Episode 135: Get (Really) Grounded

It wasn't that long ago that people were saying sitting is the new smoking. It's not actually true, but that's what they were saying. And everyone was switching to standing desk. Well, what if that's not actually the right place to go or going far enough or going in the right direction?

Maybe there's a different direction than standing that could be even more important and more relevant and something you haven't considered or certainly haven't thought about as an adult. Let's leave it that way for now. And we'll see more about this on today's episode of the movement podcast, the podcast where people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first because you know those things are your foundation. And we break down the prop again in the mythology and sometimes the flat out lies you've been told about what it takes to run, walk, play, do yoga, crossfit, lift, dance, revolution, powerlifting, skydiving, skydiving, whatever else you're doing and how to do that enjoyably, efficiently, effectively.

Can I say enjoy it? Yes, I know I did because it's a trick question because look, if you're not going to do something that you love and you enjoy, you're not going to keep doing it. So find a way to do something that you like. Anyway, I'm Stephen Sashan from zero shoes.com, your host of the movement movement podcast.

And if you don't know, we call it that because we were creating a movement about natural movement, letting your body do what it's made to do. And you can find out more if you go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com, you'll find previous episodes, always to interact with us. You don't have to do anything to join. That's just a domain we got.

There's no special fee. There's no secret handshake. But again, you can get alerted to new episodes, find all the previous ones and then find us on social media where you know what to do. Leave reviews, thumbs up, like us.

Leave a hit the bell icon on YouTube. You know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So that said, Emily, first of all, welcome.

Secondly, tell people who you are, why you're here and let's have some fun. That was awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Stephen. My name is Emily Gooding.

I'm a movement coach here from Ottawa in Canada. And I work with individuals to help improve their quality of life through movement coaching, and I'm a massage and furniture design really. Yeah, so a little bit of everything. My background is actually registered nurse.

So my background is in nursing. So I kind of fell into this by chance. And I just love it. So I was always a personal trainer when I was going through nursing school.

And it's just something I've always done. I've always worked with clients, worked with movement. And it's just something I continue to do until I couldn't nurse anymore. I just took over my life.

So that's where I'm at right now. Well, since you said time is on, you gave me a flashback to my favorite time is on story. When I was in Thailand and holy crap, this is a long time ago, 1999. So at what poet where they do time is on and this tiny, tiny woman couldn't weigh more than 90 pounds is giving me massage.

And at one point, she's working on my inner thigh and it was the most excruciating thing I ever felt in my life. And so I kind of rolled over to try to figure out to see what she was doing. And she's just leaning on me with one elbow while reading the Sunday comics. And I thought, that is so not fair.

If you're going to cause that kind of pain, you should have to pay attention. But no, just. No, they don't need to. That's the beauty of it.

I think that's why I fell in love with it. Being five foot one and 125 pounds, you know, I've always been around athletes who are much bigger than me. A lot of men that were much bigger than me. And I'm like, well, regular massage is just not going to cut it.

I'm going to have to walk on people and beat them up with my elbows and feet. I have a friend who was a massage therapist, one of his clients was professional bodybuilder and after three sessions, he said to the guy, I get it. I know you booked for 10. I've got to give you your money back.

You're just too big. I can't do it. Yeah. I've had to send some clients away just because of how big they were.

But luckily that make you all take the registered massage therapist. They speak strong guys. So he gets all of those. Perfect.

Well, so let's move on to it. I mean, when you said furniture design, that leads into what I sort of teased at the beginning when we got to this call before I hit record. I mean, I said, you know, I love someone who's got rings in the background and you described what was behind you as being more than just having rings hanging from somewhere in the background. So let's talk.

Well, anyway, I'm going to let you take it from there. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, the rings that you're describing the background is attached to a system of the stall bars. So for those who don't know what a stall bar is, it looks like a ladder that's anchored to the wall.

And it's used for body weight exercises, gymnastics, all that kind of stuff. We can attach Olympic rings to it and stuff like that. There's a pull up bar at the top as well. It's a pretty like relatively simple structure and most people probably would have seen these types of things in their gym class when they were in elementary school.

So I had one of my clients design this for me. And what was special about this one in particular is that it has a desk attachment that can hang onto the wrongness of the ladder at any height. So you can use it as a standing desk and put it down to a level where you can use a chair. You can put it right down to the ground where you can sit on the floor and utilize it.

And I wanted something like this because it was something that I would use a lot and I couldn't find anyone who would make it. So let's just make it ourselves. And yeah, and I don't have a very small, like right now I'm in my studio and it's quite a small room. It's 10 by 20.

So it's not a huge room. This is where I train my clients. It's also where I do time massage. And so I needed something that was compact and that was very versatile.

So this was a perfect thing. And I started featuring it in my videos and started asking about it. So that's where Human Home was born. So I've been working with local creators in my community to design and build furniture that helps you move better and move more often.

So we have a ground living desk. We work on creating ground cushions, standing desk to something like this and really anything we can think of. So we're still in the process of designing more furniture, refining the furniture that we're building now. So when did you start Human Home?

This was I guess last year. It was officially last year. Officially. Yeah.

Is there an official date? No. Everything I do is unofficial. I like the way you think people people talk to us about what we've built and we're just getting started.

No, this is a big thing. We're just getting started. So in my mind, in my mind is always literally it took me, we've been doing this 12 and a half years, only within the last year that I stopped looking at things that were talking about startup companies. It's like I always think of myself as a startup.

