1KHO 853: The Body Remembers | AC Seiple, The Sacred Art of Slowing Down

**AC Seiple** (0:00)
I'm Arch Manning.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
I'm Madison Skinner. I'm Eva Jovovich. I'm Decoria Moore. Wanna train like a Red Bull athlete? Tell us your fitness goals this summer to enter the Red Bull Athlete Challenge. You'll get to try each of our workouts for a chance to win an ultimate Red Bull experience.

**Ginny Yurich** (0:13)
Think you have what it takes?
Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, and the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and we're gonna be talking today about slowing down and finding relief from a rushed living and soothing our souls. And the person who's going to help us do it is Anna Christine AC Seiple. Welcome AC.

**AC Seiple** (0:36)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Ginny Yurich** (0:38)
You have a whole book that you've written about this called The Sacred Art of Slowing Down. You're also a licensed professional counselor. Can you talk about in your counseling practice, what you're seeing and why you wrote a book about rushed living?

**AC Seiple** (0:53)
Absolutely. Something that I like to be really candid about is that my perspective on this is very much both professional and personal.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:03)
Yeah.

**AC Seiple** (1:03)
Right. And so, you know, this isn't just kind of a theoretical thing or a, oh, I only see this in my clients. This is a first lived, human first experience here that I can resonate with, that I see with clients that, sure, we might know it's better for our health to be less stressed. It would be great if I had time and space to really, you know, not only do self-care in terms of, you know, maybe getting my hair done, but, you know, like caring for the depths of my soul. Like, what does that actually look like? How do I actually have time and space for that in my life?
And I think the biggest reason this is difficult is it's not just a matter of do I have time for it. It comes down to the muscle memory that's literally down in our nervous system of how we're used to living life, go, go, go.
So if we try to just slow down and stop, it doesn't feel good and it doesn't work. But we really need to build that muscle memory. And that's a process that can feel frustrating, that can feel no pun intended slow. And that doesn't always feel safe to our bodies. And so, yeah, so this book was really me sharing the process that I went on of that being complex and yeah, building something new that's a lifelong journey that will always be constructing.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:30)
OK, so let's talk about one of the situations that you talk about for your own life is that you grew up and you moved frequently as a kid.
Yes. So that's a type of situation where a parent is not doing that on purpose to make your life miserable. They have a job, they're in the military, whatever the situation is. And so you end up getting dragged along in a situation like that. And you say that having that sense of security ripped away so often, it can leave you with a sort of baseline anxiety in your body. And you wrote, along the way, I realize there's certain parts of me that still feel like they're 11 years old, walking alone into a new school in a new country with just a little purple backpack on your shoulders and you're by yourself. So can you talk about an experience like that? That's that's not abuse. It's not neglect, but still has tremendous impact on how you feel and then your life moving forward.

**AC Seiple** (3:27)
Absolutely.
And I love how you've categorized that, right? Of holding this really weighty both and. It has an impact and that doesn't mean that the parent is doing anything wrong or bad. And so how do we care for those parts?
You know, the way that I think about it, again, both personally and professionally is thinking of it through the lens of we have to navigate life, whatever circumstances are in front of us. And our bodies and the different parts of us figure out, right? How do I walk through what's in front of me? How do I move through what's in front of me? And we're incredibly resilient and kids are incredibly resilient. You know, we're resilient across the lifespan and kids especially, you know, their resiliency is just remarkable. And so as kids, we can actually navigate really complex circumstances, oftentimes pretty well. And kind of the both end of that is at that time, the way that we figure it out, whatever like adaptations we have to make, whatever ways that we need to maybe overcompensate in one area or, you know, really focus here. You know, again, thinking about like building muscle, it's like, we're really building these muscles over here, maybe not so much over here. That can work really well in that season. And then later in life, that might not actually work so well. So it's like, it did help us back here, and then it's not helping us over here. And I think that's where it gets complex, is we don't have to look at it as something, you know, bad that we need to fix or change. But a lot of it is just that being with, of how do I be with that younger part of myself or in the actual parent-child relationship, right? How do I be with my kid? And just what they're trying to navigate, you know, and not trying to just immediately try to fix it or make it all better, but offering that presence.