An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Another lifestyle tweak that I do almost every day is schedule as many of my Zoom meetings on the phone as possible. What this means is that instead of doing a Zoom video call, we do it over the phone which I know is kind of old school. What’s great about that is both of us can walk outside and be in the environment or, even better, take a walk.
As a part of our series about “5 Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Dramatically Improve One’s Wellbeing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Katie Silcox, M.A., New York Times Bestselling Author of Happy, Healthy, Sexy, Ayurvedic Specialist, and the Founder of Shakti School.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the story about how you first got involved in fitness and wellness?
I’d like to say that I got into wellness because of my own personal pain. I think many of us in the fitness and wellness industry get into the field because we have our own issues and want to feel better. Once we see that there are actions we can take to feel better, it’s just natural to become passionate about it and want to share that insight with others.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Although it may sound cheesy, the most interesting thing that has happened to me since I started my career has been watching the beautiful transformation that happens to people when they tap into their own deep reservoir of inner knowingness.
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
I’ve made many mistakes in my career path and I still do! I honestly can’t think of anything super funny, but most of my mistakes have occurred from being naive to the complexities of other peoples’ experiences. Today, I try to approach every person with the humility of truly not knowing what they’ve gone through, or who they really are beyond the superficial things we see upon first glance.
Can you share with our readers a bit about why you are an authority in the fitness and wellness field? In your opinion, what is your unique contribution to the world of wellness?
I think of my unique contribution to the world of wellness as twofold: First, I see myself as a translator of the ancient wisdom of health and wellbeing for modern women. I am kind of like a Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City but for preventative health and spirituality. I love taking old school texts and making them digestible and relevant to regular people like me.
Secondly, I feel that a big part of my unique offering is bringing forward a renewed appreciation for the way in which the feminine aspect in all of us, men and women, is longing to be experienced through health and wellness. In every realm, whether it be fitness, mindfulness, nutrition, or biohacking, we need the lost feminine… And the feminine has nothing to do with being sweet or wearing dresses and makeup. The feminine is about understanding the greater matrix or field in which we are all existing. It is the opposite of isolation. It is intuitive, feels deeply, and is interconnected. And we need this faculty to coexist beside our logic, reason, and individuality (which are also important!).
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’ve had so much help along the way, but I’m a big fan of having teachers and mentors in life. I think one of my favorite stories is working with a mentor who really encouraged me to actually get real about feeling my feelings rather than pushing my anger into sadness or shutting down my stress and worry. She really encouraged me to stay with my anger and let it be there without judgment. What I was able to see through that is how much that force was actually just a deeply vibrant energy. I was then able to channel that into great creative pursuits. It gave me the confidence to be able to encourage other people to do the same.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. We all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, exercise more, and get better sleep etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the 3 main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?
Your question reminds me of a great teaching from Shankaracharya. He says (more or less) that sometimes “I know what I should do and I don’t do it. And other times I know what I shouldn’t do, and I do do it.”
I think it speaks to a deeper truth about our mind. We think that we know what’s going on in our conscious thought processes, but so much of our emotions, behaviors and perspectives on reality are coming from the subconscious.
We may know it’s important to eat vegetables, less sugar, and to exercise but there are all of these other unseen forces pulling us in different directions.
The single most important blockage for all of us lies in the aspects of our mind that are under the surface. The famed psychologist Jung stated that 99% of this shadow realm, or the unconscious, is pure gold if we know how to work with it.
In fact, one of my favorite definitions of the word yoga is not about stretching, it’s about making the unconscious realm more conscious. We can do that through things like mindfulness, meditation, energy work, or working with a trusted therapist or teacher.
Another blockage is just the momentum of our past bad habits. If we can move towards new habits, it takes about 40 days for those to really wire into our neurology. It gets easier if we can just get through the first two or three days of bad habits.
The last thing I would suggest is to really investigate what our bad habits are and how they are serving us. So, how is it benefiting you to overeat sugar? It may seem counterintuitive, but what we will typically find is that we are overeating sugar because we have a lack of sweetness somewhere else in our daily life. We are overeating fat because we don’t feel stable, grounded, and supported. We may even be over drinking wheatgrass because we aren’t comfortable being on the planet and we want to indulge in the tastes that are reducing to our tissues. Yes, the bitter taste reduces us!
This is one of the reasons that I created our yearlong Ayurveda school because we really do need time to dive deeply into how our habits are actually coming from an untouched “gold” source.
Can you please share your “5 Non-Intuitive Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Dramatically Improve One’s Wellbeing”? (Please share a story or an example for each, and feel free to share ideas for mental, emotional, and physical health.)
I think the first one is the one I just wrote about. Look at the way that your bad habits are serving you. Ask how it’s beneficial to you and then perhaps give yourself something that would take the place of that. For example, if you’re eating a gallon of ice cream at night, maybe replace that with a date almond shake or a nice massage from your beloved.
Another great non-intuitive lifestyle tweak is to stop doing anything. Yes, that’s right. One of the best things I can do during my day is just lay my body down on the floor, or outside on the ground, and try to meditate from a place of just not doing and not trying. Miraculously in this place of laying down on the ground, relaxing, and not doing, a new state will emerge. From that state I have found endless inspiration, creativity, visions, and insight that I could never get if I was just plowing through a to do list or a healthy habit to do list.
