Interview with Kimberly Wiebe
You have been involved in holistic wellness ventures for a long time. What got you started in this area?
Fitness started for me in elementary school without much effort, I discovered I had natural strength and endurance. I could do well in endurance running and fitness testing without really knowing what I was doing. However, I always had so much fear of how I would do compared to others and what if I couldn’t do it, what would they think?
Despite my talents, the fear got the best of me and I dropped out of athletics in junior high school, much to the frustration of my coach I chose to focus on my social life.
It wasn’t until I reconnected with a high school crush that I started running again, the motivation was strong and he got me into working out. At the gym, I discovered yoga in the early ’90s. They were playing a power yoga video of Bryan Kest while I was signing in and I asked if they offered that. I knew nothing about yoga but signed up for a class that was at a time that worked with my workouts.
The teacher was known as the yoga nazi, she ate me for breakfast. She was determined to show the fit young 20 something that yoga was hard and that I couldn’t do it. I was determined to figure it out no matter how hard I found literally everything. Touching my toes wasn’t even an option because I couldn’t even touch my knees!
One day a fellow student told me about a power yoga class, our teacher overheard and determined to deter us led us through a flowing set of sun salutations, I fell in love and sought out the power classes at one of the three yoga studios in Calgary.
I loved how the studio had no mirrors, everything seemed so calm and different from the gym. It wasn’t long after that I quit the gym and focused solely on yoga for 15 years.
This was around the same time Oprah had shifted her talk show to be more focused on personal growth and awareness. I bought several books and started a practice of gratitude and journaling, which has stayed with me until this day and two of my wellness principles and tools.
The philosophy of yoga was enrapturing to me. Learning that this physical practice was really just the vehicle to the inner awareness of who we are. That the mat is our training ground for how we live our life and the awareness of if it is serving us to live our highest self.
The very first thing I ever watched on food was Paul Chek’s video, How to Flatten Your Abs. It had nothing to do with ab exercises and everything to do with food, nutrition, and how our food is grown and gets to our plates. I was blown away and that started my shift to eating all organic produce, grass-fed meat, and raw, unpasteurized milk.
In 2016, when I was told the lump in my breast was serious and most likely cancerous. I continued to do research and through Dr. Michael Greger and his site, nutrionfacts.org I made the decision to switch to a fully plant-based, vegan way of eating and I have never looked back. I feel healthier and more full of energy than I did at 25!
What has been your most significant learning’s along the way?
That I am responsible for my health and wellbeing. Educating myself with reading vast amounts of literature on a variety of topics and backgrounds and then trusting my intuition and inner guidance and immunity to lead me there over the fear, chatter, and doubt of my mind and the world around me.
You have developed a new program called ‘The experience of Letting Go’. Tell us about this program and what sort of transformation you are hoping that people will experience.
That is a two-part question and I will answer the second part first. Which is to say I have learned to not have hopes with other people’s life stories and choices on their paths. We get these moments in our lives, great calls of reckoning – a divorce, an illness, a job loss, death, or sometimes all of those or others. A very small few will stumble upward into change, growth and inner awareness of all that they are but the mass majority of people will fall back into familiar, comfortable, similar patterns.
In all the work I do my intention is simply to shine a light that we have choices and are responsible for our thoughts, bodies, and life choices and we can create a life of service willed with our dreams and soul’s desires or we can create the opposite. In Letting Go we will be specifically looking at our beliefs, where they come from and how they filter our experiences and relationships pulling us either into low vibration emotions and disease or into high vibration emotions and wellness. We can’t heal, change, or let go if we don’t understand what we believe and why.
(see below for more information on Kim’s upcoming Letting It Go Workshop)
Changing people’s belief patterns is not easy. Where have you seen the most success?
I can not change anyone’s beliefs or patterns only they can choose to do so. All I can do is offer my experience and knowledge and guide them to the best of my ability to know that there is another way to live in the world. That the experiences they are having are the experiences they need to eye their beliefs and if those beliefs are guiding them to a life they love or a life they are at odds with.
Truthfully, the people I have seen make the greatest changes in their life are those that are willing. Willing to embrace the tools and guidance wholeheartedly and do the work themselves without excuses or avoidance. Those who let their emotions be felt and move through them. I also believe being curious is very important. Curious about who you are, curious about another way of living and being in the world, curious of what you could do and create if you really listened to your heart and stepped into your courage instead of your mind, your fears and what other people will think.
What brought you joy this week?
Gosh there is so much joy in my life when you choose to live a life of awareness, as I have, you feel the highs extremely high and the lows extremely low, both bring me joy because one brings gratitude for the other. But this week, the sunshine and warm nights, my friend’s dog, cuddling and licking my hand, and hugs from friends that choose love over fear.
The Experience of Letting Go – The Workshop
transform your beliefs
transform your health
transform your relationships
The Experience of Letting Go – The Workshop
Over a period of six weeks, Kimberly Wiebe (Transformation & Lifestyle Teacher) will
lead you on a belief shifting experience. Kimberly is talented at simplifying philosophies
and ideas making them relatable to explore the world and engage in self-discovery.
Through in-depth discussion of the book, Letting Go, The Pathway to Surrender, by
David R. Hawkins MD., Ph.D., and through meditation,
breathwork, writing, and yin yoga you will be invited to explore where your beliefs come from, how these beliefs cause
you to open or close to your life’s experiences and relationships and, as a result, draw you towards low vibration emotions and illness or high vibration emotions and wellness.
“Because we are all part of the whole, when we heal something in ourselves, we heal it for the world.”
– David R. Hawkins, M.D,. Ph.D
This will be an intimate group focusing on how to handle the
changes of ordinary life, with its losses, stresses, crises, and
disappointments and how to be free of negative emotions
and their impact on health, relationships, and work.
Kimberly provides tools of guidance with compassionate,
non-judgmental support. Please ensure you can commit to
all 6 weeks.
Thursdays September 10 – October 15, 2020
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Tuition: $228
*If you or someone you know needs this workshop but cannot afford to do so at this time
please email me
register: kimberly@strengthandsoul.ca due by August 31
