Rhythmic Exercises For Dementia Wellness

Jill Simpson

I’m happy to be here.

Heather Sandison, ND

First, I want you to share with everyone that when we first met, I was so impressed by just how many people you have interfaced with around healthy exercise, safe, healthy exercise as they age. You can just give everyone a little bit of background on your experience.

Jill Simpson

I was a dancer. I was a professional dancer. After homeschooling my children, which took up 15 years of my life, I decided to go back to teaching. I was asked to go back and teach seniors the fitness of all things. I thought that sounds good. I went to do my certification, and I had just started teaching for the City Parks Rec Department. My boss called me into her office, and she said, We have had complaints about you. I was like, what have I done? She said, One lady has said that she felt things were moving to the beat of the music. That’s not how a fitness class went that seemed to dance for her. Then a disaster person complained. I made them sweat during their exercise class. She’d done this class for five years, and she never sweated. She wanted to make a formal complaint. I thought I didn’t know what to say. Anyhow, my boss went on to say that the Alzheimer’s Society had contacted her, so she took care of this whole huge district of people. They were looking, asking her to recommend somebody to teach a pilot program that they had developed called Minds in Motion.

She said You don’t seem to be able to do anything inside the box. You would be perfect. She said I’ve set up an interview; go do it. I met my supervisor at the Alzheimer’s Society, and we were like 10 minutes into the conversation. She said in her case that the job is to get the right attitude; let’s go. It turned out that there was almost a very short timeline when the grant approval from Allison Strong on Grant’s rights was granted. Before the grant, they had spent all this time designing two parts of this program. One was a physical exercise for an hour, and one was a cognitive social engagement where people sat together in a little room and did activities. They had spent all this time on social engagement. Nobody has led since that time. They thought they weren’t getting the grant and had put no thought into what they were going to do for a class, specifically for people with dementia. The class was for people with dementia and a care partner, which was the best thing about it.

They both did the same class simultaneously in the same way, which is great. We got to day one, which was only like five days later, and my supervisor said, I just want you to know that the Alzheimer’s Society hates exercise. I loathed it, and I’ve never been to an exercise course. I’ve never exercised. You are 100% on your own. Just do whatever you do best. It was a terrible thing to use the basement of this old community center, and it felt like it got down to the morgue level at the hospital or something. There is no natural light. I walked in, and there were 15 people with Alzheimer’s and 15 care partners and volunteers from the Alzheimer’s Society trying to put them through this battery of tests where they were testing strength and cardiovascular capacity and all of this. It was rather chaotic. It was obvious that these people, the people with Alzheimer’s, were not happy about being there. It was like going and getting tested. It’s where you get tested, prodded, and poked. When you go to. There was a lot of noise and struggle, and I didn’t want to do this. It’s going on, and I’m thinking this is not a good beginning.

There was this one woman, Fay, and she had Tourette’s also. She was peppering. They were constantly swearing and cursing at the weight, and everybody was getting super agitated. Finally, the test came out, or the testing was over. They gathered their statistics beforehand for the grant, and my boss looked at me and said, It’s all yours. I was like, Everything I had planned to do in this class just went out the window like I knew nothing was going to work that I had preconceived. I just sort of did a wingnut routine, and I had everybody pull their chairs into this giant circle. I also insisted that the staff from the Alzheimer’s Society take the class too. This was her first fitness class ever. We put them in a big circle. I don’t listen to my music on the iPod because what I had chosen was not what was going to work, and I found something. I just asked people and said there’s no right or wrong with doing something in this class. If you’re moving, you’re breathing, and you’re smiling.

That’s good enough for me. You don’t have to do it the same way I do. I turn on this music. I had them sit down, and I did just a few simple movements. To my surprise, everybody was able to follow right where you were. Some of the people with Alzheimer’s had a far better following. Then my boss did, so I thought that was interesting. I upped the ante to, “Okay, we’ll make this a little more complicated. We’ll lose more parts of our bodies, and everybody will be able to follow.” I went up to the gun and said, “Okay, so this is not what I was expecting.” But everybody was visual, and everybody was able to translate what I was doing into their body, not exactly in the same way, but in no class does it work that way. Then I asked them to get up, and we put the chairs away, and I remember this moment distinctly. It was a 1957 tune called, Ain’t Got No Home, and I turned up the music loud and just said, “Okay, whatever I do, you guys follow and enjoy yourself.”I turn up the music, and 15 minutes into the class, saying it was swearing, everybody quits complaining.