But anyway, be that as a man. Absolutely. And I mean, like if we talk about when the idea came about, it was from when I was a young kid and I just want to sit in the chair. And I think it's really hard to pinpoint when the origin is of these projects.

It's just if you're doing your life's work, I think it's just that starts from the beginning. When people ask me to describe how zero she's began, I usually half jokingly start by saying, okay, when mommy loves a daddy very much, then that's not a problem. At least from my perspective. Absolutely.

So as a kid, you were a floor sitting person. Yeah. I mean, I said, I think part of it is because I did an improving martial arts. So I think you did martial arts as well.

I did. Yeah. Okay. What did you do?

I think I might be that or not, but I got a follow that up by saying my Tai Chi teacher was a guy who when I met him, he'd been doing Tai Chi for 22 years. He was 27 and he, and he treated Tai Chi as a fighting art, not just, you know, thing that all people do to relax. And so, and I met him actually in IKETO where he was kind of a little overweight guy. And while he was a, I don't remember what level black belt he was.

He never wore his talking. I never wore the black belt. And so he just looked like a guy who didn't really know what he was doing. And then he would just heave you across the room with no effort whatsoever.

And the last part of this guy's name is Eric. Someone says, you know, have you had Eric push you before I started doing Tai Chi. tell me they're taught Tai Chi and they said, have you ever had Eric Push you? I said, what are you talking about?

I said, you gotta come over to the house. So I go over to his house. He's living with a couple of the guys that were all Tai Chi players. And there's no furniture in the living room.

The classic furniture for a Tai Chi guy, no furniture. And so I'm standing kind of in the doorway or the space between the living room and the dining room. I'm facing the dining room. It's important for the geometry of this.

And so I have one arm in front of me about chest level and Eric puts his hands on me very gently. And he's just kind of moving my arm very gently. And I'm like, this is weird. And I kind of curious what was going on.

I just heard some noise behind me and I look behind me. And there's four guys holding a mattress like against the wall 10 feet behind me. And as I turn around and I'm about to say, well, that's interesting. Eric just looks at me and goes, bye bye.

And all I felt was a tap on my arm. And then I hit the mattress. Amazing. That's straight out of a movie.

It was. It really was. There's like crashing tiger flying session. And so I got to find out what's going on.

So he used to go to karate schools and challenge karate guys to a fight. And he would just destroy them. And sometimes he would do something simple. Like he'd say, I'm gonna, my hands are at my sides.

I'm gonna try and tap you on the top of your head. Don't let me. And then he would just tap, tap, tap. And they'd never be able to block him.

And they were very confused. And then he would say, do you think there's something wrong with the practice you've been engaged in? And he just wasn't telegraphing. So anyway, that's a long martial arts.

Very cool. Yeah. I mean, everyone has a martial arts journey. But yeah, I guess bring it back to my interest in ground living.

It really does stand for martial arts. I started off doing karate. I've always felt drawn to the ground movement aspect because in the karate that I did, we spent a lot of time on the floor as well. And then practicing drills on the ground.

Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, totally unusual. My senses were really awesome.

And they're like, well, you know what? People are training on the floor. So we probably should get used to it as well. So I tell them about that aspect of it.

So now I do a lot of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I was going to ask if you'd gone to BJJ from there. Yeah. And that's exactly what I do now.

So now I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu where you spend a lot of your time on the ground. And they just feel really uncomfortable in at home there. And my body feels fantastic. I mean, I interact with the ground pretty heavily, like sleep on the floor.

I spend time eating on the floor from my laundry on the floor. And it helped me with my chronic pain. I was a nursing student for a long time. So I spent a lot of time hunched over a desk.

And I was like, I had crazy neck pain. I had headaches all the time. I had a lot of migraines. And it was miserable.

So really, like this just went from me trying to find solutions to the pain that I was having. And I recognized that when I was doing Jiu Jitsu, I felt fine when I was not doing Jiu Jitsu. I didn't feel good. So like, how do I spend more time mimicking what I'm doing in Jiu Jitsu in my day-to-day life?

And yeah, now my life is Jiu Jitsu. So while you're eating it, I'm trying to choke you out. Yeah, yeah, sometimes. I mean, I just want to do it.

Well, for people, I can only imagine that when you say, you know, about all the things that you're doing on the floor, especially sleeping on the floor, there are some people who are going to go, all right, that sounds completely insane. So how do you respond to that and give them the invitation to say more about why you're doing what you're doing, why they might want to try it, and what the easy way into experiment might look like? Yeah, absolutely. I thought it was crazy when I started doing it first, because we had our nice, comfy things down bed that we were sleeping on.

And I started taking, I started having pain in the middle night. It's just to give you some insight. So I was having pain in the middle of the night, and I wake up and I'm radiating things on my arm. And it was, it was, like, I didn't know what to do.

No, my fiance is a massage therapist. We were experimenting. We were doing all types of exercises. I could not figure it out for the lucky, like, why wake up in the middle of the night with this type of pain?

So out of frustration, and not wanting to wake my feet out and take off all night long. I just grabbed my pillow, grabbed my blanket and it stopped on the floor. And I would fall asleep. And then I did that again the next night.

