Have you ever painted a wall in your house and felt like the experience of the entire room was transformed--from a can of paint?
Today we talk about how the little things are the big things. And how it often doesn't take much to shift us-- how we move, how we think--even our whole damn lives.
Weekly stories by email from Bonnie’s HERE
Connect with Bonnie: Instagram, Email (hello@bonnieweeks.com), Website
Listen to Bonnie's other podcast Sexy Sunday HERE
The music for this episode is Threads by The Light Meeting.
Produced by: Grey Tanner
Have you ever painted a wall in your house and felt like the experience of the entire room was transformed--from a can of paint?
Today we talk about how the little things are the big things. And how it often doesn't take much to shift us-- how we move, how we think--even our whole damn lives.
Weekly stories by email from Bonnie’s HERE
Connect with Bonnie: Instagram, Email (hello@bonnieweeks.com), Website
Listen to Bonnie's other podcast Sexy Sunday HERE
The music for this episode is Threads by The Light Meeting.
Produced by: Grey Tanner
Bonnie (00:01.442)
Mmm, here we are back together. Thank you for being here, love.
Today, I want to share with you a story about me staring at walls. I promise this is about me paying attention. Last night, last night I watched a movie, I watched The Age of Adeline, which I've been wanting to see. And it had me thinking about how we spend time together, had me thinking about the concept of time and of age and of intention and...
and caring about each other. And I finished that movie and was kind of like in the feels of that. And I was lying on the floor and I started looking around the room and around in that space, I have two black walls. I mean, one of the walls has kind of has indent parts. So there's a couple, like if you were to stand back, it looks like two walls, but there's like a little cove in it too. So two sides of the room are painted black.
And you know, kind of general furniture up there. And I'm just sitting there on the floor and I'm looking at these walls that are painted black. So this is a setting for me last night. And I'm staring at these walls and I was thinking about how about a month ago, I painted the second wall black and it was this kind of gray color before like the rest of the house.
And this is now one, two, three, four, five. This is my fifth black wall in the house. Oh, six, there's one behind me too. So I have a lot of black walls in the house in different places and I love it. Like I love it so much. It gives a depth to a space in a really lovely way. And in this room, I was like, I just really thought that I needed to paint two of the walls black up there. And so about a month ago I did.
Bonnie (02:06.966)
So as I'm sitting there on the ground and I'm staring at the walls and I'm thinking about connection, I automatically started thinking about Flow School I started thinking about how this week I've been emailing people and telling them about like the dates and times and what's, when's, the how's, like how it all just works and to, you know, be in Flow School But why? And...
I don't know, maybe I do have a good enough reason of talking about why and talking about creative sequencing and talking about owning your voice and talking about how when you own your voice as a leader, and yes, I work with yoga teachers, but I also work with other creatives too. When you own the fuck out of your voice and when you embody your like, yes daddy energy and you're like, here I am and I have something to give and you connect with that like internal knowing of your body where you like know things.
You know that it's gonna be helpful. You know that that's powerful inside you. When you connect that and let it be a visceral feeling on the outside of your body, you let your body not try to get smaller, right? You don't try to get smaller with your voice or your body, but you let yourself be embodied. Like you get bigger in your body to allow there to be space for that internal part to come out. I Things shift, things shift. And
Flow School is a tool to help teachers learn how to creative sequence, learn how to cue, and learn how to own the hell out of their voice in that process because you can't do something different half ass. You have to own it. And that's like part of Flow School is doing things a little bit different than a traditional yoga class. And so in order to do it that way, you have to step into a new version of yourself.
One that really wants to be there and is a really a beautiful space of transition time and like my painted wall,
Bonnie (04:12.054)
there is a tool, right? Like this paint was, I grabbed a can of paint and I painted the wall and the paint was a tool and the room has changed. So I want to give you an idea. And this idea is that when I came up into my loft space before it was painted, I want you to think about this first. So you can close your eyes unless you're driving.
You walk up the stairs and you get to the top of the stairs. There's like a mirror horizontally, like right in front of you. And if you go a little bit right, there's a hallway that goes down. And that's my kid's bedrooms. And if you keep turning right, then there's the loft. And as you're looking at it from the top of the stairs, on your far left-hand side, so it's like kind of a squarish room, there is the TV. And if you keep following the wall, there's a little alcove where I have a desk. And then there was a wall where there was books.
lining the shelf and then it keeps going around and there's a couch and there's some plants and then there's a half wall that's right by the stairs. There's windows on two of those walls, not the TV wall, there's no window on that wall, but there's windows on the other walls. So this is the room. There's a TV, there's a desk, there's a coffee table, there's a chair, there's a smaller bookshelf, there's a big, like a long shelf wall with some bookshelves, there's a couch and this is the room.
