Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together each week to reframe problems big and small with you, our dear Reframables.

Natalie
And why do we call you such a term of endearment?

Rebecca
Because, Nat, we’re all in the process of reframing and being reframed as we reorient life through the stories we tell.

Natalie
This week we are reframing wellness with Princess Owens.

Rebecca
Otherwise known as Multiple Mom, a family wellness coach has a lot to share about reframing wellness for moms, for black women, and for children. She gives insights into the origins of Pilates, her business Be Well Zara, and how she opted for community over fashion.

Princess is a mom of five who is also a writer and content creator working on an initiative centred around black kids’ wellness. She’s a registered nutritionist, certified sleep specialist, and certified family wellness coach with an emphasis on children’s wellness. Her nonprofit organization is called Be Well Zara. She also teaches yoga and meditation to young children.

So we came across your name when Nat had read your article in Harper’s Bazaar. Can you talk to us a bit about that article, and the Twitter thread that inspired it in the first place?

Princess
So I was on Twitter one day, and I saw a TikTok that was going viral in regards to Lori Harvey doing Pilates, and had said she gained a ton of weight in her relationship, and after the relationship, to get back on trying, I guess, with her weight loss goals, she decided to try Pilates. So the video alluded to, you know, “Oh, the gym’s going to be full now. These classes are going to be full now because we have someone influential among young black women.” And, “Oh, now everyone’s going to be doing Pilates.” So that didn’t quite sit well with me. I had read about Kathleen Grant years ago in school, maybe… I want to say almost twelve years ago. And I just wanted people to know that we’ve been in this space. Black women and women of colour been taking Pilates. So I did a little thread on the history of her, and once I did the thread, the thread started going viral and editors was reaching out to me left and right. “Hey, can you write on this? Can you write more about this?” And that’s how it came about.

Rebecca
Which really is so interesting, because I had a Pilates era in my life (I haven’t done it so much lately), and I very much felt it was a white space.

Princess
Right.

Rebecca
I was completely ignorant to the history and some of the great teachers. I mean, Kathy Stanford, she’s so interesting. I found this quote from her: “No matter where you go, you have to remember your centre. You don’t do it physically, you do it mentally. Do it inside. Let your mind direct your body. It’s really, really quiet.” So I really liked that quotation. And do her words connect to your experience of doing wellness work?

Princess
I think a lot of times when we think of wellness in terms of our history of survival, and what it means to be a marginalized person in this country, wellness for me may look entirely different than wellness for a white woman. So I think what Kathy was doing, she was making wellness become real to someone that looks like me. Because even now, when you see the way wellness is marketed and you see the way people talk about wellness on social media and all these wellness influencers, they put wellness in with luxury. It’s strayed away from his original core message of self-care and mental health and things of that nature to more so, “Oh, I’m going to the spa,” or having the most expensive candles, or, you know, eating the most expensive exotic, and drinking the most exotic teas, and things of that sort.

But when I think of people like Kathy, it gets back to the core of kind of centering yourself. Especially as a woman of colour, it is a revolutionary act to stand in that and say, “You know what? I’m going to prioritize my wellbeing and whatever that looks like to me.” For me, it’s making time for myself to take my walk every day. For someone else, it can be remembering to take their vitamins. For someone else, it can be remembering to say no and keep their boundaries in place. So I think that’s what Kathy represents to at least me personally.

Natalie
So for her being one of your heroes, then — I’m hearing you sort of describing her in that way, as one of your heroes in the wellness space. Are there other heroes that you have come across in your own practice that listeners of Reframables should know about, should be looking to for their own journeys, their own walks?

Princess
You know what? One of the people, Hey Fran Hey from The Friend Zone podcast is one of my absolute favourite mental hygiene wellness accounts. I have to say, in terms of motherhood and finding that balance in self-care motherhood, Dr. Amber Thornton on Instagram. But my heroes, honestly, are just the moms I come across every day that are making that next step to say, “You know what? I have to start taking better care of myself.” You know, “I’m always looking out for my partner, my spouse, my kids — it’s time for me to focus on me. And I don’t know where to start, but I am going to start.” Those are the women that I have conversations with on a daily basis. Those are the women that inspire me. Because it’s so wonderful to see especially mothers and caregivers find that grace within themselves to say, “Hey, you know what? After prioritizing everyone else, it’s time to take care of myself.” And those are the women who I look up to the most, honestly.

