
so fast, I don't know where it went, but I
always want to say to you everything you do, thank
(31:25):
you for what you're doing for your community, but also
for today, thank you for your.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Time, thank you, and thank you for what you're doing.
You're amazing.
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