Stillness & Calm

SUMMARY: One of the things that helped me the most during my online dating journey was meditation. It helped keep me calm and stay in the present, which in turn reduced my dating anxiety. Meditation is one of several tools that can relieve stress while restoring energy.

I recently had the pleasure of catching up with an old friend, Pam Strand. We first met decades ago over a shared love of swimming. We were among a group of women who regularly swam together at our health club. In fact, it was Pam who first told me about the dating website eHarmony, which set me on my online dating adventure.

I’ve always admired Pam for her ability to challenge herself and take chances. Her strength, adaptability, and perseverance has led to a successful career in the health and wellness industry. Below is part of my conversation with Pam about the restorative practices she teaches to help others relieve anxiety and stress, which is plentiful in the world of online dating! 

The Early Days

We began our chat by talking about the first part of her career, which was in the world of banking and consulting. As she worked her way up the corporate ladder, stress began to take its toll.

PAM: I was starting up a new database marketing unit for a retail bank. There was a lot of disharmony in the senior levels of that department about whether that unit was really what they wanted to have, so it really came down to ‘Oh my gosh, this is a pretty stressful position!’  I continued to be worn out, and there was, at one point in time, in my performance review, that I put down as one of my objectives that I wanted to get in the best shape of my life.

It was a huge shift in her thinking, and it gave Pam her first idea for making a big change.

PAM:  It really made me think, ‘It’s now or never.’ I've always been interested in how the body works, how the body and mind work together. I thought it would be kind of cool to go into something in the fitness world. I was 44 and said, ‘OK, I'm really not at that stage of going back to school to get a sports medicine degree. I was a business major, so I didn't have any prerequisites, so I joined a personal training program. It was a 500-hour course. I got out of consulting because it was really more of, ‘The drive of this is wearing me out. I wanna get in the best shape of my life. I think it'd be really cool to do something like that, for work.’

 A New Career

MARY: What a career pivot! You became a personal trainer, yoga instructor, Boot Camp leader, and master swim coach.  You also led fitness coaching classes and became a motivational speaker!  Wow!

PAM: When I started out, I kinda got swept up in it.  It was just, sort of, all the opportunities presented themselves, and I was like, ‘Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah.’

MARY: That's so great when life presents you with something, and then you just grab onto it.

PAM:  Yeah.

MARY:  In 2012, you opened a personal training studio, Strand Fitness.  I love what you said in your LinkedIn profile that you trained men and women who "have had their moment of truth when they realize they need to do something to keep their body strong, healthy, and fit.” Tell me more about that.

PAM:  The moment of truth could be when you go in for your physical and your doctor goes, “Your cholesterol is up. Your blood pressure is off.”  So that could be a moment of truth. Another moment of truth could be someone tries to walk up stairs, and they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm so out of shape!’ My moment the truth was, ‘Wow! If I continue to do this, my health and well-being are just gonna continue to go down the tube.’  So yeah, there's a variety of moments of truth.  So many people kinda got middle-aged and then took an assessment and said, ‘Yeah, I'm not on a very good trajectory here.’

MARY: In addition to keeping your body strong and healthy, there's a whole mental health aspect of everything, and that leads me into the next thing I want to talk about. You later branched out again by creating Strong Heart Wellness. How did that come about?

A Big Shift

PAM: When I was running the personal training studio, which we opened in 2012 and then, kind of like in that 2019 timeframe, by that time my business partner had left and I was trying to run the show. I was already running out of energy and then the pandemic hit and I had some epiphanies, one was, ‘Oh my gosh!’  That first two weeks when everything shut down, every morning and I woke up, I felt better like, ‘What the heck!’ And it was like, ‘Oh, my  gosh!’ I didn't realize how worn down I really was. I was having two weeks of vacation, and I was getting up. I was walking. I was eating better. My muscle aches and pains all going away.

 Pam said she had a major realization, which would lead to her next big career move.

PAM: The pandemic sort of forced my hand. The fitness industry really got hammered during the pandemic. I was already worn out financially. The resources to get the business up and running again, I was like, ‘No way!’  I was 61.  So I made the choice to open up in a very small footprint. It went from three big spaces in this building to one small space. I began to back off. During this time, I had my own case of Covid and that really put another damper on my energy and well-being during this time. So, a couple things happened. One, I was sitting in my little living room looking out the window and going, ‘Oh boy, when this is all over people are really gonna be stressed. Maybe that's my next chapter.’ Then the other thing was, ‘Wow! I was really stressed! I was struggling now. One of my friends said, “Maybe you should check out meditation.”

Pam went online and found a new course of study, and once  again, one thing led to another.

PAM: They had a course in mindfulness-based stress reduction. Well, that was that first feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh, this seems like slowing down meditation, becoming more aware, being more mindful. That really does restore your energy.’  And the teacher had said something that I thought was pretty profound. She said, “When you meditate, and when you're more mindful, you're actually changing your physiology at the cellular level. “  That really hit home because I had always thought in my early days of fitness,  ‘Wouldn't it be really cool?  How can you gather every cell in your body to work for you and for your goals?’ That's always been kind of in my mind.  The combination of that professional insight like, oh people are gonna be stressed, and then my own personal experience of this mindfulness stuff, is pretty cool.

The Value of Meditation

MARY: When I was online dating, and I write about this in my book, I was so full of anxiety, not only fretting about the past, but also worrying about the future, and of course, as you know, neither one of those really exist. The only thing that exists is the here and now and it was meditation that brought me back and centered me, relieving my anxiety, which really helped me in online dating. Can you talk about that aspect of meditation?

