Inspired with Nika Lawrie

Overcoming Trauma By Mastering The Four Areas Of Fitness with Maggie Dong

• Nika Lawrie, Maggie Dong • Season 2022 • Episode 20

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Maggie Dong is a Fitness and Life Coach and Podcaster who helps people master their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness to raise their consciousness and attract love. In today's episode, Maggie shares insight into her personal story about how she used getting healthy as a tool to overcome trauma. 

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Nika Lawrie:

Welcome to the Inspired with Mika Laurie podcast. Maggie, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so you're a fitness and life coach, among other things as well. Can you share a little bit about your backstory and kind of how you got to where you are today?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah. So I would say my fitness and personal development journey started around the time when I was 16, because I was kind of forced into that position from losing my mom to breast cancer. Oh my goodness.

Nika Lawrie:

I'm so sorry.

Maggie Dong:

Thank you. And at that time my dad had already been in jail for two years. So with him being incarcerated and then losing my mom, I all of a sudden needed to step into that role of taking responsibility for myself and for my little brother. He was 11 back then, that's a lot.

Nika Lawrie:

That's such a young person.

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, all those events just pushed me into that position of taking responsibility and really looking at myself and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. And figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, because up until that point I had no idea. And when all of this happened, I sat in that victim mentality for a while. I was playing the victim, blaming life for being so unfair and why can't I just live like a normal kid. And nothing in my life was changing when I was playing the victim. And it wasn't until I really stepped out and took responsibility for my life and decided to make a change. That's when everything started shifting.

Maggie Dong:

So from that point, I worked through my eating disorders, my anxiety, depression, and dealt with the grief and healed from a lot of stuff. So that's what led me to where I am today, which is the four areas of fitness the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Because I realized that if we miss any one of these areas, we constantly find ourselves trying to fill a void that cannot be filled, and I was using external things to fill that internal void. I was using food and exercise and even relationships to fill that void. And that's what I do now helping people balance the four areas from within.

Nika Lawrie:

Man, your story is so inspirational. One and then two. I can so relate to it, not in the sense of losing my parents, but my daughter's father was incarcerated for a long time when she was young, and so I can relate kind of in that relationship, but also just the struggle of overcoming the trauma. And when you sit in that victim mode, when you sit in the why has the world done this to me? Why has the universe picked me to not give an easy life? You sit in that and you get so dark and things don't change and you really just kind of pick apart yourself. You are always trying to figure out why you're broken or why you're this way, and having that mindset shift to understand that you can change and that you can take responsibility, even though there are things that happen that were outside of your control, taking responsibility on how you react to those things and how you focus on those things is so powerful. So thank you for sharing your story.

Maggie Dong:

Thank you, and a hundred percent, I mean. There are so many things we can't control. As human beings, we like to micromanage everything, but really the only thing we do have control over is our reactions and how we choose to live our lives.

Nika Lawrie:

So you mentioned them a little bit, but you also talk about them a lot on your podcast. Can you restate what the four areas of fitness are and how you really came to those four areas?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah. So it's the physical, emotional and spiritual. And I really started with the physical because I had the eating disorder from trying to lose weight and I went off to college after after I lost my mom and that's when I moved to la. So for the first time I had the opportunity to kind of look at myself, because when I moved away from my hometown I was away from all of that.

Maggie Dong:

That happened and that's when I started going to the gym and started looking at my lifestyle, because I was living this extremely unhealthy lifestyle, trying to lose weight, trying to look better, but I almost had put my life at risk from doing that and I started really getting into the mentality of I want to eat healthy for my body, for my health, not necessarily for the way that I looked or to fill a void within myself. So that's where I started with the physical and after a while I actually started looking into personal training and that's when I started my business. I started with actually fitness coaching, helping people with their nutrition, their diet, and really truly living that healthy and balanced lifestyle. And as I went on with my own journey, I started realizing that just having the body that you want is not enough, because there is so much more to life than just how we look. I mean there, we're here for a much greater purpose than just to lose weight and pay bills and do all that yeah.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. One of the things that I always tell people is that you know good health overall, like wellness, general wellness, it's more than just food and exercise, like there's so much more that goes into it, and so I think that's really awesome that you're working with people and sharing that. Can you share when we're talking just about physical fitness, cause I think most people kind of have a good idea of what physical fitness generally is, but can you share two or three of your tips for kind of mastering physical fitness?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah. So I would say ask yourself why you're following the things that you're following, because there is so much out there. I mean, we know that. We know there are so many diets that people are telling you to try. Oh my gosh, every day, yeah, buy so many supplements. But why are we really doing these things and why do we follow something that we think is supposed to work and most of the time is for that instant gratification. We think that if we do this for a couple days, we're magically gonna start losing weight. But that is not sustainable at all and it's really thinking in terms of our health and looking at what is it actually doing for my body. What are the things that I'm doing, Like you know the exercise I'm doing. Is this for my highest good? Is this for my health?

