Join us on Elements of Community as Lucas Root engages in a transformative conversation with mindfulness coach Brenda Winkle. Dive into techniques for releasing negativity, silencing your inner critic, and embracing your authentic self, all while fostering connections within your community.

Discover how mindfulness can be the key to unlocking happiness and compassion in this enlightening dialogue. Explore the profound impact of self-acceptance and meaningful connections. Learn actionable strategies to build a vibrant community and infuse your life with boundless joy.

EoC - Brenda Winkle

[00:00:17] Brenda Winkle: Yes, Lucas. Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited for this conversation and I'm just grateful to be here. And so I'll just introduce myself in a very short way. I'm Brenda Winkle. And I am a healer, educator, speaker, and guide leading people to their yes filled lives. And I do this by helping people determine and discern what's theirs and what's not, helping people set better boundaries, and helping people heal their nervous systems so that they can increase their capacity.

[00:01:21] Lucas Root: I love it. What does it mean to live your best life?

[00:01:48] Lucas Root: Prioritizing joy.

[00:02:02] So when I show up to my relationships and I show up knowing I've got me. Then you don't have to take care of me, you can support me, you can guide me and all those kinds of things that happen inside relationship. But when you know that you've got you and I've got me, then we can really create a beautiful dance where we're each able to flourish in our own unique way.

[00:03:03] It's amazing.

[00:03:08] Lucas Root: Yeah. My guess is that you went through a journey to get there and arrived at a yes filled life. You want to tell a little story about that?

[00:03:45] And I learned early on that my intuition was scary for people because they would look at me with one eyebrow raised and say things like how did you know that? And I didn't

[00:03:59] Brenda Winkle: Can [00:04:00] I do that? I think so.

[00:04:03] Brenda Winkle: Think I can on both sides. Yeah, exactly there listeners, can you do that? It's to

[00:04:13] Lucas Root: Right

[00:04:17] Lucas Root: Okay, so adults were looking at you with one eyebrow raised like this.

[00:04:50] And I stopped talking about how I knew they were dysregulated, and I just started to do things to regulate other people's nervous systems. In other words, I became a [00:05:00] people pleaser.

[00:05:02] Brenda Winkle: And so I went through most of my childhood, my teenage years, early adulthood, as an award winning people pleaser, and I could people please anybody and I took great pride in it.

[00:05:17] Lucas Root: Jumping in again I'm playing with an idea, and I may actually do a solo episode on this, about people pleasing as and this idea isn't specifically the thing that I'm playing with, but people pleasing as a trauma response.

[00:05:44] Most people think it's fight or flight, but it's actually fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

[00:05:50] Lucas Root: We've talked about this on the show before, and what you're talking about is that you moved into a stress response of fawn as your base state.[00:06:00]

[00:06:08] Lucas Root: May I ask, and you can tell me to F off if you need to. May I ask what kicked off fawning as the base state? Cause it probably wasn't just people raising their eyebrows. It must've been something more.

[00:06:30] Lucas Root: You mean you have curly hair.

[00:06:47] Lucas Root: Yeah.

[00:07:21] And so that's where people pleasing really comes in and so absolutely people pleasing is a trauma response. It can also be a response to being highly sensitive because if you're highly sensitive, it's like you have an exposed nerve and If you're highly sensitive and you're wide open and you have no discernment, no filter, anything on, and you're literally feeling in your own system, all of the emotions around you, it can be incapacitating.

[00:08:02] But

[00:08:08] Brenda Winkle: Exactly.

[00:08:22] If you play music, music is actually a mild stressor. It closes down the background chatter in our minds. So it turns out noise is a stressor and what you're talking about is emotional noise as a stressor. So you can actually step into this stress response without having been trauma triggered because there's so much emotional noise.

[00:08:46] They talk about noise pollution and the same thing can be true for emotions. If we don't understand how to come into our own central channel and stop taking on things from other people, it can be like [00:09:00] a version of emotional noise pollution.

[00:09:08] Brenda Winkle: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

[00:09:27] Brenda Winkle: Exactly. And there's also some ways that we can be aware of the emotional background noise without taking it on in our systems. And that's a big part of what I teach people how to do so that they don't feel like they have to create a barrier. Although that works too, and I always say in case of emergency, zip it all up, if you really feel like getting inundated with emotions from other people, that's a great solution is to literally zip it up, but it does create a barrier.

[00:10:14] Lucas Root: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate you being open and vulnerable with it.

