Today our guest is Wil Baiden-Amissah, a strength and conditioning coach with qualifications in Personal Training, Crossfit, and Olympic Weightlifting and  twenty years of experience in the fitness industry both in the UK and South Africa. I wanted to have this conversation because scientific studies of the past few years clearly show that it is crucial for women to be doing strength training, which is contrary to everything you learnt growing up if you are a millennial woman like me. Now we know as women that we also need to work on strength, but there is so much noise on the internet and social media about strength training that we are all confused about exactly what it is that we should be doing and how much of it. In this conversation I ask Wil all the practical questions about progressive overload, cardio, finding a good trainer, and starting and sticking to a strength training routine. And then Wil also takes us deeper into the more existential topics of ageing, of softening one’s resolve, what the cultural fixation on skinniness costs us, the profound importance of rest, the magic of walking, and the slow and gentle work of cultivating a body that can carry you through life.

Wil's Instagram handle: https://www.instagram.com/wilpower.fitness/

Today our guest is Jeri Silverman, a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and Alexander Technique teacher, based in Cape Town. Before coming to this work Jeri was a musician and actor in New York, and the frenetic pace of that life led her to discover tools that helped her feel safe and free in her body, live with less tension and judgement, and to create from that place. Her work is underpinned by Archetypal Psychology and deeply influenced by the healing power of voice and breath, mindfulness studies and Vipassana meditation. She’s a mother and a songwriter, among many other things, she’s released 2 albums, appeared in international television, holds a BCOM from UCT. 

We talk about Jeri’s lifelong pursuit of presence in her life and throughout  the conversation we return to the question of what it means to be present, to really be open to and fully inhabit the our human experience. We talk about nervous system regulation, what it is and all of the things that social media gets wrong about it. About how what happened in the past can get lodged in us, conditioning our experience of the present. How can we shift these old patterns to open ourselves up to experiencing something new and thereby enabling us to make different choices based on what we desire and who we are. So we talk about opening up space for choice and agency within ourselves but also, on the other hand,  about surrendering to everything we cannot control, which is most things, as Jeri says. How, through non-doing rather than doing, we can create space and capacity within ourselves to not only tolerate the stress of life but also to experience our lives and to allow novelty and unexpectedness and vitality. The relief and the magic of letting go. We talk about posture and about how the way in which we move in our bodies determine the ways in which we show up in the world. We talk about the profound power of rest, and also what rest actually looks like. And how all of this relates to creativity.

Jeri's website: aspacebetween.co.za