HEIDI SHANER

My life is SOOOOO fantastic!! I wake up in the morning and I'm so excited because I have the whole day in front of me. I love my work and and I'm living a life of purpose and meaning.  At the end of the day, I think about how thankful I am for everything. It's incredible but it hasn't always been this way so I started to think about what changed.

I figured out what I've been doing differently so I'll tell you about it. But first, we need to understand why we tilt toward negative thoughts and negative emotions. When we focus on something whether imaginary or real, the body reacts the same way. Our focus creates the emotions which manifest in our physical bodies.

The reason why we get stuck in a negative loop is because negative thoughts literally take up more space in the filing cabinet of our brain. That's why when we get together with our friends, we talk about what's wrong. We complain and vent. We rarely get together and talk about what's going great and what we're thankful...

Come with me on a journey for a minute. Imagine that you've built the house of your dreams. It has big beautiful rooms and windows and you love living there. Then you notice you've got a moisture problem. No big deal. You get a dehumidifier and figure that will take care of the moisture problem. After awhile, you start to have trouble breathing. You do some research and you discover that you have black mold. You scrub it away and it comes back. You bring in an expert. He tells you that you've got a crack in your foundation and you will need to gut the house and start over. You freak out. You can't afford to start over and you don't want to. What about the whole house that you built, that is home to you?

You avoid the problem for awhile and try to pretend that everything is fine. You love your house, but now you know that on a deep level something is wrong and that it's going to get much worse unless you deal with it. You try more surface remedies but the black mold is growing and...

I had an epiphany teaching Pilates that I wanted to share with you. The physical training I do as a trainer is EXACTLY like the emotional training I do as a coach. WOW!!!!

I work with people one-on-one they come in with a variety of different problems. Some people just want to work on their posture. Some people really want to work on core strength. A lot of people in there have had some kind of injury and they've developed a compensation pattern and a lot of people have had pain and are deconditioned and haven't been able to do move well.

Every single person is so totally different and what they come in with and what they need is so unique to them.  Imagine someone coming in with really bad posture. They stand up with their hips pushed forward tucked under and their shoulders are slumped forward and I teach them how to stand up straight and I get them to pull their hips back and then lengthen up through their torso with their shoulders up and use those muscles that are under...

I just realized that I'm in the story business. I collect stories and I tell stories and through this process, I help heal people. Allow me to explain. You see, the more I experience and the more I hear about others' experiences, the more I see that our stories are universal. We feel the same pain. We reach a point where we can't take it anymore and we decide to do anything we have to do to overcome. We get help. Our helpers show us the tools and resources that WE ALREADY KNEW deep inside us. And then we make a shift.

I'm sure you can relate. Whenever I tell my stories about overcoming a major obstacle/solving a huge dilemma/resolving a multi layered, complex conflict, someone else relates 100%. And through this sharing process, we heal. We realize that we're not alone, that we're connected to other people on a deep level. We realize that we have everything we need to make a positive change and to feel better. We just needed someone to guide us through the process.

So here's what I...