So very much like I am a room, right? And you are a room and we have a certain order inside of us. And we can't really see our order because it's like inside this skin. And sometimes we can see the way that the order on the inside affects the outsides of us, right? I Like, think about when you get really sad.
Think about when you go through heartbreak and your whole body, your chest feels literally like it's breaking open. You can feel that shit in your body. You're like, no, I like, like the middle of my chest is cracking. It's a visceral sort of physical thing, right? So you hold, we hold our bodies in different ways depending on what's happening on the outside. I mean, sorry, on the inside. And so I sat there in my loft, looking at the walls and thinking about the layout of the room. Now that was the layout, but then I bought a can of paint and I said, I gotta paint this wall black.
Bonnie (06:35.314)
I moved those bookshelves out of the room, out of that loft. I mean, technically it's all kind of one big space, but now when you walk up the stairs, there's a mirror on the wall right that you can see when you walk up the stairs, but now the bookshelves live right there with all like children's books and some chapter books on it. So when you now turn to the right to look in the loft, you see the black walls, you see the couch, all the other furniture is there, but the bookshelf is gone.
And I had a small lamp that was downstairs, downstairs in my house, and I moved it upstairs last night. So I was like, man, I really need a lamp, not this overhead light. And I put a lamp in the corner, in a corner that was actually fairly dark, and it's perfect. And I was laying in there, looking at the wall, thinking about how I bought a can of paint, I moved a bookshelf.
and I added a light. And everything else in that room is the same. Every other piece of furniture in that room is the same. And I think about how for me, when maybe something that I learn or some phrase that I find in myself or something that I hear somebody says, how it can shift me and how I still like have all these other parts of me, but it's like,
It's like I get a light in a dark place. It's like I learn how to look from right to left and just have a different perspective. And it can be such a small thing, but it has such a big impact. So I'm sitting in that room, I'm thinking about connection, I'm thinking about Flow School, and I'm looking at these painted walls. And I was thinking, you know what? As much as it's important to know the what, the where, the whens of Flow School.
And of how we show up as teachers and how we show up as humans and how we work together and how we learn to live into our own voice and into our own creativity and into how to integrate that into our lives and how to innovate and how to help other people around us.
Bonnie (08:56.722)
I started to think about how Flow School is like my interior design experience of this last month and how you might show up with 376 things inside of you that you call yoga and they're great. And Flow School will give you a can of paint, help you move a piece of furniture and add a light.
The rest is the same. Now, suddenly, if you've ever been in a space that's been transformed by a little bit of paint and some furniture moving, you might know. It has a totally different feeling, like such a different feeling. I wanna be there like so much now. I'm like, ah, this is nice. It changed everything. And I started to think about how that's how Flow School is. It gives you just a couple tools
to change the feeling in the room. The feeling in the room that you might create as a physical room where teachers or where students might come and show up, it changes the feeling of the room of you, like myself as a room, you as a room, the insides of us that aren't quite visible, the way that our brain works, the way that our perspective is, like the way that it shifts, the way that we might grow and learn and ask questions. Those things change
in very small ways, but it has to be really intentional, right? We have to show up. We have to commit to this process of being like, I don't know. Like, and you have to go through a process where you might come in at a high when you're learning something new and then you're like, oh shit, this is hard. And then you might dip out, but you have to pass through the hard part. You have to pass through the part where it feels wonky because it's going to feel like a new beginning because you moved things in a different place. And
you have to get out of that and you have to keep moving forward into that. Because if I stopped in the middle of painting that wall where there's plastic all over the place, books from the bookshelf, oh my gosh, actually, that middle space was chaos. And my kids had friends over and they were sitting amongst these bookshelves that were falling over. There was, there was stuff everywhere. There was, we were crawling over each other. It was, it was chaos. And now if I had stopped there, the feeling in the loft,
Bonnie (11:20.738)
I would count it as worse than it began. So sometimes it gets worse before it gets better in the process of organizing and integrating. That's how it works. And Flow School, as I was thinking about it, I'm like, you know, here I am in this season of sharing about Flow School. And this podcast has been around for a minute. I started Flow School after I started this podcast.
