Speaker 1: What does it mean to live holistically, and how can you get your whole family involved? For answers, we turn to Dr. Erica Steele from Holistic Family Practice. Dr. Erica, how are you doing?
Speaker 2: Hello April. I’m doing so well. Thanks for asking.
Speaker 1: Good. Alright, so what exactly is a holistic lifestyle? How do you define that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so holistic is everything, right? It’s body, it’s mind, it’s spirit, right? It’s the environment. It’s how we feel about our work, our relationships, our mental, our emotional or spiritual connections. And even looking at the ancestry, which is a little bit of what we’re talking about. Okay, so what Can parents get their children hooked on, living a holistic life?
Yeah, so children are very intelligent. I think a lot of times we don’t take into consideration that they’re watching everything that we’re doing, and they are just taking in information moment by moment and really studying us. So I think the biggest thing is if parents model certain behaviors, right?
I have a. She’s an adult now. But I modeled all of those behaviors as she was growing up. So we talked about our food, we talked about nutrition, we talked about emotions. We really talked about meditation and yoga. E even if she didn’t do it per se, at least as an adult, at least when we were growing up, she was exposed to all of that, and my parents did the same. So I was very, And
Speaker 1: That’s cool too because, when she gets stressed out, she knows she has a go-to that she can use. So why do you need to do it early, when the kids are young?
Speaker 2: Because they don’t, they’re impressionable obviously, especially before they get into school and they’re getting influences from their friends and. The school system, et cetera. And so really putting those foundations in place early is really important because that subconscious mind develops between zero and eight years old. So all those memories and all those experiences and perceptions are all based around what they’re exposed to when they’re in that zero to eight year old. Okay.
Speaker 1: I can’t imagine sitting a two year old down and saying, okay, now listen, Johnny, we’re gonna be. Holistic and so like how do you introduce it to your kids? Is it more of an action type of thing? And you, you do what I do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s totally action. So like even with my two year olds that I treat in my practice, right? So when, let’s say I have to listen to their lungs or their heart or whatever, I actually model that breath. Okay, go ahead and take a deep breath. And then I take it in and then hold it. And then, so really I’m showing them and they do it. They, I have a three-year-old, he was a three-year-old who would talk about his emotions.
He’d be like, I’m so frustrated, Dr. Steele, and so I’d say, oh, you’re frustrated, and why are you. Frustrated because I can’t play with my toy, okay, I understand. And what are you gonna do with that frustration? So we can really guide them through the process. Especially helping them to put that language and that communication to how they’re feeling.
Especially cuz a lot of times they don’t know. They don’t know what they’re, yeah.
Speaker 1: I know that three years old sounds precocious. Okay. I know that you have an online course. Can you tell us about it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we do. So I really developed an online crash course for people that wanna be holistic, right? Because there’s a lot of buzz around being holistic and people don’t really always know about what it means to be holistic. So I’ve developed it’s a, about a six to nine month course, and it just goes over from beginning to end, practical tips, tools, things that people can implement every single day so that they can take that into their lives and then teach their kid.
Speaker 1: All right, Dr. Erica Steele, thank you so much for being with us today, and I love the hat.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you . Take care. All right.