PAM: Meditation, scientifically is known to help with anxiety issues. From a physiological perspective, it's working on your nervous system, strengthening your vagus nerve so that your system is less likely to be pulled off into the fight or flight response. Anxiety lives there. You're less likely to be pulled off center, so that that's kind of what's going on from a science perspective. The other thing that I think is really helpful in meditation is it's training your attention so that you begin to focus on what it is you want to focus on, what you choose to focus on, not what your nervous system may tell you. Meditation is training you to tell your mind, ‘No I don't want to focus on that. I'm gonna focus on what's here,’ and then I think when your mind gets clearer, you have more room to say, “This works for me. This doesn't work for me,” and you're making better choices.

MARY: Through meditation,  by clearing all that out, and just focusing on the hear and now, it made me feel so much more a stronger and confident, as I went out there in the online dating world. I was able to call the shots more. I wasn't looking for other people's reactions. I was just like, ‘No, this is what I want.’

Breath Work

PAM: I finished that meditation course and then I started breath work. I became a mindfulness and meditation teacher. That led to getting certified as a breath instructor. It just seemed like I was on this path.

MARY:  Tell me about the breath work and how that impacts our bodies.

PAM:  Breath is a good thing because it's a physical sensation in your body. The breath is always a good thing to come back to. Breath is a very common anchor for people to come back into the present moment, to continue with the meditation. That's really important. It helps you shift from wherever your mind was going to the present moment, but then breath work itself is an automatic function in the body, which is good so we don't have to remember to do it, but it is a quick hit into your nervous system. If we become aware of our breath and how we are breathing, we remind ourselves to come back into the parasympathetic, the calm state simply by breathing. I can take some deep breaths with my belly and pull the breath deeper into  my lungs. When I pull it deeper into my lungs I'm in the lobes of the lungs that have more parasympathetic nerve endings, so I'm triggering the body, saying calm, calm, time for calm.

Pam decided to shut down her last remaining studio space and move to another Chicago suburb. She kept up her studies and made another career move after adding another skill to her wellness portfolio.

Qigong

PAM:  I was introduced to Qigong in a webinar.  I'm like, ‘Oh I wanna be a Qigong teacher.’ Qigong is an ancient Chinese movement art, thousands of years old that was created as a health and longevity practice. It's one of the arms of traditional Chinese medicine. In simple form, it is taking slow rhythmic movement and some standing postures and coordinating basically a meditative state of mind with breath so all three of those things are moving together. Meditation works with the mind. You have breath, awareness and movement, and those three modalities of meditation, breath work, and Qigong play with those things in different degrees. You basically take all three of them and bring them together in a very therapeutic practice.  I gotta figure out how to bring it all together and then one morning, I said, ‘This is stupid. Just pick something!’  So I was like, ‘I am gonna open up an online business, and I'm just gonna say it's meditations from my heart to yours.

Pam founded an online business, Strong Heart Wellness and its offshoot, the Strong Heart Community, which strives to help people build stillness and calm into their daily life.

MARY: You’ve talked about how stress can be so tricky by slowly draining your energy and joy. Talk to me about how that's so important to recognize stress for what it is and not let it get away from you.

PAM: Stress is tricky because it's sort of it's so pervasive. We don't necessarily know we're under stress when we are. We think, ‘I'll just push through it.’ Stress comes in many forms. Stress isn't just what we worry about, but it's basically what's going on in your body so if the stress response within your body is triggered, then you are stressed whether you believe you're stressed or not. Stress is a very intensive process in the body. So is recovery. If we never give the body a chance to get into the other branch in the nervous system, rest and digest where the repair and the recovery and the rejuvenation comes, we stay in the stress mode and we get so used to it. We just respond by pushing harder or trying more. But really the thing is you need to be on the other side of the equation. You need to be working on recovery, giving your body a chance to rest so that it can heal, and you can rebuild your energy reserves, that you can rebuild the tissue or even on the psychological standpoint, letting your mind and your brain rest is important, so we're not on the other side. The stress just keeps running, running, running, running, running until we’re depleted.

Putting It Together

MARY: Tell me about Strong Heart Wellness and the Strong Heart Community and what people can find there.

PAM: It is an oasis of stillness and calm. I decided I'm just gonna load up all these meditations and breath work and then just put it in a place where people can come. If you're having a stressful time just come here click and listen to this or practice along. Finding relief is a piece of it but the other piece of it is recognizing building back what stress takes away. The pathway is  different for everybody, but most people are interested in finding relief. Then if we really wanna kind of change how you work in the world, we gotta get to regaining energy. Once you regain your energy, then if you're gonna make all this stuff stick, then you've gotta make some lifestyle changes and so this community helps people through that whole kind of step work, that whole ladder that has the practices. We post weekly and I have a monthly theme, like nature was a theme, so exploring how nature is a rejuvenation factor how to help you build back after stress. We’ve also been working on what are the different aspects of restoring the body, movement and sleep and rest and all of that. My friend, she's a musical composer. She's composing music for the Strong Heart Community, knowing that music is also a healer. I do meditation to her music. It’s immersive meditation that basically takes meditation and music and put it together

MARY:  Oh that's so fantastic!

PAM: All these practices help you be still on the inside, and still is not soft. It's strong.

MARY: Pam, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Stay strong!

PAM: I appreciate it and it was fun talking to you!

To learn more, go to visitstrongheartwellness.com  and strongheartcommunity.com