Twenty years ago, Dana Frost hired a life coach to assist her family while adopting two of her five kids. She found the help she needed and a new career path. Dana spent three years on life coach training and started to educate other women on emotional well-being. Today, as a certified life coach and the host of the Vitally You Podcast, she invites clients and listeners to pay attention to how their minds and bodies are connected and to seek the truth about themselves.
During this episode of the Speaking of Phenomenal Podcast, Dana shares with host Amy Boyle her technique for conquering inner ease and explains how personal life crises involving her health, marriage and family informed the kind of professional she became.
She and Amy met years ago at an event for women entrepreneurs and instantly became friends. Amy, the mother of four, and Dana, with five children, shared the struggles and joys of balancing family and professional life and making important choices every day.
Dana developed the inner ease technique after years of training and testing its tools in her own life. She came up with five steps: tension test, embodiment, breath awareness, inner truth and the peaceful path, which she made sure to describe in detail so listeners could also practice:
The tension test is about learning how our bodies react to mental and emotional distress and detecting our body language, which is different for everyone. Then, we are invited to connect with that body language (in a process Dana calls embodiment) instead of trying to solve the problem just in our head. This step consists of not only noticing the signs our body sends us but acknowledging them, trying to understand their meaning and taking action about them.
The third step is paying attention to our breath and how it connects our minds to our hearts, visualizing the inhale and exhale flowing in and out from our heart center. Then comes the truth step, which sounded the most exciting (and difficult) one to me. Here’s what Dana suggests: we should be honest with ourselves about our different roles and find out what beliefs cause us suffering. “How do I feel when I believe that? And what if I let it go?” The tricky part: we can only find our inner truth if we feel safe. “That’s a requirement,” Dana said.
People feel safe in different places, physical or immaterial. Host Amy Boyle likes to go to her “tree house,” a space on her deck where she feels “like a seven-year-old kid.” Where is your place? Thank God, I know where mine is.
The fifth and last step in the inner ease technique is the peaceful path, in which Dana invites people to “use” the truth they find about themselves as the necessary strength to move forward despite the difficulties they might encounter.
“You can simultaneously have feelings that are depleting and still be in a state of inner ease,” she guarantees. “That comes from going through this process of being able to look at your own truth.” If we know who we are and where we are headed, overcoming obstacles becomes easier.
These steps give us a lot to think about. Are you ready to start?
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Carolina Baldin is a freelance journalist from Brazil. Having worked in law, policy and regulation, she is passionate about everyday stories that illustrate larger issues. She graduated from a master's program at Northwestern University in 2023 and became a guest blogger on the "Speaking of Phenomenal" podcast blog in March 2024.
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