Personalized Wellness Journeys: Discovering the Power of Healing, Belonging, and Authenticity with Krystal Longmire

Have you ever stood at the crossroads of wellness, wondering how to tailor the journey to fit your unique blueprint? This episode holds the key, as I sit with Krystal Longmire, revealing the profound impact personalized wellness can have on every facet of life. From Krystal's transformative lessons in the military to her innovative approach as a wellness architect, we uncover the indelible link between mental, emotional, and physical health, and how financial stability plays its part in our overall happiness.

My own narrative weaves into this tapestry of transformation, shedding light on the metamorphosis from a weight-centric worldview to embracing holistic well-being. I share the intimate details of my own weight loss, and the mental shifts that made it possible, illustrating the power of purpose and the importance of direction. Like setting coordinates on a GPS, we discuss how defining clear goals can illuminate the path to personal fulfillment and how I now channel these revelations into programs designed to uplift and empower others in recognizing their own worth.

The conversation then takes flight as we celebrate the beauty of individuality and foster a sense of belonging that doesn't demand sacrificing one's essence. We draw from Brené Brown's insights on belonging versus fitting in, and I share the joy in recognizing that authenticity fosters genuine connections, allowing our unique superpowers to thrive. Thank you for joining Krystal and me in this heartening exchange. We're just a message away for any burning questions or if you're yearning for further dialogue after tuning in to this episode's journey of self-discovery and healing.

Stay in touch with Krystal: https://www.instagram.com/healingwithkrystal_/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello there everyone and welcome back to the Overcome Yourself podcast, or I titled it Overcome Yourself the podcast. As you guys know, my name is Nicole. I'm so excited to be here today with Crystal. Crystal, you work in wellness Take it away. I don't want to butcher what it is that you do, so take it away. Let us know a little bit about your background and how you help your clients today.

Speaker 2: 0:28

Thank you, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. My name is Crystal Longmeyer and I am a personalized wellness architect, and I created that title, I guess, because I feel like there's so many people in the space today that are just regurgitating information. They are really. They're just giving you blanket stuff and it's not really what each individual person needs. Every body, every physical human, is completely differently made, and what's best for you might not be best for me or vice versa. And so I started wanting to get more personal with people and find out what's actually going to work best for them, versus like, oh, you should eat this or take this or drink this or try this meditation. And I got into that because I actually had experienced several challenges with the mental health space and the physical health space on my own.

Speaker 2: 1:21

Prior to that, I actually worked at a gym for 10 years and I was not the healthiest version of myself when I worked at the gym. I was actually really financially unstable. I had a lot of negative, limiting beliefs that were really keeping me stuck, and I felt like I was just going to be stuck in that cycle forever, and I started to try to get myself out of that by joining the military at 29 years old because I was completely living paycheck to paycheck or even like I had to decide bills or food or gas and nothing all got paid at once. It was very much a challenging point and emotionally I was kind of out of balance in every way that one could be using, you know, all these crutches to manage my emotional wellness, not really focusing on myself, not understanding how to even do that because no one teaches you and as a result, my physical health suffered.

Speaker 2: 2:20

So I was like 70 pounds overweight and I'm working at a gym, teaching people like, hey, get a gym membership and be healthy, and I was working out but it wasn't really doing what it needs to do for my body because nobody was teaching me what to eat, nobody was giving me a guideline that was actually something that was specifically for me. And emotionally and mentally I was kind of all over the place. And you know how I got to the next level. You know is a series of events that occurred, but you know that's kind of how I started, or where I started and where I'm at now, and it's definitely night and day difference from former me, if you will, yes, and sometimes we don't realize that.

Speaker 1: 3:00

Even stress, right, stress there's like a chemical reaction that's happening inside our body. So when we get stressed, when we allow ourselves to maintain those stressful thought patterns right, because we ask ourselves these questions that are leading us down these stressful rabbit holes, there's like you know, one of the things that I've heard a lot about is like cortisol, right, and then you get like this protective fat around your belly because stress, right, and so there is a. There's a big link between it's not just about going to the gym, right, because we do have to eat. We have to eat the right things. One of the things that I had to that I'm working on is actually eating more. I wasn't eating enough, and so learning how to eat the right things so that you can eat more, to give your body the things that it needs, so you can work out because if you're exhausted, you can work out like it's just, it's basic math, right, like you just don't have the energy in you, and so it is like this very interesting balancing act where we do have to learn how to manage all of those areas.

