Wakefulness: A Key to Thriving vs. Surviving

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani. Good day to everyone. I'm Joe Casciani, your host for the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Our conversations are all about aging well and doing what it takes mentally and physically to to live longer and healthier. Our guests share insights and recommendations about successful aging, stories of perseverance, and inspiration about our future. Today's podcast explores the topic of wakefulness from the eyes of a mental health practitioner with over 30 years working with adults of all ages. Katherine Jansen Burkett is our guest on this program. What is the concept of wakefulness and how is it applied in our daily life? How is thriving different from surviving? And how does our outer world reflect our inner world? We'll answer these and more questions, but first a little background on Katherine. Katherine, Master's in Public Health, LPC, received her Master's in Public Health from the University of Washington in 1992 and spent over a decade in public health managing violence prevention and teen health programs. Following in the footsteps of her father, who was also a therapist, She graduated in 2004 from Lewis Clark College and has now enjoyed over 17 years in private practice offering not only holistic psychotherapy, but retreats and workshops as well. Last year, Katherine published her first book, River to Ocean: Living in the Flow of Wakefulness. Her book reflects the human voyage of finding your way to an awakened self. In the book, Katherine explores 9 aspects of wakefulness, offering insights, practices, and her own and others' inspirational stories from the field. Katherine, welcome to our program. You're very welcome. I'm looking forward to it as well. So I always like to open by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about the journey that brought you to where you are today.

Well, it's captured in my book and in kind of the navigation of two different careers, very complimentary to one another. I had a wonderful upbringing in Roseburg, Oregon. 4 sisters, dad a therapist, and mom a stay-at-home mom until she became— she should have been an attorney, but she was a legal secretary. But my trauma from my dad's departure from the family at 14, which in the moment I didn't— I was kind of relieved to have him leave because he was kind of a pain. I didn't understand until much later what would kind of ensue pretty quickly. Food addiction, a really dark place to the point of a suicide attempt actually at 16. So though I had these loving parents and he actually, his journey was about being alcoholic and no one knew it. So by 19, he was making amends with me. Damage had been done, like he had done his work. But my journey that was eventually part of my professional journey started with just leaving, getting a GED, getting out of Roseburg. I went to San Francisco, 2 master's degrees, and I have a GED. I'm a high school dropout and I kind of love saying that.

Wow.

I didn't know. What my future held and all the shame that can come with being, uh, not finishing high school. So I went to San Francisco. It really took me in. I worked in the travel industry, but I kind of at that point thought I'd be an attorney. So I knew I needed to get back to school at some point. I really missed the mountains, but I went to University of Oregon ultimately and took a health class. And it was like, well, I was quite obese. And through the journey of the food addiction, that isn't my normal body. So I'm like, well, you can get a bachelor's degree in anything and then go on to law school. Why don't I do it in health? Because that really is meaning for me. And I just, I just went into healthcare. It just, you know, I don't know that I will ever— now I know I won't be an attorney and I still love watching trials, but it just, you know, it just became very fulfilling and meaningful. Went to University of Minnesota for part of my first master's degree, lived in Minneapolis, worked for that health department for a while. But it really was at a personal retreat. When I was 39, that I was— they said, like, do you have any dream? And this— the call from the universe came and said, you need to be a therapist. And it's like, I already have a master's degree, I have these great benefits, I'm raising children, I'm married to a man with 4 children, and we have 2 children together. So my personal life was quite full, but it was really a journey of trusting that this was next. And I would say, both personally and professionally, my life is so different having taken this turn. So I'm in private practice.

Mm-hmm.

And then I just found that I liked to go to retreats, and I found my clients sometimes needed a lot more, and in community, than I could do in an hour. Like couples that needed to talk to other couples who were having similar struggles.

Sure.

So it's been really rewarding, though sometimes very exhausting, to do retreats. And then I, lastly, about 10 years ago, it came to me also, same thing, to write a book, not mainly because I can't be my kids' therapist. And I really worked hard from my inner and outer world to really recover. And I felt like all the teachings that have been given to me, I wanted to offer to my clients, my children. I wanted to make therapy affordable. People that don't wanna come and sit, they could buy a book. So that was what inspired kind of this last part.

Yeah.

So it's all part of the journey, I guess I would say. Great.

