Hollie's Presentation at Braidwood's Business Connect Meeting

11 Sep

This video was filmed when I had my local Wellness Facility, called Braidwood Holistic Therapies as a feeder for services. Although the Facility has been merged with services at the Institue for Self Crafting, much of the content in the video is still valid, so I thought I'd leave it here for you to peruse. : )

Tracey Lamont from QPRC invited BHT to come along to the September Business Connect meeting, in order to share how Hollie can help locals and local business owners.

What's in the Presentation?

The video is a 10 minute lecture about the services offered by Hollie.

Filmed as a live stream for Instagram, the quality of the footage is shonky, however you'll be able to hear the audio fine. Scroll down for the transcript if you'd rather read than watch.

[youtube https://youtu.be/tgccynDYmRk&w=600] Holistic Therapy as Wholebody Wellness

Hollie explained the word Holistic and how it refers to a wholebody, whole lifestyle approach. Hollie spends at least one hour at a time with clients, and prefers to work with the individual client as they are right now. Attention is given to how the client is thinking, moving, eating and doing their life, and diagnosis usually is a secondary set of information.

"The best cure for disease is to Be Well."

Intergrative Therapist and Coach

Hollie works at BHT as an Integrative Therapist and Coach. Integrative refers to the way she merges 20+ years of Wellness Studies into client work. Coach refers to her roles as motivator, teacher, thought leader, sometimes-drill sergeant and accountability buddy.

Some of the therapies Hollie mentions you will be familiar with, and some maybe not :

With a focus on :

And how this integrative approach is supported by the latest research on child development, trauma, addiction, weight loss, stress and chronic disease.

Repatterning your thinking, moving, eating and doing

Hollie explains the BHT motto : Think Well, Move Well, Eat Well, Do Well to Live Well. She mentions how she sees clients who have fallen into unchecked, repeated patterns that the body must compensate for. But, the body can only provide compensation for so long.

Working with a therapist is like having a support person who can hold up a mirror to you, help you see where you are not at your optimal performance, and then show you the tools for coming back online.

Have a session with HollieHollie Bakerboljkovac sees people for Sessions in the Self Crafted Life Program.

Video Transcript

Here is the transcript if you'd rather read than watch :

My name is Hollie. I own Braidwood Holistic Therapies which is next to The Paydirt Eatery.

You've probably looked through the window and wondered what was going on, so I'm here to tell you.

Tracey invited me tonight; she said, it's all about farmer's and helping, and so that fits you, right?

And it does, because like George said, we're all part of the community, and even though I have words like “Holistic” which you might not know what they mean, it's still helpful. It just means that we care.

I started working in natural health when I was 15 years old, and around that time, I also started teaching movement. Both of these things are aspects of what I'm doing at Braidwood Holistic.

Over the years I've studied numerous modalities for health; I was quite involved with the organic food industry; I healed myself from a post-viral chronic disease that the doctors couldn't help me with; and I've written a book on wellness.

So, that's why I use a word like holistic because it means so many things. Whole things. At Braidwood Holistic, I’m working as an Integrative Therapist and Coach.

Integrative meaning bringing stuff together. Therapist meaning benefits to you therapeutically, and Coach meaning motivator, teacher, role model, sometimes drill sergeant, and accountability buddy.

I see clients for at least an hour at a time, unlike other professionals that might see you for 5 to 10 minutes. I'm interested in the whole body, so I don't want to just know that you've got a sniffly nose. I want to ask a whole lot of questions about a whole lot of other aspects of your life.

And it's based on long-term maintenance of human beings. Holistic practice means focusing on how to keep our bodies well. So, not seeking a diagnosis or treatment of a diagnosis. We can do that; we can look at what your diagnosis is, but I'm not actually interested in that. I'm interested in what's the whole picture of you as a person. My perspective is that the best cure for disease is to Be Well in the first place. So, like George was saying, we've got all these aspects of people in our community that need help all the time, not just in drought; that's the wellness perspective as well.

So, some of my methods you'll be familiar with: counselling, nutrition and physical exercise, and then there's methods that you might not have heard of. Brain spotting, fat adaptive therapy, restorative movement, a focus on circadian biology, a focus on mitochondria, and a focus on evolutionary health, so what our ancestors have always done to stay well.

I also use kinesiology; that's a method for testing everybody's balance to identify areas where you do need to start focusing for treatment.

I use the integrated listening system; it's a device that you wear, like a sound therapy device, and it helps neuroplasticity. So, it helps your brain retrain itself. We use that on kids with learning difficulties, ADHD, anyone with anxiety, anyone with chronic pain.

I use flower essences, medicines that have been made from actual flowers that primarily address your emotional health.

And I'm a certified Movnat trainer. Movnat is all about functional movement; the way that humans always moved. And what that means when we use that in a therapy perspective, it's like, what is the way that you move that's holding you back from actually having physical health? So, maybe compensations or just weird, dodgy patterns in your movement that are actually creating pain over a long-term perspective.

And I also work alongside my dog, Dreamer. She's a Therapy Dog, and a lot of you would have seen her down the street. she's a giant Wolfhound-cross. Her job basically is to sit on clients' feet and lick their faces when they're crying, and just get lots of hugs.

