Transcript: How to Deal With Anxiety By Increasing Awareness & Understanding its Causes and Triggers

This is a text transcript from The First Time Mum’s Chat podcast. The episode is called How to Deal With Anxiety By Increasing Awareness & Understanding its Causes and Triggers and you can click on the link to view the full episode page, listen to the episode and view the show notes.

Helen Thompson: This is Helen Thompson. Thank you for being here today. If you’re already subscribed to the show, thank you so, so much, mums. You always are amazing and if you’re here for the first time, make sure you subscribe to the show. You’ll find First Time Mums Chat on all the main platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon as well as now on YouTube.

Today, like in every episode, I’m bringing you an amazing woman, Sukie Baxter. Sukie is an equestrian, entrepreneur and healer who is deeply passionate about how we humans craft a vibrant and meaningful existence in our complex, imperfect world. I came across Sukie’s YouTube channel earlier this year and was fascinated by her videos and asked her to be a guest on First Time Mum’s Chat.

We talked about anxiety and I’m sure that you’ll find her take on this topic very interesting. During our chat, you’ll hear us talk about how being with animals and spending time in nature can help relieve states of anxiety or stress. The importance of being self aware, developing your internal compass, and being in tune with your surroundings.

The importance of developing sensory skills and being attuned to your body and why it is so important to encourage movement in your little one and to challenge society’s norms and so much more.

Let’s get on to the interview.

Hi Sukie and welcome to First Time Mum’s Chat. I’m delighted to have you here. Can you start by telling us about your background and what led you to what you do today?

Sukie Baxter: Well, it’s a bit of a long and meandering story, but when I was younger, I dealt with a lot of anxiety. I didn’t necessarily have a name for it at the time, but I just kind of grew up being a fairly anxious person and as I got older, I was very interested in personal development and read a lot of books on my own, so I really didn’t have much of a lasting impact to my emotional equilibrium until I sort of stumbled my way into body based modalities. There were a number of reasons that I decided to get into body work and nervous system healing but the inception was my own experience and the relief that I felt, the liberation that I had from sort of chronic stress that I genuinely didn’t even know I had because it just was a constant companion.

Helen Thompson: So I know how stressful that can be. So how would you support a mom who’s suffering from anxiety? What tips would you recommend?

Sukie Baxter: Well, I think first of all, it’s really important to define what it is. When we say anxiety, what is that, what are we actually talking about? So anxiety is a label that we apply to a sensation in the body. Generally, collectively, we have decided that anxiety is the label we use when we feel agitated and activated and there tends to be sort of a jitteriness to it and a sense of an inability to rest and relax and also a lot of catastrophizing, a sense of impending doom, fears and worrisome thoughts. Things like that tend to go along with the collection of symptoms that we call anxiety.

It should be noted that it can be different for everybody. So anxiety is a physical experience in the body, as all emotions are. So when we’re talking about dealing with anxiety, I have not found it to be super helpful. It’s helpful to an extent, but there’s a point at which It doesn’t help anymore to deal with the anxious thoughts, because a lot of times those anxious thoughts are rising out of this body state, this nervous system state, where your nervous system is activated and agitated and in the state of what we call high arousal or sympathetic activation. Not important to memorize that, that’s the technical term. So what we really want to do is work at the body level to resolve that activation and give the nervous system a sense of safety, a sense of calm, an ability to be centered and grounded and a lot of times then that collection of things that go along with that agitated state, all of those symptoms that we collectively call anxiety, they really tend to diminish or disappear entirely.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I think you also mentioned to me when we were chatting that you’re passionate about animals and you mentioned how you find that when you’re working with animals it helps with that process.

Sukie Baxter: Well, obviously horses and lots of different animals, dogs, cats are used for therapy, just because being around animals is so centering and calming. I have two horses, both of whom are Mustangs. I’m in the United States and we have wild horses here. They get gathered up and it’s a whole program that they have to find homes for these horses because they have to control for overpopulation.

