FLIPSIDE OF MIDLIFE®: HOW MOVEMENT AND BREATH BOOST YOUR VITALITY IN MIDLIFE AND BEYOND

In this special guest episode, I’m joined by Michell Brown. She is a movement and vitality specialist who helps women in midlife and beyond improve their energy and confidence.

Michell is passionate about helping us stay active and enjoy midlife and beyond, and she does that through her work that blends mobility, breathwork, and mindset. You'll hear why Michell started her business, the impact your breath has on your body and mind, and, of course, her favorite thing about midlife and beyond.

 📍Connect with Michell:
🌐Website: https://www.michellbrown.com/
📧Email: michell@michellbrown.com

Want to know what Michell says in Part 2 of our chat?
Join my ELEVATE Membership to hear her talk about choosing not to decline in this season of life, and how movement and mindset can help us manage big emotions and boost our energy.

Visit my website for a promo code to get your first month of ELEVATE for only $10 (Exclusively for women in midlife and beyond. New members only.) 

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Transcript

FLIPSIDE OF MIDLIFE®: HOW MOVEMENT AND BREATH BOOST YOUR VITALITY IN MIDLIFE AND BEYOND

{MUSIC INTRO} 

Karli: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to FLIPSIDE OF MIDLIFE®. I'm Karli Newman, your favorite GenX dealer of positive vibes and life and wellness coach for women in midlife and beyond, and I have a special treat for you today.

Here with me is Michell Brown. Michell is a movement and vitality specialist who helps women in midlife and beyond improve their energy and their confidence. She's so passionate about helping us stay active and enjoy life, and she does that through her work that blends mobility, breath work, and mindset.

Welcome, Michell. Thank you so much for joining me here today.

Michell: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here with you.

Karli: I can't wait to tell our listeners and watchers all about what you do.

So let's just start off, gimme a little bit of your background, um, if you will, just your, you know, shortened life story of how you ended up here where you are today. 

Michell: Okay. I'd be happy to. Um, how I ended up here, well, I had a corporate stint. I worked in corporate America for a while. Until I had children. And then, you know, I was doing so much in corporate, I was working so hard, the eight-to-eight job and beyond, and I discovered I can't do this and have children.

So, I moved on and um, decided to open up my own business and heal my body 'cause it had been pretty burned out. And I just started discovering all kinds of wonderful health things that, you know, really help you to bring more vitality through you, that's what I wanted when I had kids, but also up until now, especially now, vitality is so important. So for me it's an everyday thing. I love finding all kinds of ways for myself and for my clients and for, you know, people where I post to have better health, greater vitality, more mental clarity, and just really creating a life that you love. 

Karli: You bring up a really good point. I think that our generation was really, women in particular, you can do it all. You can work, you can have a family, you can manage a household. And we did get burnt out. Many, many of us are still exhausted decades later from trying to juggle all of that. I think that the younger generation, I have three children, and my youngest she's a Gen Z, and I think that generation is really figuring it out of what their priorities are and what they really want in a professional and personal life. I get inspired by that. But I want to know more, Michell, go into more about what you do for a living now, where you are in this season of life. 

Michell: Yeah, I totally would love to share that with you because 

I am so passionate about what I do. I help women to have more life force, more full-body energy, and it's so important right now as you go into midlife and beyond to have mental clarity. You know, we all have that thing in our heads, like, oh, we're seeing the older people ahead of us and how they're going into the things, you know, for brain health and how it's not working in a lot of areas.

So it's so important to take care of your energy and your brain health, and I help people to do that through movement, through really conscious movement. The reason you wanna do the movement is because it opens up new neural pathways in your brain, and they need to have novel experiences all the time.

We can't just think the same thoughts that we're thinking all the time, do the same things we're doing all the time, and expect new creativity to emerge. And to have this really clear mindset, you've got to build your brain health every day. So the movement that I teach helps you do that.

The breath work that I teach really helps you do it too because it's a really practical breath work designed for you to be using it all day, in every situation, whether you're relating to your partner or your clients or your children, you wanna be using both of these, the movement and the breath work, to keep you really steady and clear, focused and open. We need to be open when we're facing challenges, when we're relating to people. I work with the movement, the breath, and the mindset. Mindset's so important to really help women have their full vitality. 

Karli: I love how you describe how those three things are so interconnected, and it is something that all of us women in midlife and beyond can relate to - the brain fog, the fuzziness, as our hormones are really going wacky during those phases of life.

And then, yes. Looking ahead to where we are going in the beyond phase of how do we stay clear-minded? How do we develop and enhance our brain health? How do we continue to move? And breath work and mindset and movement are tools for making those things happen.

I think it's so interesting that you do this and you have a way that it's all connected in the format that you use in your classes.

So, can you tell me how did you come upon this? Is this something that you created? Is this something you learned? Tell me more about this. 

