WFWP Scotland's Monthly Webinar: Practical Tips - Building Inner Strength

The theme for this month’s webinar was ‘Building Inner Strength’ and it took place online on Saturday, 20th February. We invited 3 speakers to share their professional knowledge and insights concerning this topic.

Ann Breslin, Chairperson of WFWP Scotland, welcomed the participants and explained that the topic was chosen because of the ongoing challenges we all face through the COVID pandemic. Now more than ever, we need to cultivate inner strength.

Ann introduced the first Speaker Lynnda Houston, an inner wellbeing coach. In her talk about ‘How to Identify your needs and desires by tuning into who you really are,’ Lynnda shared that inner wellness depends on physical and mental health, spiritual fulfillment and financial abundance with spiritual fulfillment being the most important. She recognized that women naturally make room for everyone else in their lives and can easily ‘burn out’, if they do not find a balance between the needs of others and their own.

Lynnda then asked us to reflect on what we can give to others, what makes us happy and what we are able to do ‘without looking at the clock.’ We need to check inwards – one way could be through journaling which means listening to ourselves, writing down our thoughts, prevent festering of negative emotions and eventually rewiring our brains. Lynnda mentioned various techniques of how to achieve this, but more time would have been needed to go into details.

Lynnda also spoke about the unique genetic blueprint everyone has and how we can get to know who we are and what we need. This scientific approach speaks of different energy types that exist and we were encouraged to find out more about our own ‘human design’ on a website called ‘mybodygraph,com’.

The next speaker was Diana Winter, an inspiring fulfilment coach and founder of Winter Meditation. Her

topic was ‘How meditation improves your mental fitness.’ Diana’s passion for healing the human body and spirit came from witnessing recurring illness where she felt that only symptoms rather than the root of the issue were treated. Like many of us, Diana believes peace, joy, and true fulfilment starts from the inside in each individual and she feels that meditation is a systematic approach to revitalize ourselves and support healing.

Diana explained that most illnesses occur as a result of too much stress in our lives due to work, family commitments and the environment, if we therefore improve our mental fitness through self-awareness and acceptance, we can learn how to cope better with normal life stresses. Regular meditation will help us to achieve this goal.

She then spoke about how internal blocks like doubt, fear and traumatic experiences limit our beliefs and prevent us from fulfilling our potential and that only if we face the pain and deal with our emotions, can we transform our inner world and then our outer world, and we will be able to achieve more in life. She concluded her presentation by guiding us through a short period of meditation.

The third speaker was Anais Calamia, a Certified Vinyasa Yoga teacher from Edinburgh. Her topic was ‘Building inner strength through body/mind balance’. Anais conducts online classes and in-person classes. She has been working with students to develop their skills and leave them confident listening to their body. She started her presentation by asking us: What do you think of when you hear the word yoga? ‘Turning into your body’, ‘self-discovery’, ‘balancing’ and ‘harmony’ were amongst the answers.

Anais emphasized that we should trust our body and soul and reflect on who we are in relation to nature. In the same way as we awaken to connect with our physical body, we should also be aware of the people around us and the seasons we are living in. Life happens in cycles - we are cyclical beings, not linear beings.

Then Anais went on to explain that our body overreacts when we perceive stress and tries to find a balance, so it is logical, that we cannot be at our best when our body fights too many influences. She went on to say that our mind and body store trauma from 7 generations of both lines of our ancestors and that it is mainly stored in our hips and belly button area. Through practicing yoga, it is possible to release trauma.

Anais also repeatedly mentioned that yoga is for everyone and we should not think that it is not for us. The main aim of practicing yoga is to focus on oneself, to re-center and to accept oneself – not trying to be flexible and spend hours on a mat on the floor. We have to learn to listen to our bodies. Listening to our body is healing and feeling is releasing. Anais concluded by encouraging everyone to take selfcare seriously.

In her closing remarks, Lynnda said that we have learned that cultivating our inner wellness will benefit us and our loved-ones, so it is a win-win situation. As a society we are addicted to productivity which is not sustainable. We should experiment with spiritual fulfillment in our lives, mother ourselves through journaling and get to know ourselves by our Human Design.

Reported by Ann Breslin WFWP Scotland Chairperson