So I have two of those horses and they have been really great teachers because when I’m working with a human client, when I’m working with someone and coaching them and helping them to resolve a state of anxiety or a state of stress, however we want to label that in their body, the part of that person that I’m working with really isn’t the, what we would call the rational, logical thinking, analytical part.

I’m working with their inner wild horse or their inner mammal. And that really can be highly effective. So one of my horses he’s highly sensitive, even for a wild horse and he’s really taught me that when we work at this non linguistic, basically the level at which language doesn’t function, because I can’t have a rational conversation with horses, when I work at that level, whether that’s with a horse or with a human, it creates a real shift in the nervous system state, and that has a profound effect, a cascading effect on the mental and emotional and physical well being of the organism, again, whether that’s a dog, a cat, a human, a horse, it doesn’t matter. That’s mammalian, so it’s really fundamental to all mammals.

Helen Thompson: It’s interesting, I brought that up because I know that there are lots of kids out there that have ADHD or who are struggling, it may be anxiety, it may be whatever. I know from my own experience and what I’ve observed, if they have an animal, whether it’s a cat or a dog, I’m particularly relating to cats here because I know somebody that had that, if they communicate and touch that cat and just talk to that cat, even if it’s just stroking them or whatever, it can really, really help them to calm down. I think, as you say, the animal is sort of a connection to them and helps them to relax and support them. I think they’re very valuable and I think a lot of people don’t realize that.

Sukie Baxter: Absolutely, animals will offer us basically all of the benefits of co regulation without all of the contrivances of human culture, right? So as people, we’ve decided that a lot of things are quote, normal or required for optimal human interactions. So one of my friends, one Works with autism quite a bit and is an amazing autism advocate and teacher and talks about how in the autism world there’s a demand that autistic children learn how to make eye contact. with other people that that’s something that’s, that’s a benchmark that they put down. And, and so they put a lot of pressure on autistic kids to make eye contact and assume that if the eye contact isn’t there, that there’s no connection happening.

That can be quite stressful for the autistic child and it can actually increase cortisol because it’s quite stressful for them to hold eye contact like that, whereas an animal doesn’t really necessarily have those contrivances. So the animal makes no judgment about whether the person is making eye contact or not making eye contact.

They’re more in a state of being and resonance with your nervous system and I think that the lack of pressure from animals to sort of perform in a certain way that we’ve culturally or collectively decided is right or good or however we want to label that, it allows us to feel that connection that we so deeply need.

Humans are social creatures. We need other creatures. We need other nervous systems to be able to feel safe, feel held, feel regulated, feel calm and if we don’t get that from other people, animals can really offer a nonjudgmental place to get it. There’s other benefits as well. Horses in particular, when you are on a horse can provide a certain kind of movement to your body that then releases certain hormones that calm your brain and decrease cortisol. So there’s other aspects of that, but I think just at a basic level, that co regulation element is really crucial.

Helen Thompson: You mentioned sitting on horses. I think the connection between you and a horse and other animals is so important. I think the more autonomy you have with the horse and the more autonomy you have with yourself, the better connection you’re going to have to that horse and the better way you can communicate with that horse. You don’t need to kick, you don’t need to be really firm and they don’t even have to have reins or anything on the horse. You can just sit and just be.

Sukie Baxter: Yeah, I think that animals in general are so much more aware than humans are. This is another thing that my very sensitive horse taught me because he is very subtle in his communication and so I had to learn to be very subtly aware of him so that I could see when his stress levels were getting amped up before they turned into an explosion. The problem we had, was that he would explode and it would seem like it was out of nowhere but when I learned to pay attention and to be more attuned to him, I discovered that, in fact, there were lots of signs, they were just very, very subtle signs.

