Ep #109: Total Wellness with Victoria Albina

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who is midlife and plus sized and you want to start running but don’t know how, or if it’s even possible, you’re in the right place. Using proven strategies and real-life experience, certified running and life coach Jill Angie shares how you can learn to run in the body you have right now.

Hey rebels, you are listening to episode 109 of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. I’m your host, Jill Angie, and today I have a super fun guest. Her name is Victoria Albina and she is a certified life coach, coincidentally from the same place I trained. She’s also a breath work meditation facilitator, a UCSF trained holistic family nurse practitioner and herbalist.

She has a Masters degree in Public Health from Boston University, a BA in Latin American studies from Oberlin College, and she’s pretty much a renaissance woman. She works with her clients one-on-one and in online groups and also facilitates breath work in person in New York City and worldwide online.

And she’s the host of the wildly popular Feminist Wellness podcast. She’s been helping women heal mind, body, and spirit for the past 20 years through a magical combination of functional medicine and life coaching. And today, we are covering a whole range of topics related to women’s health and wellness, and there may be a little bit of ranting too about the patriarchy and all that good stuff. But mostly, it’s just lots of good info. So without further ado, here she is.

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Jill: Victoria, hello and welcome.

Victoria: Hi Jill, thanks so much for having me on the show. I’m so excited to be here.

Jill: I am too. I am too. So what I would like to start with is for you to just kind of explain what exactly it is that you do and what you’ve been doing and where you’re going with your practice and why you think it’s so important. Just in like, three words or less.

Victoria: Like real casual like, tell me your life story. Okay, cool.

Jill: Yes, exactly. If you could do that.

Victoria: So I was born on a rainy Wednesday. No, we’re going back to the 70s. That’s where we’re starting?

Jill: All the way back. If you could tell us when you were conceived, even better.

Victoria: Oh wow, gross. So my formal training is as a family nurse practitioner. I also have a Masters degree in public health and I am a life coach. We both are trained through The Life Coach School. I am also a breath work meditation facilitator. Yeah, and I have this podcast called the Feminist Wellness podcast, which I am absolutely in love with. It’s so much fun.

And I came to the world of health and wellness because I was sick as a dog. So I had what doctors were calling IBS – I’m making little bunny ears here. Irritable bowel syndrome. My entire life. Like from birth. I couldn’t tolerate a lot of foods. I know, sad faces on both of us. My poor sweet mom. I couldn’t tolerate pretty much everything she tried to feed me. I was constantly colicky. I was super happy, but like, had this hot mess of a tummy and it stayed with me for life.

And I went to Oberlin – thank god for Oberlin school of weirdos where I started learning about herbal medicine and the women’s health movement. I took a ton of women’s studies, gender studies classes and started learning about the concept of agency and empowerment, and that I could take my health into my own hands and that I can actually do stuff to make myself feel better, which was like, not something I had contemplated as a teenager.

And I started learning about nutrition, about wellness, about fitness, about meditation and yoga and all these practices to help make my life better. To start to do the work of healing. And I also went to 475 million doctors, like every GI specialist on the east coast and in Ohio and went to Mayo and like, pretty much every single one was like, sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you. You have IBS, which means nothing. We found nothing and so you get this garbage can, total waste basket diagnosis. Good luck. Pretty much was my treatment plan was good luck.

A lot of people tried to put me on anti-depressants and I was like, but you guys, I’m really happy, I just either can’t poop or poop myself. I’m like, gassy and bloated and miserable but I’m also super happy. And they were like well, you need Prozac. And I was like…

Jill: Like you shouldn’t be happy, stop that immediately.

Victoria: Cut it out. Silly women. Women are so silly. But yeah, that was pretty much the only treatment that was offered was go on anti-depressants and good luck. Yeah, so that didn’t work for me on any possible level. So I took my health into my own hands and like, in the 90s and early 00s, before the interwebs, I used these things – you may have heard of them. They’re called books. You’ve heard of them?

Jill: Oh, I have. I don’t think I’ve seen one in a while.

Victoria: No, they contain knowledge. But I started reading and I read everything I could and I went to every conference and every lecture and every seminar and learned about how to heal the gut, which was a nascent field in those days. But I figured it out and I figured out the herbs to use to start healing my gut lining. I figured out that fermented foods were a great idea.

