Transcript: A Conversation With Kinesiologist and Transformational Coach Amanda Kate

This is a text transcript from The First Time Mum’s Chat podcast. The episode is called A Conversation With Kinesiologist and Transformational Coach Amanda Kate and you can click on the link to view the full episode page, listen to the episode and view the show notes.

Helen Thompson: Kinesiology is an area that has always fascinated me and something I did some training in many, many years ago. For those unfamiliar with kinesiology, briefly, it is a system of diffusing stress and energy blocks within the body to help people move out of disease into a place of wellness. It amalgamates Eastern wisdom with Western science to facilitate energetic shifts that allow your body to hit itself from the inside out.

This week’s guest Amanda Kate is a highly trained kinesiologist and transformational coach and it was great chatting with her about how she helps her clients and the tools and techniques she’s used in her own healing to turn her life around from being unwell, out of alignment and miserable to happiness, vitality, and connection. In his episode, you’ll hear Amanda talk about the importance of teaching your children through example, how to look after themselves, and the importance of putting yourself first, the importance of filling yourself with reserves of nourishing energy to help build more tolerance to stress, and the importance of trusting your internal compass and following your intuition, and so, so much more.

Hi Amanda, and welcome to First Time Mum’s Chat. I’m looking forward to chatting with you about kinesiology and your journey. Can you start by telling us about your areas of expertise and how you help mums?

Amanda Kate: My name’s Amanda Kate. I am a Kinesiopractor, which is a highly trained kinesiologist. It means I’ve done all of the advanced study. I am an archetypal life coach, I am a mentor, a mother, an author, a partner, a dog mom, a mother, all of the different things. I basically work with people in three different ways. I work with transformational coaching, which is really in-depth diving.

It is clearing out a lot of trauma patterns. A lot of these patterns that hold us back. I work with intuitive coaching, which tends to be shorter periods, where we’re working towards a goal and working out what’s stopping us from working inside that goal and then I work with kinesiology with people, which is clearing stress from the body so that the body works more efficiently.

And it, it reignites the innate healing process within the body so that the body knows how to get itself into a better state. So they’re sort of the main three ways that I work. I also have intuition development circles that I run on a monthly basis with subscription. So there’s four sessions a month that people can jump in on. So that’s sort of a lot of what I do is, is the energy work, it’s the transformation work. It is supporting people through times of change, through times when they are going, you know what, life could be a bit better than this. Or, I’ve lost myself, or I’ve lost my way, or, things aren’t that bad, but I want to get to my next stage of development.

So it tends to be when people are in that transition phase. So a lot of first time mums, obviously, they’re going through a massive transition. They’re going from this single woman or single woman in a relationship or person in a relationship to a mother, and starting a family and if they’re having their second or third child, obviously they’re just expanding their family, but it’s still a role change for the woman, which means that it is a big life change. I deal with clearing out past traumas so that we can get to that next level of transformation and at each level there is hard stuff and there is exciting, fun, magical stuff and what we do is we learn to recognize both and own both and learn to love both. So that’s sort of the way that I see, I guess, my work playing out and how it helps and supports clients.

Helen Thompson: I like the way you talk about the intuition part, because the intuition part is so important because, if we don’t fill our cup and support ourselves, we’re not gonna be in a position to support somebody else and I think self care these days is going, having a manicure or going to having a massage or whatever it is but to me, it’s working on ourselves and getting in touch with the spiritual side and I know you mentioned when we first chatted about the triangle, I’ll let you explain about that one, but I mean, it’s about being balanced and working with ourselves in order to help others.

Amanda Kate: Yes, absolutely. So the reason we call it a balance in kinesiology is because we’re looking at the body as an equilateral triangle, and on one side we have our physical and structural. One side we have our chemical and nutritional, and on the other side we have our mental, emotional, and spiritual.

Now, if one of those sides of the triangle is out of balance, then the whole body is out of balance and what we do is we want to bring the body into balance. Now, the other bit that I love talking about is the fact that Quantum physicists have proven that the universe is 4% physical matter. So that means that only 4% is our physical meat suit that our soul is walking around in.

That means that the rest of it, there’s a whole lot of other aspects that feed into the whole of who we are. So that includes our emotional self, our energetic self, our mental, spiritual, relational, financial, all of these different aspects. They also feed into that totality of who we are, and if we’re stressed in a few of those areas, it feeds into the whole and what we wanna look at, and this is part of what drew me to kinesiology, I was looking before I started at kinesiology to doing maybe naturopathy or nutrition or something because I understood how important food was in the mix. And I knew that I’d been taken off gluten by my naturopath, I was sort of on and off dairy, cause I knew it wasn’t the best for me. Eventually I ended up coming off that as well. I’m also now off pork and pork products, bananas there’s a few other things that I’ve found that are creating issues within my physical body, but because I knew the power of food, I was also looking at, okay, so maybe I go down that route.

