#80 My Body My Story 45 Over 45 - Ina and Roki’s Road | A story about courage, dedication, faith and LOVE.

This episode is telling a very special story of how Ina and her family were fighting (and still are) for the life of their son Roki, who was born with a severe brain injury. This very emotional story teaches us about courage, dedication, faith and LOVE.

 

10 Facts About Ina

(at the time of the project)

1. 48 years old.
2. Ina was born and raised on a farm in rural South Africa.
3. Ina is the youngest of seven children.
4. Ina ran away from the wedding a few weeks before the wedding in South Africa and went to the UK and India in 2000.
5. She spent nine years traveling, teaching, running marathons, and having party time.
6. In 2009 Ina met an Aussie boy who dragged her to Australia.
7. Now Ina is married to a New Zealander called Dave and they have three beautiful children. Ruby 11y.o, Roki 10 y.o, and Rosie 7 y.o
8. Ina and her family live in Newport and they grow most of their food themselves. They are literally farmers in the middle of Newport Beach.
9. She was trained as a primary school teacher, but Ina quit her job when she had her little boy Roki born with a severe brain injury. So now she’s his carer at home.
10. There are a lot of things that Ina has learned in Roki's 10-year journey that she wants to speak up about. And Ina thinks it's time now.

 

You can learn more about Roki’s story here - http://rokiroad.com/

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

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Hi, you're listening to the My Body, My Story podcast.

 

And that is when I hit the lowest, you know, the lowest that I could go. I remember going out one day thinking I, I just surrender now. That's it. Take me now if you can, please. And I put Roki on the grass next to me. And he fell asleep, which was very unusual he was when I put him down, he would scream off the pain, I had to hold him all day. And I just felt this it was like my heart cracked open. And I felt this love coming to me. And when I woke up from that five second incident, it was it was completely turned around.

This is the 45 over 45 chapter where we celebrate Rule Breakers and role models, the women who inspire us to live life our way and to show their sensuality beauty, soul, and true essence. Here we talk about what it's like to be 45 Plus, adjusting to the changes that come with time, and we listened to the stories about participants. If you have an interesting story, we'd love for you to participate. You can email us at info@aleksandrawalker.com That's Aleksandra spelled with a K S. Or visit our website aleksandrawalker.com

 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to The My Body My Story project, and today with us in the studio Ina. And while she's sitting in the makeup chair and Chitra is doing makeup for her. I will ask her a few questions. Hi Ian. Welcome to the studio. Welcome to the project. Let's start and tell us 10 facts about yourself.

 

10 facts about myself right. I'll start where I was born. I was born and raised on a farm in rural South Africa. I'm the youngest of seven children. And I'm 38 years old, sorry, 48 years old, despite myself 10 years younger.

 

You look like 30s

 

Oh, that's very nice of you. Thank you. I'm married to a New Zealander called Dave and we have three beautiful children. I was trained I am trained as a primary school teacher but I quit my job when I had my little boy born with a severe brain injury. So now I'm his carer at home. How many facts have I said now? I'm not sure.

 

So you live in now in

 

I live in Newport. On the Northern Beaches, which is a wonderful Honestly, if I wasn't there, I don't think I'd be as well as I am because swimming in the ocean has saved my life. Really?

 

So when did you move to Australia?

 

I moved I so I left home I was engaged to a lovely man who I was not in love with more like my brother kind of I loved him as a brother. So I ran away from the wedding a few weeks before the wedding in South Africa and went to the UK and India 2000. I spent nine years travelling, teaching, running marathons, having party time as best as I can try to forget what I've done, because I felt really guilty. And then I met an Aussie there and I think it was 2009 that he dragged me to Australia, in the UK from UK. Yes. So I left from there came here. I had no intention of moving to Australia. I said it's too far away from everything. I was packing up to go home to be with my mom because she was quite elderly at the time already determined that I need to go home and spend time with her. And then I met this Ozzy boy, who I'm very grateful for he brought me here. And then I was teaching at Knox grammar, which I had a really good job. It's so safe on the northern beaches. I just loved it so much. Then I broke up with him. And I met Dave, my now husband. And that's how we ended up staying here. We were planning to move to South Africa. And when Roki was born with a brain injury, we had everything packed up our whole household, our cars, everything. And when he came with a brain injury, we decided to stay.