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, yeah, I love that. What other? What other tips do you have specifically around physical fitness?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, I would say always listen to your body, always.

Nika Lawrie:

That's a great one yeah.

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, Listen to what your body is telling you. Your body's always telling you something, but it's just we don't pay attention because we think we know what's best. But our bodies are giving us that feedback. So, for example, if you eat something and it instantly causes you to feel very tired or you're bloated, I mean it's showing you something. Your body is telling you that this is something that doesn't sit well with you.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. You also talk about mental fitness and I think sometimes people don't take it seriously or don't prioritize it. Can you talk about why mastering mental fitness is so important to like our overall wellbeing?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah. So mindset is really behind everything. Even with the physical fitness, a lot of that is mindset, because you can have the best nutrition plan in the world, but if you are unable to follow that with your mindset, then it's not going to work. Mindset is really behind everything, and mastering the mental aspect of fitness is really looking at your mindset, rewriting limiting beliefs, reprogramming your, your subconscious and kind of also discipline play plays into a lot of that, because discipline, I mean, is the thing that really gets your results. If you don't have the discipline, if you mean, is the thing that really gets your results, if you don't have the discipline, if you don't have the consistency, then the other things don't really matter.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, yeah, and I think so often discipline comes from having clarity and kind of making those decisions of what your priorities are. And I think so often a lot of us know what we don't want but we don't actually know what we do want. And so getting really clear on what we want and what our expectations are, our values are for our lives, really plays into that discipline factor.

Maggie Dong:

Oh, 100%. And I mean discipline starts with the smallest things, even just waking up in the morning. So, for example, if you have an alarm set at six o'clock and you keep on pressing snooze for the next two hours, something like that it's going to show in other areas of your life as well, because how you do this one thing is how you do everything. So if you want to practice discipline, it starts with the smallest things.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, yeah, I think there's someone I can't remember, I heard it a long time ago, but there's someone that talked about hitting the snooze on the alarm clock and that you're actually training your body that you're supposed to continue to sleep even though the alarm's going on. Like your body knows that you just keep hitting the snooze, and so it becomes this habit or this routine that your body's used to, and so you will continue to sleep through for as long as you keep doing that habit. I guess, yeah.

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, I think it actually happened to me when back then I just kept on hitting snooze over and over again, especially when I was back in school. It was just snooze every morning and I might as well not set an alarm, but it trained my brain and trained my body to just not wake up and whenever an alarm goes off, I would just hit snooze right away.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah. Yeah, you also talk a little bit about limiting beliefs. Can you kind of deep dive into that and how that can affect our mental health, our mental fitness?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, so I mean, we all have limiting beliefs. They're just these beliefs that are preventing us from maybe achieving the things that we want to achieve. And an example that I can give is when I was starting my podcast, I was so scared. I mean I was thinking what are people going to say? What if I hate my voice? What if I make weird noises with my mouth?

Nika Lawrie:

That's so great, because I hate my voice through the podcast. So I love that you say that, because I think all of us have those same struggles.

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, I mean, I had so many of these limiting beliefs. But we have to understand that these beliefs are just in our head and our minds are going to make up these stories. That might not even be true and we worry about so many things. We're so stressed out, we're so anxious. It's because we're making up these scenarios in our heads that haven't even happened yet, because we're worrying about the future, thinking what could go wrong, especially with the future. We tend to think very negatively about the future.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, we do yeah.