There's heaps more that I'm doing there, but I've got a website, and you can look at that, and I'm just constantly adding articles about, not only what I'm doing but we'll see what we're selling in the shop front.Everything in the shop front is very boutique products that are for your wellness and you’re not going to find anywhere else in town, obviously. And actually some things that you might even find in, as far reaching as Canberra.But what I really want to share with you is why the work benefits people. Why would locals come to Braidwood Holistic?

A psychotherapist friend of mine said to me a few weeks ago. “Oh, dude, you're like ten years ahead!” Because what we're doing is combining so many different things: movement, psychotherapy, nutrition, habit, education, and it's not that it's a new idea, but it's not a very common idea.

But actually, it's really supported by the most recent research in science on child development, on trauma, on addiction, on weight loss, on stress, on chronic disease.

It's this bigger picture where people can get stuck with their health because they've fallen into patterns that are repeated and repeated. It gets to an unchecked kind of position where you're just used to doing what you're doing, and you don't even realise that you're doing it.

The body compensates into those patterns, and that can only last for so long. So, clearing the patterns is what's helpful to slow the process of aging, to increase the mitochondrial function, and to cut disease off before it shows up.

As I was writing this, I was thinking about two things racing along. It's like you being healthy and well and disease coming, and you just go to cut it off.

So on the window of Braidwood Holistic, it says “Think Well, Move Well, Eat Well, Do Well and Live Well. And that's really my point to focus when somebody comes in, the things that I want to know about. I want to know how are they thinking? How are they managing their mind? What sort of negative thoughts are in the way? Or what sort of re-patterning can we do with the brain in terms of either trauma or on addiction or something like that?For movement, as I said, it's about functional movement. If you can't sit on the floor, I don't think you should be running for five kilometers. When you're a baby, you learn to lay down and then you sit up and then you crawl and you walk and then you climb. But it's like as an adult, we forget about all those other aspects. So, the movement patterning is looking at where is the pattern missing, basically, and reworking that before we go any further. That has major results on all aspects of your body.

The eating aspect, of course, is about what we eat, but it's also about when we eat, how we eat, what time of the day, how much we're eating. It's not just like, so this lady came into the shop when we first opened and she said, oh she's going to tell us not to eat meat and not to drink alcohol, we have to leave... And I said, well, I certainly won't tell you not to eat meat. So, it's looking at the whole picture of what we're doing with food.

And then the doing aspect is your habits; it's your processes; it's the way that you do the things that you do that could be creating problems for you that you haven't even realised yet.

So, working with a therapist who's focusing on patterns is like having someone holding a mirror up and saying, hey look at this stuff that you've been missing. That's what I do in that position.

Sometimes, that might not be stuff that you want to hear, but I think if you've got that far as to come into the clinic, then you probably want to have an idea about it. So, when I say all that, is there anyone here that can relate to that idea of having patterns that might be in the way? We could work with that.

And also from a business...like this is a business meeting, right? So, from a business perspective, I think that holistic therapy has a huge function for businesses in this town, because if you're are not getting through the world at your optimal level, how can your business be functioning at its optimal level?

So, most of us run our businesses because we like the idea of the lifestyle... (laughs) and then we realise that's ridiculous! ...Or, perhaps we've got something that's unique that we want to share with the world. I know that there's people in this room that are definitely doing that.

But if we are able to show up in the best way for our business and our customers, then to be able to do that, we have to be able to show up for ourselves, that's what I'm trying to say.

It's easy as a business owner to invest in everything except ourselves.

And I just wanted to give you an example of what that looks like. So, I had a client for about six years. In the early days, we did a lot of work, a lot of that mirror stuff, a lot of looking at what needs to change, what are the dysfunctional patterns happening? She went right back to childhood, and she was looking at her parenting, her exercising, spending money and her eating. At that time, she was like always between jobs, she was scraping for her rent, and she spent lots of time on just judging herself. Nobody here does that, I'm sure...

Now, six years later, she comes for a check-in about every half of the year. She got clear on what was most important to her; she cleaned up her self-talk. She's running a six-figure online business, and she turns away clients because she's got too much work. Now, she said that she couldn't have done that without focusing on herself first. She had to remove the stuff that was in the way so she could totally show up for her idea of her business and then make that happen, working as a business owner. So, can anyone relate to that? We could work together.

But personally, so there's all of that right, but personally, there's this other aspect, and it's what George has touched on and even what the CRT guys were talking about. The more cool stuff that's here in Braidwood, the better it is for all of us. So, that's one of the reasons why I want businesses to do well in this town, and that's why I would like to offer my service.

But more importantly, I intend to live in this town for a long time, and I walk down that Main Street every day, and it's a lot more enjoyable when people are smiling, and people are happy, and people are moving well, when they're not judging themselves and telling themselves how horrible they are.

So, that's what I want to see for Braidwood.

On that, all Braidwood businesses get 10 percent off at Braidwood Holistic.

There's flyers there, you can learn more. If you're on social media, we can do social media swaps @braidwoodholistic....

And that's it.

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Hollie Wildëthorn