And then again the next night, into the point where I was just sleeping on the hardwood beside my bed. And I don't recommend to people that that's like the way that you should do it. So what I usually tell people, if they're having pain with their sleeping, they're all feel comfortable, and they're trying to get in the floor. And I'm sitting on my time, sitting on my time, I'm actually taking a nap right before this call.

But I have my time as a massage mat. So it's just like a thicker type of yoga mat, maybe like lunched thick. And just like start with a nap there, see how you feel. And your body has to get used to it.

I mean, you've probably had this discussion many times with anyone transitioning to a minimalist shoe, that it takes some time to transition, especially if you're coming from like an orthotic or a heavenly Christian in a supporting shoe. You need a little bit of time to build that tolerance from resilience up. It's the same kind of philosophy applies to sleeping on the floor. You just need your body has to get used to it.

But if you think about it, for most of you in history, if you just have all of our time interacting with floor and sleeping on the ground, we never have really like soft cloud-like memory foam to sleep on. So this is how we were designed to move. And when you sleep on the floor, what happens is it's not the most comfortable thing, but it encourages you to move frequently through it. So there's like built-in movement and ability work as you're sleeping.

So I personally just found that I feel better when I sleep on the floor and it's just through self-explanatory. Like maybe it's not for everyone, but it's what works for me. And if I can share my story and just open up another option door for someone else, it's just to think about it and give it a shot. Like it might not be for you, but if it works for you, then why not?

That's it. Since human beings like to have prescriptions for how to do things, I'm gonna add some things to the prescription for experiment on the floor. So talk about what you would recommend for someone who's literally, I know this is a consensus. Literally like what position should they try or start in, be doing for pillow.

I mean, just like, let's really give you- Yeah, so what I like to do, when I'm making my bed, I try to imagine I'm trying to set up my floor bed as I would for a toddler taking a nap on the floor. So I make it like some cozy, maybe roll it in yoga mat. Like I don't want it to be too, too hard. So I'll roll it in yoga mat if you have like a Pilates mat or something like that, you can do that too.

You can even use a nice like carpet, just have a carpet and then I'll throw a comforter down or sheet down depending on what you'd like at the beginning I use a thick comforter. So just so that I had a little bit of extra vision, a question I get a lot is like, do I use a pillow? And yes, I do use a pillow sometimes. So if I'm lying on my side, I tend to use a pillow just to support my head since not in that awkward, like a lateral event position.

But if I'm on my back, I don't use a pillow just to let my head use it naturally. We kind of have this little divit in the back of our head and everyone can feel the flat part of our head. And that's just to let your head sit flat on the ground when you're sleeping with someone, it's there for. So yeah, I have just like a pretty flat, shiny, ikea pillow that I got.

I actually had this like a nice, super nice memory foam pillow with contours. And I hated it. So I went to like, give me your cheapest, grab your flattest. While we're not sponsored by ikea, I feel obligated to say ikea products are not all shitty.

Yeah, no, no, no. I'm actually, when you said, actually, I keep it like, hello, I think I was like, how many ikea things do I have in my house? Can I get those books? I don't know, I've actually got some, I'm a fan of some of their desserts.

So ikea food, we're big fans of some of that. And in fact, I've got a couple of cakes that have been in my freezer for too long. I'm gonna have to pull them out and eat them this weekend. Now that you were running out.

And like, I'm understanding that too, which I still have is ikea desk. And it was just perfect. It was gonna tabletop with long legs. And it was fantastic.

My same. Yeah. Mine is the same. I have an ikea desk that I put together in my office.

And I had to raise it more than the legs could go. Not because I'm massively tall because I'm a whopping five five, but because I threw a treadmill under there as well. So I need that extra like six and I. Cool.

I just threw some center blocks down to put my desk on top of that. It's very classy. I mean, beautiful center blocks. So let's talk more just about living and being on the floor as well.

But also, you know, what your thoughts are, I mean, it is kind of funny that people, that this idea came up about sitting in the new smoking where Dan Lieberman, who kicked off the barefoot movement, his most recent book is called exercise. And the first chapter is busting the myth about smoking, sitting as new smoking. I'm saying, you know, like if we look at indigenous tribes, they spend more time sitting than we do, but they don't spend time sitting in things that keep them from moving. So like you said about sleeping, there's more motion involved, sitting, there's more motion involved.

And the fact that chair that I'm sitting on right now, wait, I'm gonna show this one. This is from core QR, core 360. It's just a thing that is totally unstable. And so I sat on, you know, like yoga balls before, this thing is way, way better.

So I'm technically sitting, but continually having to move in order to save balance and do the things that I'm doing. Yeah, I think the, you know, we should, we should differentiate the different types of sitting and you know, sitting in an ergonomic chair where you're fully supported and not moving. That's probably more equivalent to smoking. Sitting on the floor, and you've probably seen it sitting on the floor right now, I've probably changed my position like 10 to 20 times in the short conversation that we've had so far.

So it's completely different. When you're sitting in a chair, you're in that fixed position. So, and our bodies are lazy. So we, your body's going to adapt to the position that you assume throughout most of the day.

But if you don't assume a position throughout most of your day, then it's not going to adapt to it. And you're going to be in my own versatile. So floor sitting is completely different than chair sitting. There was a big shift towards like the standing desk.

And I love, I love the standing desk. I really, I work from a standing desk often, and I do work from the ground off, and those are my kind of two defaults and lying down on the ground as well. But I think humans tend to be very binary. Right?