One of my favorite mental health hacks is called orientation. It’s so easy for me to get caught up in the whirlwind of my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I just have to stop and go outside and really move into a different part of my mind. This is the part that is sensorial. I feel the wind on my skin as a meditation. I look around and notice the colors of the trees as a visual meditation. I can see how far my body is from the tree beside me. This helps the animal brain orient itself to the environment. When our animal brain feels deeply oriented to the environment through observing it, it begins to sense that it’s safe and this can dramatically reduce anxiety. You can also do this in the tactile realm. Whether indoors or out, you can let your hand rub something really soft and pleasurable. Let the sense of the tactile be the object of the meditation. You can also listen to sounds. Notice the chirping of the birds or the airplane flying overhead. Using the five senses to orient the body may seem counterintuitive, but it can instantly bring us into a more balanced nervous system state.
Another non-intuitive tweak for many of us is to just make sure to eat something home cooked that is warm, wet, and grounding every day. For so many of us, we see images on Instagram where healthy food is most often raw. Yes, Salads and smoothies are really good for you. A lot of the women I know, and some men, who actually take a moment to eat a nourishing, grounding bone broth stew with carrots, sweet potatoes, and maybe a little bit of meat can help settle her into her body. This in turn will down regulate the nervous system and help us to de-stress.
Another lifestyle tweak that I do almost every day is schedule as many of my Zoom meetings on the phone as possible. What this means is that instead of doing a Zoom video call, we do it over the phone which I know is kind of old school. What’s great about that is both of us can walk outside and be in the environment or, even better, take a walk.
One of the best things you can do for your health is to just not sit around in front of a computer all day. In fact, something as little as 90 minutes of sitting can dramatically alter your body’s ability to pump the lymphatic fluid and blood through your body. Take as many opportunities as possible throughout the day to get up and stretch. Take some miniature walks or stand and type. This has been a big game changer for me. I typically take anywhere from 10–13,000 steps a day. You may want to use something like an Oura ring, or other fitness tracker initially but over time it will become intuitive not to sit down as much. Of course, I know there are times throughout the day where we have to be seated in front of our computer.
Emotionally, I think the most important non intuitive hack is that we really need to learn how to digest and alchemize our emotions. Most of us are really good at either repressing and numbing out our emotions, denying them of their power and what they need, which is the flow. Or we just blow them out on everyone else. Neither of these two methodologies helps us actually digest our emotional experience. In order to digest an emotion fully and prevent ourselves from keeping a ton of emotional residue inside of our body, we have to actually sit with it. Be with it. Bring loving kindness to it but not identify ourselves or merge into it. It’s a tricky process. But it really helps us liberate ourselves from our old belief systems and emotional habits.
As an expert, this might be obvious to you, but I think it would be instructive to articulate this for the public. Aside from weight loss, what are 3 benefits of daily exercise? Can you explain?
Numerous studies show that exercise not only boosts our mood but increases our body’s ability to produce feel good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. For men, it has also been shown to increase testosterone. Exercise can also increase endorphins and oxytocin, the feel good chemicals that make us want to bond and feel close to others period. It also just brings more confidence when you feel strong and supple!
For someone who is looking to add exercise to their daily routine, which 3 exercises would you recommend that are absolutely critical?
The three exercises that I recommend that are absolutely critical are walking, weightlifting, and yoga. And if I may be so bold — I would add in dance as well, especially for women. Walking is critical because it’s something that we have being doing as homosapiens for thousands of years. Our body is really good at it and needs to be doing it regularly for the correct functioning of all of our organ systems.
Weightlifting is super important as well, especially as we age and especially for women who have any history of bone density loss. Yoga is great to keep things supple and to downregulate the nervous system. I add dance to that because I think it’s important to move in a snake-like fashion along the horizontal plane and things like hula, salsa and belly dancing can get you there. But you don’t need to be technical about it — just put on some music that you love and start to shake your hips. This is super helpful for the whole pelvic bowl for women. But men can do it as well!
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
There have been so many books that I have fallen in love in my life, but I often laugh that my desert island book is a very obscure book by a somewhat unknown teacher named Michael Brown. The book is called “The Presence Process” and walks you through a simple way you can learn how to meditate that is incredibly effective at helping process old emotions and belief systems and lead you to the realm of the spiritual.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I don’t know if I’m a person of enormous influence, but I do feel that we have already started a movement. Our movement is one whereby women can feel safe to step into their power as both creative and flawed beings. It is one whereby they can tap into the enormous reservoir of their intuition and life-giving energy. Hopefully we will be adding men into the fold of our offerings in the future, as I think it’s vital that we re-stitch our sacred relationships.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
I don’t really have a favorite quote, but I do have a favorite poem that comes to me when I am truly down:
The Guest House
Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
Translated by Coleman Barks
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
I love this because this really speaks to the story of my life. This whole life is a practice of being able to grow the field of your awareness and love so big that it can encompass every single aspect of you. Not just the good, sexy, healthy and the fit. But the broken, flawed and confused and angry and sad — to be able to hold all of this without becoming ever more identified with any of it. That’s a tall order!
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
What a great question! If I could have breakfast with anyone at this moment — Well, I’m really digging the work of Johann Hari. He just wrote a book called Stolen Focus. I think he has put his finger on one of the most important issues of our time and the very real collective and individual suffering that comes from it. And I would love to know how he personally has continued to navigate the treacherous waters between being a social-technological presence and a living breathing human being in the sensorium of actual life period.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
The best way our readers can follow you online is www.theshaktischool.com and our Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/katiesilcox_shaktischool/?hl=en
I would also love to invite anyone interested in our online program to check out:
https://theshaktischool.com/ayurveda-school/
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Author Katie Silcox: 5 Lifestyle Tweaks That Can Dramatically Improve Your Wellbeing was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.