Yeah, no, that's a great story. That's a great story. So you immersed yourself in the topic of wakefulness. Let's jump right into to it. How do you describe this? Help us understand what this term is all about.

Well, I love your intro to this podcast because wakefulness is not— first of all, it's been kind of hijacked by the political world right now we're in, and I, I thought of the world before anybody said the word woke in a political fashion. So I just want to kind of make that disclaimer. Wakefulness to me is living our most conscious life. So conscious living and conscious loving. And I say loving because it's about loving ourselves and others consciously. So that means a lot of different things to a lot of people. And though my, my book has an idea about spirituality, like our most conscious self is kind of our highest self. I don't use the word God a lot. I'm not proposing any religion, but it is kind of in this theme. And I have many clients that would say they're either atheist or not religious, but they really resonate with this idea of being awake, you know, and getting out of our trance states, our patterns, our old ways of being. And what you said, which I love, is this is both a physical thing, it's an emotional thing, it's a relational thing, and for some of us, it's a spiritual thing. So you could take any of those 4 categories and go, okay, Joe, are you being wakeful? With your physical health. And it's not just fitness level, it's also how you treat your body. Or if you look in the mirror, do you see— do you— are you critical and judgy versus kind and grateful for everything our bodies do? Same thing with relationship. Are we wakeful in our relationship? Are we more living based in fears like social anxiety or ego where we're controlling people or feeling insecure? So I like to get right down into the weeds when I think about wakefulness, because it's a nice idea, but this is about changing our brains and living. We're gonna live to 100, then we wanna get to 100 happy and healthy on a lot of levels. And for some people, they haven't done a lot of personal work and they hit their 40s, their 50s. They never dealt with their sense of unworthiness. They never healed. Relationships, whether it's about being forgiven or forgiving. Like, there's a lot of catch-up that happens midlife, and those are a set of my clients as well, that it's time to roll up your sleeves and get over your idea that therapy is this or that and really transform, um, from those places where we're kind of asleep.

Yeah. Well, so what were the 4 dimensions again?

The physical, relationships, physical, emotional, relational and spiritual.

And spiritual.

So for example, everybody has emotions, but a non-wakeful experience of our emotions is where I'm pretty disassociated from them. Maybe that means I'm, I'm always happy, but actually being always happy isn't real. It's not authentic. That's not the human experience. So that would mean I'm actually defensively happy and really scared. Or uncomfortable with feeling sad or feeling angry.

True.

And so emotional intelligence is another way to frame, are we in touch with and feeling our feelings, not just thinking about them? And then do we have a healthy way, not a dangerous way for others? Do we have a way of expressing our feelings, whether it's I'm angry with you, but I'm calm, or whether I can cry in front of you without shame? So that's kind of the emotional realm of wakefulness.

So it's really stopping, taking the time, and becoming aware of these emotions, right? We can't just walk through life thinking where everything's la la or everything is bitter and angry. We have to stop and really feel the emotions and be aware of them.

Well, and yes, exactly. And sometimes what people do, and they think they're feel— they think they're not living in their head. They think they're actually in touch with their emotions, but they don't complete an emotion. Gestalt therapy was based on— Gestalt, that word means complete. It's where the word closure came from, is that tradition of psychotherapy. And that if you're— in fact, we, even those of us that want to feel our feelings, will often be like, oh, I feel sad. Why am I feeling sad? Well, see, I just popped into my head because I'm thinking about my feeling. I just need to be sad. And emotions are transient states. They just last, if they last 3 to 5 minutes, that's a pretty long time. Usually they're quicker than that. So I teach people to look for the begin, a wave with a beginning, middle, and an end. Don't figure out your feelings, stay with them. It's in the body where it happens. And just stay with them and, you know, maybe you'll figure it out, but it's okay if you don't know why you're sad. Maybe your hamster died in second grade and you just never were able to cry.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah, yeah, that's good to be aware of them, but as you say, to respect them and pay attention to them because they, it can be very meaningful. But at the same time, I've heard it said that emotions are chemical reactions, and emotions, just like the chemical reactions, can dissipate over time, maybe in a matter of minutes or, you know, less than an hour. So if we hold on to it, it can become more powerful and take control. But at the same time, we can recognize it, be aware of it, and eventually process it, as you say, and move through it, right?