What I see with people is that we miss so much of that. We miss it with animals, but we miss it with each other too. We’re not that attuned to one another and we have these voices in our heads and these stories in our heads and we tell ourselves how things should be, how people should be, how we should behave, how other people should behave, what’s right, what’s normal.

Some of this is conscious, a lot of it is not. A lot of it is just shaped by our upbringing, our communities, the cultures that we’re in and a big mishmash of that, because we all have kind of a different Venn diagram of all the different circles that we move through. Even our environments, even our physical environments, the kind of habitat that we live in can affect that.

So we learned to tune a lot out and animals are just so much more tuned in because if they lived that way, I know a lot of animals that we come into contact with are domesticated and so they live in a domestic environment like we do, but they’re a little closer to that wildness. They’re a little closer to living out there without kind of the safety nets that we have like walls and a roof and social norms and society and all of that. So they have to be attuned because they’re living on the savanna. There’s predators that could get them, they have to be attuned to shifts in their environment, the weather may be shifting in a way that they need to travel to another location for better forage or better water, they have to be attuned. So when we spend time around animals, they are attuned to us and that is a very nourishing feeling that we just sometimes don’t get from other people and a lot of us really didn’t get it from our parents through no fault of their own.

It’s because they didn’t get it through their parents and so on and so forth. So our nervous systems didn’t really learn how to self regulate because that’s something that’s a skill we actually are not born with. We have to learn it from other humans. So then when we spend time around other animals, we’re getting that fundamental need met that maybe we didn’t ever get met because of the world we live in, because of the way our culture is structured.

Helen Thompson: I think animals are in nature, animals know how to communicate in nature because as you mentioned, they have to go from A to B to get what they want. I think that’s something that we lack as humans. I’m not saying everybody, but a lot of people lack that connection with nature and I think we need to get back into that and that’s where animals come in. That’s how we learn because they teach us so many things. If we allow ourselves to get back into nature and communicate with them. I do think that self regulating is so important, that’s the key.

Sukie Baxter: Yeah you mentioned a really important word there, which is self regulate and when we’re talking about animals, yes, it’s wonderful that we can go and spend time with animals and it’s absolutely essential that we spend time in nature. These things are fundamental needs, we’re human beings, we’re from planet Earth, we need lots of planet Earth to be healthy. We need trees and grass and desert or whatever your habitat is, beach. We need those things, human bodies do well in nature. Ultimately we can do that attuning that we get from animals and we get it from some people. There are some people who are very good at it. That attunement, we can do it for ourselves. Then I know that a lot of people who listen to your podcast are parents. We can do it for our children and it’s so nourishing for children to get that. It’s one of those things where we kind of need to learn how to attune to ourselves before we can really attune to another individual. So it’s something that we can experience being around animals and then we can start to pay attention to the small shifts in sensation in our bodies that are the changing experiences that we’re having. So all of the experiences that we have are rooted in our bodies.

I think this is something that’s so important to understand is that emotions in particular, they’re not happening out there in the ether, they’re not happening even between our ears. The emotion that we’re feeling is actually the label that we are applying to a sensory experience in our body. So you can kind of understand this through the question, how do you know how you feel? So if you say, I feel anxious, well, how do you know you feel anxious, what’s telling you that? There’s something going on. There might be a pit in your stomach, there might be tension around your heart, there might be tightness in your shoulders, your breathing might be shallow. It’s going to be unique to each individual person, but there’s some embodied signature that will tell you how you feel.

The same is true for all emotions, for love, for grief, for excitement, fear, all of those have signatures in our body. So we can start to really attune to our embodied experience and that really starts the process of allowing us to attune to ourselves and ultimately very, very down the road to be able to make decisions based on our embodied wisdom, which means that we become increasingly self led, meaning we trust ourselves more, which then I have found leads to just an overall decrease in anxiety. When we have self trust and we’re self led anxiety just shrinks so, so much because there’s so much confidence and grounding just in being in our bodies.