 

So let's talk about this story because I know it's a very important part of your life. Yeah, so what happened?

 

So it was caused by the hospital. I had an internal rupture. But the nature just was that it wasn't picked up in time. So he wasn't monitored properly. And he was without oxygen for more than 14 minutes.

 

Was it during your pregnancy?

 

Now during the labour during the labour in the labour, I had an internal rupture. So our first born Ruby was a caesarean. And then they recommended for us to try for a natural birth but the two pregnancies were too close, which we found out later we had a court case a five year court case. So I had an internal rupture on the previous Caesarean scar, which meant that Roki couldn't breathe and the placenta dislodge. So he and but not only that, they didn't notice the midwife who was with me didn't notice that he was In Yes, so they got him out in time he was resuscitated. And of course, then that's where our journey started. He is quadriplegic. He is tube fed, has a lot of spasticity and seizures. So in the beginning of Roki's life, my husband and I did a lot of fundraising. We put posters of him all over the street saying, Please help Roki.

 

He's such a beautiful little baby boy. And we were devastated that his life was taken in the 40 minutes, you know, he lost the life that he could have had, which was quite a journey for us. We raised a lot of money. We went to India four times for stem cell therapy, because it wasn't available here. And we tried to fix and fix him and the beginning of his life, you can imagine when there's a little baby, he was in a lot of pain from the start. Really bad muscle spasms, seizures, we couldn't sleep day and night. So we did that for four years. We had the five year court case, I worked on him every day did all these therapies at home. We took Ruby to India with us, she was only 18 months old, stayed there for six weeks had stem cell therapy slept on the floor. We did that four times in the space of five years.

 

do you believe it helped a lot?

 

yes, definitely, it helped a lot. But we couldn't sustain the fundraising, we did not have enough money. Roki developed, he could pick up a toy, you know, he couldn't move at all he started sucking. But then when, during our one of our visits there, we had a relapse where we ran out of one of his medications. And we were giving an an equivalent medication there, but it was the wrong one. And he had what they call induced, its chemically induced seizures, which are different from normal seizures. So that caused more damage. And then we were sort of back to square one. And by that time, and I was pregnant with our third child, Rosie then so it all became a bit too much doing sustaining those trips and doing therapies.

 

So then, when we returned after the fourth trip, Rosie was little, probably two years old. And I continued with doing a very strenuous therapy at home that was seven days a week. It was very I had I needed four volunteers a day to move Roki's body into crawling repetitions to teach the brain the repetition. I did sensory patenting on him, I taught him to read I made five books a week for him. I did all these incredible things seven days a week without taking a break. And then Roki developed dystonia, which is a whole body, back arching spasm that we think was triggered by all the stem cells, because the last treatment she gave him a lot. So he goes into growth, growth spurt, too much for him too quick. So then the dystonia was very, it was a terrible time for us, Dave and I had to hold them day and night.

 

Dave was a bill, he's a builder, he would come back from work home having to take over from me, I'd been holding him on the couch all day, and I had to rock him to get rid of the pain, nothing helped. We tried everything. And that went on for two years. And that is when I hit the lowest, you know, the lowest that I could go. I remember going out one day thinking I, I just surrender now. That's it. Take me now if you can, please. And I put Roki on the grass next to me. And he fell asleep, which was very unusual he was when I put him down, he would scream off the pain, I had to hold him all day. And I just felt this it was like my heart cracked open. And I felt this love coming to me. And when I woke up from that five second incident, it was it was completely turned around.

 

And then I saw how this journey that we have together is here to teach me. And it completely changed the way I look at things. So then I started to delve into what is this showing? Yeah, he him and I chose this life together. You can't believe that someone would choose a life and so much pain to teach others something. And that's when it started to change for us and we found some cannabis oil that really helped for the pain, which we you know, that's a whole another story to go into that. But it really was a game changer for us to think then okay, he's here to fix us. We're not here to fix him because we really tried to fix him at the beginning, which you can understand is your baby is little and so sick. You would do anything that you could.

