Did you miss us?? Because we missed you! 

Kristen Ales and Kristin Mathes return to the podcast to fill you in after Kristen’s maternity leave. As it turns out they both have been busy nursing new babies! Kristen tells us more about her first few months of motherhood welcoming her daughter into the world and navigating role transitions as a new mother and group therapy practice owner. Meanwhile Kristin Mathes has been in full creative mode launching yet another surf therapy retreat in Costa Rica and full rebrand of her business. They both reflect on both the discomforts and excitement navigating big life transitions. As they both expand and take on new challenges, they discuss the future of the podcast and what to expect moving forward.

In this episode we explore:

To sign up or learn more about Finding Flow a mind body surf therapy retreat to Costa Rica hosted by Kristin Mathes, LCSW see her website for the juicy details. 

You can learn more about the hosts Kristen Ales, LPC and Kristin Mathes, LCSW by visiting their websites.

This show is brought to you by:

The Wilder Wellness Intuitive Eating online course is a self-paced program that will help you heal your relationship with food and your body. This 10 module course will help you stop obsessing over food so you can reclaim your time and mental clarity, take charge over how you take care of yourself, and begin to take steps towards finding food freedom. Learn more and sign up here. 

While Kristen Ales is out on maternity leave, we are revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the past. These are powerful conversations that we would love for you to hear or are worth listening to again!

Abby Chan, MS, RDN discusses how to build a movement practice around empowerment and choice, rather than a place of punishment or in pursuit of purely aesthetic goals. Abby helps us explore how we can begin to slow down and shift our focus to how our body FEELS rather than just focusing on numbers, stats, or how our bodies look in athletic wear.

Abby Chan, MS, RDN is a non-diet, weight-inclusive Registered Dietitian who specializes in helping others re-establish their relationship to food, and movement. She is the co-owner of EVOLVE Flagstaff, an integrative facility that focuses on injury prevention and rehabilitation, strength training, nutrition, and meal preparation to help you do what you love, for life.

When she isn’t working with patients you may find her in the gym strength coaching, teaching a yoga class, or in the cheffing it up in the kitchen. Other than work, she spends her time as an artistic director for Dark Sky Aerial. She is a movement artist who uses her love for dance and aerial arts as a form of expression and processing.

When she isn’t working or creating you can find her outside on shredding trails on her mountain bike, skiing, or vanning with her pups!

While Kristen Ales is out on maternity leave, we are revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the past. These are powerful conversations that we would love for you to hear or are worth listening to again!

In this episode, we talk all about how clinging to perfectionism can increase feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. And how we can begin to loosen our grasp on feeling like we need to be perfect all of the freaking time.

In this episode, we also discuss our own relationships with perfectionism and how showing up messy or imperfectly has allowed us to show up as better therapists in our client work and as business owners. We will share with you strategies we both use in our practices to help clients take the first steps toward letting go of perfectionistic habits and tendencies.

Joanna is a licensed psychotherapist based in Bozeman, Montana and the owner of Root & Rise — a modern and inclusive mental wellness practice for millennials. Joanna brings her true self and inner nerd to the therapy space. She specializes in the areas of anxiety, perfectionism, self-worth, life transitions, burn out, eating disorder recovery, and is a big advocate of feeling all the feels, authenticity, self-compassion, and letting go of shame. When she's not with clients, she's either hiking, camping, skiing, climbing, making a mess in the kitchen, talking to her plants, or getting lost in fiction novels.

While Kristen Ales is out on maternity leave, we are revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the past. These are powerful conversations that we would love for you to hear or are worth listening to again!

Want to know one of the most important steps in actually cultivating positive body image and a healthy relationship with food and our bodies? One of the first and most important steps of this process is letting go of the "fantasy body" that we have created in our heads, and rejecting the idea that once we lose weight all of our troubles and issues will magically disappear.

Join Kristen Ales as she explores her own experience of letting go of the "fantasy body". She talks about how comparing herself to this "fantasy" kept her from finding joy in her current body, and how it actually held her ack from addressing a number of important issues in her life.

In this episode, we talk about using the stages of grief to let go of our fantasy bodies to find joy and acceptance in our "here and now" bodies.

In this episode, Kristen covers:

• comparing her body to a fantasy she had created in her head

• the stages of grief

• advice for navigating each stage of grief

• a realistic look of what happens when we take this step

• the benefits of finding acceptance

While Kristen Ales is out on maternity leave, we are revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the past. These are powerful conversations that we would love for you to hear or are worth listening to again!

Join Kristen Ales and her friend, and fellow therapist Ally Barnett, LCSW as they discuss intimacy, desire, and how pleasure can be a powerful tool to connect with our bodies. In this episode, we discuss how sex and sensuality can actually help you feel more at home in your body and connected to your desires in and out of the bedroom.

Ally Barnett is a sex therapist who lives and works in Burlington, Vermont, and Jackson, Wyoming. Ally works with individuals who are looking to work through concerns including things like pain, shame, suppression, and control that they feel are no longer serving them when it comes to areas of intimacy.

Ally works with her clients who want to express themselves more, overcome body image issues and increase sensuality, understand their desires and limitations when it comes to pleasure, help feel more connection between body and mind, and create healthy boundaries and desires around sex, sensuality, and intimacy.