We tend to be like all or nothing without the other sit or we understand, but I think what's really important is that we can, there's a whole spectrum of movement in between those two positions. I don't think that sometimes we can stand, sometimes we can sit on the floor, sometimes we can apply down. And sometimes it just means looking at listening to your body and asking what does it need right now? Today, I didn't have a great sleep.

So maybe I just need to take an app and lie on the floor for a little bit. Normally if I was going to do a conversation, I'm usually standing up to my desk because I'm feeling a little bit under the weather. I'm going to sit down on the ground today because I'm just going to conserve a little bit of my energy, who we can address accordingly. But I think a lot of people tend to, like now I'm using a standing desk and I stand here all day.

And then when they have a day like I'm having today, they're going to feel like crap. So standing desks don't work at all. So I think having some flexibility with the way that we move as well is really important. And it forces you to be really intuitive about what's going on in your body as that movement exists on the spectrum.

I have a chair next to me in our conference room. And in my office where I have my standing slash treadmill desk, I've got a desk next to it. Because like you said, there's sometimes where I'm going, I just need a break. And I need to lean back and just chill.

And I am thinking that after I spent time on this or standing, when I was thinking, I need to go back to a chair for a while, I feel guilty. I will confess. It's like, I should be able to handle this better. And then it took me a, not very long because I don't kind of second guess, some things like that very often.

But it took me a few times where that was going through my head going, yeah, yeah, I just want to sit down. It's no big deal. Absolutely. And I just want to put ourselves up over sink.

It's like, I don't think it's like, we just fail at it. It's like, no, we're not used to it just yet. And it just takes some time to adjust. And am I just needing to spend more time sitting on the floor, too?

Because you need to grab it towards being on the ground. I mean, you have a pretty active job. And you talk a lot throughout the day. Am I just needing to spend more time on the ground or just lying down?

I spend a lot of time sitting on the floor. We have a, Lane and I, we work really hard and often long hours and so I'll roll home, cook some dinner. We get on the couch, we watch intelligence. And often I find myself sitting in front of the couch on the floor.

And when I'm on the floor, I think often about my dad, who the only time he was ever on the floor is if he was trying to build something like a coffee table without the instructions and it would turn into something completely different because he didn't follow the instructions. But I never really saw him spending time on the floor. That was not a thing I saw adults doing when I was growing up. And I'm very aware of that every time I do it, which it's sort of interesting that my life looks so nothing like anyone that I could model from growing up.

And I'm not unusual. I mean, this is a not uncommon thing, especially with the people I hang out with. But it is sort of interesting to see that, how somehow that happened conversely, not I think of it. I know people who still live in the same place where I grew up, which was an upper middle class neighborhood outside of Washington, DC.

And the idea of people sitting on the floor, it seems a little weird for them. So it's fascinating seeing how these things penetrate people's brains. There's definitely a cultural component to it as well. My dad is from the Caribbean.

My mom grew up in Asia, who met here. So I grew up sitting on the floor with big families. There was never room at a table to have dinner. So the younger ones always sat down around the coffee table.

So interacting with the ground was just something that was a part part of my life. And it was not a really big table. We squat. Even from the toilets, you see in Asia, they're on the ground.

So you've got to be able to do a deep squat if you want to have a bowel. It comes in handy. Absolutely. But yeah, I think our modern life is just not built close to the ground.

Every technological advancement that we have in quotation marks is designed to disconnect us from the ground, even from our shoes and we're starting out our shoes. Like our heels are more and more elevated. So that we're further away from the ground. Our buildings are getting taller, so we're not as close to the ground anymore.

Our beds are even getting higher. We're seeing some of the beds that are out there. You have to climb on to the ground. I have to get a running start to get up.

The trucks that we have, you have to basically get a ladder, just to get on top. But we're really like, no one wants to be close to the ground at all. And I think because initially it takes a little bit of work to get there, if you're not used to it. Yeah.

What else do you want to tell about? I mean, this was the intro to what we're doing. And there was a bunch of things that we kind of touched on before we started this conversation that for whatever reason have flown completely out of my head, which means I'm just going to see where else are we going with this? I mean, one of the things that I wanted to do with human home in particular and bringing the desk, I have this ground living desk that we make.

And it's just like an individual moon shape that's like the slide right under. So you can support your elbows, but you can move your hips freely underneath the desk and change your hip position. That's something I want to get into school. Because I think that when I was in school, if I had something like that, I would have described a lot more than I did, because I spent a lot of time in school being distracted, focused on my pain and just being miserable and not enjoying the process of it, just because I just don't like this.

I hate sitting here. I feel antsy. I want to leave. I want to move around.

So I think I had that as a kid. I think I would have done a lot better in school. And you know, when we talk about we don't know how far you want to dive into this. Oh, all the way, let's go.

So I mean, I see a lot of kids with ADHD or a lot of people with attention kind of deficit issues. And I really think that if we gave them the freedom to move around more, we would see a lot less of that. I don't know. I look at my eight year old nephew and I'm like, there's no way I can get you to sit down in a chair for eight hours a day.

And it's not because he's a bad student. It's just because I don't think I can. I don't think anyone's designed to do that, let alone an eight year old boy. So, you know, I think it just making it more accessible for kids to move freely will help them learn better.

