370-Self-Love & Hypnotherapy with Kim Basler

Hypnotherapy & Self-Love

This is a conversation that has been building for years between me and Kim Basler. We’ve been internet friends for years but had yet to spend time in 1-1 conversation.

Kim has a long history of dieting and decades as a fitness professional where her body was her “business card”. Today on the other side she shares her journey and how we be in love for our body!

What you’ll learn listening to this episode on Hypnotherapy & Self-Love:

• How identities play into cycle of self-destructive behaviors
• What is hypnosis 
• How to best use hypnosis and NLP for food and body image
• Loving our bodies versus loving on our body

Mentioned in the show: 

Undiet Your Life Program

Non-Diet Coaching Certification

Kim’s Guided Self-Hypnosis

14-Day Free Trial inside Kim’s Empowered Movement Community

Connect with our guest:

Website – Kim Basler

Instagram – Kim Basler

Facebook – Kim Basler

Transcript

Self-Love & Hypnotherapy with Kim Basler

Welcome to the podcast, Kim. Hi, Stephanie. So happy to be here with you. Years in the making. Literally years in the making. It’s pretty amazing. We’ve known each other for years and we’ve been talking back and forth about having this conversation on the podcast and talking about what you do and it’s happening today.

So I’m very excited about that. Very excited. for you to talk about your journey as a woman through fitness and where you are now and how you’re helping people. And we’re going to talk about hypnosis, which is an area that I do not have any or very little knowledge on. So get ready for an amazing conversation.

So tell us your story. How did you came to be in the non diet space and helping women there? Yeah, thank you for this question. I mean, like you big long stories, right? So we decide what we want to share. Um, I grew up very much in a home environment where there was a lot of dieting, started dieting at 12 years old, similar to you and, you know, you kind of go into an environment and in a culture and a living lived experience that everyone’s doing around you.

And it sort of becomes your norm. Unfortunately, we know what can happen. And the dieting took me into a high school where I was really fixated on trying to make my body smaller like so many women are and that led me into an eating disorder. And then I went into the fitness industry, you know, I started I joined a gym at 14 as we’re told.

Exercise more, you can get your body smaller. And I went right into, I mean, this is back in the 1990s. So I, I was in all of this space. I didn’t know that I was not In a good space, you know, you just kind of are doing what you’re doing. And then I went into the industry, fitness industry, and I was working in that space for a really, really long time and juggling all the balls and being a mother and exercising way more than one should and just really fixated on the scale.

That was my was my daily thing that I did every morning when I woke up. And it was going, I’ll say, well, in quotations, um, until it wasn’t, until my body started to tell me that I couldn’t live like this anymore, my signs of my body telling me, you know, we ignore, we ignore what we feel, we push our bodies, many of us, and that’s what I did until my body started to tell me that I was not doing well.

And it started out with, um, body hives. I had, I was full of body hives and those body hives were being treated every single day with Allergy medication, which is what I was just told to do, and then it went into chest pains, chest palpitations, chest pains, and, you know, when you’re trying to juggle all of the things that you believe you have to do and how you’re supposed to look as a woman, it’s going to start to impact the other parts of your life, and it then started to impact my marriage, and I just felt like I couldn’t do all I couldn’t do it all anymore.

I was literally, I don’t like to, I used to call it a breakdown, a mental breakdown. I don’t call it that anymore, but I, and I’m just going to give a little, a little warning here. Cause I come into some sensitive conversation. Now I was, my brain was trying to show me ways out. You know, I couldn’t, I couldn’t keep up the pace anymore.

I was falling apart. I wasn’t sleeping anymore. I was unhappy, but I didn’t know how to get out because it was the identity that I’d known myself to be for my entire life. And I felt like a failure. I felt like it was all my fault. And then in 2016, I wish I could say that I was strong enough to say I need help, but that’s not what happened.