All this anxiety and angst about being there was just totally gone. People were smiling, and they were laughing. I was like, what just happened? That was a pivotal moment in my life because I had taken care of my dad, who had Lewy bodies, and I had never thought about dancing and being with him. It had never crossed my mind. I was like, This is a way that I, as a dancer and a fitness instructor, have a way to communicate with you. I can communicate with your movement. So it just grew from there. It was just an amazing moment. I thought I had to understand more about this. Then I spent a decade studying the brain and how it works and why it doesn’t work. That’s the story.

Heather Sandison, ND

How exciting. So since then, you have dedicated your career to supporting people with neurodegenerative diseases through movement. Give us a little sense of the classes that you offer and the different types of people that you work with right now.

Jill Simpson

The pandemic changed everything. In a lot of the programs that I was doing, I worked with wonderful residential home facilities for people. I’m going to say people from 20 to 50 who had cognitive issues at birth. a lot of kids with Down’s and cerebral palsy, a lot of them in wheelchairs, and we danced, we drank, and we performed. We would go around the community and perform. I worked with people, and I worked for the Parkinson’s Society. I did the training with the National Ballet. I was a dancer for Parkinson’s. I sort of worked with everybody. But fitness for your aging brain, which is my big focus right now, has two strings. It started that it was just coming out of this grant and this pilot study, and about week four, this lady came up to me, Camille, and said, I want to tell you something privately.

We went off, and she said, Something strange was happening to her husband, Johnny. At home. He had early onset and had had it since his mid-fifties. Early, at 55, she said that when we go home from class, we have this photo album, and I always leave it on the table. It’s sitting on the kitchen table. Johnny went home from class a couple of weeks ago when you opened the photo album, and he started talking about the people in the album, and he said, She said he hasn’t remembered or recognized a single person in that album for two years. So she said every week she would go home and they would open the album, and he recommended it for a couple of days. Then that would fade, and I thought that was interesting. The group of people in this Alzheimer’s class got together, and they wanted to know what was going to happen to them at the end of the pilot. It was only eight weeks. So one lady stood up and said, What are you going to do with this at the end of eight weeks? You can’t make us. That’s not fair to make us feel better and then shut us out. Along with my boss, she encouraged me to set up a program where they could go. This was 2014, and a lot of them were with me right until the pandemic shut us down in 2020.

Heather Sandison, ND

That went on for quite a while, and then. We. embraced Zoom and being able to provide fitness classes online. Is that right?

Jill Simpson

What happened when the pandemic hit? I had a lot of people that I was working with live. I had never taught on Zoom before and never recorded. It was, my gosh, what am I going to do? I caught these companies and my suppliers into giving me a super discount. I put 150 little kits in bags, and I threw them in the trunk of a car. I went to the parking lot because we weren’t allowed to go in and everybody would meet. People thought I was selling illegal hand sanitizer in the beginning because this was like the first three weeks of the Covid lockdown. everybody had a kit for those who couldn’t do it, I made it out of household items, and two and a half, three weeks after the pandemic hit, we were doing the classes online. I had to do that.

Heather Sandison, ND

I want you to talk at a high level. I want everybody to know what’s in the kit, and then let’s tell them why these kits are important. What’s in the kit?

Jill Simpson

There is a dryer ball like the little, spiky, hard kind that we use to help people train their balance. It stimulates the mechanic receptor and the nerves in your hands and feet. Then we work on balance, and then I teach them to do this at home. A lot of people, especially people who might have had chemotherapy, have trouble feeling in their limbs. They said it was extremely helpful. Balance improves demand. We were told on a balance that we have balls that we bounce, and we have these funny little things that you can throw a ball and catch in the air.

We have big balls. We have weighted balls. They weigh like two or three pounds, and they’re both the size of your hand, and you feel like you’re in the circus when you’re doing this right. It’s easy to catch, but there’s this real sense of accomplishment because of the weight as it hits your hand. We have bands, all different kinds, like therabands that we don’t traditionally use in the same way we have little rhythm instruments because when you move tiny, tiny little movements will up your heart rate more than going for a walk, you can up your heart rate sitting on the couch, shaking a little bottle of rice so that you can double your heart rate in a minute and you’re sitting on the couch. Then my favorite item is the Dollar Store broom’s neck. Just the handle out of the broom. It used to be a dollar. It’s now up to a dollar 50, the best piece of fitness equipment that we have is in that kit. We’re using it in different ways all the time. If you use something in the same way, your brain has no challenge. You’ve got to do it. Everything has to be different. Every class has to be novel. Every class has to be a challenge.