I started doing the things that are now all over our Instagram, all over our Facebook, our Pinterest, like everywhere of like, feed the gut microbiome and you will heal the person. I eventually found a naturopath who did the right stool test, having had 400 of them with the regular Western doctors and they were all completely negative, normal, didn’t explain my issues.

They found the parasites that I had. I was like, full of yucky bugs, and – I know, my sweet little tummy. Such a mess. And I had the things that come with imbalances in the gut microbiome and disruptions to the gut microbiome. Depression, anxiety, weird sadness that set in later after the thousands of Prozac offers. But you know, those things we now understand are part and parcel of disruptions in the good bugs in our gut that help create our neurotransmitters, that help us absorb nutrients.

I had what we now call SIBO, small intestine bacterial overgrowth, and I had – I’m going to nerd for a second – at my distal ileum, the last part of the small intestine, which means I wasn’t absorbing B12 for nothing. Plus, I have this thing called MTHFR. I could really nerd here. I’m going to reel it in.

But anyway, it means that genetically my body’s like B12, folate, I’m going to not absorb those. So it’s not shocking that my B12 levels were garbage and so I felt like garbage because you know, not to be all because science, but because science. And figuring all of that out did so much to help me heal, but what actually has led to the true real sustainable wellness that I enjoy and am so grateful for every single day is the life coaching that you and I practice.

It’s that inner connection and understanding that I don’t need to walk around repeating my childhood, being frustrated, resentful, angry, annoyed, blaming others, feeling like a victim, telling these stories that my body is just broken as an excuse for my behavior. I can actually and have actually and now teach folks how to manage our minds, controlling our thoughts to control our feelings, taking our minds back from the patriarchy, from socialization, from what we learned in our family of origins, from all the amazing survival mechanisms that we cultivated as children that no longer serve us as adults.

So it was really that work plus – we can get into more detail about this because I’m obsessed – the pranayama breath work meditation that I do every single day. The combo of those things has helped me to get in touch with myself in such a deep way to move my energy to really get in touch with my feelings and to realize that feelings aren’t a problem. Feelings are the solution. And when we let ourselves hold space for ourselves to feel our feelings in a deep way, the world is ours.

Jill: Oh my god. So well said. So well said. So alright, so let me ask you this because you just said something that I think is pretty important that most people have no idea is going on about how our mental wellness impacts our physical wellness. And so what is the connection there? And I think it’s so interesting that your physical wellness, originally your doctors assumed that your physical wellness was affecting your mental wellness, and they were trying to put you on anti-depressants. So the two things are very, very linked, but what have you found about the connection of mental wellness to physical wellness?

Victoria: So there’s this amazing two-way super highway in our bodies that’s governed by the – do you want me to nerd? Because I’m just going to keep nerding.

Jill: All the nerd. I have a degree in biochemistry. I’m all for it.

Victoria: So we have this amazing two-way super highway in our bodies that’s governed by the vagus nerve, which is the 10^th cranial nerve, runs out of your head down the middle of your body and into your gut. And enervates, or gives nerve function to every organ along the way. Your lungs, your heart, your diaphragm, all your digestive apparatus, reproductive organs.

And the vagus nerve, one of its most ancient functions is cortisol management, is stress management, is fight or flight. So whether we’re in sympathetic dominance, which is freak out, a lion’s about to eat your face, or our parasympathetic dominance, which is rest and digest, feed and breed, which is have a snack, chill out, everything’s cool. You can digest right now, you’re not in mortal danger.

So when we get shunted into sympathetic dominance, when our body’s like, you’re about to get eaten, everything that’s not a vital life function, like a survival function gets shut down because duh, right? So blood gets shunted to the heart, to your legs so you can run, your breathing gets high up in your chest and gets rapid, your digestion gets shut down, fibroid, come on. Making hair, skin, and nails, forget about it. Ovulating appropriately, no way.

Like, your body is like, I am under attack, I need to either run and climb a tree or get int a cave or I need to punch a lion in the nose. So adrenaline spikes, followed by cortisol, which spikes a little more slowly and then stays elevated until danger is over. You complete the stress activation cycle and your body can calm down.