And if you can get kids to learn better, then we're going to really progress a society. I have a thing I want to add to that we have a lot of parents. And I'm not going to make medical claims and what I'm about to say. But I'm just going to share this with you.

We have a lot of parents of kids who have who have autistic children or kids with ADHD who say the only issues they want to wear are yours. And it seems like they function better when they are. And I said, I think I have a theory why. And my theory is that getting that extra stimulation by wearing shoes that don't have a shit kind of padding is actually doing the same thing that Ritalin does, Ritalin is a stimulant.

And it calms people down who have issues being hyperactive or having attention deficit problems because it's letting it's giving the brain a certain kind of information. The way the analogy that I have is when I lived in New York City, I could meditate better or fall asleep pretty much instantly on a subway because the noise of the subway was just a little bit louder than kind of the thinking in my brain. So it's easier. And my theory is something similar to having.

I also joke when people ask me what I've done for a living and I have a very long list of things that I've done in the last 40 something years. I start by saying, well, you have to keep in mind they hadn't invented Ritalin when I was a kid. If they had, I would not be doing the things that I've done. But so I would contend and it would be interesting to see if being on the ground is just adding additional stimulation from all the movement you have to do and feeling that that might be calming in a similar way.

Yeah. I mean, I think that what you're saying is really valid. It reminds me of when I walk my dog and we, he has a lot of energy. He's a poodle mix and he's got lots of energy.

He's very, very active. And what we noticed that if we bring him to a new neighborhood for the same life of a walk, he's a lot more tired after that walk than it is when we're just bringing him on our regular routine walk, just changing your environment. And I think that provides a lot more stimulation. So yeah, I agree with you.

Yeah. Well, Lane and I were somewhere where the hell do we go? I have no sense of space or time. We were, oh, New York, duh.

She'd never been to New York City before. And she found it really, I found it very relaxing because it was familiar to me, even though things have changed a lot since I left there. I moved out 29 years ago, but nonetheless, it was still very familiar in many ways. And for her, it was totally novel and she was just exhausted from the stimulation.

And of course, the irony with the dog, we have our first dog. Each of us, it's our first dog. We've had him for three months and the secret with him, he's also pretty high energy is getting tired and in a manageable way. So like if we just let him have his way when we're out for a walk, he'll just be looking for, I call him dog, the bunny hunter.

He's always on the lookout for the bunnies. And in our house, he's constantly running back and forth from window to window, looking for the bunnies were the somethings. And but when we take him for extra stimulation, if we have to drop him off a doggy daycare, he comes back pleasantly exhausted. So yeah, there's definitely a, if you don't go that far, there's definitely a relaxing component to a certain kind of stimulation, but when it gets to be a lot and it just flat out, not showing the ground.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, I think that's that's really valid. It's just if you look at your dog, they're not too different. I think we forget that we're mammals as well.

At the end of the day, we're animals as well. So we need, you know, our lizard brain still needs the same thing that our dogs do. And I think like 95% of behavioral issues with dogs are associated with lack of exercise. And I find myself starting to get an anti-imritable if I don't trade or exercise as much as I'm moving.

And if I'm forced to sit in a chair all day long, I'm not a happy camper. And I think the challenge or the problems that people get acclimated to that in a certain way, if they just keep doing it, your brain is designed to like, just like being in New York. And for enough time, you just start shutting off some of the stimulation. You just don't pay attention to it.

You still affect you in some way, but not as much. And my suspicion is that people who are just sitting all day, who aren't moving very much, and there are things and issues that go along with that they either don't put two and two together, that that's part of the problem or their brain just sort of, again, acclimates and shuts it off just to allow them to continue doing the thing they need to do. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. I think getting to the ground can be really challenging for some people as well, like you're saying, you get acclimated to sitting in the chair. So getting to the ground can be a little bit challenging. I see people have a really difficult time.

You're just feeling comfortable on the ground. So I just want to patch on that a little bit because I think it's important. And I think that there's a way that we can transition really safely. So I got people to get on the ground right now.

And, you know, if you're not used to it, it can be really uncomfortable and you're going to hate doing it. You're never going to try it again. So what I always encourage people to do is to try to make it a little bit more inviting and to you want it to be comfortable enough that you want to sit there for a little bit, but not so uncomfortable that you hate being there. And there's a nice fine balance.

And once you get used to that, you can start to remove some of the some of the comforts and you'll need less and less with time. And the beautiful part of that is the more comfortable you get with discomfort, the more comfortable everything else feels. And you know, you'll start to just feel comfortable in all kinds of places that you probably shouldn't feel comfortable in, but it opens up a whole new world of comfort for you. You just kind of basically have to lower your standards of what's comfortable.

I'm going to do it gradually. Well, so let's talk about what that means then to do it gradually. But maybe as a bit of a mild tangent, I imagine some people are uncomfortable with the idea of getting on the ground because they've experienced that they have a hard time getting off the ground. Yeah.

So I teach a small prevention class for seniors and in the fall prevention class, what I get them to do is to actually come on, as I fall down, but to get to the ground and practice getting back up. Most of the times, why seniors end up in nursing homes? It's not because they fall, it's because they fall and they can't get back up. So getting back up is a really important skill.