Speaker 1: 4:04

And another thing is there's a. There's a correlation between money and happiness only up to a certain point, right Up until the point where we can pay our bills. And so if that basic need is not met, if we're not at least meeting that level where we have the things we need, we have a roof over our head, we have food coming in right, then our happiness is gonna be affected by our money. Once we reach that level, that stuff is taken care of well, now we can focus energy on other things. So, okay, that's just a lot that I've gotten from the things that you just said. So take us a little bit into that background, that series of events. How did you take control of the stress? How did you get from there to where you are now, where you're actually helping in wellness versus skinny?

Speaker 2: 4:57

right? Oh my gosh, totally, and yeah. So the first thing that happened was I joined the military.

Speaker 2: 5:05

And I joined the military because, like you said, I was in this state of unhappiness. I was broke for like six years and my goal in life was to not struggle Like my big goal, like if I could just not struggle, then I made it. That's how I felt and looking back on that now, like it almost makes me a little emotional, because there's so many people right now that are in that same space, especially with the state of the economy. And after I joined the military, I thought it was gonna solve all my problems, because you go to a recruiter and they tell you oh, we're gonna pay all your student loan debt and we're gonna take care of this, that and the other. And it gave me this big like do I dream of oh, I'm going to be a better leader and it's gonna change the trajectory of my life. And it did teach me some things and I did have an interesting experience that I won't go too much in depth in, but it was very educational. I did learn things, I did become a better leader and I actually finished my contract four years in because of an injury and around that time I had also met my now husband at the gym that we were working at. I had hired him and he was so good at sales that when I joined the military and went back to school to make myself a part-time employee, that gave him the opportunity that he should have had before, because he was actually promoted to my boss. So I hired him and then I demoted myself as a result of my path and he was able to become my boss, which I did not enjoy, and he loves telling that story. But down that path he actually got so good at what he was doing that he reached the ceiling. He was not gonna make any more money at that job and he was like, well, there has to be more than this. He found a network marketing opportunity and that network marketing opportunity taught him in the skillset of trading in the forex markets and so he was able to become an educator for that company and he started traveling.

Speaker 2: 7:08

And I was very anti-network marketing. I had that mindset of, oh, that's a scam and you're just trying to sign people up so you can get paid, and I was against it and he was like, okay, well, I'm gonna go do it. And then he started like traveling to all these other countries and speaking for these people and I'm over here at my job, just like I wanna go to Trinidad, I wanna go to Spain, I wanna go to these places. And he's like well, you have a job. He's like, do you want to get involved in this? So I did, started getting involved and I was able to pay off my $15,000 in student loan debt. So I no longer had a negative stigma towards network marketing and, as a result of what he did, he was able to completely retire himself from what he was doing and then I no longer needed to work a regular job. We were living in Indianapolis at the time and we moved to San Diego and we're like we're gonna live here and we're gonna do the thing from here.

Speaker 2: 8:00

But I wasn't happy doing that thing. It wasn't my thing, it was his thing, and I felt like I'm just doing what he basically used to retire me, like that's what I should be doing. And we do that to ourselves a lot, where we tell ourselves what we should be doing, but it's based on arbitrary information that we're getting, because when we think that's what we should be doing, based on what somebody else wants us to do or what society says or what our parents told us, and that's where I was at. And so we ended up going to this Bob Proctor event and at this event Bob Proctor was standing on stage and he's asking the audience what do you want? And so I wrote I want to be a master forex trader and a chairman 100. It was the rank in this company we were in.

Speaker 2: 8:42

And these strangers sitting at a table with looked me and they're like that's not what you want. And I was like well, how do you know? They were like I couldn't feel you at all. You have no emotion. There's no desire behind it. There's no. Like it was robotic when you said it. And they were like where's your brainstorm list? And they asked me to see what I had written on my like little list. And I reluctantly showed it to them and I had written dance but crossed it out. And they were like why'd you cross that out? Well, I'm not that good of a dancer.

Speaker 2: 9:09

Limiting belief. And they were like I wrote yoga. They were like why'd you write yoga? I was like yoga teachers are broke. Limiting belief. And there was something about wanting to clean the oceans, like that's a big passion of mine, because the oceans are such an important part of our physical existence on this planet and they were like, why'd you cross that out? It's like, well, the oceans, massive people are literally destroying it every single day. I had no idea how just little of me is gonna do something about that limiting belief. And so that's how I actually got into.