Rebecca
So do your children… how do you do it with them? Is there a moment where they’re like, “No, mommy’s doing her thing, she needs space.” Have you had to create those boundaries with your children?

Princess
Absolutely, and one of the things I always talk about, especially to moms wondering how to maneuver with multiple children: you have to let your children see your personhood. They have to honour your humanity, because we’re not super moms. We’re not these supernatural beings. We are very much human. We have these experiences that make us sad, makes us tired, makes us exhausted. Sometimes mommy get bored. Sometimes mommy needs to self-regulate. So I learned how to explain these moments to my kids in a way where I’m meeting them at their level, where they can understand, and in turn it’s teaching them empathy, and it’s teaching them how to be compassionate towards other people when they see other people might not be in the best sort of space — but it’s not wrong, you’re allowed to feel that way. So setting up these boundaries with my kids has been essential in my journey as a mom.

And one of the things that I do, and it’s the cutest thing, so if I’m having a day where I kind of just need, like, not to be touched because I’m touched out, because I’m touched out, I’ll say, “Mommy needs two feet.” So when they hear that, they know, “Ok, I need to just give mommy some space and, you know, find a way to entertain myself for now. Mommy just need two feet for maybe ten minutes.” You know, the other day, it was so funny — I went in my son’s room, my five-year-old’s room. So I go to give him a hug. It was Saturday morning, I said, “Can mommy give you a hug good morning. Mommy just wants to hug you.” He said, “Mommy, I need two feet,” and I loved it. I loved it. So yeah, just making things plain and clear for them, in turn I think it’s teaching them how to advocate for themselves when they also need that personal space.

Rebecca
Right. That’s so excellent. That’s the place where I felt guilty sometimes, is the touch part — is that I think I should always be available to be touched. But that’s so interesting that you’ve been able to name that in yourself, and then name it to your kids. I really love that.

Natalie
And given them the language to receive it. It is about language, isn’t it? We have to be able to translate these very adult but human emotions to the kids who are experiencing it themselves, perhaps for the first time. So, like, at five, to be able to say, “I need my two feet,” that’s brilliant. That’s so many skills so early. Princess, this is so interesting because your focus is children’s wellness. That’s your whole thing. And I just watched this TikTok video where one mental health expert, and I think they were a psychologist if I remember it correctly, but they explained a controversial opinion (that’s what they called it) as to why they believed mental health and wellness strategies taught in school is basically too little too late. And he was breaking down schooling and society in a very kind of western-centric way, where he was essentially saying we’re so socialized to just function on our own as individuals — so like an individualistic sort of sense of the world, that basically what should have been happening in community hasn’t, and then it’s like just a band-aid when all of a sudden we start talking about social emotional learning at school. So he’s not saying we shouldn’t do it, but he’s recognizing that society writ large is perhaps a little bit like coming late to the game here with that type of language. So would you agree, first of all, but also do you see hope or possibility found in the way that educators in school, but also educators like you, can use this language to help families, to help kids?

Princess
Yes, and yes. I agree that in a sense, it is a little too late, but I also have a tremendous amount of hope. I think, honestly, it starts with equity within marginalized communities, right? Because a lot of these children are going home to a place where they may not have any food to eat, and may be sitting in the dark, right? These are very much some kid’s realities, and I think it’s hard to teach skills and implement skills on how to regulate your emotions and things of that sort and teach emotional intelligence when it’s so much they’re up against. So I think the larger problem within our country especially, I think we have to find a way to make sure that these children are taken care of at home. Parents are stressed, they’re overworked, they’re burnt out. There’s already so much on them, and my heart goes out to caregivers, especially now in this day and age where we’re dealing with multiple pandemics at once, we’re dealing with the economy just about crashing — we’re dealing with so much. I feel like once we get to a place where we can… I don’t want to say kind of neutralize all of that, but it has to be something done for people to have the resources they need to survive. I’m not even talking about for people to even thrive — we’re not even there yet. I’m talking about just for people to make it day to day.

So once we kind of focus on that… not kind of, excuse me. Once we do focus on that, I think it’ll be easy to transition into implementing and putting together programs for children to learn things that will help them with their cognition and emotional intelligence. But it really starts at home and providing resources for these caregivers and parents to be able to fully take care of their kids. Because kids know when they’re living in lack. Kids know when they’re living in spaces that, you know, “I don’t have as much resources as I need to grow and develop properly as a child.” They might can’t word it, they may not know the exact language for it, but absolutely they can feel it. And I think once we focus on that, how we can do away with some of these food deserts, how we can make sure that healthcare is universal, how we can just be a support system, make sure that child care is cheaper for families — I think then we can really put an emphasis and focus on those sort of things, because those things do matter.