But there was part of me that just knew for me, it felt a bit limited. I wanted to look at more, I wanted to have a more holistic perspective, and that’s why I loved kinesiology is because it does look at so many of those different aspects. In the kinesiology that I learnt, we learned a lot about the Brain Gym, the Touch For Health the Psych K, we do some reflexology stuff, we do some iridology stuff, we do, personality profiling and typing, we do advanced spiritual sort of techniques with color and sound. So we bring in so many different things and we obviously learn the meridian systems and the chakra systems and the auric fields and all of these different bits which are ways to balance the energy within the body so that we can bring that body, whichever aspect is out of balance, back into balance. Bring it back into the fold. Allow that energy to flow through the body in a way that is nourishing and nurturing for the body. We can start to uncover those hidden stresses, the suppressed stresses, those stresses that have been stored in the body for a very long time, and we can start to move that vibrational frequency out of the body so that it’s not disrupting the energy flow anymore and it’s such powerful work to be able to do that and by clearing out some of those past stresses, some of those past conditionings, we do get ourselves into this state where we can connect more deeply into our body, which means we can connect more deeply into our intuition because things like past conditioning do cloud our intuition, it clouds our way of processing things.

And so I love that way of thinking about, Bringing in the bobcat and clearing out some of the really big layers of stuff that we’ve collected over the years to have a cleaner energy field so that we can look at ourselves in a different way and process the world in a different way and have our energy move through us in a clearer, cleaner way.

Helen Thompson: And if we do that, we’re supporting our kids because we’re teaching them to do that and as you mentioned, if you need to de-stress and you go outside and take your shoes off and ground yourself and holding your baby, you are actually teaching them that respect because you are showing them that okay, I’m stressed right now but I’m going out here to ground myself and because you are doing that. they’re picking up on your energy and they’re picking up on the sense, okay, she’s stressed, but she’s showing me how to de-stress because she’s doing it.

Amanda Kate: Absolutely, everything that we do, our children watch and I use the example at the moment. I was a very stressed mother, I was living in a very stressful situation, I was across the world from my family, I didn’t have any support structures around me. I had a few close friends, but that was it, there was not much other support going. So it was a very stressful way to raise children. I certainly didn’t have the full community that, we would’ve had back in the day and that created its own issues but as a result, my children were a bit more stressed than perhaps they would’ve been had I been a calmer, clearer mother, however, with the work that I’m doing, I notice that they are changing and they’re learning it through osmosis. The way you were saying. They’re watching me, they’re watching the way that I interact with people, they listen to the way that I speak now, they listen to how measured my words are, the way that I talk with them about language and how important it is and the energetics behind what we say, and they learn through osmosis. They’re not learning because I’m telling them what I’m doing and how I’ve cleared this and this is the process that I’ve done and all of that. They don’t know that aspect, they just see the result. They see me taking care of myself.

Yeah, absolutely. They have seen the work that I’ve put in. They’ve seen the dedication I’ve put in, and they see then the result of that and they kind of go, huh, that’s interesting, she’s changed and we laugh at who I was before because I’m like, who would you prefer, old mom or new mom and they’re like, oh God, we’ll take you thank you very much. Cuz I was stressed, I was reactive, I was more defensive. I was much more shouty and quick to anger and I can’t remember last time I had to raise my voice at them because you know what life’s pretty calm now because I’ve done this work to get more energetically aligned and they see it and they pick up on it, and I am teaching them through example how to look after themselves. We were mentioning before about dropping bits of self care through the day, so this is one of those things, especially as a new mother, when we are first home with baby, it can be so overwhelming, we are down on sleep, we don’t really know this new being that we’ve bought into the world as much as we’ve carried them for the nine months and close enough to gestation period that it is. We do know this creature, but we also kind of don’t and we’re getting to know it and so there’s a lot of trial and error, there is a lot of them getting to know us, us getting to know them, and there’s a lot of settling in that needs to do. Plus we’re sleep deprived, plus our body has gone through a massive traumatic event. Even healthy births are still traumatic for the body. And so there’s all of this healing that needs to happen and the downtime that needs to happen and so if we can sprinkle bits of that self care through the day. The coffee I used to leave around my house as a new mum was crazy, but drinking it hot, smelling it, enjoying all the senses around it, allowing it to fill us up, allow it to be drops in the bucket that is replenishing our energy. Taking those steps outside the front door to have a few deep breaths of fresh air, or feel the sun on our face, or taking our shoes off and putting our feet on the grass.