If your thought habit pattern is that you ask your boyfriend to take out the garbage and he’s like no, babe, and you take it as this personal affront, he doesn’t love me, somewhere deep inside, that inner child is like I’m being abandoned, I will die alone when this lion comes, adrenaline goes up, cortisol goes up, all these stories start spinning in your unmanaged mind.

How you’re unloved and unlovable, how he’s to blame, how you’re the victim, like, so many stories that then shunt your body into that sympathetic dominance. Maybe not to like, the full degree of lion attack, but to some degree. And what happens if that is happening 475 times a day, your neurotransmitters are going to get completely jacked. Your thyroid is not going to get what it needs. You’re going to burn up all your B12 and your vitamin C. Your immune system is going to be down-regulated.

This mental state of thinking the world is against me, I am a victim, things are harming me, everyone’s out to get me, it’s all about me, whatever those stories are, I’m depressed, I’m broken, et cetera, will down-regulate every bodily symptom that we need to have optimized in order to have a happy, healthy, functioning mammal on this planet. So thinking those sad thoughts, thinking those anxious thoughts creates depression and anxiety in the body. It cuts both ways and continually feeds on and into itself.

Jill: Right. So you’re like, literally thinking yourself into a chemical shit storm in your body.

Victoria: To put it elegantly, yeah. That was succinct, elegant, scientific.

Jill: So I mean, it’s fascinating because I’m 100% on board with you. I totally, totally believe that our brains can impact – it’s not just our thinking. It’s not just our mindset. It’s our entire body. But how do you introduce this to a patient that you’re working with when they come to you and they’re just like oh, I have this chronic physical problem, oh, and by the way my entire life is falling apart.

How do you – because here’s what I imagine happens is that somebody comes to you and they’re just like, physically I’ve got all these issues, all these physical issues, and you’re telling me it’s all in my mind. Do you ever get that kind of a response where somebody’s like, look just fix my body, my brain is my own business?

Victoria: Yes, and to be real, those aren’t the right patients for me. Just to be very real. People who just want transactional medicine, like when you have strep throat and you show up at urgent care and you’re like, throat hurts, and they do a swab and you’re done. Transactional medicine like that, or like, hi, get my pap done, that’s not why I’m here on the planet. I don’t think the universe put me here. I did it for years and years and years and my thoughts about it created quite a bit of misery for me.

Jill: Well, because it doesn’t really work.

Victoria: It also doesn’t work.

Jill: So talk a little bit about this concept because your podcast name is the Feminist Wellness podcast, which I fucking love. So can you talk a little bit about what that means to you? Why did you name your podcast that? What kind of topics do you talk about? And by the way, if you’re not listening to this podcast, y’all should just go. Pause, go subscribe, and then come right back because it’s amazing. Tell us everything about Feminist Wellness.

Victoria: Thank you, and yes, please do go subscribe. I share some fun stuff. You know, when I showed up at Oberlin these many years ago, I didn’t realize that I could take control of my health. I had no idea. I thought that I had to go to the white man in the white coat in order to fix my health. Let’s even talk about the word fix, right? Because I was never broken, nor are you, sweet listener.

But in order to heal, I thought I had to externalize that and put that in someone else’s hands. And what feminist principles have taught me is that I am my own best healer. By learning how to manage my mind, by managing my breath, by taking control of my choices throughout my day, I heal me. Someone else may be a guide but no one out in the world can fix me again, because I’m not broken, and because the call has to come from inside the house. It has to come from a place of agency and empowerment.

Jill: Love this. So essentially you’re saying that instead of just okay, I have a disease or I have a condition, that you have to be an active part and you have to be leading the charge and basically rally the troops. Your troops might be a physician, a specialist, a coach and so forth, but you’re the one who has to lead this stuff. You don’t just show up and like, lay back. It’s not like getting a massage, right?

Victoria: Right, but even in a massage, if you show up and you’re tensing against the massage, it’s not going to work. If you go home and you don’t stretch and you don’t take an Epsom bath and you don’t drink water, you’re going to be full of lactic acid, you’re going to be worse off than not getting the massage.