One of the things that’s so weird to me is when a child first goes to the dentist, you have a dentist to show them how to brush their teeth. When a child goes to the doctor, you have a doctor explain to them why it’s important to take your vitamins. But there’s nobody, there’s nothing set for a child, a young child — let’s say like my kid, like a five-year-old, to explain to them the importance of self-regulation, to give them strategies to calm themselves, to give them strategies to just know when they need to have that personal space. There would be no need for time out, since kids know how. “Hey, I’m overloaded, I’m too stimulated, I’m too hyped right now — I need to go to a corner.” And I’m grateful in that, and I know I’m privileged enough to know how to teach my kids this and that’s why I — not to jump ahead, that’s why I created Be Well Zara, because I want to teach other kids this. So I think it takes a whole system do-over to make this possible, but I don’t believe it’s impossible. I think we can implement programs to really teach children emotional intelligence. I really do.

Rebecca
You’re fundamentally hopeful.

Princess
I’m fundamentally hopeful, absolutely.

Rebecca
So just tell us more about Be Well Zara.

Princess
So I created Be Well Zara… when you look at even books about anxiety for children or ADHD or different neurodivergent things, and just, you know, mental hygiene in general, they’re all geared towards white kids. So I was like, “You know what? There’s a need for something for children of colour where they can see themselves being talked to in a language that they understand about their anxiety, about their mental wellness. So I created Be Well Zara out of a necessity. So once I sat down, I had to really sit with it because I didn’t know how I wanted to approach it. I didn’t just want another, “Oh, eat your veggies, you’ll be fine,” type of wellness organization. I really wanted to create something that would not only teach children how, but also provide resources. And that’s how Be Well Zara came about.

Natalie
If somebody just hearing you right now were to say, “I want to get some of those resources,” what would they get from you? Like, if they were to participate with that program, donate to your program…

Princess
I have classes twice a month. I post them on my Ko-fi account. Our website is in the process of being put together now. The website is not up, but you can reach out to me on my Ko-fi account and the multiplemom.com account. And basically classes — I offer nutrition classes, and all these classes are free. We do yoga, we teach mindfulness, we teach body awareness in kids. We also teach nutrition. We do dance classes for self-esteem development. So pretty much right now, the way we help is in form of classes.

Natalie
So I’m a really bad sleeper — like, really bad. Like, this morning, both my son and I were up at 5:30, and Frankie was ready to go. And he’s eight, and I’m turning 44 in a week, and I’m not ready to go at all. I haven’t slept through the night, I swear, since basically he was born. So it’s been like, eight years of not great sleep. Part of your expertise is sleep awareness. So for a sleep strategy that one would be able to sort of say is a nugget or a takeaway, what is it that is provided by a sleep strategist like you?

Princess
That sleep doesn’t happen when you lay down and go to bed. Actually, you should get your mind ready for bed as soon as you get in from your school day or your work day. And that helps so many of my clients. I tell them when you get in from school and you get in from work, a lot of times everything gets so chaotic and everyone is moving and everything is loud, and it’s so much noise — but that’s actually the time. And it will also help the children with their homework, because that’s the time when you should set the environment for calm, very relaxing. What I like to do when my kids get in, or right before they get in from school, I’m already closing the blinds, I am turning on soundscapes like rain sounds, or my children like to hear bird chirping. That’s not very relaxing to me, but it’s relaxing to them.

So I start that early, and then around dinner time, sometimes children are excited, talking about the day. I say, “Oh, quiet voices, we’re quiet.” It starts with as soon as you get home. People just tend to think of unwinding just for that moment — no, you have to unwind and prepare your system. It takes a while for your nervous system to calm after moving all day. You’re moving eight hours plus, you know? Moving, just going, going, going. So you need a lot — it takes more than just that, you know, 40 minutes before bed. I would say from, let’s say if you work a nine to five, from five, you’re focusing and being very intentional about quiet time, and that will help. But you cannot go to bed overstimulated, and that’s the biggest problem: we go to bed overstimulated. Just our nervous system hasn’t calmed. It’s just moving, moving, still responding. It’s moving, moving, moving. So we have to give ourselves time for everything to kind of slowly shut down.

Rebecca
So you, I would imagine, would be very anti-technology in the evenings? Is that very much not a part of your household, when you’re needing to shut down stimuli, or do you have a way to balance that?