[00:10:22] Lucas Root: So you had this trauma.

[00:10:25] Lucas Root: It moved you into a base state stress response.

[00:11:06] And so that all changed in 2007 when I walked away from an unhealthy marriage with two suitcases, my five year old daughter, and 400 and just rebuilt my life.

[00:11:26] Brenda Winkle: Thank you. It was really scary. It was scarier making the decision.

[00:11:58] And it was just so [00:12:00] interesting. And I look back now and I'm in awe. I don't know how I knew to just do one next step at a time, but that's all I did. I did one step at a time and we left everything, including a car behind, and everything and more came back.

[00:12:58] Lucas Root: Wow. All of that [00:13:00] only because one, you had the courage to take the step, one step at a time, but two, you asked. You had a community that you could ask, but you did ask.

[00:13:35] It can also be triggering in a way, if you have lived a life where your needs are not met. Asking and seeing and feeling your needs being met is one of the most healing experiences we can have.

[00:13:57] Brenda Winkle: I love the Mary Kay community and I was a part of it [00:14:00] for many years, but I left that behind. I would love to talk about the community inside of one of my programs called Yes Academy. And so my brand is Your Yes Filled Life. That's my podcast name. And Yes Academy is the way in which we can find our yes filled lives.

[00:14:45] We've got doctors and all different kinds of vocations, but they're all good at what they do. They're all sensitive and rather intuitive and looking to develop those skills.

[00:15:03] Lucas Root: I have an idea about supporting. And I've said this before and I probably will say it again. In my opinion, anything that you want to be great at, anything at all, anything that you want to be great at, you need support in, anything. LeBron James never stopped having private coaches ever.

[00:16:05] Lucas Root: Yeah yeah. And, I go back to this in my own life as well. Everything that I want to be great at, I need support in. I talk about this in my coaching practice. Everything you want to be great at, you need support in. And it's not necessarily just the things that I'm coaching. If you want to be great with finances, you need support.

[00:16:44] But if you want great, you're going to need coaching to get to great. You just aren't going to be able to do great on your own. LeBron James never stopped having private coaches ever. To me, this is such a core theme to [00:17:00] being great at being human.

[00:17:21] Lucas Root: Cool. I didn't know that.

[00:17:51] Lucas Root: Supposed John Coltrane would feel about hearing that?

[00:18:18] And so John Coltrane would probably challenge a lot of the classical musicians and saying, being a little too serious right now, have some more fun. I have a feeling that's what he would say.

[00:18:55] Lucas Root: Here's an interesting question. What is perfection?[00:19:00]

[00:19:05] Lucas Root: No. Give me the classically trained musician answer.

[00:19:20] cool.

[00:19:24] Brenda Winkle: Yeah, I think it is.

[00:19:28] Brenda Winkle: But keep us stuck.

[00:19:31] Brenda Winkle: Could that definition be improved on?

[00:19:42] Brenda Winkle: Absolutely, because if you're not expressing, if we're talking about music or really anything, if there's no expression, then it's robotic. And so the interesting part about perfectionism, especially for musicians or really anyone is that [00:20:00] when we perceive something as perfect that somebody else has done, it's often rooted in some type of expression.

[00:20:14] Lucas Root: Okay, slingshot that into your current version of Perfection.

[00:20:41] And perfection is perfectly imperfect. It's not going to be perfectly artic executed. It's, there might be a margin of error, but as long as there's expression, I feel like the expression to [00:21:00] me is more important than the expert execution.

[00:21:08] Brenda Winkle: I think he'd be all over that because he absolutely emoted. There was a ton of expression in his music.

[00:21:44] I wasn't there. So I didn't unfortunately get to buy it then live at the stage. But I knew someone who was there. And apparently the curtain opened to an empty stage with just one chair sitting there. And he walked out [00:22:00] and he sat down and he started. And from this point on was the recording which I got to really appreciate.

[00:22:18] And while he was playing the rest of his band started to set up behind him. And you could hear it in the recording occasionally, there was a chair being put there, you know. The drum was being attached to the drum setup it wasn't loud. It wasn't disruptive. But if you didn't know the story, you'd hear these sounds and wonder as to how that informed and impacted the journey that he was taking us on.

[00:22:53] Brenda Winkle: Yes.