Our cohost Kristin Mathes is launching EMERGE, a surf retreat to Costa Rica where she currently lives and is here to tell us all the juicy details about this incredible adventure! Kristin is inspired to share the fun, and joy in surfing with others who are ready to break free from self limiting beliefs and give anxiety space to breathe. This therapeutic and trauma informed surf retreat will offer mindfulness activities and therapeutic workshops to support you in discovering personal freedom and self love through surfing Mother Ocean’s waves.  EMERGE is a retreat for first time surfers / beginners who want to hone in on their skills. But surfing is not the only adventure on this retreat. Tune in to hear more about why you don’t want to miss this epic adventure!

In this episode, we explore:

You can learn more about the hosts ⁠Kristen Ales, LPC⁠, and ⁠Kristin Mathes, LCSW⁠ by visiting their websites.

This show is brought to you by: EMERGE, a surf therapy retreat that will help you discover peace and reclaim your power through surf, community, and ocean healing. This 7 day / 6 night retreat to Costa Rica is reenergizing, our community is supportive, and the surf therapy experience is the perfect blend of adventure and deep transformation. Emerge as a more confident you. Learn more and sign up here.

We are finally sitting down and asking cohost Kristin Mathes, LCSW all of our questions regarding surf therapy - what is surf therapy? how does this relate to therapy work and trauma healing? how in the world did this therapist from Wisconsin learn to surf? and how she plans to partner with a local surf school to offer surf therapy retreats down in Costa Rica.

Kristin explains as a newer surfer how she was drawn to the water and how surfing became a part of her life. She tells us her hopes to share a little bit of her paradise and community in an upcoming surf retreat Emerge.

In this episode, we explore:

Using ocean healing and surfing as an experiential modality for embodying healing, presence, and empowerment.

How surf therapy increases resilience through nervous system regulation and skill building that help us move through the hard stuff

Kristin tells us more about her story learning to surf and how it brought her to a new life and community in Costa Rica.

How Kristin plans to incorporate surf therapy in retreat format down in Costa Rica where she lives.

You can learn more about the hosts ⁠Kristen Ales, LPC⁠, and ⁠Kristin Mathes, LCSW⁠ by visiting their websites.

This show is brought to you by: The Wilder Wellness Intuitive Eating online course is a self-paced program that will help you heal your relationship with food and your body. This 10-module course will help you stop obsessing over food so you can reclaim your time and mental clarity, take charge of how you take care of yourself, and begin to take steps toward finding food freedom. ⁠Learn more and sign up here.⁠

We are jumping on the latest instagram trend this week and revealing what’s IN and what’s definitely OUT for us this upcoming year. Kristen and Kristin both get personal on some of their growth edges and what they each are making more space to welcome into their lives. And of course, on the flip side what is getting booted out the door in 2023. Some in’s include: self confidence, boundaries around work, grace in motherhood, mentorship, and movement. And some defining outs are perfectionism, people pleasing, hyper independence, and comparison.

In this episode, we explore:

You can learn more about the hosts ⁠Kristen Ales, LPC⁠, and ⁠Kristin Mathes, LCSW⁠ by visiting their websites.

This show is brought to you by: The Wilder Wellness Intuitive Eating online course is a self-paced program that will help you heal your relationship with food and your body. This 10-module course will help you stop obsessing over food so you can reclaim your time and mental clarity, take charge of how you take care of yourself, and begin to take steps toward finding food freedom. ⁠Learn more and sign up here.⁠

Have you set New Year’s goals that have already failed or overwhelmed by the goals you’ve set? In this episode we are talking with Violetta Znorkowski the founder of Expand and Impact a school of emotional mastery and embodied self- leadership where we are addressing goal setting in a new way. Violetta helps women who are recovering from burnout untangle themselves from hustle culture. She encourages us to continuously check in with the process of working toward our goals and being willing to change direction with our goals. Her approach to goal setting that includes mindfulness and self compassion reminds us that it’s not always about the final product, but the process. If we enjoy the process we are much more likely to accomplish our goals without sacrificing our health and wellness. 

In this episode, we explore:

You can learn more about Violetta and Expand and Impact here. Or on Instagram.

You can learn more about the hosts ⁠Kristen Ales, LPC⁠, and ⁠Kristin Mathes, LCSW⁠ by visiting their websites.

This show is brought to you by: The Wilder Wellness Intuitive Eating online course is a self-paced program that will help you heal your relationship with food and your body. This 10-module course will help you stop obsessing over food so you can reclaim your time and mental clarity, take charge of how you take care of yourself, and begin to take steps toward finding food freedom. ⁠Learn more and sign up here.⁠

If the diet was meant to work, we wouldn’t need to keep dieting! In this week’s episode we are joined by Sam Berkowitz a registered dietitian who helps individuals untangle their relationship with food to discover a life free of diet culture, guilt, and food rules. Sam takes a health at every size approach using intuitive eating practices. We discuss why dieting and big new years lifestyle changes often fail us rather than the other way around - you failing the diet. We explore alternative approaches to dieting and ways to support your overall wellness in the new year in a sustainable and supportive way. 

In this episode we discuss:

You can learn more about Sam and her work here.

You can learn more about the hosts ⁠Kristen Ales, LPC⁠, and ⁠Kristin Mathes, LCSW⁠ by visiting their websites.

This show is brought to you by: The Wilder Wellness Intuitive Eating online course is a self-paced program that will help you heal your relationship with food and your body. This 10-module course will help you stop obsessing over food so you can reclaim your time and mental clarity, take charge of how you take care of yourself, and begin to take steps toward finding food freedom. ⁠Learn more and sign up here.⁠