I, uh, you’re nodding your head. You get it. Um, I had, you know, whether you believe in God, but there was something higher than me that came in. And I literally did fall to my knees in a, in a In just the tsunami of tears that just would not stop and I had to get out and I just said, you know, I don’t know what this is going to look like.

I want to go on a medical leave, but that’s where it started for me. And I recognized that as, as I left the industry of fitness and spent a lot of long days by myself trying to figure out who I am and trying to recognize, like, what’s left because I can’t do this anymore. And that’s where it started for me.

And I learned very quickly that I had been dieting my entire life and how much that had impacted my joy, my happiness, my ability to love me for who I am and my healing journey began. So that’s a little bit of a snapshot. Thank you for sharing that and there’s two things that stand out for me, and I’m sure you can talk about that, but it’s the word identity Because as a fitness professional for decades, I think For me it was the corporate world with making a lot of money, right?

Your identity is Rewarded by society as a healthy person, a person who makes a lot of money and runs big business. Our identity is acknowledged, rewarded, positioned by society. Talk to me a little bit about that from a fitness perspective. Because you’re supposed to be in the most healthy environment, right?

Yeah, that’s exactly right. You know, so many of us and I say us, anybody that works in the field, we’re recognizing that this push this chase this idealistic look of how we’re supposed to be, it’s exhausting, and it’s burning us out and it’s making us sick. And yeah, I was caught up in it and I look, I look back like as even from a child, I struggled with who I was, like my self worth was right from a childhood.

Age so I openly talk about how I sought the validation. My ego needed the validation. And so the thinner I got. The more praise I got and you know, when I became a mother and everyone saw everything that I was doing, I was also praised for that. I don’t know how you do it all. Tell me how you do it all.

You look so great. And so even though I was falling apart and I knew that I wasn’t able to keep this up. We put on the mask, right? Like how many times would I walk into the gym and I’d have to put the mask on. I had 40, 50 people in front of me that were there wanting me to smile as I always did Stephanie, but I was tired and burnt out.

So, yeah, it was the only thing I knew. It was the only thing I believed I was good at. And I was good at it. I became instructor of the year for all of Canada for the company I worked for. So I was good at what I was doing. But it wasn’t coming from the foundation of love. It was coming from a foundation of, you know, this is what controls my body size.

Yes. I have fun teaching, but the, the root of it was coming from the calorie burning and the thinness and the validation. Yeah. And we, because we’re rewarded for this identity, it’s hard to come out of it. Yeah. And I don’t even think I knew that at the time. Like, I didn’t know that at the time that that’s what I was, what, that’s what I was doing.

That comes from all of the work of the healing. Right. Um, but yeah, but you met the resistance, like it was hard. So I want people to hear your story. It may not know it’s their identity, but the resistance. The feeling of stuckness you’re in, perhaps it’s a story similar to us in a different identity. Yeah, and it’s the behaviors and it’s the ways we live every day that become that person that we know ourselves to be.

Right? And it’s those behaviors and that way of being. That is, I’m gonna call it a drug. It’s the, it’s the, it’s the drive. It’s the addiction. It’s the, ooh, that steel that you get from that. Right? Yeah. So, beautiful story. And today, 180 in another place. Now you help women. That are going through this journey themselves.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, it’s beautiful and it’s um, it’s come about in the most wonderful way. You know, when I think back to the first few clients that I worked with, right, we brought the clients that help us. Right. And it’s been wonderful. And it’s, it’s been a space where I’ve been able to help them gain the clarity that they wanted for their lives.

I’m not here to tell them what their self love or their self worth should look like, but I am here to help them recognize that what you’re doing isn’t working for you. So let’s just recognize that and then seek out what will feel good. Right. And being a space for them. So yeah, I’ve worked one on one with a lot of clients.

We did it. I’ve done a lot of one on one coaching as many of us do. And, and then now I’ve got my beautiful communities that I serve in and I support. And I love that so much because as much as it’s about healing the relationship with food and learning how to accept our bodies, it’s also then all of the other pieces, the courage, the confidence, the things that we’re allowing ourselves to do now that we weren’t allowing ourselves to do before.