Michell: I have been doing this for 30 years. I've really been passionate about, first of all, people's bodies and how they work and how we can avoid getting stuck in our joints and in our bodies because that actually drains your energy and gives you less strategies to think with when your body's all glued up.

I started out learning all kinds of things about the body and then, I discovered for me a program that helped me put things together. It's nice when you find something that helps you put all the things that you're interested in together. From this program, I developed my work and I still study so much every day about all kinds of new things that I find.

And then how I can meld them all together. That's just my passion, you know, is to really discover and explore how we as women can lead our lives, lead our families, lead our work, and lead in our friendships and stay really clear and focused and have fun at the same time. 

Karli: You mentioned getting stuck and I think that has some dual meanings in this season of life. Where we do feel maybe stuck in life, just not really knowing what's next. Or maybe it's a career feeling of, gosh, I just feel stuck in what I'm doing. I don't feel like I have meaning and purpose that I want to have. That was my personal experience. That's why I say that.

As far as our bodies go, being stuck, too. That's so important. I believe so much in stretching and maintaining flexibility as well as the strength piece of it when we age. When you said stuck, I just thought of that. You feel those aches and pains when you get out of the bed in the morning, or you know, as you've been sitting for so long and your hips are just really hurting, or maybe you have some low back pain and that just radiates through your hips and down into your knees. Being active and having a form of movement to be able to get unstuck in our bodies, but also in our minds, from what you're saying with tying in that mindset piece, that's so valuable.

You mentioned breath work a couple of times. Give us some practical tips that our watchers and listeners can take with them that will help us go through our day professionally and personally outside of work.

 What do you recommend about breathing and breath work? 

Michell: It's interesting that you were talking about the stuck, so the breath work will help you with that also. Because when you're stuck in your hips, you're stuck in your shoulders. There's part of you that's not breathing. We didn't get taught this in school!

When your body gets stuck, your breath is gonna go lower, you're probably not gonna breathe into that part of your body, and that stuckness in your body is going to drain your mindset. It's gonna drain your energy. You don't have as much energy to put into what you're doing because it's going into holding you tight for some type of protection.

Whether your hips can't move, your shoulders can't move, your brain automatically thinks that you're in stress mode, so it's gonna divert the blood flow out of your head to your limbs. Your belly's not gonna get it. So then we have gastric things happening. Your hips won't get it.

And all those organs in there aren't gonna get this, blood flow that needs to occur because your body is in stress mode and it's getting ready to run or fight. But that's not a great way to live. It just doesn't work when you live like that day in and day out. The breath work is gonna start to get that flowing.

That's the interesting part. When you focus internally, in on your breath, something in your brain reorganizes. It goes, oh, we're now moving from stress into rest and digest. And now in rest and digest the blood flow can start going again. Electrical circuits can start connecting. Because we're basically a whole field of electrical circuits inside our body.

Things can start connecting again, and then circulation happens. And this is so amazing because when circulation happens, your body moves better, you're more relaxed, you're let go a little bit. You're not pulling yourself up off the ground and your brain works better.

That's the behind-the-scenes of why you wanna practice your breath work every day so that you're sharper in your mind so that you don't get as stuck or glued together in all your joints, but your joints can move freely. The breath is, one of the foundational tools to be able to help you with that.

A tool that you can use is start to be aware of your breath. For all the listeners right now, just tune in like you're tuning into a radio channel, but the channel is inside you. And as you tune into yourself, you can be more aware of your breath and of what's going on. And where we're aware of what's going on, we have more power, we have more ability to manage this internal system. Because this brain of ours, that's the manager. The manager's out to lunch, then things are not working right.

So one tip it's a, a thing you can do all day. You can do it anytime you take a break, you can do it in your house, you can do it anytime in a meeting. You can put one hand on your diaphragm, so your diaphragm is down here below your heart in the lower ribcage, you can put one hand there and just feel is that moving? While you're breathing. If you're noticing your breath right now, notice is that place moving or not.

It's so common for us to breathe up in our upper chest, and when you do that, your brain thinks you're stressed. You may not even be stressed, but your brain thinks you are, so you're gonna be more uptight. So when you start to breathe down here in your diaphragm and just put your hands there and let this whole area breathe and feel your hands move, like the ribs are moving out, the ribs are moving back in again.

That action makes that biggest breathing muscle that you have work. It's so amazing, and then your body starts relaxing. But you gotta remember to do it. So take notes, put sticky notes up all over the place. I set like 10 alarms on my phone. They're silent and it reminds me to breathe. You've gotta have these little nudges because if you don't, you'll forget.

'Because it's not familiar yet. 