Jill: Yeah, been there, done that, by the way.

Victoria: That is not cute. 0% cute.

Jill: I love this idea and also the concept of – well, what does feminism mean to you? Let’s actually talk about that because I think there’s a lot of people out there that have this belief that feminists believe that women are better than men. And I feel like nothing could be further from the truth. So what does feminism mean to you?

Victoria: Yeah, so my work is absolutely guided by key core feminist principles, which I believe can and should transcend the gender of any one person or group of people who use these principles in practice. So I use these principles to guide everything I do and the way I approach my patient care, my life coaching clients, and for me, it means holding a deep belief in the following.

Every human on this earth – let me back that up. Every creature on this earth has inherent dignity and value. We are all capable of changing growth, no matter how we’ve been socialized or how we’ve managed our lives in the past. We are not able to heal the world until we heal ourselves first, and I do hold that as a feminist principle.

And that while many of us have been taught to believe we are less powerful than we are, we are all worthy and capable of reclaiming our birthright to exist in this world as our full complex selves, to live our lives on our own terms, and to claim full autonomy over our own bodies and our own choices.

And this applies to mammals of all genders. Men, women, gender non-binary folks, trans folks, to spirit folks, like, every human creature on this planet if subject to the socialization, to the powers of capitalism, patriarchy. We see this and we’re naming it now in ways that are really useful like calling out toxic masculinity and recognizing that humans socialized as men, people presenting as men are subject to the call and the problematic drive that comes with masculinity in its complexity in 2019 in the US.

Jill: So can you distill that down into one sentence for us? I’m like oh my god, my brain just broke a little bit.

Victoria: You are so funny. So I’m going to break it down. So feminism is believing that all humans are of equal worth, value, have dignity, a right to autonomy, to make choices for our own bodies.

Jill: I love that. And here’s what – as you were kind of like, explaining your – because it’s kind of like a manifesto that you’ve created for yourself. It’s beautiful. But I also – what I hear in there is elements of the body positive community and it’s kind of fascinating to me that there’s all different beliefs out there like that basically come back to the same tenant that all humans are valuable, period. Not because of this or because of that or in spite of this or whatever.

This is something I talk about with my own folks a lot is people who think like, I love my body despite its flaws. I’m like, just stop that. There’s no such thing as a fucking flaw. They’re just bodies. That’s how it is. So I kind of love how you drilled it down to that because I think it transcends a gender thing, it transcends a body size thing, it transcends race, it’s more about just like hey, let’s just be humans and be cool with that.

Victoria: Yeah, totally. From a body positive framework, 100%. And I think we can also recognize the ways that we are treated differently and that yeah, there’s some complexity to living in different human bodies and we get to own that and recognize that and call out our own privilege and call in the people we love and are in community with.

Jill: For sure. Yeah, I don’t think anybody – at least I don’t think I’ve ever believed that there are not differences between us and that there aren’t challenges living in this body versus that body or whatever, for sure. And some is just literally physical, biological, and some of it is socialization and culture and so forth. But I just love the whole concept of let’s just respect each other and let other people do what the hell they want with their own bodies.

Stop interfering, which is, I think, to bring it back to the concept of wellness is if you have autonomy over your own body, then that means you don’t have to just turn over your care to somebody else. You actually get to lead it on your own.

Victoria: That is so much of what I’m here for. And it’s so fascinating in the 20 years I’ve been in health and wellness, wearing lots of hats as it were, but in different capacities, my framework has always been the same. Like your body, your choices. I will guide you, I will tell you that this is likely the best thing for you, but you do you, babe.

And what’s been super interesting has been to witness how people respond to that and like, the confusion that usually humans who are socialized as women present when I’m like alright, what do you want? And they’re like, I don’t know. Like, I was talking with – I got the sweetest email last week from this woman who had been my primary care patient back when I was doing that.

And I had done her pap smears, and she was like I have been thinking about how when I came in for my pap, you told me that I could keep my button down on, just take my bra off, and I was like, wait what? I don’t have to be totally subject and naked and wearing just paper? And then I asked her, like I asked all of my people getting a pap smear, do you want to lie down, we can do this old school, or do you want to sit up so you can see what I’m doing? Third option, do you want to sit up and I’ll give you a mirror so you can literally see what’s happening inside your own human body.