And so what I teach also, and this is kind of has my name on it, is I came— I didn't understand that, um, the rage I had inside of me wasn't just about, oh, I was raised in the '80s where you express your feelings and no one ever taught me. No, unregulated anger is not the same as expressing anger in a regulated way, right? The emotion is running the show. I'm probably not thinking straight. I'm not in executive functioning. I have no empathy for the person near me. So my first journey in kind of working with my temper, because I really had to see, uh, through some really unfortunate and unconscious ways of being that I had a temper. But what I didn't look at for a while and didn't understand is that I had the pain that I had around what had happened in my trauma also was a rage that my father left and really kind of told my sister and I it was our fault. He said it in a way that was super unconscious, and he again did his immense work. And so my point being, at one level, wakefulness around anger, for example, is making sure that the— your anger is not running the show in the conversation, right? That you get through the wave, 3 to 5 minutes, and then you find your voice and your system is calmer. That transmitter has dissipated and the other person is going to experience you as safe, which is the whole point, right? That our anger wants to have a voice. What I had to look at is going deeper to what was sourcing my anger. That wasn't just about that moment. It was very, very old. So, so if there's very old anger or any repression, that's when we get, like you said a minute ago, to these unregulated states. Feelings don't go away, they just go on a shelf and then they're going to come down and they're going to be bigger, right? And they're going to be harder to regulate. So very uncomfortable. Some of my clients would be like, yeah, you've got to feel the baby feelings. But once you get accustomed to it, you don't have to be afraid that once you start feeling, it's going to explode. You're going to get current. And the other thing, Joe, and you may know this, but many people don't, that if I want to be really happy, you know, this living to 100 happily, I can't bypass the hard emotions. So there's a correlate. You want to feel big joy, then you need to be willing to feel the other feelings in the proportion that they actually exist.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, it's not always a nice neat package, pretty package. There are some of the uncomfortable emotions too, and difficult, uh, objectionable emotions. Sure.

Yeah.

So help me understand then, you know, the wakefulness is important. What are the repercussions of not having this appreciation for What's going on? What are the consequences of not being wakeful? Why is it so important?

Well, I think we're— if we go to the different levels, which may be helpful, let's just start with the emotional one because there's another emotion that's so important, especially with aging, because there are losses that are going to accumulate over time, which is grief. So if I don't feel my grief, then what will happen in that repression can become depression. So an operating theory in psychotherapy is not all of depression is about repressed emotion. There are genetics probably involved. There are situations, the thing called situational depression. A good chunk of depression is repressed emotions. So if we don't feel sad, if I'm not willing to feel sad, I just always try to be happy, or I'm always just distracting myself, then we are putting ourselves at risk for depression. So that's clinical consequence. For me, if we're not wakeful in our relationships, you know, we do damage. And in doing damage, then we can end up quite alone because, you know, or even if we're not wakeful because we're so anxious, but we never learned how to work with our social anxiety, so I isolate. I didn't even need COVID again. Then there is social community. Like, we are creatures in the collective. We are meant to be with one another. We have mirror neurons. It's so important to be connected. So if I don't know how to get work through my social anxiety, then that's— there's going to be a relational, or again, if I'm unsafe for someone. So, uh, how about the spiritual?

How about the spiritual? Where, where was that?

That's a great question.

Yeah, that's going to be a little more difficult.

Yeah, it's okay. You know, I— what's true for me, and I just kind of take the stance of what resonates for others, so we don't need to kind of get validation from other people, try to convince them to join. A backstory, as I was raised, my mom was quite an explorer spiritually. So though we went to the Presbyterian Church, which was very friendly, I never had any trauma with that. She took me to a psychic at 14. We went to Quaker meetings. We practiced Judaism in a certain way. Like she was all over the place. So for me, there's always been many paths to God. I believe nature is a path to God, that there is this source energy, love, something bigger than our human ego self in many ways of experiencing it. And nature is one of them. And so I believe that my kind of personal and even professional perspective is we are in a spiritual crisis, not a religious crisis. I'm not talking about that, but we are so disassociated, not just from our bodies, not just from our emotions, and not just from each other, but our sense of source, whatever we would define that as. So I have to be careful as a psychotherapist because I don't have a, a religiously based practice.

Sure.