Heather Sandison, ND

When I first heard you say you were dropping these kits off, I was like, Okay, what’s in their socks? But they’re these props that you’re using. To give. You are the exercise, and that is helping with what we call. There’s another interview here on the Reversing Alzheimer’s Summit with Ryan Glatt from the Pacific Neuroscience Institute. We’re talking about dual-task exercises and diving into the science of why it’s important to engage your brain at the same time that you’re engaging physically. It sounds like a lot of your exercises do just that. Tell us what a typical exercise routine with you would be like a class would be like with you. Is it 30 minutes? Is it an hour? How does it start? What do you do during it? How does it end? Why is there a particular way you’ve set up classes specifically for people with dementia?

Jill Simpson

The demand for the ones specifically for dementia is not particularly different. The concept comes from those who are trying to prevent dementia because all the basic principles are the same. If you do the same thing over and over, your brain goes, I’m going to sleep. To me, brains are like I remember my teenagers. They would do the least passable work around my house. My lawn would grow a foot and a half if they were lazy. Your brain is like that. It’s conserving energy. It’s going to put it into something else only if it’s forced to do it. There is no typical class. Every day is different. Sometimes we’re working with words as we work with our bodies, but it’s always a combination of physical and cognitive. You said dual tasks. In a class, we are multitasking. We might be doing three or four different things. Most importantly, we are timing it to music. The rhythm of the music ups the dopamine in your brain, and people, especially those with dementia, can follow the music very well. They have that sense that rhythm and music are such stimulants. Whatever it is, we’re always doing it to music. I try to make it different, and I try to make it fun so that people want to be there. 

Heather Sandison, ND

There are so many great points you have there. A lot of people who aren’t professionally working in the Alzheimer’s space don’t realize that music and rhythm are two of the last things that a classic Alzheimer’s patient will lose. So at Morongo, we have a quite advanced resident, but she still knows the words to Jingle Bells. So these familiar rhythms, or especially if there’s an emotional attachment, if it was, say, a song played at your wedding or your prom or something that stood out to you, those will be ingrained, and you’ll have access to that. Either the lyrics or at least a familiar idea of the rhythm. Those memories of those moments might also come back. then this idea that variety is the name of the game here, we want it mixing it up continually, and then you also encourage people to get involved. We discussed these props before we made them.

Jill Simpson

If there are four people online, can I just go back and tell you a little story? See, I had a gentleman in my Alzheimer’s class, and he was in his mid-nineties. He was pretty advanced in terms of Alzheimer’s, but he had all these other body health issues as well. His daughter, who came to the class with him every week, called me. He’d been away for a couple of weeks, and she called me, and she said, Dad’s in hospice, and would it be possible if you could tell me what some of the music you played in the class was? Because he loved it, he had been a singer, and we always played boppy rhythmic music. I said I’ll do better than that.

We will bring the class to the hospice. So I talked to everybody in the class, and a group of us took the music and our art class to his room in the hospice. It was the loudest room in the whole hospice because we had the music cranked up, Tom was there, and he was lying in bed. The minute I turned the music on, this was a man who had forgotten how to swallow. He could no longer chew, and he was at the end of his ability for his brain to keep his body functioning. I saw them showing their tones. I could see him looking at me, and all of a sudden he was doing these moves that we had done in class. They were part of his body. A man who couldn’t swallow could dance lying down in bed. Then he died that night. But we had a lovely class. It was just that it was great.

Heather Sandison, ND

What an incredible goodbye! this idea that it’s fun. That it’s in his when he’s, like, essentially going in the direction, taking his last breath, that he would find the energy and capacity to join you. But part of that is because it’s fun and it’s enjoyable. There’s motivation to keep coming back. The other variety is important. Consistency is also important. Continuing to telepathize is how we get the benefits, right? If you show up when you’re not going to get the benefit, and I share this with my patients, I say all the time, if you’re doing some online cognitive challenge games, if you’re not having fun, skip it. Let’s think about something else that you can do that will be fun. What motivates you? Is it the social piece? Is it looking good? Is it the capacity to be able to do things around the house and remain independent? What is it that motivates you? Let’s connect to that, and then let’s also make it fun so that you want to be there because then it’s more likely that you’re going to continue to show up and get the benefit. What are the things that you do to make it fun?