Maggie Dong:

And that kind of affects our mental health because we're constantly in this state of negativity, of stress. But rewriting those limiting beliefs is really asking yourself. But rewriting those limiting beliefs is really asking yourself is this true or am I just making this up? Is this a story that I've created? And when we truly get to the core of that question, is this true? Most likely, it's usually not.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, I love that. So you also talk about emotional fitness, and so I think this can sometimes be one of the hardest areas for people to master. What advice do you have for someone who's struggling with mastering their emotions? How can we overcome that?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah. So I see that we're either on this like very this end of the spectrum where we neglect all of our emotions which is where a lot of people are at and I've been there, I. I was telling myself that I can't cry, I can't be angry, I can't show any of my emotions or we swing too far to the other end, where we just unleash everything on everyone and I've done that too. I've been on both ends of this. Yeah, I think everybody has. Yeah, so it's coming to that balance point in the middle where we do have control over our emotions. We're not unleashing it onto everyone and everything, but at the same time, we allow ourselves to feel when we need to feel and we're not neglecting them, we're not restricting ourselves from feeling. So everything I mean at the end of the day is that balance and coming to that balance point. It's easier said than done, but having that awareness of this is where we want to be at. It helps us get there.

Nika Lawrie:

This is where we want to be at. It helps us get there? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a lot about the self-talk that we have in our own heads and maybe even back to like the limiting beliefs or just the stories that we're telling ourselves in general about whatever we're experiencing at that moment. We can shift how we think about whatever's happening to us to kind of manage or maintain the type of emotional state we want to be in. So I love that you teach that. I think it's such an important thing that's often overlooked in the general health and wellness area.

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, I mean emotions. I was scared of them. I was so scared because growing up, my parents told me that I couldn't cry and I just had to be strong all the time. But that kind of story that we tell ourselves, it's actually. I mean, if we store these emotions in our body and we don't allow ourselves to cry or feel angry, it's energy built up in our system.

Maggie Dong:

Oh my gosh yes, it's energy built up in our system and, yeah, I was getting all of these like physical symptoms for the emotions that I was storing in my body, and it wasn't until I allow myself to just feel everything and be okay with crying and not have judgment of that. That's when I actually got rid of the physical symptoms over there.

Nika Lawrie:

I had a very similar experience. I've been through a bunch of traumatic moments and you know I was storing that energy, the anxiety, the stress, the overwhelm inside of me for a long time and I started to get physically sick. I had crazy chest pains. I was having pains like almost like arthritis pains in my joints in my late 20s, early 30s way too young to have that stuff normally. I was having digestive issues and what I started to realize was that once I started to work through the trauma, when I started to work through the emotions and kind of release them and process them and understand that I'm not alone lots of us are going through the exact same thing when I started to let go of the trauma and emotions, that's when I physically started to feel better.

Maggie Dong:

Oh, me too. I can relate to that so much.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, I love it, I wish, I wish more people could see it, and I and I hope that we can help more people start to see that so they can transform their lives too. Yeah, so the last of the four areas that you really focus on is spiritual fitness, and often this is either totally forgotten by people or it's kind of just linked to like a religion, a belief system that they have, which is fine, but there really is so much more that goes into that. Can you explain, like, what spiritual fitness is and why we should invest time in our own personal spiritual fitness?

Maggie Dong:

Yeah. So it's really interesting because when I talk about the four areas of fitness, people always tell me I've never heard of spiritual fitness, physical, mental or emotional fitness, but not spiritual fitness. And the reason that I call these areas fitness is because fitness implies that it's an ongoing journey, like we're not doing it once and we're done, yeah. Spiritual fitness it's something that we have to practice daily and that is connecting to our souls, connecting to our higher selves, because, like we said earlier, if we don't connect to our souls, we don't have that sense of why we're truly here. It wasn't until I connected to myself. That's when I realized that I'm actually here for a much greater purpose than I can even ever imagine. Yeah, yeah, that's the spiritual aspect of fitness is connecting back to ourselves so that we, we create more meaning in our life, and that meaning is not superficial, like we we need to look a certain way or I need to get the body that I want. It's meaning like truly, why are we here and who am I?

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, I, yeah. How have you? How have you connected back to yourself? What are some of the, the processes or tools, maybe, that you've used in order to do that?

Maggie Dong:

yeah, it's a lot of shadow work. Yeah, um, people think that spirituality it's all fun, is you just meditate all day? But no, you, it's a lot of healing, a lot of shadow work, diving deep, deep within ourselves and and connecting to our hearts, really, because we live so much in our heads and we live so much in the external worlds that we forget to connect back to our hearts. But it's in our hearts that that's where our souls live and that's where we actually have all the answers, and it comes from within.