All of those tiny little things, those little moments, having that cuddle with your baby, where you just breathe them in and there’s no distractions. It’s just you and bubs in a moment together. Those little bits, if we allow them to fill our cup, we’re not then giving to other people from this empty reserve. We are filling up ourselves, we are creating reserves of energy, and we’re allowing those little moments in time to be these little nourishing energy boosts that build us a bit more resilience, a bit more tolerance to stress, and it helps us then when we go into the stressful times, because we’ve got that extra reserve sitting there.

Helen Thompson: So, for a first time mum who has just come out of hospital and is going through all that, what would you recommend they do. I mean, somebody that doesn’t know about kinesiology cuz you and I can chat about kinesiology forever but for a mom who doesn’t know about the sort of spiritual and the connecting of the left and right side of the brain and whatever else.

Amanda Kate: I think there’s so many different I guess, threads that go into that question. I think the main thing is one, it would be, deeply listening to what is really, truly going on for them. It would be understanding where they’ve come from. So a lot of our conditioning comes from childhood. It comes from growing up, it comes from society. So looking at what expectations they’re placing on themselves, because a lot of our expectations that we place on ourselves as mothers, as wives, as partners, as daughters, as sisters, as all of the things that we are, it comes from that past conditioning and so a lot of us learning how to become moms, is actually unlearning some of this conditioning. If I trusted my gut more as a mother, I’d have been a completely different mother, but I was told too often by other people that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that these people had more experience and blah de blah. Which is just, I hate to say it, bullshit, apologies, but that’s the truth of it and I went against my intuition. Now I look at it now and I’m like, gosh, if I had a baby now, it would be so different because I don’t care as much about other people’s opinions. Now back then, I cared deeply, I wanted to be the best mother I could be, but in doing so, I wasn’t the mother that I needed to be because I was too busy listening to everybody else rather than trusting my internal compass. And that in itself I think was I guess the biggest regret in my life in a lot of ways, and it’s not that I regret it in the fact that I beat myself up over it, but there is that regret because I knew better and I didn’t do better, and that is one of those things that I do look back on and go, oh, if only I could change that. What I do now, instead of beating myself up about it, however, is I look at what I can do now that influences my children in a beautiful way. So the big question that I ask a lot of parents, a lot of people is are you living the life that you would want your children to live?

Now, I can honestly say I am. I would be happy if my children were in as loving a relationship as I am. I would be ecstatic if they had a job that they loved as much as I love mine and so I look at it and I go, yeah, but I ask some people that question and they almost burst into tears because they are like, no, this is not the life I would want for my children and I go, well, why are you accepting it for yourself then? If you don’t want that kind of relationship for your children, why are you in it for you, if you don’t want that job for your children, if you aren’t happy, if you are miserable and you don’t want your children being miserable, why are you being miserable because by you being miserable, what you are teaching them is that they should be miserable and they shouldn’t expect anything more in life. Now, one of the biggest things that got me out of my marriage was I knew that I deserved a better love. I knew that my ex-husband deserved a better love, cause I couldn’t love him the way he wanted and needed to be loved and my children needed to understand a less toxic love because what we had actually wasn’t love it was toxicity and it was control, and I wanted to demonstrate better for them, and I wanted better for me. Now sometimes as women, the way we make change is actually for other people. So I actually left my marriage for my children. I needed my children to see better. Now it was obviously for me as well but that was the easier way for me to go and everything I have done since then, it started off being for them because I wanted to show them better and then all of a sudden I was like, huh, I’m doing this for me now and that’s when I knew things had changed and that is one of the things that if I could impart any bit of wisdom is that we do as mothers need to put ourself first. We need to demonstrate what life could be, what life can be. We need to demonstrate the possibility, we need to demonstrate that we are people, that we are important, that we are not their slave, that we are not second class citizens, that we deserve to take up space, that we deserve to stand on our own two feet, that we deserve to be honored and respected and loved and by doing that, we are showing our children that they deserve that too and when we put ourselves first and we look after ourself with deep boundaries, with deep love and deep self respect, everything actually flows better.

My children have improved no end because I look after me. So even if they get less time with me one week or the other, or whatever it is, the quality they are getting far surpasses what they had when I was stressed and run down and sick because they’re getting this part of me that even I hadn’t accessed before and so going in and doing that deep internal work to clear that past conditioning and start to really uncover who you are and what you need and what makes you tick and what makes you sing, gives your children permission to do the same, and they are watching everything you do, and they know when words and actions don’t line up.