[00:23:05] Brenda Winkle: And that's perfection, right? See if he would have waited, yes, agreed. If he could have done it a lot of different ways. He could have waited until the band was all in place, but then he would have missed whatever was coming through him, whatever he was channeling in that moment. It wouldn't have been the same.

[00:23:24] Brenda Winkle: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes our human, I always think of myself as two beings. I have my inner being and I have my human being and my human is the one that you see before you and my inner being is my higher self. And sometimes our humans or my human wants the external situation and circumstances to be perfect before I really start something and my inner being reminds me that's not necessary, that's a very human, a human [00:24:00] qualification that when the emotion and in my case, I feel like it's always a version of love whenever that love is ready to flow, that's the moment regardless of whatever's going on around us.

[00:24:18] Brenda Winkle: Yeah.

[00:24:27] Brenda Winkle: Yeah. Let's cycle back. Let's cycle back.

[00:24:34] Brenda Winkle: Yeah. Yes Academy. So because I've experienced trauma in my life in a couple of different ways, and I think most of us have, and I just love to unpack the term trauma because I think that there can be some ways in which we might hold ourselves back from the healing we really deserve if we're hung up on a definition.

[00:25:16] Our nervous system views trauma as trauma, and If we can eliminate the hierarchy of trauma and think this trauma is really trauma and this trauma is not as serious of trauma, it really empowers us all to embrace our own healing.

[00:25:32] Brenda Winkle: Yeah. So with that in mind

[00:25:38] Brenda Winkle: Yeah, all trauma is trauma. And yeah, exactly. And it all deserves and can be healed.

[00:26:02] My mother came to visit my older sister and I both live here in California which is a very large state. So that doesn't narrow it down a whole lot. But within reasonable driving distance. And my parents still live in the house that they bought the week after I was born in Vermont. They still live there.

[00:26:41] And fortunately I was spending some time with them, of course. If mom's in town, I'm going to go spend time with her. And my mother shared that she was triggered by this. And I turned to her and I said every single childhood, every single one, there is no such thing as a childhood that doesn't have trauma.

[00:27:15] Brenda Winkle: Exactly. Thank you for sharing that. And I think just normalizing that experience and taking away the emotionality we have about the trauma is that's really the root of where we can begin healing. That's foundational is just taking away the emotionality around trauma and taking away any sense of blame and just being like, okay, so how is this showing up in my body today?

[00:27:58] Lucas Root: Let's pause again for a [00:28:00] second because this is an important conversation. When you cut yourself, that's trauma.

[00:28:07] Lucas Root: Now it's not necessarily emotional trauma. It might be entirely free of emotional trauma, but it's still trauma and your body will then heal it. And so I'm bringing this up because I want people to know that healing from trauma is natural.

[00:28:20] Brenda Winkle: Yes.

[00:28:34] Brenda Winkle: Exactly. Thank you for saying that.

[00:28:37] Brenda Winkle: Oh no, thank you for saying that. I think it's so important. And there are some wellness spaces that make us think that the only way to heal from trauma is through talk therapy and talk therapy is important and it's also insufficient. Yeah, it, so to really heal trauma, we want to get into the body.[00:29:00]

[00:29:22] It doesn't mean that scalpel is not a useful tool. Talk therapy is a useful tool. But just like actual physical wounds, there are times when talk therapy is useful and times when it is not, and times when it needs to be used as a part of the overall picture.

[00:30:05] And so I do believe in talk therapy and it's not enough tool.

[00:30:59] [00:31:00] So while the hot seat might be really specific to Susie or Deborah or whoever, everyone on the call experiences a level of healing because that's how healing works. We heal each other. We heal in community with co nourishing each other. And so that's a big part of the way that my community functions.

[00:31:41] I believe the opposite, but when I do breath work, the people that I do it with have a tendency to journey. And I can anchor people physically, but I personally don't have the skill to anchor people over Zoom. And so [00:32:00] if people are journeying and they don't have anchors already set for themselves and I can't provide it for them then that becomes a challenge.

[00:32:10] Lucas Root: Just the way that when I conduct breath work, that's the way it plays. People have a tendency to journey. And when you're journeying, you need to have an anchor and when I'm not physically present with you, I can't be the anchor for you.

[00:32:29] Lucas Root: That's amazing.

[00:32:49] Even if they're non local.

[00:32:53] Brenda Winkle: Yes. Yes.

[00:33:07] Brenda Winkle: I was thinking about this overnight, and I was thinking about.

