308 Let Loose With YoGoGirls Yoga Founder Debby Siegel

Debby Siegel is a Yoga Teacher and founder of the business, YoGoGirls. She calls herself a passionate steward of Earth, mostly a Barefoot Steward. She’s also a marketer, copywriter and editor with a distinctive edge which she finds in the wild.  She’s an avid cyclist, enthusiastic athlete and Mom of the Millenium. Debby is currently writing a Mindful Marionettes Puppet Show designed to teach kids about mindfulness.

Contact Info

• Website: www.YoGoGirls.com
• Email: Debby@YoGoGirls.com
• Social Media: @YoGoGirls

Most Influential Person

• Gretchen Rubin

Effect on Emotions

• How has mindfulness affected my emotions? Oh Wow. That is a good one. Thank you for asking that. Yes, they for me, like I said, it's about quieting my mind, right? And being able to be in this moment right here.
• For me it has leveled off the extreme emotions which are derived from worry about the future or fretting over the past.
• So by being right here, it's made me pretty even keel, and that is not always been something you could say about Debby Siegel.

Thoughts on Breathing

• Well, there's actually science behind it, right; breathing deeply into your abdomen. And I am really drawn to a yogic breathing called Deerga breathing, it's Deerga breath. It's a three-part breath and it's where you start by feeling your belly cavity, so you're breathing deep. You expand that out and then next you move into your lungs and your rib areas, blowing those out in 360, and then finally just even extending the air all the way up into your throat.
• You start filling bottom to top and you exhale and you empty top to bottom. And this type of breathing has a lot of indications that all of the benefits of meditation and breathing will scientifically happen as you kind of hit your Vegus nerve.
• And then it takes your body into that rest or digest phase an out of the fight or flight that pretty much all operate in more often than not. I'm very drawn to that type of breathing. One might even point out that prior to our interview I was breathing, I was integrating that into my own instruction and guidance. So yeah, it calms you, right? I am a rock climber, so one of my hobbies, I climb cliffs. I can get on the same rock wall, that's the same difficulty from the ground. And then you take that same rock wall and maybe put it up a few hundred feet, which I've done as well, like all over the United States; I've climbed in 11 states.
• You start from that place and start to climb and you realize the mind-body connection right away. It changes, you know, your mind is so powerful. It changes your ability to focus on climbing.
• So I will say breath has been incredibly powerful there. It can get you past that, that anxious fear that we in the sport doesn't involve. So yes, breathing, I incorporate it into almost everything I do now and I feel I need to come back to that clear-minded place that breathing is, it's my medicine.

Suggested Resources

• Book: The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
• App: Insight Timer

Bullying Story

• I've been both the bully and the bullied in childhood.
• I feel like recalling and retelling childhood bully stories would kind of give them some power in my now. So I would instead like to focus on the second part of your question, where mindfulness would've made a difference.
• Mindfulness would make a difference for bullying everywhere, right? I mean, I happen to believe that bullying is just a person's need to be seen. We all need to be seen by others. We all need acknowledgment. It's a human condition and bullying is just a more intense method of achieving this.
• So by holding more space for others in our day-to-day lives, perhaps we'll be offering the fulfillment of being seen to someone who might otherwise turn that lack into a bullying opportunity.