Danielle breaks down the importance of exercise not just form a physical standpoint, but a mental one too. Learn the benefits of staying active as it relates to both your mind and body simultaneously.
Danielle Jokonen is a yoga teacher, trainer, shaman and a life coach. She talks about why exercise is important and how it helps you heal. The biggest thing, she says, is to ask why you're doing the exercise.
Hello, my name is Danielle Jokonen. I'm a yoga teacher, yoga teacher, trainer, yoga creator, your own determination, yoga, and a shaman and a life coach. And I'm here to talk about exercise. Why is it important? Why should you do it? And where are you on your relationship with exercise in your life? I've been doing exercise since I was born. At ten months old, I was running and I've stopped running as much. I sure have, because I found yoga and I realized I don't have to run so much. But let's talk about why exercise and why it's important.
Number one, I can say, is moving your body, elevating your heart rate, building that resistance and flexibility gets you present and helps you heal. And though exercise can also keep you stuck and rigid and stagnation, actually, or shut down or blocked. So again, it goes back to why. Why are you moving your body? Or quote unquote, we call it exercise these days. Right. So why are you doing the thing you're doing? Going back to intense now, when I was little, I had really bad ankle pain and hypermobile joints.
And I remember going to the doctor and they're like, it'll be beneficial when you can start strength training. So whenever that year turned around, however old I could be, 13, I started lifting weights because I didn't want to be in pain. And I thought that would make me better because I thought there was something wrong with me. Was there something wrong with me? No, but I believe there was something wrong with me when I was 13 years old. That's why I started lifting weights. Loved it. Sure. It helped me.
Yes. Building strength, working my heart, right? All good for me. And then I became a group fitness instructor, I became a Pilates instructor, a massage therapist. I ran every day. I didn't realize till later in life that I was also running away from my feelings. So, again, intention. Why are you doing the exercise that you're doing? Okay. So I started lifting weights because I thought there was something wrong with me. And I was running because I was running away from my feelings. So that's the start of my journey of exercise.
And then I became a personal trainer. Loved it. And what allowed me to tap into more intentional movement is yoga. And how I found yoga was when I was twelve, my mom introduced me to female vhs with Baptiste yoga, and loved it because it helped me with my sport of basketball. Now, I only used it at that time for like a supplement or like a benefit towards the thing I actually really loved, which was basketball. And then my life fell apart when I was 24 when I was supposed to get married. The wedding got called off a month before the wedding.
Devastated. Devastated. I didn't know what was up or down. The floor was falling from underneath me. And what I turned back to a movement exercise. Yoga. Why? It got me back to my breath. It helped me calm down my fear of who am I? What am I going to do now? This person doesn't love me anymore. My world is over. My yoga mat was there for me, and it allowed me to be okay at that moment, allowed me to accept, even though it was super hard to accept. Again, exercise. Why are we doing it? Intention.
It is really. It helped me through that really hard time in my life. And then I wanted. After that, I took a teacher training. I took three teacher trainings after that to really dive deep into what is this yoga all about? And what kind of movement is this, and how is this helping my mind, my body, my heart, my soul, my life. Like, it saved my life, really. So, again, intention. So that's when I opened a yoga studio and I taught yoga. I stopped running so much because I realized why was I running?
I was running away from my feelings. And through yoga, it helped me feel, it helped me process, let me uncover and release any old feelings that actually wanted just to be expressed. And what we suppress tends to come to disease. So it allowed me to heal on a very deep level. And again, why exercise? Whoa. It's big. The biggest thing, it helps you get present to your physical body. But my invitation for you guys is to ask why? And what is your intention behind the exercise that you're doing? Mind blowing question right there.
So why are you choosing the exercises that you're doing? How are they supporting you? Why are you doing them, and what's your intention? Sometimes we don't even know. So look at the movements you're doing. Honor them. Applaud that, and I invite you to look. Why are you doing what you're doing? And put an intention around it, and then see what you can get access to. My name is Danielle. Questions about any of this, please reach out. It's an honor to be here and have a blessed rest of your day.
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