 

So I think that's what he's teaching me and my journey going forward. And as part of the reason I'm here today because this is something I would never do for myself is to his And Mum is holding up the mirror and say, Mom, look at what you've done. Look how far you've come. Look at, how much you do for me. And he's teaching me now to look inside of myself and come back to the person who I really am here meant to be, which is not an energy of sacrifice. It's meant to be an energy of being who I am and teaching others. What really matters in life, and learn what love is, learn what love is, it's all about unconditional love. And until we love ourselves, we will not giving anything to the world, the best thing you can do for humanity is to love yourself first. And to find out really, who you are within yourself, come back to that centre of yourself.

 

And I remember at the beginning of Roki's life, it was as if I have suddenly sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and the rest of the world was up there, carrying on with busyness of life and trying to fill emptiness in their lives for superficial things. And I was down here looking like I was removed from it all of a sudden, looking into it. And it's taught me, he has taught me so much, which is incredible, because he can't speak and he can't move. And all of the people that have come into our lives, so he cannot speak, cannot speak or do communicate telepathically. I can hear him. And so can his sisters? And they have since they were little, I can hear him saying things to me. No, it's not a voice in my head. It's just a knowing. And yes, and as the years have gone, since that incident, I had that I became a lot more open to hearing to what he's telling me.

 

And so he's a middle child.

 

He's the middle child,

 

how old is he now?

 

He will be 10 in June. So he's nine at the moment and years journey. Yes. It's taken me that long to come to this point where I think I'm ready now to step forward into the world and say, This is Our Story. And I want to share it because I think there's much to learn from it. Yeah.

 

So he has older sister and younger sister?

 

Yes. Ruby is 11. Yeah. And Rosie is seven.

 

So how do they communicate with him? So what's their relationship? Yes.

 

So Ruby. In the beginning, it was very hard for me because she literally lost the mom she had. She had, I had no time for her. I was so busy with Roki. So that was very hard for her. But they have always been very connected to Roki, they have never complained. Or we can't do things because of Roki, we can't just hop in the car and go to the zoo. We can't take them everywhere because it's a whole process of taking Roki anyway. And Rosie, the younger one has always just accepted. That's the way he is. And they both love him dearly. And they both play with him, which is very hard. If he's not responsive. He smiles and he will make noises. But it's hard for a child to keep engaged if someone is not responding like another child would. And I think Roki was very sad in beginning of his life to watch his sisters run around and feel like he can't run around. But now he's made peace himself. He's very peaceful. And here and he feels like he can just watch and join in the fun instead of doing all the work, but we involve him and absolutely everything. He's always and that's what's important for him. He just wants to be with us. So this is the sisters are again, they also communicate with him telepathically especially the younger one, Rosie, and she made me aware of it. When she started talking. She would say mom Roki says he doesn't want to wear that shirt. Oh, he wants to wear this one. No, don't read him that book. He wants this book. How do you know Rosie? It tells me and that is how I started thinking well this is coming from a three year old. She no one has put that in her head. It's just because she can hear it so I started opening up more to listening to what it is he's got to teach me

 

such it's such an interesting thing that small kids they always feel better because they're not limited with still the with adult way of thinking

 

yeah, no, or there's no pre existing ideas of what things should be like and she has completely just accepted the life and Roki as it is without any trouble. It was a little bit harder for Ruby, but for her. So what

 

do you do do like you can chain you raise awarness or the case is like that or like because this obviously was As I understand the hospital mistake, so do you I know it's not a good thing, go back and think what would have should have, you know, happened? But is there any, you were all you just concentrate on your raising Roki and making his life easy or you also participate in kinds of activities? Raising awareness? Yes, yes is like that

 

Yes, I think this is the beginning for me this year. I'm ready now to do that and to be campaigning about things. There are a lot of things that I have questions about, of course, why in Australia is stem cell therapy not available immediately for children like Roki when they are born? In Japan, they treat these children with their own cord blood at birth, they put them in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and most of these babies go home without any brain injury. Why is that not done here? They have the machinery in the hospitals. I know. I looked into it many years ago, and I got onto slack. Well, we haven't done the safety checks. And this is not available because it's risky. We took into India, one of the riskiest places you can go to participate in a stem cell therapy that was untested, and he only benefited from it. And that was a big risk. And it was very frowned upon. But I think yes, I'm ready. Now there are there lots of things that I want to speak up about not not fight, but speak up for the case of for the sake of, of humanity, really? No, not just children like Roki. But there are a lot of things that I've learned in Roki's journey that yes, I want to speak up about. And I think it's, it's time now,

 

what's your biggest lesson, you think you learn from that situation?