Speaker 2: 9:39

Wellness was at this event. I rewired what I wanted, wrote it down, what I actually wanted, and then I, after months and months of wanting to, I finally messaged the teacher I had been working with and was like, okay, how much is yoga teacher training? And she told me and I sent her a payment right then and I had been looking at the flyer for that Every single day that I went to the gym for the entire time. I lived in California and at the yoga studio I lived at Indianapolis for over a year, but not believing in my own abilities or thinking that yoga teachers were broke stopped from actually taking that step, and it was like the door that opened to this whole world of like holistic mental health and wellness and I started studying and getting certified and everything I could get my hands on after that. That's so cool.

Speaker 1: 10:26

That is amazing. And then, in that game, did you drop weight, Did you get healthier in that? Was that a part of it? When the stress relief did that make it easier for you? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Was that even? Did you stop paying attention?

Speaker 2: 10:42

Yeah, no, I didn't necessarily. I did stop paying kind of paying attention to the weight and started more feeling, paying attention to like how I felt, and the result of that, I did drop like a lot of weight. My body was shaped, I had strength, I was doing strength training and yoga, I was meditating on a regular basis, I was practicing gratitude, I was journaling, I was reading personal development books. I was completely changing the entire trajectory of my whole programming that I had been living in for the last 34 years at that point, and so there were a lot of different things that changed. My opinion of myself was definitely one of them, and I think I ended up getting down to 150, which my prior weight was like challenging to get below 185. So I felt really good about myself, I felt confident and I felt like there's just so much, so much to this, and what ended up happening is I started coaching people in the network marketing company. So I was still in the network marketing company at this point, still not loving the network marketing.

Speaker 2: 11:51

One of the things was with network marketing, you get people on a call and kind of find out what their goals are and what's their why, and I started to teach people how to figure out their why.

Speaker 2: 12:01

Because I realized that if I didn't know what I wanted after going to this event, all these other people probably didn't know what they wanted either.

Speaker 2: 12:08

And so I was like I want to help them learn what that is. I want to help them dig into their heart and find out what they want and not, you know, when my mom said I should, or my husband thinks I should, or my kids say whatever, and so everybody has the right to go after what they're passionate about and and feel fulfilled when they're doing it. And so I started to work with these people and I I would get on the phone with them and almost every single time, within five minutes of the call, they would be telling me that they were physically abused, that they were sexually molested, that they were beaten, that they experienced drug abuse, these different traumas, and I was like, well, this is the reason that they don't know. It's not even necessarily that they were programmed, but it's that they've got all of these patterns and all of these things that have been fed into them their entire lives and they don't believe in themselves and they don't know their worth.

Speaker 1: 13:01

And so then it was like they're trying to protect themselves from letting this happen again.

Speaker 2: 13:07

Oh my gosh, yes, like putting that armor on, and I was like this is what I'm supposed to do. I asked myself, like I was why are these people telling me this? I'm not on the call to talk to them about this. I'm on the call to help them figure out their goals. But then I was like, well, there's a reason that they're telling me this, it's because I'm supposed to help them. And so then that's when I really got into kind of creating programs and doing coaching for people.

Speaker 1: 13:33

It was amazing and I want to highlight that in the beginning of your story, what you wanted was to not struggle, but you were still focusing on struggle. And then you mentioned that you were stuck in that cycle for like six years, and so you're like, I don't want to struggle, I don't want to struggle, but to your mind, the only thing your mind heard was struggle, struggle, struggle. So your mind is going to give you what you want. You think struggle. All right, dude, like let's struggle. And you were able to, through all the things that you mentioned gratitude, the meditations, the journaling, refocusing, like changing your perception and changing that focus and now you knew what you wanted. And so that is a very important key is what are you focusing on? And like really taking that brainstorm and figuring out what do I want? If this is what I don't want, I know I don't want this and what do I want instead? Because until you don't know that, like it's like you know, like you get in your car and you just start driving when are you going? I don't know, but I don't want to be here. But like, if you know, you know once I got stuck on like 285, it's in Atlanta.

Speaker 1: 14:37

It's this big circle that goes around the city. This is like I was stuck on this road for eight hours, dude. So I went around one side and I went and almost hit the exit, but then I was like no, it's got to be. And then I drove all the way around to the other side to one exit before where I was supposed to be. It was a whole thing. And that's what happens when we set out without a destination, we don't have a GPS. You get right where you were about to get off and this is the exit. This is where the success is. No, I'm going to turn around. This is obviously not working. And then you turn around and you go all the way back around to the other side Eight hours, Like I spent the whole night driving around that road.