So what I would say is practice doing that more and more frequently and practice it with support and people around. If you don't feel necessarily comfortable getting to the ground by yourself, right now, make sure that you have someone around or make sure that you have something to hold on to so that you can get up or you can maybe even start by just getting standing up on your couch and sitting on your couch and then just getting back up, like you can get all the way to the ground or just get to a lower platform, for example, and eventually you can start to remove some of those cupboards. But yeah, like there's no shame in having someone come around and help you with that too and making it easier for yourself. Having, if you're going to sit down on the ground and go to your stairs, you know, the bottom of your stairs and then be able to use the stair that the railing to pull yourself out to and practice it.

You only get better when you spend more time doing it. Any other techniques or tips you want to share for either getting down or getting back up? It's honestly like however you want to get up and down, it's going to work for you. But this is a drill that I like to do where you find 10 creative ways to get up and down 10 different ways.

And it's there's like, so yeah, you get up off the ground, you can start, you make it challenging by not using your hands at all and you have to find 10 rays that you can get up different ways to get up and down off of the ground. But explore your creativity and see what works best for your body. And like, don't be afraid to use your hands in weird places, to put your feet, like just experiment and give it a try. A lot of it is just problem solving that you have to do for your own body.

Everyone's really different too, right? So you really just have to find what works for you and find what works for you. And so you actually do it's like practicing on a balance. You just got to keep doing it and you'll get better at it.

Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where we want to find a lot of tips and tricks like this just reps. Well, I am going to pressure you to trick though. So out of 10 different ways to get up or down, let's focus on the getting up for no parent. Give me two that people might not normally think of.

Getting up off the ground. Okay, one extreme one would be to do a back roll and then come off like that. That's not going to be very accessible. When you I think it's a thing about your stance and when you're coming up and think of you have four points of contact that you could have, right?

Whether it's your hands, your knees, your feet, you want to make sure that there's enough space between those if your hands and your feet are in line, like you're walking a type of you're not going to be very stable. So you want to make sure that you have like almost an equal distance between those points. We're bipedal. So the goal would be to try to push yourself up onto your feet using your hands.

So you always want to think of where your center of gravity is usually just below the belly button, a little bit below that. It really depends on where it is, but kind of in the core and you want to position that over your feet. And once you're your center of gravity is over your feet, then you can elevate yourself. So if you're in like a quadriple position, like you're on all fours, you might have to use your hands to push your center of gravity back over your feet.

And then from there, you can say that. But if you know where your center of gravity is, your goal is to try to put it on top of your feet and then from there, you can elevate yourself. So just using that one, sort of hands and feet, get either you're going to push yourself back onto your feet. I'm just doing this for people for the fun, but to help kind of spur some creative thinking, hopefully, is then you could do the opposite of that, try to move your feet closer to your hands.

So whatever, you know, whatever the fixed point is, there's going to be a moving point and see if you can switch that. You can imagine there's ways of doing that left and right as well. So it's like one way I think of it is think of whatever you're doing and then try to find the opposite of that one. And then from that, see if you can find something that kind of goes left or right.

Yeah, I like that. I do it all the time. I've been talking about this a lot lately, only because I'm really happy about it. I noticed that I was putting my pants on left leg first.

And so I spent like the last probably two months doing everything I could to focus on right leg first. And sometimes I'd forget and it's like, Oh, damn it, I forgot. But after about two months now, I'm Amber Leggstress. And I'm just a lot of just as likely to start with my right leg as my left, just from wherever my balance is subtly shifted or, you know, what might be next to me or whatnot.

So I have a fondness for like what's the thing that I'm doing? And now let's try to find the opposite of that one. Oh, that's a really, really good. I feel like that's something that I've done with brushing my teeth where I've tried to brush my teeth on my left hand because I've always brushed my teeth on my right hand.

So I don't know. Maybe I should try it with my left hand because in case I don't have the use of my right hand anywhere, it's a high possibility. Yeah, I had that. I had shoulder surgery.

So my right hand was all locked up for, you know, months and so I was doing everything on my left hand. And the only thing I didn't get totally fine with was writing. It was a little bit, but yeah, in a couple months where I was in a sling, I didn't get good enough writing. And I figured out how to type with just my left hand as well, which was a little better than just a hunting pet kind of, but that was that was a fun challenge.

I really enjoyed it. Yeah, again, more stimulating as well for us. The more simulation we got, I think better for us. There's one that I noticed people have been doing lately.

And I don't know if anyone's thought about it. This didn't sound really silly, but I think as a result of people watching more television coming over from Great Britain, there are more people who are now using their knife and fork the way people do in Great Britain than the way we typically do in America. So America, there's, you know, you hold the fork in your left hand, cut with your right hand and then switch the fork to your right hand to actually pick things up instead of keeping it in your left hand. And I'm watching in restaurants, I noticed I see more and more people eating that way, where growing up, if I had seen anyone do that, I thought they were crazy.

Oh, interesting. I know that that that happened when Peppa Pig came out with kids and kids started to develop British accents. Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

So, so funny, but yeah, you'll see American kids with British accents, purely from Peppa Pig. That's all right. It is fun how watching kids pick those little things up. I always like it when kids who grew up in a family where the accent in the house is very different than the accent out of house and watching how they coach, which I find that fascinating.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I grew up in a pretty multicultural household. So I had to do a lot of that with my mom being from Cambodia and having a pretty like strict Asian upbringing and then having, you know, Caribbean dad, it was, it was the economy was so, so funny. So I go over to my mom's family, my mom's side of the family and you'd have to address everyone, say hi to everyone, you can look them right in the eyes and greet everyone.

