1. Your Happiness is Worth the Exercise

Welcome to the very first episode of Exercise Your Happiness! Listen in to hear some of my story and learn about how this podcast can help you release the emotional baggage, practice self-acceptance, and shift fear into excitement for life.

If you’d like guidance & support on your emotional wellness journey, go to https://tinabcoaching.as.me/Happiness to book your free emotional strategy session with me.

This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher. 

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Exercise Your Happiness. I'm your host, Tina Bernal. I have to tell you, I'm sitting down recording this, and I just want to get up and walk around my house. I want to pace and move my body because I am so excited, I have this energy that is, like, exuberating from inside of me. And so if you do know me, you know that I'm a high energy person. I'm a fast talker. I talk with my hands, and I'm pretty loud. So I'll try to lower my voice just a little bit so that you can really hear what I'm saying.

So I want to share, really, the importance of this episode, in episode 1, why I called it exercise your happiness. I want you to understand that exercise is a metaphor. It became a metaphor to me because exercise is that movement I needed to move from a place I was in to where I wanted to go. I needed to become someone else. And I needed to do that by what I'll share in future episodes about the understanding of “exercise” itself. What does it really mean? Because I'm not here to help you train for a marathon or lift weights, so to speak. 

But in this word exercise, it became the uncomfortable. It became the persistence, it became showing up when I didn't want to. The burn, repetition, the uncomfortable discomfort, what you feel when you start a workout program or you're committed to going out for walks, and it's, you know, step by step to mile to mile. It's, like, in the path. It's the journey. We don't want to go to the gym all the time, but when we get there, we start working out, we feel better. Or if you don't exercise at all, I want you to use it as a metaphor. 

Understand that in every episode here, I'll share something, give you practical tools, but then you'll have to do the exercise. I don't call it homework, but it's an exercise. It's something that you have to practice over and over. It's like hearing my voice, and I may say something and you hear me, but do you really understand? And I might ask you I actually will share and tell you to go and share that with somebody else so that you fully understand, practice those things. So that's how exercise Your happiness came to be. 

It’s because I had to practice. I had to do something different. I had to be uncomfortable. I had to feel the burn, the pain, and practice that because I didn't have that happiness for a very long time, and I had to shift into that and move into that happiness. So I thought it was really important that I share. I'm so excited that you're here so that you can learn these things. I hear so many women telling me I'm in my own way. I know what to do, but I'm not doing it. And I say you need to exercise, but not in a way that they think that I mean. 

I want to introduce myself again, Tina Bernal. I'm a fitness specialist, integrative health coach, neuro accelerated hypnotist, and working with women for over 15 years, and those are just titles. And if you know me, I'm not driven by titles. I actually I don't want to say I get embarrassed, but I don't really share those titles. I don't really share what I do. I share my stories, my experiences, my tears.

The clients that I work with 1 on 1, they heard it all. If it wasn't for those Struggles, failures, setbacks, and those poor choices that kept me feeling stuck in despair, I would not be here right now, so I'm actually going to start off giving you an exercise. 

I want you to embody this right from episode 1. So now if you're driving, Keep your eyes open. Pay attention to what you're doing, and I want you to Imagine that you're carrying this heavy, heavy backpack, and you've been carrying this heavy backpack for so long. I mean, like, your brow is sweating because you carry this backpack. And I want you to imagine that you take both your hands and you kind of, like, slick your thumbs under the shoulders of the backpack. And you begin to slowly lift that backpack up above your head and over your shoulders, down to your side and let it go of this backpack that you've been carrying for so long, You didn't need to carry it. It became just part of you even though it just became heavier and heavier. And in that backpack were fears, struggles, poor choices, limiting beliefs, the obstacles, The tears and the views and words and things of everyone else, and you carried it because you thought you had to. 

But now you put it on the side of you, and you let it go. I don't even want you to look at it anymore, and so I want you to understand How important how important this is, the power of your mind and the thoughts that you have and why you're listening to me right now saying, well, I really want to find happiness again because that was me. I'm sharing this experience of this metaphor, so to speak, of really understanding that whatever you're carrying, you don't need to carry it anymore. 

So I'm gonna go back and share a story, and I'll come back to that backpack. But in 2008, exercise became this metaphor for me. It was 2008, and I had a crazy emotional episode. And I couldn't control myself. Meaning, I couldn't control my thoughts. It was just chaos in my mind, and I was, like, screaming, Screaming on the top of my lungs to my 2 young boys. I mean, they were all of 5 and 8, 7? I don't know. Not doing the math right now. But I just vividly remember. It's like an imprint of this day, and I was yelling at them. And it was finally when I looked into their eyes, because, again, I've had these episodes maybe quite too often, and I remember looking at them in their eyes, and It was like they saw a monster. Their mother was a monster, and I thought, oh my gosh. What am I doing? And, also, this is what changed. I heard a whisper. What's wrong with you, Tina? Why do you do the things you do? You're not good enough. Hell, you're not even a great mother. It's kind of like you don't even deserve them. 

And in that Short moment. I fell to my knees. I grabbed my boys, and I just hugged them. And I told them I was sorry, which, again, I've said so many times. But I felt that this was so different in that moment. It was just different because I had this feeling. It was like an intuition, this gut feeling That was enough was enough, and I needed to do something different. And that's where this Exercise became that metaphor. 

I needed to get more uncomfortable with myself and find out: why was I saying those things to myself? What were the limits? I had 2 beautiful boys, a wonderful husband. I should be grateful,  right? I still found a way to complain. I still found a way to have excuses, and I finally said enough is enough. I needed to let go of this inner voice, this critical in a voice, and I realized I was holding on. 

Remember the backpack? I remember the heaviness that I finally lifted up with all this strength to start to let it go. At that point, I actually started to open up the backpack like as if I was putting my hand in the backpack and grabbing out the things that I didn't need anymore, to lighten the backpack, to finally take it off my shoulders and put it aside, and walk away from it. 

So the most important message I have for You listening to me, you can do this. You can do hard things. And just like that quote that maybe you heard, “no one's coming to save you,” you can save yourself. 

During my episodes that you will hear and practice and exercise, that you can and will find true happiness even if you've been feeling alone, fearful, longing for maybe just a sense of belonging, and you need guidance. I will provide that for you. Practical tools, my own stories, giving you tips and strategies to help you practice your exercises or maybe the exercises that I provide to you. 

I want you to understand and really know and remember this. Your happiness is worth the exercise. I want to thank you for listening to me on my episode 1 episode 1 of exercise your happiness because This is vulnerable. This is different. It's uncomfortable, and my being able to share this with you, makes me happy.