Helen Thompson: I think it’s important for parents to learn that because then they can teach their children because if somebody sees you in tune with yourself, it sort of snowballs. It can reflect on others because they can see how it works. I think that’s what we lack in this society. I think a lot of people aren’t in tune. We’re so much engrossed with technology, so much engrossed with fear based things and we’re not really connecting to ourselves. I think that’s the key to creating a better world. I think the world needs more of that. We all need to learn how to attune to our children and how to attune to others.

Sukie Baxter: Yeah, it will change the world, absolutely because when you are not attuned to yourself, what happens is you don’t really have an internal compass, and this is sort of the bigger vision for the work that I do, is that I really think that we would have healthier, happier people and a healthier, happier world, if there were more people who were self led.

That doesn’t necessarily mean selfish, it means that we are really in tune with ourselves. When you’re not in tune with yourself, what happens is you’re sort of lost. From a sensory standpoint, a lot of us really exist from the neck up. We’re very good at being in our heads and we’re taught to be that way from a young age. We’re also very good at ignoring our bodies and even subjugating our bodies. So no pain, no gain, having grit and tenacity, all the, all the things, right? Those are admirable traits if you’re striving for something, but to be always shutting down your body’s communication is ultimately problematic. One of the ways that it’s problematic is that if you don’t know how you feel, then you have this sense of anxiety and you become very open to being sold a solution for that anxiety. That could be a physical thing, so that can drive consumerism. just buying things to try to resolve that anxiety, which is sort of almost like a parallel for hunter gatherer type of behavior. So in a hunter gatherer society, you might feel a little bit of agitation of hunger and needing to go gather or hunt some food and once you complete your gathering or complete your hunt and you satisfy your hunger, that would resolve the slight activation or slight anxiety, you might call it, in your body.

But in this world where we just don’t have a sense of connection to our bodies and we go out and we consume, consume, consume, it really never satisfies anything. We just become consumers in this loop of always trying to resolve that anxiety. One of the things we can also consume is ideologies. So if you really don’t know who you are and what feels good to you and you don’t have an internal compass you can be sold an ideology that. makes you think it will resolve that sense of anxiety and that can look like anything. You don’t have people who are self led. I think a self led society of people who really know who they are and know what they value is ultimately going to be a healthier and happier world.

Helen Thompson: So how do you support people to feel that connection in their body?

Sukie Baxter: So I teach people how to connect with their bodies through developing sensory skills. I teach people how to feel their bodies, which seems like a very simple concept and it is simple, but it’s not necessarily easy if you’ve spent your whole life being disconnected from your body. So really developing sensory skills, developing that muscle, and then through practices that bring people into their body and connect them with their physical felt self.

I do a lot of work around teaching people what’s shaped their body and shaped their experience of their bodies as well. I have programs where I walk people through various practices. Some are awareness practices, some are actual, I call them neurosensory practices, which means that we’re actually doing movement and attuning to our bodies and then noticing the shifts in our bodies and over time, what this does is it actually starts to reshape your brain through the magic of neuroplasticity, which really isn’t magic, it’s science. As you begin to put new info into your nervous system, you form new neural connections and that can decrease stress. It can change the way that your brain is literally wired through just adding new information and attuning to that information.

Helen Thompson: I like what you said about movement and connection and getting in tune with movement. I used to teach Brain Gym and Kinesiology and I know from my own experience that if I’m getting stressed and if I’m sitting at a computer for too long, if I actually get up and move and do cross crawling or do any kind of movement it really, really helps me to get back on track and to regulate. Even if that means just going for a walk around the house.

I’ve noticed that with teachers as well, when they’re teaching, they’re all sitting in a classroom. If they actually allow them to get up and move, even if it’s just for five minutes, it really, really does help because it brings that regulation and it helps to get their brain working more effectively as well, both sides of the brain.