And like, the number of people who looked at me like I had 6000 heads and were like, what? This doesn’t have to be painful and horrible and I don’t have to feel like the subject, like I’m being tested, I can emotionally participate and have agency and empowerment here? What is this witchcraft?

Jill: Wow, that has never been offered to me in any type of – it’s always okay, the doctor is here. You best just shut up and listen.

Victoria: Shut your mouth and scooch forward.

Jill: That’s fascinating. I just want to talk about a recent experience that I had that kind of blew my mind about how women’s bodies are treated by the medical establishment and the lack of information out there. So I mean, I don’t make a secret of it on this podcast is that I had my last period – we’ll get to that, but two and a half years ago.

And so I’ve officially been in menopause for – post-menopausal I guess, for a year and a half. And then about a month ago, I ovulated surprisingly, and I had all the symptoms of ovulation and I was complaining about tender breasts and so forth to a friend of mine. And she’s like, sounds like you ovulated. I’m like no, no, that’s not possible, I’m in menopause.

And she said, you know, that’s not a certainty. Like, you can still ovulate for years after your final period. And I was like, just gobsmacked. I’m like, wait, what? And I’m like, looking it up on the internet and I couldn’t find anything. I’m like, you’re making this up. She’s like no, it’s menopause. That one year thing is just sort of a – what’s the word?

Victoria: Story?

Jill: Well that, yes, but it’s a random number – arbitrary is the word I’m looking for. It’s an arbitrary amount that most people when they’ve gone a year without a period aren’t going to get another one. And so I feel like as a woman, I was kind of like, I’ve been lied to because I was told once that year is up, it’s over and you’ll never have a period again, you won’t ever get pregnant, which I was like, I do not want to be 51 years old and pregnant. That was a whole other thing.

But it really got me thinking, and then of course we started talking about it that like, why isn’t this information out there more and do you think it’s because women don’t ask? Because we’re taught to just shut up and listen to what we’re told. Do you think it’s like, a patriarchal thing that there’s so many men in women’s healthcare telling us what to do with our bodies? They’re sort of guiding the conversation or what is that?

And I consider myself to be a very enlightened, very curious person. Like I spend a lot of time researching and I just – literally, my brain exploded when that happened. I was like, this is not cool.

Victoria: Right? Yeah, I think you hit on some important points there that like – and this has been shifting in the last five, 10 years, but historically, most clinicians, particularly physicians have been men. And so it’s been a man’s system for most of the history of what we would call Western medicine.

Before that, a lot of medicine was in the hands of wise women, of sag fem, of like, midwives and herbalists and witches and we can problematize the use of this word but like, shamans and people who are moving energy and using herbs and using nature and nutrition and connecting us back into the earth. And our system of medicine has moved so far from the earth and into such black and white thinking that it’s either no, you’re menopausal or not.

It’s either the test is positive or it’s not. It’s negative or it’s not. And we’ve lost our connection with wonder, with mystery, with the earth, with magic, with spirit, with the many forces that control our bodies beyond and including the biochemistry. Because if our thoughts can change our biochemistry, so too can the moon, right?

Jill: I think that’s what people miss is that science is awesome. I’m all in for science, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s unexplained and we know that our thinking can impact our body biochemically, so that whole black and white paradigm I think is not super helpful but yet we cling to it because people like answers. People like to have some certainty that okay, there’s a 95% chance that this is going to be cured or it’s like, I feel like that’s not how any of this works.

Victoria: Yes, every single day, more and more I’m realizing that that is not how this works, that we are not robots and that the complexity of being a mammal is so far beyond what Western medicine with their lab-based, drug-based, one pill for one ill kind of framework could ever begin to touch upon, or to like, manage. Because I don’t think that human health needs to be managed. We need to return to our own innate ability to heal ourselves in deep ways.

Jill: Well, you said something earlier that really stuck with me, and it might have been before we started recording but you said something like wellness is more than just a bunch of supplements. So say more about that.