And that’s really what excites me too, because when we can step away from all of the rules and the conditions of what we’re supposed to be as women, we then see a bigger ceiling of where we can go with our lives. You’re telling me about Powered Women? Yeah. And it’s a movement community. And I wanna, I want you to explain what you do in there, because I think a lot of women listening here are at the stage where they have, they’re like done with dieting.

That is a no-brainer for them. And they wanna move their body, but they’re struggling. Mm-hmm. . And all they can find out there is a traditional fitness model. And I’m assuming your model is completely different. That’s right. Well, I can tell you straight out that my model and this community came about when I was still, I actually went back to the gyms.

I just want to say that I went back to the gyms teaching when I left management. I still went back to teaching, but when the pandemic came, I had to leave that space. And of course, many of us, we went online thinking it would be for two weeks and we would be back, but we knew that that’s not what happened.

And so I was teaching for a while, and then I, and I was doing so for free, and then I decided to create this community. So this community is really helping. It came from a place of movement, which your listeners might also understand to be exercise, but I call it movement, and it is a space where we are in weight neutral.

There’s no conversation in there about the exercise. Being about shrinking our bodies or changing our bodies. It’s about using movement to make us feel better to help us feel stronger to give us more mobility energy confidence. So, you know, and I guess the other thing is to none of my classes are, are, I’m going to say, crazy hard, like, you know, and they might be hard for maybe harder for the beginner, of course, but I’m not in there to create Something that feels too hard.

I want more people moving. I want women moving. So it’s learning how to be able to find the ways to move our bodies, release the rules, give ourselves permission to move our bodies the way we want. So as much as I teach live classes in that space, I also have an on demand library that probably has, I bet you 130 classes in there by now.

And so everything is, is usually around that 30 minute mark. And they get to go in there and choose what they want to do that day. No different than me. I don’t want to force my body to do things that it doesn’t want to do anymore. I want to move my body to keep it well and strong as I age, but I don’t want to force it to do things that are uncomfortable.

So that’s what the library is so great. So we’ve got the movement piece in there, of course. But the other thing that we do in that space is it’s really about sisterhood. You know, the women that have joined that space have created that space. They are there to support each other through their challenges.

They are there to support each other through their confidence, through their body image issues. You know, as much as we all know that the dieting doesn’t work, let’s be real. We still feel the feels because we live in this society. So I’m in there navigating and helping these women through those tougher days.

They help each other and, and we’re all there to help each other see what’s possible. You know, we’ve got women in their 60s and their 70s who are Who are in different stages of life. And then we have some women in their 20s and their 30s. So what I’m seeing here is beautiful generational support. And it’s, it’s lovely.

I am, I am just thrilled by it. So that’s a little bit about it. I love how you’re using what you’ve been doing for 15, 20 years, the fitness, which you’re really good at and have. shitload of experience and you’ve turned that around to create, yeah, fitness, but way more than that. You’re using the medium of fitness to help create courage and power and all that stuff.

But there’s another thing you do. And this is new. I did not know that. And I want to talk about it. It’s called hypnosis. Yeah. I’ve never talked about hypnosis and 364 episode. Well, allow me to be your first. What is hypnosis and how does it help with our journey of undying our life? Beautiful. Okay. So I went into this level of training because I needed it for myself because I’m going to keep this in the language that will help your listeners understand.

So. Everything that we’re doing in our life, all of our behaviors, our actions, which create the results that we have come from our thoughts. So we know that 95, somewhere up to 99% of our thought patterns are coming from our subconscious mind. Okay. So the subconscious mind is definitely rooted in those early years between zero and seven.

When we are trying to create change, let’s talk about the diet and dieting our lives. We have those patterns. We have the things that our mama or our grandma said to us when we were little kids, that’s all in our subconscious. What hypnotherapy allows me to help you do. And then it teaches my clients to do it too, is to be able, what we do is we go into the theta into our brainwaves into a deep.