 

to love myself more? Because there really is, if you think of if each human on this planet learns to love themselves, truly, and I don't mean superficially, and then in an ego centric kind of way. In fact, it's putting the ego in the background, we all have to have our ego, but it's learning to put it in the background, and really learn to Why am I here? What is my journey, coming back to who we really are. And that is the biggest thing he's learned me. But I had to get to that point where I was really low, and nothing else made sense. Then going inward,

 

there is a very famous German (Austrian – editor) psychologist who wrote a book. I don't know what's that in, in German translation of English, it's Viktor Frankl. (The Will To Meaning, 1969 – editor) …and he was a prisoner of a concentration camp (Frankl spent a total of three years in four concentration camps – editor). And he was telling that the those who found meaning, even being in such a horrible situation like a prison. And it's to do with all the prisons like not only the physical prison, but your mental prison or yes, your prison, like how in your body, your brain fact functioning, but your body is not. And so the main thing is to find a meaning of your life. Yes. What's the meaning why you're here? Yes. What's your purpose of being here? That's how it helps not only survive, but thrive as a person. So I can probably think of the situation is the lesson also to try and find the meaning of your life and probably Roki's life because I'm sure he also has some purpose. Definitely.

 

Yes. And at the beginning, I thought it was only about his story. But I understand now that it's, it's our story us as a family, and I feel like he is going to tell the story. We're teaching him to communicate on a screen he can only move his eyes. So we have a screen that picks up his eye movements and we busy teaching him to type his name because his intellect is intact. And yes, yes, I agree. I definitely was in prison. Because I lost my life the way it was. I was stuck in that house doing therapy because I chose to do it but it was still imprisoning because I lost every free choice. I had my child my free choice was do I have one sugar my tea or two sugar mighty a day that was choices I had. I wouldn't just walk down to the shop and go to the beach or swim?

 

I know it's a maybe a look, forgive me if this question is hard, like you may not unsafe one, but what? What was the other options? Like? Okay, you heard that verdict, they told you that he has brain injury. So did they give you options what to do or it was implied that you go home and take care of this child with no different definition of what's going to happen did they offer you variance,

 

there's no guidebook when it comes to brain injury. They, they told us to go home and try and get as much respite as we can. At the beginning, for a lot of children are put in care for some hours in a day to someone else looks after them while the family carries on with their life. So there were options like that. From the beginning, we questioned everything in the medical mainstream. So for us, it was doing it ourselves, because we wanted to make him feel like he is loved even though this has happened to him. And we didn't want to offload his care onto someone else. So there is no guidebook. But there are we deviated away from medicine, mainstream medicine, because we saw that the things that happened to him while we were in there, that it wasn't doing the best for him that it could. So we took control of his health. We make all his food ourselves. We grow most of his food ourselves. We literally farmers in the middle of Newport Beach. Yes. Great. So we were almost yes, we're getting there. Getting to the chicken. So there is no guidebook, but we follow our intuition. Our gut feeling

 

of it was your conscious choice. Yes. To stay and to take care of Roki Yes, yes. On your own and not just to anyone else. But you are decision makers. Yes,

 

we made that choice, which is very hard. I had to quit my job financially. It was very hard for us the beginning before the court case. And Dave was a builder. So he continued to do building for as long as possible. But now we are both home, we grow all of our own food. We do Rockies care, but we also get people in now to come for a few hours a day. And we've trained them to do the care and his schoolwork, his distance education. And so we feel like we have a happy balance now. And we did go to a place where you could leave your child and we spent a weekend there and it just didn't feel right to us. It. It felt like because he's always with you. He's always with us. So

 

you cannot travel?

 

Yeah, we can travel. For the first time this year. I well. Last year, I went to South Africa. When my mom passed away. Well, first to see her and then I went to her funeral and that's the first time I left Roki ever. So we can travel and Dave and I can have nights out we can book a nurse overnight. But most of the time we like to have Roki with us. We take him with us on the plane and we

 

how was his first flight?