Jill Simpson

I’m unabashedly silly. I can. I am not self-conscious of what I do, and if I mess up, they love it. If we’re ever tossing a ball and I miss it, it’s the highlight of their class. That’s one thing with the Alzheimer’s group watching. They’re working in partnership with care partners. and it doesn’t have to be one-to-one, but watching your care partner struggle to do this, too, creates a lot of laughter. The exercises aren’t, and there’s nothing to accomplish. I made that clear. There’s no right or wrong way. What is important is the process. We’re doing the same exercise. You get it right away. I don’t get it. My brain is working harder than yours because you’re so in and got it slack off. Mine is still on high alert. Part of it too is that people come out feeling the words they made up are empty in their brains, saying, I would come out, and I’ve got, I’ve got this sort of tingle. It feels like my brain’s tingling. My theory is that primitive man with drumming, and music—all this is part of—you think back to a very tribal culture.

There’s this drumming music dance that connects people beyond themselves. That is an important thing: to connect with others beyond yourself. But then people would say, They go into a trance. My interpretation is that they didn’t have the word “neurotransmitters.” It’s just this flood of cocktails—there’s a cocktail and a flood of neurotransmitters, chemicals, and proteins in your brain. When you exercise, when you hear the music, all that stimulation is there at once. They were just having your brain buzzed but didn’t have a good word for it.

Heather Sandison, ND

That’s great. How fun! It sounds like people are often energized by this; imagine exercise. I’m going to be so depleted and tired after. But they’re walking out feeling energized and engaged and having fun. I want people to understand that if they’re doing exercise right now, what are a couple, two, or three tips that you can give them to make their exercise better for their brain? I’m hearing drumming and music, and here is that always part of your course in your classes, or what are some of the key things that somebody who’s maybe not going to work with you would want to incorporate into their routine?

Jill Simpson

That’s the key thing: the benefit to the brain is the lead-follow relationship. Lots of research on why dance is so good for your brain as a neuroprotective activity. Not only are we using all parts of our body, but when you’re dancing, you’re not using them symmetrically. My left hand might be doing one thing while my right hand is doing something else, and my feet are doing something else. I’m coordinating it with the music. But where the real benefit comes in is picking up a cue from somebody else and turning on the music. Dancing in your living room is cardiovascular exercise. It is not a cognitive exercise. That needs to be clear. The benefit is a quick reaction time. I’m doing this. You’re sitting and watching me, and you have to go. What hand?

What is she doing with her left hand? Which hand is she doing it with? Do I have one of those? They are mine. What’s she doing? She’s doing that. It’s follow-and-lead. Interestingly, ballroom dancing is good because you’ve got one partner giving it to you, and then you’ve got the other partner responding to the cue. The cue is not verbal, so we’re communicating differently. I used to teach ballroom. I thought it was an exercise in telling people and teaching them how to communicate in a way that didn’t involve words. But tango is one of the best things for your brain of all ballroom dances. That’s why. Would that be a but in a waltz? It’s a slow beat, and you have one slow beat to give the cue for that person to respond. In tango, it’s fast. That thump thump. That’s half the time or less that that person has to respond. I touch you in a certain way, and you get to be in position one beat later.

You’ve got to be there because we’re going in that direction. It’s the rule, and in the fitness class, it’s you following me. Or you, I will have everybody in the class lead sometimes just makeup anything. Tell me what you do in a day at a household. They would say, well, doing the dishes. We’ll turn that into a cardio exercise, and everybody will lead in the class. It’s not always me leading. We follow other people, but it’s that relationship between giving a cue and translating that into your body.

Heather Sandison, ND

Not everyone’s going to have access to you, but if somebody did want to work with you, they did want to join a fitness class with you. How could they do that?

Jill Simpson

You could go to my website would be a good, easy place to go betterwithfitness.com. If you’re interested in fitness and rearranging your brain, I can teach you other things as well. For those interested in fitness, there is an online senior exercise program. In everything I do, whether it’s fitness for an aging brain, the emphasis is that we exercise to keep our brain healthy enough so that we can keep our bodies functioning well for as long as possible. I want people to be their best selves at 95 or 100. What do you have to do? You have to start now. Don’t wait till you’re 94 to decide. You want to be fit at 95 so that you can do and then Fitness For Your Aging Brain. I have a YouTube channel, and now those are prerecorded classes. People do them at their own pace, or groups will do them on their schedule. If you just Google fitness-for-your-aging-brain, all one word, and aging are still Canadian way without any aging fitness for the aging brain, it’ll just pop up as a search, and I’ll take it to the YouTube channel, where there’s information and there’ll be a couple of free classes that you can try at home. That’s what I sell by subscription, and we’re going to do this pilot at Marana. I’m excited about a live-streamed dementia class, right? After we do the pilot and I get all this feedback, we’ll tweak it, and then it will go live as well.