Deep level of relaxation. When people think of hypnosis, they think of the comedy. They think of the person quacking like a duck. Hypnotherapy is about a deep level of relaxation that I take you into, which allows your conscious brain that wants to fight. Okay. It basically goes to sleep. And it allows me to then speak into your subconscious mind, what it is that you desire, what it is that you want for your life, how you can learn, how to take these rules that have been a part of our lives for so long and put them to rest, put them to rest and speak into the subconscious mind, how I want to feel about food, how I want to feel about my body.

So it’s is Your subconscious mind will only ever take on what is aligned with your values. So sometimes think, well, oh, my goodness. Well, what is she going to make me do? Well, I can’t make you do anything or take on any beliefs that are not already aligned with who you want to be. So this is such a beautiful tool because.

You know, we all know you talk about self sabotage all the time, right? We, we are trying to do things with our conscious mind, which is maybe responsible for 5%, 5%. So no wonder. And I don’t want, I don’t want people to understand we’re not failing here. We just have to be able to address that subconscious.

So that’s what the hypnotherapy allows me to do is I, and I mean, most people are coming to me for the food behaviors for the self love for the body image, right? But it goes into everything. I’ve got people that I’ve helped with anxiety with, with, um, confidence, like so many different things. Right. Um, yeah.

Give me an example, because as you said, I was laughing when she was saying like about the quacking on the stage, but Most uneducated people like me think of hypnosis as a showtime, but what really happens in the session just to like, create a level of safety with people if they ever want to do it? What does that look like in a hypnosis therapy session?

Beautiful. I love this question. So the wonderful thing is I do it through zoom. Okay, so it can be done virtually. So for the safety, first of all, we always what I do is I meet with people ahead of time to find out exactly what their desires are. Okay. They then really spend time on their own thinking about how if I have this desired goal, this desired identity, whatever I want to think, well, how do I know when I’m getting there?

What am I going to see when I’m living as this person? What will I see? What will I hear? What will I feel? What will my days look like? Right? So we’re really painting that picture, which they share with me, and then I build that in on my own time when I’m not with them into this beautiful script that I’ve created for them.

They come into Zoom, we see each other on our screen, we create that safe space in there, and then they can choose to sit down, they can choose to lie down in their own home. I do see them, and that’s important that I can see them. I invite them to close their eyes, and then I literally… Put on my beautiful music and I record.

That’s the key here is I record the session because although the hypnotherapy sessions already working for them right there on the spot, we know that the subconscious mind needs repetition. Okay. So then I create this recording for them. I then send it to them and then they will use that recording for sure in the first few weeks, three to four times best time to listen to hypnotherapy recordings.

And you know, any type of meditation work is first thing in the morning when we first wake up. Go to the bathroom, listen, or before bed, right? And then we follow up with another session afterwards to see how they’re doing. So it’s, it’s beautiful. My clients have had such wonderful, wonderful support with it.

And it is that next step that I’m so grateful I have. I often combine the hypnotherapy with also time techniques. Time techniques allows me. to support them. Time techniques allows me to help them travel in their timeline, in their subconscious mind. So we can go back to root behaviors. You know, where’s your root behavior, where you felt shame, where’s your root behavior, where you felt, um, fear, guilt.

Okay, these types of feelings that people have stuck in our bodies. So those tools go really, really nicely together. And often after the hypnotherapy, I’ll then use some of my other tools from neuro linguistic programming, which helped to then create those anchors in our body that we can then use so that when I feel confident when I feel.

Free around the food table around the potluck dinner, and I’m feeling so secure in myself, or maybe I’m on the beach and I’m like, you know what? I feel so good. And you can anchor those feelings in. So, um, they’re beautiful tools. It gives me shivers as I talk about it. Your, your passion comes through the zoom screen.

So, if no success. This therapy is about you narrating a script. To me, the recipient client will hear that and it will go directly in my subconscious mind. Did I understand this right? Correct. And the script is created based on what your desires are. That’s the key. And so we have something called the critical faculty, which is in our brain.