Speaker 1: 15:17

And so when you were able to sit down in brainstorm and sit with some people who are like hey, there's no passion there, you were like, okay, let me put an address in this GPS. I'm done driving around in circles. I'm going to get where I want to go, and it's definitely not on this road. So we got to figure out where to go. That is amazing, Amazing, Amazing. So talk to us a little bit about how you help your clients, Because I know you have a free gift that you mentioned that you would love to give our audience. So can you tell us about that and how it fits into how you help your clients now?

Speaker 2: 15:58

Yes, so the free gift that I have is actually something I feel like everybody can benefit from, because I feel like, whether it's a condition that we've been diagnosed with or it's just something that happens every once in a while when we're overwhelmed, which can be a lot more for some people than others, we all have some kind of anxiety that we experience, and so I created a free anxiety management guide to help you overcome whether it's something that's debilitating for you on a regular basis or whether it's just like okay, I feel anxious right now. I want to calm this down so that I can focus on my day, and that's one of the things that I typically try to incorporate in my healing sessions. So I work with people one on one via healing sessions, health coaching and life coaching, and the difference between those is that healing sessions are more for, like, the mental, emotional wellness. Maybe there's a pattern that the person is repeating that they want to stop repeating, or maybe they don't realize that they are in a pattern, but they are just not happy and they're over it. Or they struggle emotionally, or they know they have anxiety, or they want just to feel better emotionally. They just want to feel good. Then I typically work with them and just try and help them realize their own patterns. I don't actually I used to call myself a healer and I feel like that's kind of a misnomer, because a healer is someone that facilitates healing for other people to heal themselves. But in the name it kind of indicates that like I'm going to lay hands on someone and then like they're going to be healed, and that's not necessarily what I believe I do or what any healer actually does. They're actually just facilitating.

Speaker 2: 17:39

And then on the nutrition side, I work with people that have psoriasis or any autoimmune disease, crohn's disease, digestive challenges, maybe leaky gut, gluten intolerance which I found out that I also have or Hashimoto's or just anything. They've gone to the doctor and the doctor's like okay, well, there's nothing wrong with you, so you know bye, or give them a pill and the pills like maybe causing other challenges, and it's generally like there's a food that you're eating that's not good and even if you just take a blood test, it's not always that simple. Like sometimes you have to go even deeper than that and do food elimination, diets and actually takes work. And what tends to happen with a lot of people when they're trying to find answers is they get given up on, like they can't find the answer after around one, two or three. So they're like, okay, well, sorry, and it's it's. That's sad and you know, I just don't want to give up on people and I feel like there's an answer for everyone.

Speaker 2: 18:39

And then on the life coaching, I kind of combined the healing and the nutrition and I work a little bit with goal setting and you know what do you want and you know overall happiness and gratitude is tied into every single one of those, because I feel like all of those things start with your mindset and reprogramming yourself, and you mentioned something about what you focus on and how important that is.

Speaker 2: 19:00

And I feel like a key that many people don't realize in every aspect of wanting to grow and change in their lives is, when asked what they want, they always say what they don't want and your mind doesn't hear the don't. Your mind just hear like that's where you're talking about with the struggle. Your mind doesn't hear the don't. So you become what you think about most of the time and if all you're thinking about is what you don't want and that's what you're going to bring into your life, that's what so many people do, and sometimes it takes several rounds with clients where I have to be like, what do you want? And then then actually give me an answer on what they want instead of what they don't want.

Speaker 1: 19:34

Yes, because we sometimes we limit ourselves from dreaming and if we think about the things that we want and we're miserable and we have this job and we can't do it, you're just like. You're like, oh, I feel bad thinking about this. I'm just, I just need to focus on this so that I can do it, because this is the plan. And then somebody is like, well, what do you actually want? And you're like, I don't know, I haven't thought about that, because I've been thinking about work and I've been thinking about filing this and I've been thinking about the kids and I got to take them to soccer practice and then I got to get to bed at a decent hour and then there's the show and blah, blah, blah. So I don't, I haven't even thought about that. Like what vacation, you know? Like what now? Right, um, yes, so I absolutely love that. I love how you you facilitate that. I mean, as a you know, I help people with their businesses, with their online businesses, but it's the foundations. Like, just like you work with people on those foundations.