Heather Sandison, ND

How exciting and fun. Just this internet age makes it so much more accessible, and I want to applaud you for embracing that because so many seniors are sometimes isolated by their circumstances. They don’t have a driver’s license anymore, or they’re quite far and maybe there’s not something available for miles and miles around. So having this come into the living room through the TV is just such a great way to make it more accessible. I hear you recommending that they do it with a care partner. If they have someone else there with them, are there any other kinds of safety issues that come up? Many people, as they age, worry about getting exercise because they’re afraid they’re going to get hurt. How do you prevent that from happening?

Jill Simpson

That is hard when people are at a distance. I only recommend the care partner doing it with a care partner. If one partner has Alzheimer’s,

Heather Sandison, ND

Okay.

Jill Simpson

In the dementia prevention stream that is on YouTube, lots of people do it on their own. I always, always have notes. This is what you need for the class. then I’m constantly reminding them to look at the floor, look around at the floor, and make sure it’s safe. Where’s your dog? If you’re going to bounce a ball and that dog is thinking, you’re going to play it. You’re playing, and you’re doing that for him. I have three people who are not online but, in their regular lives, have major breaks because they’re out playing with the dog or some of these dog racks. It just happens for safety, so we set it up in a safe way. I’m using it to describe exactly what you need to do.

As we’re using equipment, I forgot. We always have drugs and drumsticks too, with lovely and loud music, so I’m always watching. Now, in an online class, I can see you; like on Zoom, I can see you, you can see me, and I can go, “Oh, wait a minute.” On prerecorded, people have to be cognizant. I tried to warn them during the class. “Hey, have you checked this out?”

Heather Sandison, ND

Good. There’s such a catch-22 for so many people as they age that they want to go in the direction of exercise for a healthy brain. Yet there’s this fear, and so making it feel safe and accessible is a great point and something that I’m glad that you’re considering. Is there anything else that people should consider while they’re looking towards getting more exercise as they age?

Jill Simpson

The most important thing is not to buy into our society’s message about aging so that it’s a constant bombardment, telling us about what we are not supposed to be able to do. Let me give you an example. My pet peeve drives me crazy. I wrote to the head of this company, a big pharmacy chain across Canada. They just set up a set of 55-plus parking stalls designated right in front of the door. You’ve got handicapped parking. Those are very handy. then right, equally distant is the 55-plus. What’s that message at 55? You should be concerned that you’re unable to walk across a small parking lot. What we should be doing is taking the senior’s parking and sticking it on the far end of the parking lot.

Right. Because as you age, you need to do more. So society says, hey, kick back, you’ve earned your teeth, 65, retire. All of these things just take life easy. But the reality is we have to work harder to keep our brain active. The world is closing in as soon as you retire and we need to broaden and then physically we need to do more. My son, who’s 27, can take a month off of the gym and go back and not notice it might. People take like Mike, people in my classes take a week of Christmas off last year they took Christmas off.

This year they said can we just do one drop in in between? Because I felt awful after Christmas ten days ago. It’s a lot of eating, too, but, you know, you have to be consistent. You have to do more and you have to do it above your capacity is stretching your capacity, sitting in a chair, in a seniors fitness class, sitting down and lifting a £1 weight is not going to help you age. I age well, right. You’re not going to increase your health span and you’re not going to increase cardiovascular capacity. So my advice is when you’re exercising, find a class that is real exercise. And so many are. I hate to use the term, I’m going to say, dumbed down and patronizing. Right. Or you should sit in the chair. Will you exercise? No. I need to be able to stand up because I want to be able to stand up by a bungalow. You’ll never, you know, and then three weeks later, you can’t do stairs, write all these messages about what we can’t do. And I want people to focus on what they want to be at 95 and what all they can’t do because there’s no reason. And I defined you can’t do that.

Heather Sandison, ND

I had this great patient yesterday. She’s 87 and she said she always surprises everyone because she can sprint basically up and down the stairs and she’s like, it’s because I have stairs in my house.