 

well, it when we flew to India, he was very little of those were difficult days because we had to hold him on the seat because he's got no head control. Now that he's bigger now than we've had the court case they will buy a business class ticket for him and dive so he can lie down. And these are also things that you know, that I speak need to speak out about with the there's no facilities for children who are disabled who are bigger. There's nowhere on a plane to change their nap lobby, we have to do it on the floor. There's nowhere and in the cities or in the towns where you can access a toilet safely a clean one where you can change a child who's 11 years old, not 11 months old. These are things that are not in place in a country like Australia.

 

You never think about that until it till you're in that situation.

 

Yes.

 

Wow. That's a very emotional story. So I know it's kind of you concentrated on Roki and like you say, you just start loving yourself and being 48 Do you feel that ageing ain't coming like, does it consume all your time? With that you focus on Roki or now when you have some time for yourself, you start noticing some maybe age changes or whatever. And what does it mean to you becoming older?

 

You can call it this way. Yes, yes. I, I prefer to call it ageing. Yes, yes. I think I really like where I am now. I feel like yes, physically, it's, it's harder to deal with picking them up and doing all the physical work because it has taken its toll on myself and Dave, I ruptured my Achilles last year, which came from holding him on the couch for two years, swaying him because I had a lump there. Even though I ruptured it while I was dancing on the dance floor, having fun, but it has taken its toll. So in a physical sense, it is a little bit hard, but it has forced me to look at how to deal with that myself. So I'm doing a lot of fascia work on myself, which I had done on Roki for seven years, but not on myself. So he's saying, ma'am, yes, you've done all this for me. But now, what about you? So I'm doing a lot of fascial work on myself, and stretching and yoga at home every day, Good swimming in the ocean. And in the emotional and maybe spiritual sense. I like I like becoming older because I feel like I'm getting closer to who I really am. And if I look at the younger me, I had absolutely no idea. Yeah. And

 

we have to go through a lot of life tests to finally start realising who we really are.

 

Yes, yes. But it became so much easier for me when I realised when I could envision that Roki and I had on a soul level sat down and said, Okay, we have these things to learn on a soul level. These are the lives we're going to have together, even how difficult it might seem to be. So once you see it like that, that we've planned this together as a family to come here. It's like a learning school, isn't it? Which makes any challenge. Easier not saying it's easy, but it makes it easier to accept. So you stop asking why me? Why did it have to happen to such a beautiful child who nothing was wrong? He was textbook pregnancy, nothing was wrong with it. I didn't even know I was pregnant half the time, it was so easy. And you stop asking that. And now you think, Well, let me stop wasting time. What is this showing me? Yeah. And I know from a lot of work that I've done that Roki, Roki and I belong to the same soul group. And in many, many lives ago, I had an incident where I was in charge of something very important, something someone undermined me and something happened, something catastrophic happened. And I banned myself on a soul level from that soul group. And I've had many consequent lives where I've had lived in an energy of sacrifice, I sacrifice myself for something and, and then this life, I've done it again, I've sacrificed I quit my job, I gave up everything I could do socially, I lost friends, I kept the good friends, but you know, I lost my life the way it was. But now in this life, I've chosen to look at that and go, it's time to look at myself, forgive myself, acknowledge it, and let it go. And he's come to help me with that. And that, you know, to think that someone would choose a life and such a painful he has daily pain. And that's very powerful that he's chosen to, to do that and say, Mum, I'll come and help you with this. And for all of us,

 

he must be a very old soul. You know, he is who chose such reincarnation, in that body.

 

Not easy, not easy, and it's evident throughout his life. We had a lot of volunteers that helped us in those two years. Sam is one of them. That's how I know Sam. And he has touched so many lives just being in these energy people. People want to come back and we miss Roki, we want to be with Roki, he's taught me so much.

 

Do you have any, like websites dedicated to?

 

we have a http://rokiroad.com/

 

You say it again,

 

http://rokiroad.com/. So his name we gave him. So in the theatre in the crazy moment of his birth where 17 people were running around the theatre trying to resuscitate him and I caught I caught his gaze. He was over there and he was covered by so many people around him. I could hardly see him. And he looked at me and I I knew that he must have told me, he said, I'm Roki. I'm Roki. So they asked me what his name is. I said, Well, he had a rocky start, he has to be Roki. And we spelled it aro Ki. So it's Roki road.com. And on there, I wrote a lot in beginning of his life, this whole story is on there.