Sukie Baxter: Movement is deeply linked to learning. So we know that children who miss movement milestones often have delays in their cognitive development as well. So movement and learning are linked and I think this is a huge cultural problem that we have in westernized countries and I think it’s probably pretty widespread. I can only speak to westernized countries, because that’s where I have the most experience. In our school system, why is it that movement and learning aren’t linked? Why is it that as you get higher up in your studies, you decrease the amount of movement that the child has. You take movement out of the diet. So the older the child is, the fewer recesses and the fewer movement opportunities they have and any movement that is done is often regimented through, for example, like a physical education class, where movement is prescriptive. You’re going to move in this way, you’re going to exercise in this way, it’s not free movement and it’s certainly not movement through a sensory rich environment. It’s often done in echoey gymnasiums with fluorescent strip lighting. That’s not a very sensory friendly environment to a human organism.

So you mentioned that in classrooms, they’re allowing children potentially to get up and move and then come back to learning but I think we even need to take that a step further and start making the movement happen while they’re learning. So why is learning being done when they’re sitting at a desk and movement is something we do apart from learning? Why are these things not happening together? We know that when you move it helps your brain form neural connections. It does a whole host of things that I’m not specifically an expert in early childhood development, but I I have done a significant amount of reading about it and I do have a friend who works in this area and have done quite a lot of training with him. It’s pretty interesting how much more effective it is to integrate movement with learning just because the way that human brains work.

You’re absolutely right. When you’ve been sitting around for a long period of time, if I’m trying to solve a problem, if I’m writing something, typing something, or trying to make a video about something, and I can’t quite get it, I get up and move. I just walk away from it. I try to leave my office or home and go somewhere else even, because the change in environment, navigating something different, moving through something different, stimulates your brain differently, and it can enhance your problem solving skills.

Helen Thompson: I definitely agree with you there. I’ve done that myself and when I teach baby massage, I’m always encouraging parents to allow their babies to move, whether that’s moving by doing massage or giving the babies a break to roll around and have that freedom of choice it was interesting. You said movement and learning You don’t have to sit around and do it. You can actually get up and talk while you’re moving and communicate to the teacher while you’re moving, because I think sometimes that helps you to get your brain moving. When I’m talking to people, I use my hands a lot or I get up and shift around and it really does help you to get that brain connection and all those brain nerves working together. I think it’s so, so valuable.

Sukie Baxter: Yeah, I think sometimes we think that it’s sort of a trick or a hack or one of those quick tip kind of things off the cuff. It’s just like neuroscience. So the vestibular system, which is part of your ability to balance and stay upright, is linked to long term learning, like to information retention, so when you are doing things that challenge your ability to balance, i. e. moving, you’re actually going to retain information better. So I think that we think it’s like one of those silly little pieces of advice that people give kind off the cuff when really this is a neuroscientific fact that you will learn better if you are moving while you are trying to retain information.

I think this is so relieving for so many people. I personally have quite a lot of early childhood school trauma and I have talked to lots and lots of other people who have some form of early childhood school trauma from being shamed or othered in some way due to a desire to move. So I heard from somebody recently who said she would, kind of shake a leg, bounce her knee up and down when she was focusing in school and the teacher would come by and smack her knee.

I got shamed for sitting on the floor one time and it was a very unconscious decision in elementary school. I do remember where I was focused really hard and I always focus better when I’m sitting on the floor. Without thinking about it, I scooted my chair back and sat on the floor and the teacher was just not kind to me and the stories go on. So if you’ve ever experienced some kind of shame for needing to move in a way or sit in a way that helps you focus better, that was not at a traditional desk with a chair, it’s so validating to know that you’re not broken or weird. There’s nothing wrong with your brain. That’s just how human brains work. We need to move and we need to change our position in order to allow our brains to make the connections they need to make in order to focus and retain information.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I think that’s so true. I think a lot of teachers are beginning to realize that. I spoke to a an elementary school teacher just recently and she was saying that she takes her kids outside if they’re restless or whatever and they’re not focusing. She just says right let’s go out for a walk along the beach and then we’ll come back and she, as a teacher has been shamed by her colleagues for what she does. Why are you taking the children out to the beach, you’re supposed to be teaching them, you’re supposed to be encouraging them to learn and taking them out to the beach for a walk, isn’t learning!