And you didn't hug and kiss and then go over to my dad's side of the family and you hugged and kissed everyone. And it was just such a different upbringing. But I mean, like, it's just the way we grow up here in North America. There's so much multiculturalism.

Yeah. But you kind of learn how to adapt. That's just the way it was. That's the way I grew up too.

Where have you landed on that spectrum? Somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the middle. And I feel like I can adapt depending on who I'm talking to. So yeah, I know how to adapt and I try to gauge the situation and see what's the most appropriate.

So, you know, I can go both ways. Yeah. I tend to lean towards hugging and kissing. I like it.

I, you gave me another flashback. I remember being probably in junior high school where our social circle included boys and girls and we weren't sexual, but it was definitely like we wanted to be more physical. And I remember like when we were all kind of figuring out, is it cool to hug each other? And we really worked the problem until not consciously.

We never talked about it. But you could tell it was like, we want to do something to acknowledge the closeness that we have in our relationship. This is like a thing to do, but we hadn't seen anyone do this. And so that it was something that came out of thing.

And of course, now in Colorado or living in Boulder for years, if you don't greet someone by hugging them, they think there's something wrong with you. Yeah. Yeah. That's just the way it is sometimes.

And I mean, if you don't look at my aunt on my mom's side without addressing her, she thinks something's wrong with you too. So I mean, we all just come from different blocks of life. And then I think what we value is just very different. But finding what works best for you, for me, I innately feel like close to people.

I feel like I want, I want to hug them. So that's something that I'm just embedded in my life. Yeah. And to your point of adapting to figure out what's a perfect situation I have given that up long ago.

So they're or mostly, or maybe I never thought of it to begin with, which is probably more likely. So there are definitely times where I've done something like hugging someone to say, hello, where that is not what they are used to it all. And by and large, no one's ever complained. Because I mean, if I acted like I was embarrassed or it was the wrong thing, they might have a response, but otherwise, like, oh, and then it seemed really fine.

I'm not suggesting people go hugging anyone. But anyway, let's go back to the floor for a second or more. I love this idea that you want to introduce this whole this concept into schools for a number of reasons. Hey, have you had any luck making that happen in some way?

And be what else do you imagine what would be useful for whether it's for kids or for anybody else to explore these different levels of living and, you know, and a human home? Yeah. So right now we're in that process of just like continuing the design process of the desk. So I want to make sure that I can solidify that and have enough to be produced so that, you know, I'll have the stock ready when that time comes.

I think what I'll start with is reaching out to private schools because they're just a little bit easier to influence versus like the school boards. So that's that's kind of the direction I'm taking right now. But I'm also just getting the opinions of kids. So anytime I have the opportunity to have a kid in the studio, like you can spend an hour trying out this desk and I'm like, what do you think you like it?

What do you not like about it? What did you do on it? And I think that's like the stage I'm at right now where I'm just gathering data and learning to see like at the end of the day, it's the kids that are using this. So I want to hear their opinion because I think as adults, we tend to just assume what's best for kids, but we don't ask them very much.

So right now I'm at the stage of just like asking as many kids as I can. And so far, it seems that they like them. I always give them a choice that I said, there's the desk with the chair and then there's the ground desk and I'll leave you to it. And whenever I come back, they're always in the chat.

What's the most interesting or surprising response you've gotten from any of the kids who tried it? They don't give a lot of great feedback, but I think just the fact that they like using it, they like the freedoms move around so they can move around the desk out. They like on the floor with it. And it just feels kind of like they tell me that it just feels like right.

They think they want it. That's all they tell me. They're like, I want this desk in my house so I can play my games and I can play on the computer or my cars, whatever it is. Got a set up camera to capture those responses.

Oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, that's a great idea. It would be super fun. Sorry.

It's all more flashbacks. There was a time in New York when I was there again, 30 something years ago. It was a commercial for some Broadway show and they had this like eight year old red headed kid and he says, I love it. And a kid likes it.

You know, it's great. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, it was it was brilliant. And while as campy and comical as it was, it was on the money.

It's like for that show, it's like, yeah, the kid loves it. Definitely worth going to go to the panel tour. Absolutely. Sort of like don't ask a five year old if you're ugly because they'll tell you the truth.

Kids are extremely honest and it's something I've grown to appreciate about them. They'll give you the honest truth. And so, you know, I do a lot of play with my clients. I do a lot of workshops and classes where you do a lot of play.

So I always ask my nieces and I'm like, what do you like to play? Can you help me come up with the game and they're so creative and so like un-emhibited. It's just like really beautiful to interact with kids in that way. Cause they're just like the most creative people that you'll ever meet.

So if you need to brainstorm, they're the best people to go to. Well, and they can tell the truth from fiction when you're telling. My favorite thing is if I'm out barefoot, which I am a lot in stores and restaurants and whatnot. And they'll be some kid with his parents and the kid will sometimes ask their parents, like, why is that man not wearing shoes?

But sometimes they just ask me directly, which is my favorite. And I'll say, I have two answers. I say, if we were to beach, would you wonder about that? And they go, oh, no.

And that's usually all they need. They're fine with that one. But sometimes I'll say, do you like wearing shoes? They go, no, I got, yeah, I'm either.

And I mean, but what's really fun is if you do that with adults, if you, and I do that with adults to, I'll say, if we have this conversation, it stops them a little bit, but then they start to argue. But the kid, like, that's all you need. It's like, I get it. It's context.