They can see it and they know it and that’s where a lot of the behavioral issues I find come from, is because they’re seeing these words and actions that don’t line up. So of course their words and actions don’t line up as well. The more congruent I’ve become, the better my conversations with my children, the better my relationship with my children, and the more I’ve seen them taking that into other areas of their life, which is phenomenal, it’s such a blessing and a moment of pride and so that’s part of, I guess, what we were doing, through that kinesiology work. It is untangling those past conditionings, recognizing them for a start as well, because of course we don’t know what’s possible until we even realize what normal or what abnormal that we’ve been functioning within is. So it can be quite confronting at first because I didn’t know a lot of my normal was not perhaps as normal as it could have been.

Helen Thompson: And being balanced for yourself if you are balanced and if you balance that triangle that you were talking about and if you do that, then your balanced yourself and it’s like that scenario of being on an airplane, taking care of yourself before you give your baby the oxygen.

Amanda Kate: Exactly and if they see you giving yourself oxygen, they give themselves permission to give themselves oxygen and they’re learning that and it is really, really important, because then even when you are stressed, they can recognize that that’s not your normal state of being. They can recognize that, oh, well, mom’s clearly going through something right now because she’s stressed.

Helen Thompson: Yes and you’re showing them how to deal with that as well by saying, look, I need time out here. I’m going to go and have a bath. I’ve given you dinner, whatever. I won’t be seeing you till tomorrow morning. Obviously you can say that to them when they’re teenagers, but if they’re a bit younger that’s a bit different, you just pass them on to dad or whatever and you just go and do what you want to do cause I think as a mom, you’ve really got to be taking care of you and in this respect, a spiritual side, rather than having a manicure or whatever it is. It’s more taking care of your holistic side, your spiritual side, your whole being and as I mentioned before, the chakras, being aware of where you’re going and what you’re doing.

Amanda Kate: Yes, definitely and I think even with little kids, I always used to chat with my kids because I never knew exactly how much they knew or not. So by prefacing it, they do remember these things and so it would be, you know what, I need some time right now because I’m feeling tired. There’s a couple of interesting ones that I had realized. One was shortly after I divorced and sometimes I get home, I’d be tired after a long day at work and a bit snappy or whatever but I realized that my kids weren’t in my head and they didn’t know the things, like that I was tired or that I’d had a hard day at work or whatever. They’re not mind readers. Crazy that isn’t it but I walked in the door and I remember walking in going, okay, guys I’m actually really tired tonight. I’ve had a really long day and I’d really like a little bit of help. So if I ask, would you mind stepping up and giving me a hand, and I mean, obviously age appropriate stuff, but whenever I said that to them, it was amazing. I rarely needed their help because I verbalized it.

So they already knew, okay, mom’s tired, but then if they pushed me and I lost my shit at them, cuz let’s face it, we’re human, you could almost guarantee one would go to the other, well, she warned us, so they knew it wasn’t them that was creating the anger, they just knew I was on a short fuse and so that communication became vital in our relationship. You know what, guys, I’ve had a really tough day or occasionally, shocker, I would do something like run past the fish and chip shop on the way home and buy them some chips and dim sims and they would think I was the best mother in the world because they had this exciting dinner, rather than me coming home and cutting up the usual sort of meat and veg salad or whatever it is.

They thought it was wonderful and I’d sit there and I’d only pick at a few chips because I may not be that hungry and they’re not exactly the best for my dietary requirements to eat. We would have the most stress free evening. They thought I was the best mom in the world because they got this treat dinner and I thought at first I was like, oh my God, I’ve got salad stuff in the fridge, I really should have cut up a salad. But I didn’t have the energy, and so it was the perfect evening because I’d given myself that break and I can guarantee, and again you’ll know this from the energetic side of things, but energetically, if I’d gone home and cut up that salad with this, resentment, they’d be eating salad with the resentment and anger dressing.

Whereas absolutely stopping past and getting some fish and chips, and I think I’ve probably done it, it’s not that often, it’s maybe once a year, but when I do we have this laughter and connection and stress free stuff that goes on, and that is actually healthier overall than me feeding them this resentment and anger salad.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, absolutely and I think that’s so powerful to a mom, to be able to accept that and all you’ve gone through with kinesiology and everything else, taking it as a holistic side, is so, so important.

Amanda Kate: Yes, absolutely. I absolutely love it and that for me is one of those things that giving myself permission to do my own version of what’s perfect for me in that moment and sometimes what’s perfect for me is to know that I’ve got the salad ingredients in the fridge and still make the choice to go home and cut up the salad but knowing then that there’s the option to do the other just takes pressure off me and it’s small things sometimes that takes the pressure off and often what we are doing with the mothering expectation is we’re looking at everybody else around us and figuring that they’ve got their shit together more than we do.