Sukie Baxter: This comes back to the cultural bias. So we have a bias in Western cultures that being quote, good or well behaved or studious, equates to not moving, right, sitting still, not making noise, not, quote, fidgeting. Again, it comes back to eye contact. So for me, you’ll notice as we’re talking, and I know your listeners will hear this on a podcast and they won’t see the video but you’ll notice that I often look away. I think better and I can come up with words better when I look to the side or I allow my eyes to go in different directions. I don’t necessarily make eye contact with someone the whole time I’m talking with them and I think most people are like that. We have this mandate that children sit still, with their eyes forward, looking at the teacher, looking at the blackboard or the whiteboard or the projector, whatever they’re using these days and quote, paying attention.

There are even some requirements to physically take notes. That helps some people to take notes, but it doesn’t necessarily help everyone. Not everyone is able to do auditory processing and also write at the same time but we’ve decided that these equate to, quote, good behavior. What’s really interesting is when you start to think about this, and this is just a seed I like to plant for people is like, if you start to think about why is that good behavior and is that what works for me, you’ll start to hear it in other places, right? So I was recently listening to an audio book, and the person who created the audio book kept saying, between every chapter, it really works for me to read a book while listening to the audio. You’re consuming information in multiple ways, you’ll retain it better, you should go and get the electronic version in addition to listening to this audio book. I had to think about that because it doesn’t work well for me. What works for me to retain information from a book is if I’m physically moving while I do it.

So when you start to have that seed planted of well, this is what somebody else has found works for them, that doesn’t mean it works for me, or this is what works for a lot of people, or it’s what we consider normal, whether it is or it isn’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s, quote, right, and it certainly doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right way for me.

Again, this comes back to being self led. So as we start to realize this, we can start to attune to our nervous systems a little bit and start to realize, well, gosh, I feel much more focused when I listening to a lecture while weeding the garden. Or listening to a lecture while walking on the beach on my headphones, or at the gym or whatever it is for you. Or I feel much more focused when I do sit and read along with something that might be the thing for one person, but it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for everybody. I think we just kind of need to relax our idea of what constitutes quote good or studious behavior and be open to the idea that different nervous systems and different brains are going to assimilate information in different ways. By and large, we all need movement to be a component of that.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I agree with you. I like listening to music and, and moving around and doing things while I’m doing something, because it helps me to focus more. Everybody, as you say, has their own way of doing it and there’s no right way or no wrong way to learning. I think teachers are beginning, as I said earlier, to get more attuned to themselves and getting more attuned to the fact that there are different ways of learning and allowing their students to learn that way.

Sukie Baxter: That’s great to hear that there is a little bit of a shift but I would love to see that change more drastically. Most classrooms are pretty antiseptic. There’s not a lot of nature going on in the classrooms and I think that that’s one of the things that we can easily change. It’s not that hard to bring little bits of nature in, even if it’s just pictures on the wall, but you can bring in plants, you can bring in rocks and logs.

You could bring in a log that kids could walk on or just having decor that is natural can really help the nervous system even if you can’t necessarily take children out in nature, because I know that’s not an option for every school. So even if you can’t necessarily leave the environment that you’re in, you can bring nature in. Just to bring this back, because I know so many of your listeners are parents and have babies and young children and you may not have the ability, depending on where you live, to necessarily go forest bathe all day long. You might have a park nearby that you can go to, which is great. Any little bit of nature that you can get out in, your backyard counts as nature. You can also bring it inside and just that alone can be so helpful for a human nervous system to be surrounded by some of the natural environment.