You know, I get it. It's about comfort. That's all they care about. That's enough of an answer.

And they're not going to argue because they've taken it in. I'm like, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I love it. They are delightful.

We, the biggest compliment I ever got was from a friend of mine, their children who worked that time, like eight and 10. And we were hanging out for a day and at the end of the day, as they were going to bed, they said to their parents, Stephen's weird. They said, what do you mean? He's like, he's not like a normal adult.

He's like a kid adult. And I said, that is the highest praise I think I've ever gotten. Yeah, that's it. That's exactly it.

People don't quite understand. Like, you look like an adult, but are you? Yeah. Yeah.

I think it was as weird as I talked to them like they're my friends. I mean, I don't use as many four letter words, but some, but because I can't edit that well. But I just treat them like they're friends of mine. And it seems to be reciprocated.

Absolutely. Yeah, actually, sorry. I don't know why I'm doing this, but I showed up at one friend's house and their daughter was throwing a bit of a tantrum. She's like, like, whining, like, which literally going, yeah.

And I just walked out to her and got right in her face and did the same noise right back at her. It took like two seconds. So she's a person who's staring at some stuff. Yeah.

It was just. I really think that's how kids learn, too. If you just talk to them like a normal person, they learn quickly. And I noticed that there's a funny story.

I was driving home. It wasn't how my cousins felt about me having my bongs and my beat out. So all my paraphernalia. I was driving home from the rock climbing gym with my nieces.

So I called my kids and said, hey, I forgot to do something. Could you please relocate the paraphernalia? And I thought that would have been the end of it. Right.

But they're like, what's paraphernalia? Oh, no. Honestly, it's a plant. And I like to them.

And then I realized we got home. They go like, can we see the paraphernalia? I was like, OK, I don't want to keep this up. This is paraphernalia.

Like, I would use it to smoke weed and get high. That's what it's used for. And then we had a whole conversation about that. But they're genuinely curious by nature.

And I don't think it's a bad thing to encourage that and just have discussions. Because they'll just ask questions. And then they're like, oh, OK. Yeah.

Done. It's over. Done. It's over.

It's quick and painless. It's not too bad at all. But now they know what paraphernalia is. And that's that's you know, to have a paraphernalia.

I have a six-syllable word at your disposal. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, absolutely. But if we only talk to children like children, then they're never going to learn how to move beyond that.

Well, let's bring this back full circle. The irony then is we're trying to talk to adults, like adults, but so they can be more like children, to enjoy being on the floor, to enjoy experimenting, to enjoy these different things. I don't know what to do with that way, but that was brilliant. But I think that's a very interesting thing is, in fact, if we go back to the beginning of our conversation, think about tribal cultures, the way that the parents and the children behave in terms of movement and relating to the ground, there's no difference.

It's there's not in the same way that like what you were describing in the kids would sit around the coffee table on the floor while the adults were at a table, or a variation of the kids' table for Thanksgiving. That's just not a thing that happens. And I think what we're talking about in many ways is, you know, giving ourselves as adults, the invitation. I don't want to say permission, the invitation to think back to what we would do as children and start exploring that, to hopefully keep that mobility, that sense of curiosity, that willingness to notice a pattern, try something else, that we just tend to get lazy and forget about.

Yeah. And I think it starts by just, I mean, to sit on the floor and to do the things that we do, interacting with the ground is to really like defy the conventional. It can be really uncomfortable. So I think it's really important that the first thing we do is just start with our small tribes, right?

Start in your home environment, start with your friends. And it can be as simple as planning a picnic and just spending time on the ground. It could be really simple. You don't have to go and start a huge mission in order to do this.

Just start with a culture inside of your home. And if your kids grow up that way, then it's just going to be normal for them. That's just the way it is. If your friends start to be exposed to this, then it's just going to start to be a normal thing in their life.

And it just takes me a little bit of change, a little bit at a time in shipping that culture. It takes time, but I think just starting small and just starting with the little things that we can do, that's a really, really good place to start. Yeah. And keep in mind, in public, the odds that someone's going to remember who you are and have unpleasant thoughts about you in any way that will come back to you is about zero.

I do this. Like when I'm teaching barefoot running to people, I'm going to go to the park and I'm not going to get into details, but have them do a bunch of weird movement games. And basically, the instruction is keep doing it until you're having fun and don't care what other people think. Because guaranteed, they're not close enough to see you anyway.

They won't recognize you anywhere else. So your self-consciousness is completely misplaced. So knowing that, just do it until you don't care, even if they did see you again. Because then explaining that you had a whole bunch of fun and they should try it too.

Yeah, absolutely. I used to, when I started wearing minimal issues, I'm always, I'm going to try to wear shoes that don't look too minimalistic, like the vibrams. And now I just wear vibrams because I want people to ask me about it. I want to start conversation.

Like I want to wear the funky issues that I can so that people can look at me and be like, what are you doing? And we can actually start a conversation. I think that's something that's really just like beautiful to have in my life. Because now I just have conversations with people on the street when I'm walking down the street barefoot with my dog, like, why are you walking down the street barefoot?

Why not? Why not? I will let you know that you can possibly have a similar kind of conversation with people if you're wearing these instead of those. Although it doesn't start with people looking at you, a scam, it starts with people going, hey, wait, are those issues?