But I do, for people who are open to it or wanting that, you know, definitely people that are exploring that, having them have that kind of sense of spiritual path. That's actually one of my 9 aspects of wakefulness, is developing your own spiritual path. If you don't happen to resonate with an organized religion, some form of it in an organized way, I think it's critically important. And the consequences is just this sense of separation, which creates anxiety and depression and many, many things.

I know that was a difficult question. It's a difficult topic. We could probably spend a lot of time, you know, further exploring this. I know you've written a lot about thriving versus surviving. Can you shed some light on this? What's it all about?

Well, first, I think we need to know what that difference is. And so I like to point people to what are the cues when you're thriving? For me personally, I notice I get playful. I don't get like I'm trying to make jokes playful. I just have this and I feel a certain way in my body. When I'm surviving, it feels like white knuckle. I'm white knuckling life. I'm surviving. And we all have survivorship in us. And, you know, we survived a pandemic and some of us have survived death, some of the beloved, some of us have survived other kinds of difficulty. So it's not something to be dismissive of our resiliency and our survivorship, but the kind of this is as good as it gets, getting through the day, the getting through the day is a day we'll never ever get back. I want to help people without like crazy expectations or magical thinking or raise the bar, remove the glass ceiling, and say, what would it be for you to thrive? And sometimes they're very uncomfortable conversations. Like, I'm not thriving in this marriage. Doesn't mean you just go to marriage counseling. It might mean you're not in a relationship that ultimately is wise or healthy for you. You know, I'm not thriving. I've had this, which is intense. Not thriving as a parent. I thought I wanted to be a dad. Well, you're not going to give your kid away, but we got to find a new path for you because you're just kind of, you know, you've done what you're supposed to do, but you took a hit and you're kind of surviving here. So another aspect of thriving, I believe, is a loving and active practice relationship to ourselves. And we have this culture where if I have a relationship to myself, that might mean I'm selfish or I'm a narcissist. When in fact, as we love ourselves generously, we have a full bucket to love, eat out, you know, to experience love and offer it also generously. And so sometimes writing is really just beginning to have boundaries or taking care of ourselves in ways we didn't before that we're white-knuckling it because we're kind of in self-neglect.

Okay, so would you say it's almost two different perceptions of the same situation. One is a way of viewing it as, uh, learning, thriving, and the other one is just surviving, just barely making it through. But it might be the same situation, just two different perspectives. Fair enough.

Yes, I— well, I, I would offer two sides of that same coin. I think sometimes it is about, no, we need to make change. But often enough, and certainly a divorce, or if you ever did consider or not raising your own child or something like big changes. We wanna go slowly through and it, it is very much about going back to this idea of emotional intelligence and health. If you are in something hard, it feels like you're just kind of, oh, you know, in that hardship, we need to feel the feelings around that. And so it's an and not a but, cuz when you do but it cancels out the first thing you say, of course.

Mm-hmm.

Openness. I feel the hardship of this. That this is even hard to do day to day, you know, and there is good in it. And as I make space at the table for that good, then it's a duality. Yes, this is hard. And wow, how I am— these, these particular things are being served in this situation. I mean, I've had clients that work with them long enough, they're like, I'm so afraid of getting cancer. And then actually when they get cancer, it is not what they thought it was. It is scary, but there's incredible things that came from it. Incredible things. One person in my book died. He was my Embracing Death and Dying story from the field. Um, and he has passed. He passed about 6 months ago, 3 years longer than he had planned to, but it was actually in embracing his death that he felt he, he said, I've had the best year of my whole life and, and my, it's, it's impending. My death is impending.

Yeah.

So I guess it's this kind of wisdom, you know, the Serenity Prayer, what to change and what not to accept, what to change and the wisdom to know the difference is something like that.

Mm-hmm.

That you may need to make some major changes in order to thrive, or it may literally be some reframing and working with your life as is and having a different experience of it.

So it makes me think of transitions, as you mentioned, the person who came down with this cancer and passed from it. But transitions are always difficult, especially for people 50, 60, 70, and over. Loss of a loved one, a medical diagnosis, or, you know, an undesired move. What advice do you have for people to cope with these transitions? And I call them setbacks, serious, sometimes not as serious, but how do you recommend people manage through these?