Helen Thompson: Yeah, I’ve noticed that particularly in some schools in Tasmania, they actually do bring nature in. Whether it’s a plant, I’ve noticed that there are plants in the classroom and they have stones that people can pick up and feel. I love the idea of having a log or something in the classroom. I think the teachers wouldn’t like that. I think they’d find it a bit too distracting for them to teach, but I don’t know.

Sukie Baxter: But that comes back to what is good behavior, right? This really does require a whole revolution in how we think about humans really, not just kids, but humans and learning and what it means to be alive and human. So I think it’s interesting that this conversation has gone into talking about school and education, which is not typically something I talk a lot about in my work because I tend to work with adults, not so much children, but I do have thoughts.

If we think about like, okay, well, if a child getting up and walking on a log and doing like some balancing practices on that log is distracting, then that tells us that we’ve defined a good behavior as not being distracting, not doing things that might take attention away from the teacher. So we’re back to kids sitting still looking straight ahead is not distracting other children. It’s not that I have one single answer, I’m not a childhood education or development expert, but just from a nervous system standpoint, it opens up the question, how can we make nervous system friendly environments for learning? How can we make nervous system friendly environments for work and productivity? So how can we actually get done the things we need to get done as adults once we’re beyond educational age and still be in nervous system friendly environments because office buildings, again, are just the evolution of these very antiseptic, sterile school buildings, by and large, unless you happen to work at Amazon and you have those in Seattle and you have the globes with all the foliage, I don’t know if you know about those, but there’s certain environments like that, but most office buildings are not a sensory friendly environment. There’s fluorescent strip lighting, they’re very rectilinear, they smell bad because there’s just canned air being sent through the system. There’s hardly any windows that open often. A lot of times there’s just kind of this electromagnetic buzz from a lot of computers and other electronics.

So if we’re looking at schools and how can we make education more nervous system friendly, how can we make offices more nervous system friendly, how can we consider our nervous systems and consider that we are human animals who exist as part of planet Earth and make our environments more conducive to healthy humans, healthy, happy humans on all fronts.

I think that if we started thinking about things in that way, we would actually have to do less self care, we would have to do less less of what I teach because we would just be in better environments and that would do a lot of the work for us. Does that make sense?

Helen Thompson: I think it makes a lot of sense and I think more offices should be like that, but I think that’ll take a while to happen.

Sukie Baxter: Yeah, so in the meantime we do what we can do in the environments. We don’t have complete control over our environments. We have some level of influence over certain aspects of our environments. You may not even have complete control over your own home environment because you might share it with other people, so everyone has needs and preferences and all of that. Where we can make our environments nervous system friendly for ourselves, for our children, for everyone in our communities, I think that if we can just move forward with that consideration, we’ll start to make changes slowly and hopefully eventually it will add up to bigger changes.

Helen Thompson: I think it would make the world a better place. If somebody wanted to find out more about you and find out more about your body work and all your pearls of wisdom that you’ve shared with us today, how can they find out about you?

Sukie Baxter: Yeah, well, my home on the Internet is my website, which is WholeBodyRevolution.Com and I’m sure you can add that in the notes and then my other locale where I hang out a lot is on YouTube. So I do a lot of YouTube videos and you can find me at YouTube.com/SukieeBaxter.

Helen Thompson: Well, I’ve listened to a lot of your YouTube videos and they’re very informative. You do a great job on YouTube. We talked a lot about movement and we talked a lot about regulating and I think when you do your videos on YouTube you’re doing exactly that, you’re practicing what you preach. So thank you Sukiee for being here, I’ve really, really enjoyed talking with you and and thank you.

Sukie Baxter: Thank you so much, it’s been my pleasure.

Helen Thompson: Thanks mums, as always, you’re amazing and I hope you enjoyed this episode. Be certain to check out Sukie’s website and her popular YouTube channel. She’s a popular lady with over 500,000 subscribers, wow! If you haven’t done so already, make sure you hit that subscribe button.