Victoria: Yeah, again it’s like, it’s so important to get the right test. So 25-year-old me would still be very sick 40-year-old me if we hadn’t gotten the right stool test and I hadn’t figured out that I had blastocystic hominis, parasitic infection and small intestine – you know I love saying weird shit in Latin.

But I had wild beasts in my tummy and until we named them and figured it out, it would have been much harder for me to heal. And knowing I had a B12 deficiency so I could get B12 shots, et cetera, was super vital. But again, this return to spirit, this re-connection with my breath, past learning, this capacity to manage my own thoughts about my world, to connect in with the earth, to reclaim my connection to nature and the moon and the great spirit.

All of these things, these have been the actual true healers in my life. And like, I take a great multi-vitamin every day. I take my B12, I take my C, for sure. I also believe that food is medicine. I’m really thoughtful about what I put in my human body and I recognize the way energies affect me. The way healing and trauma from my ancestral line affects me, how my inner child stories affect me. And these things affect my actual physiology beyond what a supplement could ever touch because that’s not what it’s for.

Jill: Yeah, because I talk to my runners about this all the time. I’m like, the running that you do, the physical training that you do is like 10% of what it takes to train for a marathon. The rest of it is 90% of the mental stuff, and the mental can impact the physical, for sure. Huge impact on the physical.

So kind of what I’m hearing from you is like, it’s not that you don’t want the science, it’s not that we don’t need that information, but we need to think about the whole picture instead of like, what are the medicines I need to take, what is the protocol for treatment? Because the protocol for treatment is just a little small part of total wellness.

Victoria: Yeah, we need to be truly holistic about it. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Science and medicine ain’t all bad. And I prescribe Western drugs here and there. I’ve got like, a list of 10 I’m not mad at. Maybe a baker’s dozen. But yeah, really looking holistically at all the factors of wellness. Mind, body, soul, spirit, all of it.

And again, that reclaiming of agency is so key. I mean, the number of emails I get every week that are like, I had diarrhea once, panic, and I’m like, okay, so let’s reel it back. We can manage our minds and we don’t have to be scared of our human bodies. And I think that’s so much of it.

This patriarchal system, again, where white man, white coat, he knows. Oh wait, lady white coat or whatever other mammal in a coat, the person we’re calling clinician, physician, like, that knower knows more about what’s going on with your body than you do. That paradigm is keeping us sick. That framework of completely externalizing that healer role is keeping us sick, keeping us panicked, keeping us scared.

Like, I would say most of my patients are deeply traumatized by the Western medical system. By the time they get to me, they are traumatized about their bodies. They fear their bodies deeply.

Jill: Right, because it’s just a big mystery. It’s like, you can’t tell what’s going on in there and all you know is you don’t feel good.

Victoria: Right.

Jill: And nobody can fix it.

Victoria: And you haven’t had a period in two years and you’re ovulating and you’re like, what are these lies?

Jill: Exactly. It’s like, wait, what? So we’re getting out of time a little bit because this has been an awesome conversation but what I kind of what to know is so for somebody who’s listening to this and – what is the kind of person that should be coming to you for help? What issue would they have that they would come to you for help?

Victoria: Yeah, right on. So I do sort of general life coaching. I love – my practice is predominantly women, however you define that, you define that. I don’t. No gender policing here. But I work mostly with women because that’s who I’ve been working with and that’s my lived experience and passion.

And I love women who want to reconnect with confidence, who want to reconnect with self-esteem, who want to learn to not be scared of their bodies, who want to learn to manage their minds so that they can let go of, as we were talking about earlier, the things that drive cortisol and drive us to continue to have IBS, Hashimoto’s, thyroiditis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, resentment, anger, disappointment, fear. If you feel stuck, if you feel confused, if you’re like, I don’t know what to do with my life or like, I know I have this goal, I have this plan but I just can’t get moving, or like, I just feel stuck.

The tools of life coaching and pranayama-based breath work meditation that I bring to the table, along with my 20 years in health and wellness and my medical training make me an optimal person to help you through that, plus I’m freaking hilarious.

Jill: She is freaking hilarious.

Victoria: And I do generally swear like a sailor so just be prepared.

