Cheryl is a leader in using movement to improve brain and body performance, reversing the impacts of aging. As a child, Cheryl asked, “If we can do war, how do we do peace?” Her lifelong exploration of that question led her into embedding transformative learning technologies into adult education, coaching, inclusion, and diversity training and supporting people to recover their personal sense of wellness and wholeness after injury and trauma. A devoted practitioner of aikido, Tai Chi, and Feldenkrais, she is committed to her personal evolutionary path to integrate body, mind, and spirit in service of peace in the world. She has coached individuals in private, public, non-profit organizations, unions, and utility companies from over 12 countries around the world. She is a published author in the field of diversity and inclusion and is well regarded for her blog on how our movement can help us create a more potent and peaceful self in the world. Her mission: Move more; react less, and live more fully with no regrets.
Cheryl Whitelaw, Move More No Regrets Coach
Who is Cheryl?
Finding my Path Under Wide Skies
I grew up on the prairies and live now in Edmonton, Canada so wide blue skies above rustling, golden fields are the horizon that feels most like home. I am blessed to live in a city with one of the longest natural river valleys in North America so I can hike, cycle and kayak enjoying the scents and sights of the natural landscape minutes from my home.
I grew up in a family of teachers and farmers so inherited a personal legacy to be a life-long learner, following my curiosity to study and explore human development while staying connected to the environment around me. I feel compelled to explore what it means to live fully as I sense, feel, think and move. I am happiest when I am moving, finding an essential wholeness, a visceral lifeforce when I am connected to the earth, in flow and fully occupying my body.
The movement practice that is my one, true love is aikido. I train at the Abundant Peace Internal Martial Arts School, preparing for my black belt test. While I enjoy so many aspects of aikido, what I most love is the joy that comes from connecting with my partner, a moment-by-moment interaction looking to create a non-harmful, harmonious resolution to a moment of conflict. In that dynamic process, I become part of something bigger than myself, feeling a flow of power that is not about exercising power over someone but more about expressing the power of an essential vitality of life. I also train Tai Chi; the two movement practices together are transforming my body to be more supple, strong, responsive and a skillful instrument to express my intentions.
I don’t know exactly where my path began. There was no big, life-changing event that led me to here. My path has been more about exploring through different work, discovering early whispers of what I am now becoming, following my desire to know more and evolve.
I studied at a liberal arts university settling on a bachelor’s degree in history after studying in psychology, anthropology and music. I earned a Master’s degree in Education, writing a thesis on transformational learning. But in studying these degrees, I was really studying what it means to be human and how we become who we are.
Valuing the transformational power of learning, I worked in colleges and universities in various roles; as an instructional designer, evaluator and applied researcher, as a Dean and a corporate trainer. In each of these roles, I explored ways that learning could become positively and powerfully impactful. I worked with learning tools like online technologies, developmental feedback loops in formative evaluation and frameworks like intercultural communication competencies. I was the person in the room who asked odd and challenging questions.
As a child I asked, “If we can make war, how can we make peace?” As an educator, I asked, “How can we help learners discover knowledge for themselves?” and “What are the crucial elements to create a transformative learning moment?”
My Body Speaks Up
When I was 38 years old, I was a Dean at a 2-year college with a strong social justice mission serving diverse students from Indigenous and LGBTQ+ identities, students from over 100 countries of origin and from economically marginalized backgrounds. Our students often faced complex barriers. I was drawn to how education for our students could literally change their lives for the better.I was being groomed to become a Vice President. And I heard the whispers from my body, that I was making the wrong choice, sitting in meetings 10 hours a day, working through weekends.
The pressures of my work created a physical armor in my body – a rigid, numb zone in my ribs, shoulders and neck so I could “shoulder” all of my responsibilities. The yoke I was carrying became heavier when my father died and my mother turned her expectations for care onto me. When I turned 39, it felt like I had turned 59 in my body and my life. I was successful on the outside, serving a cause I believed in and losing contact with my body as a vital, dynamic being.
I spent almost a decade reconnecting back into my body, through Pilates and yoga. I brought movement back into my daily commute. My unquenchable thirst to learn now included learning from my movement. I was inspired by my Mother; she has lived most of my life with MS. She supported her own well-being with daily self-care routines and an unshakeable core philosophy, what she calls her happy body cell philosophy. She urged me to take care of myself, to do daily what keeps my body cells happy. MS has a genetic component that is turned on by environmental factors like chronic stress. I was at the age when I was statistically most likely to flip the switch on this disease. Several family members had been diagnosed. I realized that I was gambling with my health and likely to lose in betting against the odds.
Over this decade, I stepped into a less stressful role and eventually into my own business, Kind Power. I woke up to everything I had given up in order to devote my life energy to my work. And I found my way back to living in my body as an awake, vital, sensing self. I realized that so many of us are taken out of ourselves, that many of the maladies of body, emotional and mental health happen because we are chronically not present with ourselves. From this dislocation of self, we act in ways that harm us. Our unconscious habits of how we move, as dis-embodied selves, can create early impacts of aging. And that we can change these habits, we can learn, at any age, to live in a way that we sense and feel while we move so we can choose and change how we respond to our social and physical environment. We can become more fully human.
What is it that you do for your clients?
I support my clients to learn from their movement so they can move more with less pain through coaching, classes and workshops. I like to describe my work as a kind of functional life yoga; it’s not just about doing the movement; it’s bringing a mindfulness to how you move, to how movement functions in your life and to learning new movement habits so you can choose movement that carries you towards wellness and wholeness, rather than wearing out. Almost all clients come wanting to fix or work with a specific issue. While we focus on that issue, almost all my clients realize that they are learning how to be present with themselves, how they can embed self-care in their movement and how they can create positive choices in how they move and how they live. My clients find personal freedom as they learn; that the legacy of what they have inherited, what has happened to them and how it has shaped their body and their selves, they learn how they can shape their sense of selves to live beyond how they have been conditioned. Movement becomes a vehicle for self-awareness and growth.
I worked with a client with a chronic condition who was raised with high expectations for her performance as a young girl in 3 different activities: equestrian, ballet, and figure skating. Her body reflects the toll of years of attempting to meet the performance expectations put upon her. While I support some specific movement issues for her to improve her balance and her breathing, overall I support her to find softer, gentler and more supportive ways to care for herself as she moves. She is learning to find a way to function in her life that is not based on striving to achieve a demanding performance.
Who should hire/work with you?
The people that benefit from working with me come with an attitude that they are willing to invest in learning how to move towards wellness. Learning is more costly than taking a pill and waiting to heal. When my clients invest in learning from their movement, they take their learning away into their movement for life.
My clients come to me after they have had a life-changing injury or when they live with a life-changing condition like fibromyalgia or MS and want to keep active in their lives. Often, they are aged 45-70 and find the change in their movement quality is affecting their world, forcing them to live in a smaller world of possibilities. I help them function in their world and open the door to what is possible for them.
What is your big goal? Where do you see yourself in 10 years from now?
I am working towards the creation of online and onsite wellness through a movement center. In my future center, I will offer accessible programs online and onsite to support mind/body integration and wellness, including aikido, Tai Chi and Awareness through Movement programs. Through partnerships, we will provide outreach programs to children and adults focusing on supporting women, immigrants and LGBTQ+ audiences to learn through movement how to live with greater peace and personal power. Clients will be able to access hands-on healing modalities. We will host urban retreats. In 10 years, I would also like my center to be a hub for movement lab and practice innovation events, a place for practitioners to study wellness through movement practices.