I like to call it like the wall, the wall between the subconscious and the conscious mind. So when I take you through this beautiful long meditation process, I’ll call it meditation, but it is getting you into your theta, right? We’ve all had those times where you’re driving in your car and you’re just really relaxed.

That’s what we’re doing. We, we go into hypnotherapy into a hypnosis state many times in our lives. So I’m taking you there in order to let that critical faculty go to rest for a while, put it to sleep so that I can then speak in with these beautiful embedded commands into the subconscious mind. And that’s when the reprogramming rewiring happen and then you let go.

So many people want to let go. That’s how we let go of. Yeah. Yeah. And you like, it is there, there comes a time where people are like, you know what? I’m just done. I just want this so much. Right. And that’s the thing. We’ve been doing too many things with the conscious mind. We’ve been using the willpower.

Right. Stephanie, we’ve been using the willpower. We’ve been using. Yeah. We’ve also been using language like, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore. And we know that, that the subconscious mind can’t, you know, deliver on those negatives. Right? So it’s all about the way is the words are spoken and the subconscious mind like a sponge and it’s like, okay, okay, the subconscious mind will take you wherever you want to go.

It’s like you speak into it and it doesn’t know the difference between real or imaginary. If you speak it in and you speak it in a way. Your subconscious mind goes, oh, that’s where she wants to go. That’s where she wants to go. And the more we take on that behavior pattern and those thought patterns, we then naturally start to take on the behaviors of that because it starts from the thoughts.

What’s your opinion on this? Labeling ourselves. So I’ll give an example in the world of chronic pain, right? I. I’m someone with chronic pain. Oh, I’m a binge eater. I am a binge eater. Let’s take that example staying into food that just came to me. Yeah. Yeah. What’s the impact of taking on the identity of our quote unquote problem?

How does that play in the subconscious mind? Well, again, it’s going right back to that, what we just talked about. So the subconscious mind is listening. Um, I, I did not come up with this analogy, but I’m going to use it right now because it makes full sense. So I want you to picture that you’re walking around your world and you have a little executive assistant who’s walking around with you and she’s got her little notepad out.

I am a binge eater and she’s got her notepad and she’s like, Oh, binge eater. I’m going to make sure that I, that I found all the foods that she’s going to binge eat on because that’s who she wants to be. So think about that. Right? Yeah. Think about that. So when you’re taking on the behavior, you’re saying, this is my identity.

Well then that’s the behaviors that you’re taking on. Cause that’s where that comes from. So no. Like what I am not a binge eater and not a binge, even though we’ve, it’s kind of like all the people who say I’m an addict. I’m this. I’m it’s the labels. They don’t help us. The labels don’t help us. What if we’re going to say I am something.

How about saying I am a piece of food. I, my body knows what it needs. I have the ability to listen to my body and give it what it needs. I have coping skills and I can use those alongside food, like there’s so many things that we can say. Let’s keep our language positive. Right? I’m going to use this beautiful example for your listeners, Stephanie, don’t think of a pink elephant.

What did you think of? Pink elephant. Right? Okay. So, so let’s think about what we’re saying. If I want to think about who I want to be, think about that and speak that out in those terms. That’s the direction we want to go with our thoughts. So that’s phenomenal because that’s what I do unconsciously. Like I, I’m not, I don’t, I’m not a chronic pain person.

I experience chronic pain. I’m not a stress person. I experience stress. That’s right. Cause it’s not who we are. They’re the, they’re the feelings that we’re experiencing, right? It’s not about denying what’s happening to you. That’s not what we’re saying. You experience binge eating, but you’re not. That’s exactly right.

Let’s talk about self love because you have this beautiful gift for the listener, which is a self love hypnosis, which I think is brilliant because people can experience hypnosis, right? For all the people who are like me, who’s never experienced it, experience it. And also geared towards that goal of loving ourselves more.

