Replay: How to use pleasure as a way to connect with your body and desires with Ally Barnett, LCSW

Wilder Pod Updates

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: * Kristen reveals some highs and lows within her first few months of motherhood after she welcomed her baby girl into the world.  * Kristen also discusses the expansion of Wilder Wellness and the direction she is taking her business in the future - with more in person events to come!  * Kristin Mathes launches her second retreat-  Finding Flow a week of mind- body surf therapy in Costa Rica. Registration opens soon.   * Kristin discusses overcoming a lot of anxiety related to the vulnerability of rebranding her business and working with social media.  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 [http://www.emergewithfreedom.com/retreats-findingflow] for the juicy details.  You can learn more about the hosts Kristen Ales, LPC [https://www.wilderwellness.co/] and Kristin Mathes, LCSW [https://www.kmmentalhealth.com/] 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. [https://wilderwellness.teachable.com/p/wilder-wellness-intuitive-eating]

Replay: Slowing down, avoiding burnout, and creating consistency in your movement practice with Abby Chan, MS, RDN

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!

Replay: The impact of masking our fears and insecurities with perfectionism, with Joanna Townsend, LCSW

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.

Replay: Letting go of our Fantasy Body

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

Replay: How to use pleasure as a way to connect with your body and desires with Ally Barnett, LCSW

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.