Princess
I think I have a way to balance it, because I have a five-year-old and I have two seven-year-olds, so they’re tablet heavy right now. So one of the things I try to encourage, though, is traditional play. There are studies that show that children are less stimulated, believe it or not, than children, you know, playing with blocks, playing with things like that, than just sitting on a sofa with their tablets all day. So what I like to do is encourage my children to go outside. “Go outside, go play.” Back in the day, we used to make mud pies, we used to play with the different things we’d find that nature provides us. We used to play with it outside in the backyard. “Go outside in the backyard.” So learning to do that, and then another thing is my children like to listen to music, so it’s easy to say, “Boys, let’s have a dance party. Let’s dance,” and we’re dancing. You find ways where their mind is less on the tablet.

But again, it will require for us to be more hands on and more, you know, proactive with our children. And I know it’s easier said than done. Like I said, after you’ve worked all day, the last thing you want to do is come home and be the main source of entertainment for your kids. But if you want them to sleep through the night, you have to keep them busy — calmly, but busy. There should be a routine, there should be structure. Without that structure, without routine, they’re going to rely heavily on their tablets and screen time. But if you have something set up for them and you have it in a way where it’s easily accessible for them to just proactively do it sometimes even without you, you’ll notice a change in their sleep hygiene, definitely.

Rebecca
It’s interesting Nat, because you’re a very routined household.

Natalie
I know. You’d think that I would be better at this. I’m hearing you say, Princess, that it’s a lot about the sort of brain stimulation, and in that I’m constantly working — because even though one technically has a workday, the creative brain, the writer brain, is constantly thinking. So I do have a hard time shutting down my mind, and I think then I model that for Frankie. So I need to work on that, for sure.

Rebecca
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Princess, do your kids do yoga and meditate? Is that a part of your parenting practice with them?

Princess
Yes. What we do is, we don’t do full-on yoga sequences, because my seven-year-old has ADHD, and doing something for that long, sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge. But we do yoga story time, and we’ll do random yoga poses. Like, one of the things I taught him is the starfish. I’ve posted it on Twitter. When he needs to regulate, when you’re dealing with a neurodivergent child, you have to learn their cues, wou have to learn their triggers. So my son, he gets very antsy with his hands — like, he has to move his hands, he has to move his hands. So one of the things when I see him doing that, I’ll get down on the floor with him and I say, “Let’s do star folds,” and we’ll just stretch our hands out really wide. Get on the floor and stretch our hands really wide, and hold it for 15 seconds. And sometimes I’ll make it a challenge and say, “Let’s see who can hold the pose the longest.” And he’s like, “I’m going to beat you, mommy.” And in doing so, he’s not even realized that he’s calming himself. That’s also a part of body awareness — his mind is just centred on the movements. You’re being intentional about your movements. He still gets to move his hands, but now it’s more goal-oriented and intentional versus just fidgeting, which makes anxiety worse. So we’re learning different strategies.

His twin, the seven-year-old, he likes to write, so yoga might not work for him. So when he needs time for himself, he needs time to calm himself. So I’ll say, “Jordan, what happened in school today? What was your favourite part of school today? You want to write about it?” And sometimes he’ll say, “No, Mommy, I’m not in a mood to write.” And then other times, he’ll say, “Yeah, Mommy, I’m going to write. I’m going to write a letter.” And I’ll say, “Can I read the letter?” And he’s like, “No, Mommy, I don’t want you to read it.” Or he’ll say yes. So if you don’t want me to read it, I won’t read it. If you let me read it, I’ll read it. But just finding different ways for them to express themselves — and it also helps them process those really big emotions that sometimes they don’t have the language for. So just using the full body to process things mentally.

Natalie
I like that idea of writing — his practice of writing almost as meditation.

Princess
Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.

Natalie
So if we were to go one step further — basically, we recognize, right, that individuals can experience healing through yoga, through meditation, through the whole body practice, as you say. Do you believe that healing is possible for communities through some of the practices that you specialize in?