Speaker 1: 20:33

We talk about very similar things. I start with gratitude, like if that's how I teach my clients. I'm like you change your perspective by focusing on gratitude. Yes, this sucks, but what can I be grateful for right now? And I know, because that's what I did, right, I had to learn to focus. I don't have all of these things, but what do I have? How can I start with what I do have and go from there? Right, how can I earn the money to get this new computer? How can I make something happen to you know, do whatever it is? Just the computer was sitting in front of me.

Speaker 1: 21:06

Then the next step is the habits. Those simple, tiny success habits is what I call them. You mentioned a lot of them. We reshape our focus by journaling, writing about those things that we want, that we don't want, getting it out of our brain, practicing gratitude. I always say write three things down every day, three things that you're grateful for, so your brain can practice.

Speaker 1: 21:29

And then the last part of my book, which is where this whole podcast and stuff comes from, is discovering the superpower in what you thought was your weakness. And so I think that that's what we're talking about, where people are like oh, I have anxiety. Well, it's it. Maybe that's where your superpower lies. We just have to work through what's going on right, because there is something there, there's a wound there and once we heal it, there's a superpower that can come out of that, because we, when we have anxiety, when we have these things, we have to teach ourselves.

Speaker 1: 22:04

Malcolm Gladwell calls it compensation learning, right, we have to teach ourselves how to, how to keep up with everybody else, like how to how to put on a brave face and we're like shaking inside, you know, and things like that.

Speaker 1: 22:17

And so those are really valuable things little lessons that we learn, little insights that we get, like people, like when we have anxiety, people that have anxiety, you know, and so it's amazing to be able to reframe that, because, I mean, an anxious mind is just an over analytical mind, right, and if you turn that and use it for good, right. Instead of using that as as nervous energy, we can use it as excitement, energy and and there's so much good that can come from that, right. So, just using what we have in a different way, just seeing it in a different way, right. This has been absolutely wonderful, crystal. So how can, how can, how can the audience get their free gift, how can we reach out if we want to work with you and set those, those foundations, the healing and and then our wellness like those are like, that's where everything starts right. So how do we get in touch with you for that?

Speaker 2: 23:10

So I have. Instagram is definitely the easiest way to get in touch with me at healing with crystal underscore, and on there there's a link to the free gift. It's actually in the link in my bio and it's also on my website at crystalsworldcom, and that's also where you can contact for the healing sessions. If you want to get involved with healing sessions, or if you want to do just as a discovery, call and find out how it would actually benefit you, because I feel like that's an important conversation for everyone to have. As I said, it is very personal experience, and then I also work with essential oils, which I didn't even really talk too much about, but if you are interested in learning more about those or want to use those for mental health, physical health, emotional health or anything of that sort, then I also have a website you can order those from or you can always see in me with questions.

Speaker 1: 24:00

Amazing and the link for the for the anxiety management book. Can you say that name again and where we can find?

Speaker 2: 24:08

So it's called the links, just called anxiety management guide, and you just go straight to my Instagram. Click the link in my bio and it'll be right there.

Speaker 1: 24:18

Perfect, and all of those links will be in the show notes when this episode airs and so, depending on where you're watching this, check below, check the comments. The other links will be available so you can get in touch with crystal. Crystal, this has been amazing, you are. You are so vibrant, you enjoy to speak with. It was just such a pleasure having you. Can you leave us with a final tip for the audience?

Speaker 2: 24:43

Oh yeah, so I love what you said about finding your superpower, and I think that your uniqueness is your superpower. I think that we're all given special gifts, and those gifts don't look like your neighbor or your friend or your family or the people around you, and it might be in the same field as somebody you know, but you do it differently than everybody else, and so that's something that I actually talked about in a chapter in a book that I wrote that I spent so much of my life trying to fit in, and then I found out that not fitting in was what made me special and what made my superpower shine, and so I would say, tap into that uniqueness.

Speaker 1: 25:32

I love that, and that makes me think of what Bernie Brown says is that it's not about fitting in. We're not looking to fit in. We don't need to fit in. What we want is belonging, and we belong the way that we are. We don't have to fit in to belong. So when we are ourselves, we belong to each other right and to our world, to our friends, to our family, and so we don't have to fit in. I love that. So, so, so much, crystal. This has been amazing. Thank you so so much for being here with us and I guess until next time I will see you on the World Wide Web. We will see you, guys, next time. Thanks for being here. Let us know if you have any questions, reach out to us and we'll see you next time. Bye, thank you.