Nika Lawrie:

I love that. It's so, so true that one of my favorite things to do is sit in a dark, quiet place by myself, even just for like five minutes, and just kind of ask myself the questions, like if I need guidance on something or if I'm struggling to kind of find clarity or something. I just disconnect from the world. So I go in the dark, quiet place, you know no phones, no distractions, and I do it, and then I ask myself you know the question I'm struggling with, and usually after a few minutes I start to kind of feel clarity and get the kind of answers that I'm looking for. And I think it's you know. Some people call it God and praying, some people call it you know your knowing or connecting with the knowing. Some people just call it, you know, going inside and finding your own higher being, and so I think, however that is or however that shows up in your life, it's such a powerful tool to help guide you.

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, it's so powerful and meditation is definitely a tool I would recommend, because before I started meditating, my life was a mess Like I can say that because I was constantly anxious and stressed. And when I first heard about meditation because people were telling me to just meditate and I told them there's no way, because I'm trying to get stuff done, there's no way I'm going to sit there in silence for 20 minutes and do nothing I saw it as a waste of time. But what I've come to realize is that the 10, 20 minutes that we take out of our days to actually meditate it actually saves time down the line, absolutely. We gain that clarity and we come from a place of groundedness and clarity instead of this anxiety and stress and worrying.

Nika Lawrie:

Absolutely. Yeah, I totally agree. And sometimes, you know, I had kind of the same thing when people were first telling me this was years ago. I was like I don't have time to meditate, Like I'm literally just trying to keep everything afloat. But what I started doing was just five minutes a day, Like back when I worked in the corporate world. I'd come home from work and I'd take just five minutes to just lay on my bed, close my eyes, decompress, before I started cooking dinner and doing all those kinds of things.

Nika Lawrie:

And that five minute shift was so profound in how I interacted with my family and how I felt in the evenings after work that I started to realize, wow, if the five minutes is doing this much, what's going to be? You know, what am I going to get out of 10 or 15 or 20 minutes? And you can slowly build up from there and work it into your routine. A hundred percent, yeah. So you, you have your podcast and and and social accounts and stuff. How can people find you listen to your podcast? Where can they find you online, and social accounts and stuff.

Maggie Dong:

How can people find you listen to your podcast? Where can they find you online? Yeah, so my podcast is called mind muscle enlightenment and that's where we talk about the four areas of fitness and in coming into alignment with our mind, body and soul, and that's on all platforms and my social media. I am on Facebook it's just my name. My Instagram, it's my name, maggie Dong, and an underscore, and the program that I currently have is called Heal and that's where we just heal from our traumas. We actually do the shadow work and raise our consciousness so that we can let go of all of that, so we can live with love, peace and freedom.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah, I let. Letting go of the trauma is, oh my gosh. It's the greatest thing you can do for yourself. So I, you know, for the listeners, I highly suggest checking that out and connecting with you, just because it can be so life-changing to work through it.

Maggie Dong:

Yeah, a hundred percent, and thank you.

Nika Lawrie:

Yeah. So I have one last question for you, and it's something that I asked all of my guests, so I put you on the spot a little bit. But what advice do you have for someone who wants to make change either in their life, in their community or around the world?

Maggie Dong:

I love this question. Thanks, thanks. I would say start with ourselves, because any change that we want to make in this world, it starts with us. We can't truly show up in the world until we have healed ourselves, until we show up for ourselves, because for a long time I did this too. I was always trying to help other people, because I wanted to be there for everyone, and I got to a point where I was so burnt out because I wasn't taking care of myself. I was constantly showing up for everyone else and coming from a place of empty and it actually wasn't serving anybody. So if we want to help the world, it starts with us, because as we heal ourselves, as we raise our vibration, as we raise our consciousness, it automatically influences all the other people around us.

Nika Lawrie:

I love that. It's so, so true. Always go within and heal yourself first. Put your oxygen mask on first, so you can help everybody else. I love that. Thanks so much, maggie. This has been fantastic, and I'm just so grateful to have you on the show.

Maggie Dong:

Thank you so much for having me Absolutely.

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