That's a great question. I would always go from the foundation of how do we experience it in the body and emotionally, because that is our kind of a baseline of coming out the other side of a transition emotionally intact and healthy without what we talked about earlier, accumulated pain that is more harmful to us. So we got to be honest about this is hard. The second piece is watching the mind. You know, this is hard, but is it doubly or triply hard because of the story I have of it? I will never be okay. Well, really, that's a projection into the future, and that would generate a whole lot of really painful feelings, and it ultimately is probably not true. And so feeling what's happening, you know, as we honor our body and our our emotions. But watching the mind— there's some crazy statistic, Joe, that the mind is like— I don't even know if I believe this one, but I heard in a conference— like 90% inaccurate. And every thought we believe. So that's actually the second aspect of wakefulness in my book, because the first one is about befriending self, but the second one is like, okay, now we got to get to where this— the trouble is. And the trouble is often the mind. And so I would say when you make a transition, watch your thoughts, watch your story, and watch your projections. Thirdly, take care of yourself in it. It's hard. So if you're not already good at practicing self-care and self-love, be the practicer of it, not the professor of love towards self. And that might mean body work. It might mean leaning on friends and getting external support. It might be being patient with ourselves. That, oh my God, Katherine, you should be over this by now. But that's not what's happening with my grief. So it's taking that stance with oneself. It's also trusting our resiliency. We can really project our fragility a lot more than our resiliency. We've done hard things. We will probably do hard things again. And as we are doing it, to remember that that is a core part of the human psyche and experience. This incredible strength. Not, not that we're not human in it and it's— we're vulnerable, but we're also strong when we're vulnerable. And again, lastly, leaning on others. And for some people that's really shame-producing, like, I should— because we have such an individualistic society and like fierce independence is kind of the North Star. And I disagree with that. So to really say, I need help, this is hard, I'm making a transition and And even if somebody— I can't come along and make that transition, Joe, go away for you. I do a thing by accompanying you called undoing aloneness. And that's the more powerful thing than fixing my problem, is you just, just not being alone, being accompanied.

Yeah, I like those. Those are very important points. Thanks for that. I talk a lot about those, you know, what I call interpretations of the event, how we explain it to ourselves and as you say, watching our thoughts and projections, but it is a matter of a label that we put on a particular event and what that label means and all of the implications or inferences we take from that kind of explanation, how we explain a certain event, right?

Exactly. That our mind is constantly— what's happening is filtered through our mind, that you and I could have the exact same experience and have a completely opposite inner world. Experience of it, right? And that we can do good work to see, kind of witness, ah, that's my filter, that's the lens here. But, um, that's, that's pretty deeply embedded stuff. So I love that you're talking about that with folks. And the, the other thing is this idea that transitions— I took a class at Lewis Clark, actually, the whole class was called Transitions, and A lot of people think of it as like, it's so uncomfortable. I'm not— I'm at the end of something. I'm probably grieving. I haven't fully gotten to the what's next, you know, to fill in all that space. I don't really— I'm a little disoriented, right? It's unknowns, and unknowns the mind does not like. But I think of it as like a hallway. If we are in a transition, that's a long hallway, but we can't kind of handle it very well, we're going to go to a very quick door, maybe 4 feet down. And okay, fine. Now we're out of transition. You went ahead and picked a new relationship when your spouse died, right? You couldn't handle retirement, so you quickly went into— back out of retirement. But if you stay longer, if you can stay with the feelings that come up in transition, you're going to get to the better door. The door that's really supposed to open, not because you, you know, it just, it's unbearable to you. So I think transitions are actually a really powerful time to really see our process and practice some of that patience.

Yeah. Yeah. I've heard that hallway description called the corridor principle. We walk down the hallway and there's a lot of corridors off to our right and left, and we don't know what's down those corridors until we walk ask them and see. So we don't want to necessarily take the first one because there could be many other opportunities beyond that.

And I think in the visual I get now, because when I heard that, I, again, we are so conditioned to do, be individualistic. I can walk a lot further down the corridor when I have someone who cares shoulder to shoulder.

Sure. That's right. Yeah.

That's what we can ask for. That's what we can offer when we know someone are in our transition.

Yeah. Well, tell us about your book. You have a book, uh, River to Ocean. I love the title. Living in the Flow of Wakefulness. What's the message? Why did you write it? Well, you mentioned you wanted to have something for people to read rather than coming in for counseling, but what's the message you would like to impart?