Jill: Yeah, you kind of kept it under control for this show. I’m surprised. You know we have an explicit warning. You can say whatever you want.

Victoria: Oh fuck, I wish I’d known that an hour ago. God damn it, woman. Shit.

Jill: Motherfucker.

Victoria: You got to tell people that shit at the top of the hour.

Jill: I probably should make that more clear.

Victoria: You should. You should be like, please swear. We are New Yorkers.

Jill: Please, don’t make me do it on my own. I know, right? Victoria is a New Yorker. She’s got the language. So okay, so that’s super cool. Is there anything else that you want to make sure people know about you? And we’re going to give everyone information on how they can get in touch with you and obviously, they’ve all subscribed to your podcast by now. So is there anything else you want to share to make sure that we – tell people.

Victoria: Yeah. Well, something that I think is particularly helpful for your runners is connecting in with the breath because you get to mile whatever and you’re like, breathing up at the top of your lungs, barely filling your alveoli, the bronchioles aren’t getting full respiration and oxygenation and your run’s going to suck, and you’re not going to detox all that lactic acid at the same rate.

Meow, meow, science, science, breathe – that was for efficiency’s sake. The more in touch you are with your breath and the more you can control your breath and use your breath as a way to connect in with yourself, and as a tool in your training and as a tool for healing, the better it’s all going to be.

So I have a series of upcoming breath work classes, so they’re going to be – the first one coming up is a four-week general breath work training. It’s breath work for health and healing for anyone who would like, you know, better health or some healing. It’s going to be four weeks all online so you’ll get videos each week, you’ll get writing prompts, journaling prompts, it’s going to be really fun. I’m super excited.

I’ve been working on the soundtracks for like, way too long and they’re so good, and I think that would be a particularly great offer for your folks. Yeah, and then also coming down the path will be breath work sessions for specific medical concerns. So breath work for IBS, breath work for thyroid health. We’ll work on different chakras and energy points. I’m going to nerd real hard and then get my witchy-woo on at the same time.

So it’s that one part science, one part sacred balance that I bring to the work and I’m so stoked. I should probably give your listeners a discount or something, right? That seems polite.

Jill: I think that’s very polite.

Victoria: Alright, well, I’ll think about it.

Jill: Yeah.

Victoria: 10% discount for your listeners. Check the show notes.

Jill: Yeah, that’s what we’ll do because you guys listening, we literally are just coming up with this as we’re speaking and so we will come up with a code for you and we will put it in the show notes, and we’ll have links too. But they can find you at victoriaalbina.com, is that correct?

Victoria: That’s right.

Jill: Find her there.

Victoria: Instagram, @victoriaalbinawellness. The Facebook is the same.

Jill: Fabulous. And the podcast is Feminist Wellness with Victoria Albina. I love this. Okay, so this has been amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. We should definitely do this again and okay, I think we’re done.

Victoria: I think we’re done. This was awesome.

Jill: I’m like, not smoothly executing the ending of this podcast at all.

Victoria: Those are just your thoughts that are creating that feeling.

Jill: Oh my god, you’re so right. Damn it.

Victoria: This was so much fun. Your listeners are like, the luckiest mammals because we get to listen to you and your amazing wisdom every week. Lucky humans.

Jill: Alright, well thank you so much joining me and yeah, everyone make sure you check those show notes. Just go to notyouraveragerunner.com/podcast and search for Victoria Albina. I don’t know what episode this is going to be yet so I can’t give you a link, but if you go to – if you’re listening to the episode obviously you know what episode number it is and you can go to the show notes. I swear, I need a beer.

Victoria: Oh please, we are recording this at 8am. No, JK. It’s the afternoon.

Jill: It is the afternoon. Alright, well have an amazing weekend and thanks again for joining me.

Victoria: Thank you.

–

Hey rebels, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Victoria, and if you want to connect with her or learn more about what she does, head over to victoriaalbina.com or check out the Feminist Wellness podcast, which is available wherever you get your podcasts.

We will also have all of her links in the show notes and I really hope that you go check her out because she’s kind of an amazing human being and you just need to be following her. Alright, until next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to www.notyouraveragerunner.com to download your free one-week jumpstart plan and get started running today.