And so if you've been with me for a second, you've listened to like that growth in that space and me stepping into this ownership, even for myself, of like, you know, people have asked me about Flow and how do I do it? And I do it different and trying to make that as a conscious thing to myself of like, how do I do this different? And how can I help people do that and learn how to do this and learn how to teach it? And figuring out a system that you can personalize that still takes effort--
because it does, because things take effort. And being able to give it, and being able to watch it transform people's lives, I can't say how impactful that is. Like it feels like, I'm not quite sure how to put that into words because it's given people the freedom to move. It's helped them choose. It's helped them choose more of them--
by talking about creative sequencing and moving your body because our bodies are like these tactile things that are malleable. And the physical practice is so important because it helps you shift your insides. It helps you shift your insides. And that changes your perspective. If you put a light in a place, if you paint a wall, if you move a piece of furniture,
the room shifts and it has a different feeling. This is what Flow School is like. I give you a different tool of how to build a sequence and why to do it and where to shine a light on a particular piece and how to do it and why a piece of furniture might make more sense over here if you're going for said experience. So all of these pieces then are small ways that you start to build a room
Bonnie (13:42.022)
that you teach in. And you can almost think of that as a visual piece of like if you were to build a room that you would want to gather people in and you could name the furniture different things, right? And so that's what we're doing. And that's what Flow School does. And my whole hope with it is that it gives you the tools to create the room that makes you feel like you belong in it.
And that you create belonging for others in it, that there's space for others. You're like, oh, come over here, come sit by me. That's the rooms we're looking to build. And to give you a couple tools in order to own that is a gift.
Bonnie (14:28.819)
So this is my thought about looking at walls. This is my thought about Flow School. And I just want to take this minute where yes, I'm talking about Flow School and yes, I'm starting online Flow School in January and signups will be open like this Saturday as I'm recording this for Flow School that starts in January 2024.
And there will be other Flow schools online. You know, this is what I am doing. Like this is working with teachers is what I'm doing. And in real life is happening more. So if you want me in person, if you want me to like be with you, to Flow with you next to you on your mat, to talk about the things in real life, come find me. I'm gonna be in Florida in March. I'm gonna be in Sacramento in May. And I'm gonna be in Switzerland in October. And I might go back to Texas in 2025.
And I really would like to get up to BC Canada because I was up there once and I would love to go back there. So if you're in those places, you know, let me know. There's other places. So I think there's this draw I have to be with you in the room. Let's just keep talking about rooms, yeah? And I just want to use this moment to express gratitude because you've been here with me for a second, a lot of you. And that...
You've watched this podcast kind of evolve. You've watched me evolve. Like there's so many stories that I share here. And, um, the gratitude I have for those people who show up for Flow School, who have, and that if this is round 13 that I'm going into and the hundreds of teachers that I have had the privilege of working with, they continue to teach me how to teach and how to help you own the hell out of your voice.
And--
Bonnie (16:25.794)
That was an honor.
And it is small things because you have the things that you need. You have the furniture, you have the lamp. You just got to put it in a different place. You just got to let it be a little bit brighter. You actually turn it on. Right? Or what if that wall is blue instead of purple? And it is small sorts of shifts, and it can be really intimidating or it can be like you feel like you're in a stuck place, like nothing's moving, like the energy doesn't flow through the room. Right.
And when you feel like you're in a stuck place, it's really hard and there's not a lot of joy in it. And Flow School, one of my whys on top of all of this is because it reignites your joy, not just in teaching, but in your own body and in your own movement.
And that type of joy, when you feel connected to you and to the movement in you, that type of joy is so contagious. Your joy is contagious. That can't not affect other people. This is why Flow School exists. This is why, this is what I'm doing with my life until I'm not doing it with my life.
Like this is what I do. If you are a teacher, and you're like, wow, this is what I want. This is what I've been called to do. Help me rearrange my room. Come talk to me. Flow School, come find me in Flow School. I am doing mentorship. I'm doing online mentorship. I have them, I have a couple varieties of ways to work with me online. You can book a discovery call 20 minutes for free. Come and talk to me. Make social media social. Y'alls, like this is our best life. This is the one life we have. In my movie, Age of Adelaide, she like was living forever, but you know what? Then...
Bonnie (18:19.566)
Well, I won't spoil it for you. So, but we don't live forever. This is it. Like this is it right now. And we're so lucky to be here.
And let's get bigger. Let's own it a little bit more. And if you're feeling called, reach out, come talk to me. And if I'm not the person, then let me direct you to somebody else who is.
I love you big. I am grateful for you to be here and for your practice of paying attention. And maybe you have had looking at walls experiences like I have where all of a sudden it does this whole train of thought and now Flow School is now rearranging room.
Hmm. Keep practicing paying attention loves. Talk to you soon.