Jill Simpson

I yes.

Heather Sandison, ND

Know all day long my bedroom’s upstairs and the kitchen is downstairs and she’s still cooking very traditional Mexican food for a big extended family. She’s the matriarch and everyone comes to her house and she wants she’s worked her whole life to kind of create this family and this home and this place where they can gather and have their parties. And she wants to keep it. And that was so motivating for her. And so it was just really sweet and amazing to see how hard she works at it. And I appreciate what you’re saying is it’s not as easy. Just doing the minimum is not going to allow us to maintain capacity, maintain ability as we age. We’ve got to push ourselves and really envision where do we want to be, who do we want to be and what do we want to be able to do? And then put into motion, put into these exercises, these classes, whatever it is that’s going to keep you fit and strong and able.

Jill Simpson

And I it’s really important how what you said about having a reason for going to a fitness class can be I go there because I know what’s good for me, me wanting to be my best possible self at 95, wanting to be nobody have ever asked. You know, I always have people at the first tell me what you look like at 95. What do you envision? What can you do? Nobody’s ever said, Oh, I am. I’m a little care facility here. Right. And everybody’s taking care of me. I’m unable to do anything. Everybody has this great vision. So when you’re exercising, you should be tapping into that vision and having a purpose because you are that purpose and all those little incremental gains just reinforce what you can do as opposed to society reinforcing what you can’t.

Heather Sandison, ND

Right. Right. This mindset piece is such a big, big component. Well, Jill, this has been fantastic. Really, really wonderful. I’ve learned so much from you and I’m so excited to get the pilot program started at Miramar and have you sharing your wisdom and all of this experience with our residents there, but also with everyone who has joined us here on the reverse Alzheimer’s Summit. Is there any other parting gift or words you want to share with our audience.

Jill Simpson

That share a little story.

Heather Sandison, ND

Please?

Jill Simpson

Okay. This was probably my most unusual, atypical person in my class. So very early on, right after the Alzheimer’s pilot and I was running this Fitness for aging building where people could come out as a pilot. So it was advertised in the city, little brochure or whatever, as a class for people with Alzheimer’s. And this lady walked into the classrooms and she can read this piece of paper, says, this is my registration. And it was and I she was 23 years old and I went, Brian So we talked and this is what I’m here. And she said, I have all the signs of Alzheimer’s. And she had what was, I would say, medically induced dementia. And that’s my term. I don’t know if there is a term, but she had had intractable depression as a teenager. Then she came out of it and she’d gone to university. She’d done a degree she’d gotten honors. She got depressed after the afterwards and they given her electroshock shot electro shock therapy and it had weight through memory. She showed me her piece of paper. It was her degree. She said, I have no idea what what I got a degree in. I don’t know anything. She couldn’t read. She couldn’t find the words like it would take her, you know, a couple of minutes to say to tell me something in a short sentence anyhow. So she would use sort of I would say she would get overwhelmed so fast in the class because we were busy. So I told her just to closed her eyes and go into herself, sit there, and when she was ready to come back, she can open her eyes or get up and join the circle.

Then about weeks ago, she starts running out of the room like and she her expression was like, panic break. I said, Wow, I don’t know what I’ve done. This caused her this panic. So after the class, I said, you know, Lizzie, what is it? Well, how can I help you not be overwhelmed, right? What can I do that will make this work? And she was like, Oh, no, no, it’s not. And she said, As I’m moving these movements, they’re triggering memories. And I have I guess I’m remembering things I would have thought I’d lost forever. And she said, I ran out of the room and she ran up to the cloakroom, a butter book. And I sit in the cloakroom in the closet and I write some down before I forget them again. And then she asked me, I was doing a conference in Texas, a workshop for people with PTSD, and she had told me a lot about her life in an abusive life and that and that’s why she had gotten into this psychological state. She said, I want to make a video and I want to tell my story. So that’s what we did. And she was just an amazing woman. But the fact that the movement had triggered these memories that were not that she thought she’d lost forever.

Heather Sandison, ND

So, you know how incredible the power.

Jill Simpson

Of the stories hope they.

Heather Sandison, ND

Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much, Jill. This is so exciting what you’re doing and just really creating accessibility to, well informed exercise that’s safe and again accessible is so key and fun. The people want to show up for it. Thank you so for doing the work you’re doing and your dedication to those who are struggling. And it’s really inspiring.

Jill Simpson

Well, the feeling is likewise. Thanks.