 

So people, if they're interested, they can visit this website.

 

Yes, yes.

 

I haven't updated it latly. But I think the next phase now will come where I start to write about what it is. I'm here to do.

 

So what if you could go back to any age? What age it would be? And what advice would you give yourself, and then time,

 

I think I would go back to the age where I was running marathons, because I really miss that which would be the age of maybe 30-31. I really miss that freedom of running. I'm hoping to get back into it. And I think the advice I would give myself is, is have more fun and trust, trust in your journey. Because at that point of my life, I was I was always looking for something like everyone else, looking to fill a hole, asking myself why have I not met the perfect guy at you know, chasing that? Where is my happiness? And I think we can all learn to just live in the moment and trust the journey that we're on.

 

It's very interesting that you answered this question, focusing on you and which is for me, it's a great sign that it wasn't any age where you could change the situation. But it's about you that you did something good you liked. And that's what you wanted to go back to. It's just shows me that you're done a great job on. Accepting

 

Yeah, no, I would not want to change. I couldn't, because I can see now that we're both here, for this room for this reason. Yeah.

 

So when if your body could talk, what do you think it will tell you or ask you?

 

Are we having fun yet? I think I have become so serious, because you can imagine having a child with a disability requires a lot of organisation and being organised. And everyone in the house has a routine and there's not much room for fun. And my husband is the fun. He's the crazy creative one that brings the fun, but I've always had to, okay, we have to do this, I have to write a list. I can't forget anything. And that's another thing about blaming myself, I want to be in control, not not in a horrible way. But I want to take care of everything so that if something goes wrong, I can blame myself, because that's what I used to do. That's where it comes from from that life 1000s of years ago. So what was the question? I can't remember about

 

the body what it would tell you or ask you, and you said the answer.

 

So I need to let go of being so serious. And having fun now.

 

Yeah. Yeah. It's a nice question. So if we move to subject of body image, I would ask you the question, where do you think? So what do you think are the main causes of body image issues or insecurities?

 

Well, that's very obvious that everything that is shown to us to be so perfect and right, which of course it's not, it's you're bombarded with beautiful body images everywhere. And Pitt children grow up thinking that that's the norm. But your body images is, is what you chose to have in this life. And it's, there's no right or wrong. And however your body looks in a certain stage of your life is is a measure of what's going on with you on a soul level. For example, for me at the moment, I would like to be at least six kilos lighter, but I know that I'm looking for Slim girls. Now, but I want to run again, you see, likely, but I know that the weight I'm carrying is the weight of responsibility, which I now need to start sharing and then I will lose weight because I've tried everything I've tried, fasting, eating less, giving up all the things I like, we eat healthy already, because we've learned that through Rakesh journey, we grow all our own food, we eat really healthy, but so whatever's going on in your body at any stage in your life is a mirror of what's happening to you on a soul level. And that's what I've learned. Oh, yes, body image is definitely I wish people could dig a little bit deeper into not just the superficial what you see.

 

I heard the theory of that extra body weight you carry, if you deduct from your normal weight, what what is extra? It's the weight of the person at the age. Like, for example, if you carry six kilos, it's the child of six kilogrammes. So what age is that? Or if it's 30 kilos, so probably it's a teenager. That's what the cause of your problems or the weight problem. So that's very interesting. It's from the psychologists I follow. And it for me, it was very interesting. subjected to this to study, because I still not completely bought into that. But it's an interesting theory,

 

I will tell you about a book that is my reference book that I've used for many years. It's called your body is the barometer of your soul. So whatever. And the lady who wrote the book and an eight noon tool, I think her name is she's not with, she's not aside anymore. But she, after many years of working with people in a therapist, therapist role, she saw these patterns in different ailments. And then she started looking at what the psychological issue behind it is. And so she made the connection with for example, my I ruptured my right Achilles, and that is your, your physical doing for yourself. It's your right side.

 

So you're talking about psychosomatic.

 

Yes. So this book is a reference book. So if something happens to you, you look in there and it gives you

 

Its like Louise Hey

 

Louise  Hay was she has affirmations which I read her books as well. But this is more of a reference. Yeah, it's very similar. It's like more on a physical you can look for this. And then you can find out on a soul level what it is you need to, to look at.