Princess
Absolutely. It makes it a little harder in the midst of a pandemic, but I think if we were to centre things around that village again and doing things collectively, I think absolutely it’s possible for communities and groups to recover. And that’s one of the reasons also why I created Be Well Zara, because I felt like it’s not only just about the individual kid. You get to these classes, you see other kids, and pretty soon these people start feeling like family to you. And I think that’s a lot of what’s missing, and in a lot of ways the pandemic has certainly made it worse. I feel like once we get to a place where we get back to just kind of leaning in on each other, because this whole human experience is a collaborative effort — so we definitely need each other. And a lot of times we’re too embarrassed, we’re too shamed for whatever reason, to admit it. But just as you need community, that person next to you needs it and has the same maybe fears and concerns you have. So if we can find a way to break through that glass wall that we have up, it’ll be easy for us to come together collectively and recover, because once we recover as a whole, it makes it easy on the individual process, I think, if you have more people that may have similar experiences.

And just being a human, right? We all go through so much. When you have people that are walking next to you going through… even if not the same things, just going through their own things, dealing with their own problems, dealing with their own concerns, their own anxieties of the world. We all working together to get through it. I think it makes it much easier. We’re stronger together. So definitely I think it makes the recovery process better. And once you see it done, you can look at it as a group and move forward and say, “You know what? We’re here. We did it. It was a struggle, it was a fight, but we made it through together.” So I think it’s definitely important. Not only possible, but it’s essential for all of us that we do it collectively.

Natalie
You are optimistic. We need to hang out more. This is like the spirit I needed this morning, Princess Owens.

Rebecca
How did you know you needed to do this in your life? I can make that my last question. Do you know what I mean? How did you know you needed to bring this optimism, or this way? How did you feel this longing to be these kinds of practitioners? Like, how do you become the change?

Princess
Well, for me, like I said, being a black woman. Being a black woman in America that’s been a black girl and knowing what I wished to hear, wished to receive — not from just the people inside my house, because I was surrounded, like overwhelmed, like almost to a fault, how sheltered I was with love, but I appreciate it. But when I stepped outside, it wasn’t always like that. So I want to be a positive outside force for someone who grew up like me, was looking for that extra affirmation, that extra assurance that, “You know what? I’m beautiful. I’m a good person, I can be healthy, I can be whole.” And that’s what I wanted to do, ever since I was a child. I’ve always been interested in encouraging other people.

And I think certain life experience made it even more evident for me what I should be doing. Like, one of the things when I was about 18, my mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And I’ve seen people so supportive — my mom, like, the community became so supportive of her. Whatever she needed, people would bring. Like, my mom has faith like no other. Her faith is insane. So she says, “I’m not doing chemo. I’m not doing radiation.” She said, “I’m just whatever. It’s my destiny. That’s what I want it to be.” Now, I’m not, let me make this disclaimer — I’m not anti-chemo or radiation. I think people should do what’s best for their health. If that’s what you and your medical team discuss and come up with, then do it. I’m just simply sharing my mom’s story. So when she decided to do this, people, of course, thought it strange because she’s far along into cancer, like stage four. But she was like, “I just want to just spend the rest of my life, no matter how long it is, just eating whole foods from the ground. I want to eat whole and slow foods. I want home-cooked foods. I want organic root vegetables.”

So my mom did this, and needless to say, I’m 35 and my mom is still here. So whatever she needed, the community bought. People, she didn’t want any fried foods, anything of that sort, but people bought over… “Oh, hey, I saw beets was on sale. I know you might, you need to juice beets because you’re doing almost a plant-based type of lifestyle.” And so people would randomly bring my mom vegetables, and bring her alkaline water, and just seeing that community step up for my mom in the process of her own healing, in her recovery, it was like an awakening for me. Because prior to that, I wanted to go to school for fashion. I thought I was going to be a fashion girl, but once that happened, I was like, “Man, no way. This is what I want to do. I want to be in the wellness, and I want to share the gift of wellness with my community. And I want to help other women that look like me understand that it’s nothing wrong with prioritizing your wellbeing and taking care of yourself.”

You know, it’s ok to serve others. I think it’s a beautiful gift to be able to serve others. But it’s even more beautiful when you can serve yourself first, because you cannot serve from an empty well. So you have to pour into yourself all the love. Especially women, we’re so nurturing and loving. We give out so much, but we never think to bring any of that back home to us. And I also think, looking back as an adult, of what my mom went through. My mom was that type of person, always babysitting people’s kids and, you know, taking people food shopping, and doing so much — not just for our household, but for the people in the community. So when it was time for her to, you know, be loved on and receive all that she gave and put out there into the world, people showed up. So it was an estimate. People showed up. And a lot of those people were saying, “Hey, now you got to focus on yourself. Don’t worry about us. We’re going to be ok. Now you have to take care of yourself.” And it taught me so much, and that’s what I want to share with the rest of the world.