Embark on a journey of self-discovery as MysticMag sits down with Willow Tucker, a spiritual teacher and healer. In this captivating interview, Willow shares her inspiring professional beginnings, sheds light on the essential 5 pillars of Holistic Health, and reveals the transformative power of Hatha Yoga. Join us as we delve into the unique structure of her retreats and workshops, and uncover the remarkable array of services she offers to nurture mind, body, and spirit.
Can you please introduce yourself to our readers and share a few details about your professional beginnings?
My name is Willow Tucker and my professional beginnings were in massage therapy. I began with an excessive education in anatomy and massage techniques and did twice as many hours as were required to be licensed. I gained additional skills in Structural Integration, Craniosacral Therapy, and many more specialty classes before I left that institution of education and began exploring multiple modalities taught by many different instructors.
On your website, you mentioned the 5 pillars of Holistic Health. Can you tell us what those are and what makes them so crucial?
The 5 pillars of Holistic Health are:
1) Spiritual- feeling part of something bigger. Being part of a faith, tradition, part of nature. Meaning and place in life.
2) Mental and Emotional-Our mindset is a foundational aspect of our health and interplays like a tennis match with our emotional life. If we are lacking a positive mindset we are already beginning with defeat. That mindset leads to emotions and emotional states that do not support our goal. Not to say that emotions are negative or should not be expressed but how they impact one another is the key aspect I am illustrating with this example. If we can “talk back” to the voice inside that is berating us, telling us we can’t, we will fail, shame, and correct that voice, let it be heard, and hear where those beliefs are coming from. Then correct it to the reality of the situation. Do those thoughts serve me well? Are those thoughts helpful? How does listening to that voice make me FEEL? Then with that inner feedback, we can correct the voice or welcome a different voice to be heard, one that has thoughts that serve me well, thoughts that are helpful and make me FEEL good.
3) Environmental-such a wide category. This can be those you live with, the home you live in, and the health of the environment both on your mental health and physical well-being. The lighting, the air, the noise or sounds, the availability of natural spaces, the presence of toxins, all of these things fall under this category and are part of the picture of your Holistic Health.
4) Physical-this category includes your body, organs, muscles, and teeth. It includes movement, exercise, nutrition, hydration, sleep, and all phases of life like birth, death, menopause, and those transitions.
5) Social-this category is about your work and service in the world, all of your relationships and connections or lack thereof. There is an abundance of research on the impact of our social lives on our Holistic Health picture. One study in particular was the Blue Zone and the majority of those areas of the world had a solid social connection where walking and visiting with neighbors, family, or groups was part of their daily lives, in addition to what they ate, the Blue Zone discovered other key areas of importance to these places incredible health compared to the rest of the world.
There are many systems that organize a whole person’s holistic health system into categories such as those above and with many variations. They are important because they illustrate that just diet and exercise are not the only factors to focus on for better health. Even focusing on those two and your mental health does not encompass a truly holistic view. They are crucial because if you are missing any of them the picture of your life is missing a piece of the puzzle. This creates imbalance or stress and therefore does not create wellness.
These days there is a huge focus on diet and exercise without looking at a person’s whole life. Diet and exercise are just a fraction of what creates health. Presenting these pillars on my website informs my clients that they will be addressed in the wholeness of their lives.
What is Hatha Yoga and what can a person expect from your Hatha Yoga classes?
Hatha Yoga is one style of Yoga among many others like Vinyassa and Kundalini. Hatha means Ha means Sun and that means Moon, a balance between strength and flexibility, strength balanced with peace and gentleness. So with Hatha yoga, both increasing strength and doing poses like down dog, plank, and forward fold are all part of challenging, heating, and working the body so that once that side (sun) is expressed we can arrive in our bodies to the place of the Moon, feeling into the awareness of our physical bodies, our subtle bodies, our breath, and meditation. After the stretching, core, and heating we cool, from sun to moon, and end deeply relaxed and renewed addressing both sides, the sun and the moon. I find that Hatha Yoga is slower and more focused on awareness than faster moving methods like Vinyassa, for me this appealed to the importance to go slow in correct form and awareness of my body, to arrive in a pose the way MY BODY fits in that pose. To move through poses to care for the body not to shape it into a pose that doesn’t fit my body to look a certain way. My teacher was very focused on awareness as she also studied Hannah Somatics and integrated it into her yoga teachings, as do I. So coming to my Yoga classes, you will receive a unique blending of somatic movements to release pain and tension and develop a deep awareness of the body as well as Hatha Yoga movements and I sing a soulful song at the end of each class during savasana.
You organize different retreats and workshops. How are they structured and what makes them unique?
The structure of my workshops is small and intimate and I think that makes them unique. These small groups are what work best for me personally and I am able to give personal attention to students when groups are very small, I mean under 7, most times less than that. 4 is a great number of structure and building. When I have 4 students sometimes the energy of the 4 carries us through the course, the course becomes a living energy that then moves through us impacting us individually and as a group. For me as the instructor, I channel the energy of the teaching and teach it to my students, but also, that energy is there to teach me something and so I always grow and get a tremendous amount out of every course I teach. Retreats are also best very small and intimate and that is unique! It would be a very different experience if you were my student arriving in the rural forest of Southern Oregon for a yoga retreat creekside and there were 100 people there camping everywhere or 4 people. How does each scenario impact the instructor, the student, and the land? Will students have the same contact and connection with the instructor? Notice, none of these questions revolve around profit.
What other services do you offer?
Ohmygoodness! Many! Ear candling, far infrared sauna sessions, detox foot baths, energy healing, chakra readings and clearings, past life sessions, emotional repatterning, body of belief sessions, forest bathing meditations, guided medicinal botanical walks, Hip Camp Host, Ayurveda workshops, aromatherapy workshops. Public speaking and private workshops for small groups. First blood celebrations for young women are custom-created rituals to celebrate their passage from child to woman, hand fasting, and other custom rituals.
Is there anything else about your work that you’d like to share that we haven’t covered?
I am an intuitive empath so I often feel what others are feeling, and others from beyond the veil communicate with me for them to hear. I often don’t remember what I have channeled for clients, but they remember it for years to come and say they carry the messages around with them always. I work from a body-based place in terms of illness, I look at the beliefs, emotions, and mindsets around illnesses as well as, social, environmental, and more.
To learn more about Willow and her work, you can visit her website at www.willow-tucker.com