Well, it is everything that this conversation has been about. Mm-hmm. And I've spoken to a couple of the specific areas that, um, because I didn't ever planned to be an author, and I likely will not be another one. I threw everything in there. I'm like, I need a chapter on this because we got to embrace death and dying because it's coming down the line. So the inner world part is based on a philosophy that change is an inside-out job. So I started with the inner world and relationship to body and relationship to our mind and our sense of self first. That felt like that's the self and the wakeful Wellness we take then to our outer world, which includes relationships, relationship to nature, living in troubled times, having our own spiritual path, those outer world kinds of things. It also just was a nice way to kind of frame it because I wanted this to be readable, and my concepts always have practice ideas because if you don't integrate practice, it just stays in the mind, but it actually doesn't become the new brain. But I also have stories from feel to kind of inspire that somebody's done this in their version of it before, and most of them are not my stories. That's the focus of it. So I even encourage people, just start— if you're having trouble in relationships, just start in that part of the book because it's a kind of a contained siloed part as well. They all connect, but sure.

Yeah. So it's not necessarily a linear narrative. You can start in different sections. Yeah. So River to Ocean, Living in the Flow, Wakefulness this? It's available on Amazon, I'm sure, and on your website. Your website is Barnes and Noble, I think, has it as well.

Okay. It's Audible. I have chose a really wonderful narrator. If people like books on tape, so through Audible it's also available. Her name is Leslie Howard. She actually put it up for award. We didn't win, but she's a very popular narrator. And she just— it was really cool because you have to pick a person. So we had all these I had like 200 people sending me their voices.

Oh, wow.

Gonna narrate my book. And so great, great.

Well, congratulations. So I always like to close by asking our guests, what would you like our audience to take away? We covered a lot of really valuable media information, insights, a lot of your experience. What would you hope our listeners take away from this conversation?

Well, it's kind of a piece of the spiritual path. I believe intuition kind of, you know, deep truth and knowing can come from the ethers, from kind of the beyond. I would encourage every day, yourself, myself, your listeners, to travel through that day lovingly asking the question, in this moment, am I in my wakeful self or am I asleep? And I think we know. I think we know, you know, it's where we're judging not just disliking a homeless person or cutting somebody off on the freeway or reacting to somebody in our household without giving them benefit of the doubt. So just that gentle question, and I say gentle and I say lovingly because this isn't about let's just beat ourselves up. It's a lot about self-talk, you know, how we're going to be. And when we see our sleepiness, so, so notice it, and then with love, be grateful Or, wow, I'm so glad I can see where I'm unconscious, where I'm asleep, and now I can bring something different, some other kind of wakefulness. Don't go for a run if you're hurting your body. That's not wakeful, that kind of thing. Take it to the day.

Respect ourselves, respect our feelings, be aware. Yeah, great information, great information. Thanks, Katherine. Uh, it looks like we're out of time though, but before I wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners to visit my website. Website livingto100.club. Sign up for the email list and download a free copy of my 9 tips to make living longer enjoyable. While you're on the website, be sure to peruse the library of blogs and podcasts. And also on the website, you'll find my email address and an option to set up a brief call. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Let me know what you're thinking. And finally, if you're interested, reach out to me to schedule a presentation for your group in person or online. I think there's real value in helping older adults feel inspired about their future. Daphne, thanks so much for being a guest on our show today. For those who might want to contact you, how can they do that?

Harbor Glow Holistic. Harbor, like, I'm very much into nature, as you could tell. So www.harborglowholistic.com or Harbor Glow Publishing is also my publishing company for my book. Yeah, to visit my website, I just was writing something on 4 Questions to Transformation that if people wanna be in my email community, I don't sell the list to anybody. They can contact me to get the book or just even to be a part of that. And then they'll get my little tidbits too, like you're doing.

So great. So harborglowholistic.com.

Mm-hmm.

Well, thanks again for being a guest on our show.

Thank you. Take good care, Joe.

Yeah, you're welcome. And thanks to all of those listeners today and hope to see you next time.

¡Hola!

Hi everyone, this is Meredith from the Senior Fitness with Meredith podcast where I discuss all things for seniors. From Fitness, Your Health and Wellness Journeys, How to Be All Over Strong and Beyond. I also have my mini podcast called Motivation with Meredith. It's a great quick motivational pick-me-up for your days. Join me, listen now. Search for Senior Fitness with Meredith on your favorite podcast platform.