Karli: I love how you talk about how much our body does without our awareness even being there and. It's also a metaphor for our lives. Having that awareness of our breath, having an awareness of how we're feeling in our bodies is similar to having an awareness of, what's going on around you or where are you challenged and maybe where would you like to see some change? Where would you like to adapt to new habits? Where are some things that you would like to leave behind you as you step into a new week, a new month, a new year? And awareness is exactly what you said it is. It's the starting point, and from there you can create change. You cannot create change intentionally if you don't have that awareness.

And I really love your tips about having those little personal nudges, whether it's sticky notes in different places, using an alarm on your watch, an alarm on your phone that just kind of bumps you with, Hey, are you breathing? I know that a lot of people might do that for drinking water or standing up and moving around from a desk, but to do it for breathing. That is something that all of us can obviously use based on what you just described.

Oh, I love that, Michell. Thank you for sharing those tips with us.

Before we go any further, I want to say that you are a special guest on my podcast episode, and this is part one of our conversation. Part two we will record here in a little bit, but part two is only released exclusively for my ELEVATE members. So if you are not one of my ELEVATE members, I encourage you to go to the link in the show notes and transcript and investigate what that is. It's a really great community that I'm building for women in midlife and beyond. How to live life to the fullest, how to connect with other women in midlife and beyond, and it's full of content and tools that come out every month and it's an ever-growing library, and you have access to all of it when you do become a member.

So please go to that link and check it out. And if you do join, you'll be able to see part two of my conversation with Michell, which is coming up in a bit, and she's gonna dive a bit deeper and give us some really great nuggets that we can use to help us feel really good and boost our vitality and energy and clarity of mind.

Okay, Michell, I would love it if you would share with the listeners and watchers how they can learn more about you and what you do. 

Michell: Certainly. Well, I have a website they can check out. It's michellbrown.com and Michell is spelled a little differently. It's M-I-C-H-E-L-L and there's no e. So my life has been a series of questions about where's the E, but there's no E.

And they could also email me at michell@michellbrown.com. 

Karli: I will include both Michell's email and her web address in the show notes so that you can just easily link there. You can find those there.

I wrap up every part one of my podcast episodes with guests, Michell, by asking the question, what is your favorite thing about midlife and beyond?

Michell: Ooh. My favorite thing is coming into my power in this stage of my life. You know, the twenties was all about one thing. The thirties was about something else, but now in midlife it's like, wow, there's a lot of wisdom that's been built. Receiving that wisdom and then being able to share that wisdom is so valuable.

I feel like there's so many people in the age group that we're in, but then younger that can really benefit from wisdom and wise words from midlife people. 

Karli: I think our generation is really starting to talk about things more openly than ever before. I hear it all the time in the different events that I do, in conversations I have in my community, of, you know, my mom never told me any of this kind of stuff.

My sisters didn't even talk to me about it. and now we're out in public speaking about menopause and perimenopause and how important it's to share information and how we do feel about life and share that wisdom. I really like that you said that.

I came across an article the other day and it, it was something about aging and wisdom and how in the United States, the culture has not really liked to use the word wisdom because it was construed as elderly or old or senior.

I agree with you absolutely. We do have life experience. We have experiences from our friends and our connections that we have learned from. And it's so great to be able to extend a hand down and help the women behind us come up with us.

And it's really, also changed my perspective on the women that are ahead of me by a decade or two to really appreciate. They have a lot to share and they're not necessarily of the generation that will just tell you about it. So I think we can ask a lot of really good questions with that age group to learn from them.

Because just like we are helping the women behind us, they can help us, too - know what to expect, some of the challenges. Maybe ask what their favorite thing is about where they are in life and to help them also see the beautiful things. Because as we know, hopefully, if we all follow your lead, Michell, and we stay active and we continue to breathe and move our bodies and keep a positive mindset, we will have a more positive outlook as we age.

There are so many beautiful things in every moment of life that we can find if we seek them out. I really appreciate you sharing that. Your favorite thing is the wisdom you've gained. I love that. Thank you. 

Michell: You're welcome. Thank you so much. 

Karli: So I do wanna wrap up part one here. Again, listeners and watchers, if you are interested in hearing part two of my conversation with Michell, please go to the link in the show notes and transcript. Check out my ELEVATE membership. You can join your first month for only $10. It's a steal so you can get in there and see what it's like before your second month, which will be $25. It's still a really great deal, even at that price. There's so much value inside of there, which I know you will see when you go check it out.

I want to thank all of you for being here with Michell and I today. Michell, I wanna give you the biggest thank you for taking time out of your very busy day and sharing your tips with us and your wisdom. 

Michell: Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun, and I really appreciate, your time and your wonderful venue that you have of FLIPSIDE OF MIDLIFE®. It is so cool. 

Karli: Thanks, Michell. All right, I'll see you soon in part two. Listeners and Watchers, I hope you'll be there too. Take care.

{MUSIC OUTRO}