No, exactly. Exactly. And what we are doing also is we’re perceiving what perfect is by what everyone else is doing and we are trying to live to that. Whereas actually what’s perfect for us, one moment to the next, will be very, very different and so it’s allowing our idea of perfection for what is perfect for us in that moment to come to the forum for us to give ourself permission to allow that through and that may be not getting outta your pajamas one day and just sitting there with your babe and having time because you’re exhausted. Sometimes perfect is actually making yourself have your shower, put your clothes on, and get out for a walk and what we do is we practice with our discernment on that.

You know, a great example today. Perfect. I haven’t been in the water. I usually go cold water swimming. Most days I try and do sort of four to five times a week. Now, the last three days because I’ve been so busy with work and clients and events and all sorts of different things, I hadn’t gotten in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, this week. I knew I had to get in the water today, I had to. I got there, it is windy, it’s about 14 degrees, I know it’s about 10 degrees in the water. It’s a really rotten day here, but I knew that if I got my butt in that water and did my 20 to 25 minutes, I would feel better for the rest of the day. So I made myself get in that water.

Now, if I had sort of looked at the general bit of , what would I really like to be doing, I’d like to be staying home and getting warm, but I knew I’d feel better, so I made myself do it. Now, there are other days I know it’ll make me feel better, but I also go, no, I’m not gonna do it because I know also there’s a part of me that’s not gonna regret not going in, but I knew if I got to the end of today and hadn’t hopped in the water, I knew I’d regret it and so this is where that fine tuning of our discernment needs to come in. Some days, it is good to push ourselves, it is good to take that extra step, it is good to do something that we are not really excited by and other days it’s perfect to not do that. So the more we get to know ourselves at a deep level, the more we can tune into when we need to push ourselves and when we need to hold back, when we need to take that step, when we need to hold back, when we need to do that extra bit of self care, and when we can actually give to somebody else a little bit more than we perhaps, feel that we’ve got in the tank.

And, and in doing all of those different things, even when we get it wrong, we’re learning. And we are demonstrating for our children that they can make mistakes. That sometimes you need to push yourself and sometimes you need to give yourself a break. That there is this holistic approach to life that balance isn’t standing still in one spot. Balance is walking along that knife edge of life and occasionally falling off and then dusting yourself up, getting back on and asking for help when you need it. That’s the biggest thing I probably didn’t do back then that I’ve learned to do now. I have a speed dial of different professionals, other kinesiologists and reflexologists and acupuncturists and massage therapists and all of these different people, coaches, and what have you that I will call if I realize that I cannot get through whatever it is that I’m going through without a bit more assistance. Now, there will also be friends on that list. Who can I talk to, who’s this, who’s a good sounding board for this particular problem I’m going through? Sometimes it’ll be just journaling it, but I have these little toolkits available to me that I really suggest people put together. Get a list of professionals who can help you get a list of things that make you feel better and put simple things on it. Go outside, breathe fresh air, feed on the grass, glass of water, stop, you know, take a deep breath. It can be simple things on that list too.

And then it can be those things that we pay for, like professional help and then there can be things that we love doing that light us up. Read a chapter in a book, paint, something like that, and if we’ve got that list available, then when we are stressed and when we aren’t able to access our full resources, we can literally look at that list and go, oh, have a glass of water. Yeah okay let me do that, let’s see how that works and sometimes that’s all we need.

Helen Thompson: Thank you for all your pearls of wisdom, we’ve had a lovely long chat. If somebody wanted to get in touch with you to find out how they can embrace kinesiology and embrace being holistic and getting in touch with themselves how would they go about doing that?

Amanda Kate: So the best place to start is my website, which is AmandaKate.com.au. I am also on Facebook. I have a Facebook group, which is Divine Messy Human, which is the title of my book. I also am on Facebook as Amanda Kate Transformation. I’m on Instagram, I am on LinkedIn, I’m on TikTok, so wherever you are I am pretty much.

Helen Thompson: Okay, so thank you. I’ll put those in the show notes. Thank you for that, Amanda, and thank you for coming on the podcast. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.

Amanda Kate: Wonderful. You too. Thank you so much.

Helen Thompson: Amanda shared some great tips and insights, and I highly recommend checking out her website and social media For those wanting to know more about kinesiology, I have also included a link in the episode show notes to a page on Amanda’s website, where you’ll learn more about kinesiology and its many, many benefits.

I’ve included links to Amanda’s website, Facebook group and other social media mentioned in the episode show notes which can be accessed at MyBabyMassage.net/podcast/091.