 

So do you think that negative body image effects relationship and in what way, but I'm not talking only about men, women relationship, any relationship friendship, work.

 

I don't know anything about the body image is not a true representation of what the person who the person really is. So you're only looking at what you can see. So it's very judgmental, and very superficial.

 

If someone you have that insecurity about your body, do you think it affects your relationship?

 

Definitely, well, if you insecure about yourself, you you're not going to let people see who you really are. Or allow yourself to be seen for who you really are, because you're putting up screens and boundaries around yourself to protect yourself. So if you don't feel comfortable in the body that you are, then you can't show people really who you are. And therefore you're not in your you're where you are in your life, the vibration of where you are in your journey is not in it's not in line of where it should be. So you're sort of out of whack.

 

So what do you think about this positive positive body positive movement?

 

It's novel than that was keep that it's where the idea that whatever weights you are, you have to be positive about your body. And it's mainly not completely for overweight people.

 

Because usually that's pool feels insecure or unhappy and so they accepting themselves accepting their body and but for me, it's a bit there's a bit of a controversial couple of things and that I like the idea, but I don't like when people hide that when they lazy to look after their body. And they hide behind this concept on body positive. That's why I'm not watching my health. My body. Yes, you know, I'm just trying to be body positive.

 

Yes. If you ask those people truly, if they are truly happy with where they are at, you'll probably get the answer no. But because there's this thing being put out there that it's okay and you must accept yourself how you are, which is in a sense, it's not right. But they must be for Every one the limit will be different. So there must be a time for you to ask yourself, Is this really good for me? Is this really what I want to be? Yeah, it can't be all that good. And I guess it's personal for each person.

 

So if you have any insecurities about your body image or weight, or the way you look blinds coming out, whatever, you know, whatever it is, how do you overcome that? And has it change with age?

 

I think I really have overcome that with having such a wonderful husband, who calls me I'm a pensioner because I had to get a pension a pension because I care for Roki. And he says, I'm married to the, to the most good looking pensioner on the northern beaches. And he calls me his silver fox, and I just decided to let my grey hair grow out now because it didn't feel right to cover up things anymore. And I was uncovering who I really am. It didn't, I just couldn't do it anymore. So I've overcome it largely by looking at what my children and my husband say. And then they say, Mom, we love the way you look. It doesn't matter. We were like your silver. Hey, Mike, they draw me now with silver hair. Whereas before, I would have been really offended about that. So I think the journey of getting to know what really matters in life and coming back to who I am has helped me sort of disregard those physical things, and ensure it's nice to look in the mirror and say, Oh, I look nice today. And I've grown used to the idea of seeing the grey hair and a little bit more weight than what I'm used to. But I now look in the mirror and think, you know, I'm evolving. And I like where I am now. Does that answer the question?

 

Yes, it is. My last question. If you have any favourite quote about being a woman or maybe saying or maybe your own thoughts.

 

Being a woman, it's such a privilege to be a woman, the giver of life, and the birth of everything. I do have a quote of Desmond Tutu. He was a well known South African Bishop. And he one day said, I secretly wait for the day where the world be ruled by a woman. He said, It's time for the world to be ruled by a woman, for us to come back to the womb, and have all that unconditional love. So I think being a woman is such a privilege because we we were the giver of life and unconditional love.

 

Excellent. Thank you for sharing such a personal story. And I hope that people who listen to this podcast, it may touch their lives as well in some way. And if someone wants to keep in touch with you, we have your website. Of course, no problem at all. You can contact your vet anytime via your website.

 

I can say it was certain that this is a big step for me. And thank you so much for giving me the opportunity and I know that I'm here in service of myself and all of humanity. So I hope that in the next part of my journey, I can live that out to the fullest. Thank you. Thanks.

 

If you have an interesting story, we'd love for you to participate. You can email us at info@aleksandrawalker.com That's Aleksandra spelled with a K S. Or visit our website aleksandrawalker.com

 

This is the 45 over 45 chapter of MY BODY MY STORY podcast, where we celebrate rule breakers and role models - the women who inspire us to live life our way and to show their SENSUALITY,  BEAUTY, SOUL, and TRUE ESSENCE.

 

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