Well, and it’s a self love itself, self esteem, right? We know that our feelings about our body. You know, I’m actually presenting on body imaging them in a month and there are some people that can have lived a certain lifestyle, but they’re not experiencing it the same way, you know, they’re not impacted the same way.

So what’s the difference, right? So we have to build up that level of self esteem and that confidence in ourselves, instead of constantly feeling like I have to learn how to love this body that feels pressure for people. So it’s like, that’s why I really believe that we have to see ourselves nurture, nurture this body, take care of this body, love on this body, but also all of the other pieces.

So in this hypnotherapy recording that I’ve created for your listeners as a gift, it’s, I don’t want to give it all away, but it’s a beautiful journey that they’re going to go on through me. So it’s a beautiful narrative story that I’m going to walk them through and they’re going to be doing things in this narration in this time in the recording that’s allowing them to release things from their past that they have been holding on to their whole life.

And when we can start to let go, you know, we’re holding, let’s go back to this identity. We’re holding on to things that people have said about us, that we’ve said about ourselves. And we get to start to let that go. We don’t have to let our past come with us into the future. Right? I love the analogies of the stories.

You know, we get to turn the page. So this recording will be there for your listeners. And they get to listen to this. All the instructions will come with it when they download it. And um, it’s a beautiful, beautiful gift and I, and I hope that everybody takes the time to get it. I think it’s fundamental to change our story that we tell ourselves to be one of love, right?

Towards our overall person, because that’s the foundation of us. So many people want to take the right action to take care of themselves, right? They want to move their body. They want to drink more water, not because they want to lose weight, just because they want to take care of themselves. But in order to have those good health promoting habits, we need to come at the habit from a place of love.

That’s right. Right. We know that nothing’s going to come. You know, you could be doing all the behaviors, but if you’re doing them from the wrong energy, it doesn’t matter. Right. Be sustainable. No. And then let’s, let’s also assume you might get there, get there and then be like, well, what now? I mean, I can think of all the times when I was in a very, very, very small body and I was not happy.

I still found faults in it. So we have to be able to find love, find love. We might not be in love, but can we find love? Yeah. For this body, because if we can find love for this body, then we’re going to want to take care of her, take care of her. What does that look like? You know, and this is this part of looking into our future.

If I want to envision myself loving this body, this body that has worked so hard for me, this body that I might’ve mistreated, but I want to love on her. How am I treating her? What am I doing for her? Right? So. Yeah, I think this is a great tool for everyone to have a different energy behind their intention and taking care of themselves.

And it starts with us making the choice, you know, like, we have to recognize and I know you probably talk about this all the time. You know, what are the things that we’ve done to try and get us on this path of self love? And if they haven’t worked. Then why not try a new approach? Right? And, um, you know, it’s, it, it takes time.

It takes time and it takes commitment and it takes. An environment that supports you, but we’re all able to get there and the sooner we realize this, the happier our lives will be amazing. Where can people find you Kim? Yeah, that’s all the places all the places. So very active on all the socials. So you can find me under Kim Basler.

B. A. S. L. E. R. underscore food freedom. So all the socials under there. My website’s kim basler dot com. And I think that that’s probably my emails. Kim at kim basler dot com. So everything’s under my name and I I’m very, you know, my social is very much my space where I share. I share very. Transparent with full transparency, I’m heart centered, you’ll see me crying one day, you’ll be seeing me dancing in my kitchen the next.

That’s who I am. That’s the video I have of you, you dancing salsa, I don’t know which dance you were dancing in the kitchen. It must be your most popular video because I see it often. You know, dancing, dancing has been my outlet for freedom and embodiment, right? Like it’s being able to. To allow myself, my body’s changed, right?

Our bodies change and our bodies can change and will change. And when we can release and just like feel that sensuality of moving our bodies, it’s just the best feeling ever. So, yeah, so we’ll put the link to the, the hypnosis, the free hypnosis for self love and all the link where we can find you. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.