[00:33:12] Brenda Winkle: I did, I slept really well. I had been out of town the previous week and I was really missing my dog. And so the first night I got home late, and I picked up my dog from the dog center and then we just came home and went to bed and he woke up at three in the morning and was like, Hey, let's play, let's go for a walk.

[00:34:31] And I think that for me The first thing is creating inclusive spaces by creating safety in every time we come together and safety can come in a lot of different ways. For example, you could do a safety check right now by just looking at the walls around you. And just rating on a scale of 10, how safe do I feel right now in this space?

[00:35:55] And I think that's one of the ways that it shows up in my community is we [00:36:00] reach out to each other and say, Hey, we missed you on the call. Or someone will say, I'm coming, but I'm coming late. Don't worry. Don't worry, I'm coming late. And so those ways in which we're showing up for each other and noticing each other's presences feels really nourishing.

[00:36:50] And so we're creating a feeler system inside of my community where people are sharing phone numbers and they're jumping into calls that last between five and 10 [00:37:00] minutes, and they're witnessing each other.

[00:37:24] Lucas Root: Wow. I love that. 90 seconds is a magic number for us. It turns out you may not know this, but it's a thing I study. Minimum effective dose for things that happen inside our bodies runs somewhere between 60 and 120 seconds, which could be about 90. If you want to really maximize the impact of a workout, make sure that the impact of the workout lasts for between 60 and 120 seconds, and if you shoot for about 90, you're gonna get there.

[00:38:25] If you do 90 seconds of physical movement as somatic exercise, you pop yourself out of that emotional groove. Now, maybe the emotional groove is extraordinary joy, but for some reason extraordinary joy isn't serving you in that moment, right? 90 seconds of dance or shadow boxing will pop you up out of that groove.

[00:39:14] So it turns out 60 to 120 seconds of mantra work whether you're doing it in the morning in the mirror, or you're doing it to reset your direction after you've popped yourself out of a groove or you're doing it to get yourself settled into a hard work session that's going to last 30 to 60 minutes or a hard study session if you're working on studying something or a meditation session if you want to go do some transcendental meditation and you're going to use the mantra to set the direction to move you into that with really high degree of focus and Input and output it takes somewhere between 60 to 120 seconds. Again, [00:40:00] shoot for 90 of that mantra work to be able to set your tone for that next period of work.

[00:40:36] And so I've asked around 50 people this question, and all of them say a version of three things, movement, some kind of silence or changing the sound, adding music, listening to birds. So movement, silence, and sound are basically what everyone says. And I started to [00:41:00] think of it as a disruptor and a disruptor in a most positive way, a disruptor in changing the pattern we're going to disrupt this unhealthy or unpleasant trajectory into something better.

[00:41:30] Brenda Winkle: I love this 92nd thing.

[00:41:36] It's just not useful.

[00:41:46] Lucas Root: Yes, great example. Yeah.

[00:41:52] Lucas Root: We accept that we live in a life that has a social contract around circumstances. When you're in the boardroom, when [00:42:00] you're in church, there are rules about our behavior. And it's not that I don't want to have giddy joy. I just don't want it right now.

[00:42:35] And I was wondering if you've noticed, and I have a feeling what you're going to say, but I can't wait to actually ask you this question. I was wondering if different cultures in different parts of the world also have social contracts that are discernible to people who are visiting or how that kind of shows up in social contracts [00:43:00] globally.

[00:43:44] It is a social contract inside the community of the people who live there. And the social contract is, when you're satisfied with your food, you express it with burping, and with eating loudly and smacking your [00:44:00] lips, and slurping. Which here in the United States would be, not just rude, but get smacked rude.

[00:44:19] Brenda Winkle: Yes. I love that. My dad always talked about, in the United States, that he believed there to be vertical strips that went from north to south across the country of social norms and we grew up in the Midwest, we meaning my parents and I, and my sister, we grew up in the Midwest. My parents grew up in South Dakota and my sister and I grew up in Nebraska and there were very similar social norms between South Dakota and Nebraska.

[00:45:13] Lucas Root: Yeah. And it goes deeper even than that. So if you go into a Hasidic Jew community, men can't shake hands with women. It's not acceptable. The first time I did that I was dumbfounded. I was like, why are these women not willing to shake hands with me? What's going on? What's the problem? I had to get pulled aside by a man and then explained that these are the rules here.

[00:45:39] Brenda Winkle: I grew up just below Pine Ridge in South Dakota, which is a Native American reservation. And in Native culture of the Oglala Sioux, making direct eye contact is a form of challenge. And so when we were teaching students in that part of the [00:46:00] country, if a student did not make eye contact with their teacher, the student was showing respect.

[00:46:26] Lucas Root: Yeah, there's definitely dissonance there. And those are examples of the social contract. Now, in popular language, we call that culture, but it's not culture, except in that it is the memory of community as community plays out in the present progressive.

[00:46:58] Lucas Root: Absolutely. And very [00:47:00] important. One of the ways that I use the social contract, this is so important to us, why shouldn't we use it? Why shouldn't we lean into that a little bit? One of the ways that I use the social contract to build deeper community faster is by including a pledge.

[00:47:20] Lucas Root: You can use a pledge to take people into a different special place. Weirdly, and we don't even think about it, but every single time we step into the house as a guest of somebody, we're actually making a pledge inside our hearts, inside our minds, to abide by the social contract that we believe reigns in that situation.

[00:48:16] For example, you could have your pledge written in the language of fantasy. You could have your pledge written in the language of energy workers, which is very much grounded in this earth, but it's One layer removed from the standard American culture.

[00:48:56] Lucas Root: Yeah, and look I know a [00:49:00] lot of people push against the idea that boundaries are useful. But I'd like to invite you into a different version of this How many of us play games? How many of the games that we play have no rules? If you're holding up a zero finger, then you have the right answer. All games have rules.

[00:49:29] Brenda Winkle: I call boundaries the how to guide for you. Yeah, I love that. They do make it fun. And it's one of the ways that if we circle back to creating a yes filled life, it's one of the ways that we can do that because if we can protect our joy, a lot of protecting our joy is setting healthy boundaries. So that we're not doing things that are draining us or that [00:50:00] are costing us joy.

[00:50:19] Lucas Root: Here's another piece you can take with you. Anytime I have somebody do a pledge inside my communities, I charge them at least one dollar.

[00:50:30] Lucas Root: When you charge somebody a dollar. It's not about making money, and everybody knows that. What it's about is being energetically bound into that pledge.

[00:50:45] Brenda Winkle: Yes. I love that the energy exchange is so important and it plays back into the reciprocity where we're talking about showing up for people. How are you contributing to the community? What are you getting from the community? [00:51:00] And that energy exchange is such a beautiful way to tie that up.

[00:51:31] It's again. It's a dollar. Nobody's getting rich at a dollar. I need Hundreds of thousands of people to show up to my open night for that to be meaningful to me except that it's energetic binding into that space.

[00:52:06] Lucas Root: So yeah, the I charge a dollar thing is a repeating theme in The way that I interact with the world and if you want free I'm down with that find me on instagram. There's lots of free stuff there. When you're showing up to spaces that have a meaningful framing then you're also going to be paying a dollar, at least.

[00:52:35] Lucas Root: Fun. I like to wrap up my interviews with three questions. And the second and third question are really big curveballs. Now, obviously my audience is familiar with this and they're excited about where this is going. And my guess is, Brenda, that you don't know where this is going.

[00:53:00] Lucas Root: So the first one, very simply, for the people who've been inspired and love what you've shared, what's the one best way that they can find you?

[00:53:27] Lucas Root: The hub of everything.

[00:53:30] Lucas Root: Now there's a statement.

[00:53:36] Lucas Root: I'm just gonna let that fly. The hub of everything.

[00:54:26] Brenda Winkle: This is one of those weird questions and I get this one all the time. It's in my inbox almost weekly, I would say. And here's the answer. We don't set boundaries to avoid conflict. We set boundaries to tell our truth. And the part of a boundary that we are responsible for, Oh, thank you. The part of a boundary we're responsible for is the setting of it.

[00:54:55] Lucas Root: Yeah. Setting it and holding it.

[00:53:47] Brenda Winkle: Yeah.

[00:53:57] Brenda Winkle: Ooh. The one question [00:54:00] I wish you would have asked me I think the question that I would love to have been asked would be. around how do you set a boundary without creating conflict?

[00:54:58] Lucas Root: Be responsible for holding it.[00:55:00]

[00:55:23] Lucas Root: Love that. What a great question. Why didn't I ask that? Final question is, do you have any parting thoughts for us, Brenda?

[00:56:01] Lucas Root: Ah, what a lovely way to end. Wow. I so appreciate you, Brenda.

[00:56:10] Lucas Root: Thank you.