JANINE LATTIMORE
LOVE & VITALITY
Hi, my name is Janine Lattimore
Love and Vitality Coach
A trained teacher and former youth worker and group fitness instructor, I have had an almost life-long passion for mental, emotional and physical health. I have been helping people to learn, grow and navigate life for over 25 years.
My focus is on what gets the most effective results, the most efficiently. That’s why I use and teach embodied mindfulness processes because they are the easiest, fastest and most effective way I have come across for people to create change, healing and transformation for themselves.
I test and live everything I teach. I am not interested in just selling you something.
My aim is to empower you to unleash all the love and power within you, and to have fun doing it!
I am certified as an NLP Practitioner and Coach, a Nia somatic movement instructor, and as a VITA Sex, Love and Relationships Coach.
I help people experience more love and vitality.
In all aspects of my life and work – that is my overarching intention.
What love and vitality mean for me:
– self love
– alignment with Love
– belonging
– safety
– acknowledgment (seen, heard, felt)
– clarity
– aliveness
– free flow of energy
– allowing
– receiving
– balance
– eagerness
– friskiness
– power
– life force
– adventure
– creativity
– animation
– strength
– vigor
– stamina, resilience
– bloom
– sparkle
– fun
My Story – A Recovering People Pleaser
It takes courage every day to show up unashamedly as yourself
Most of the time, for all of my life up until my mid-forties, I showed up in life as who I thought other people would like. I am a recovering people pleaser. I was extremely conscious about everything I said and did, and trying to make sure that everyone else was happy and liked me.
The result – I felt chronically stressed, anxious and repressed. Some people liked me, and some didn’t. I helped people, served people, gave the shirt off my back for people, but I had difficulty truly connecting with others, and difficulty truly loving others.
I was living in fear:
Fear that I wouldn’t be liked
Fear of rejection
Fear of abandonment
I felt like I was wearing a mask most of the time. I felt hurt that other people didn’t accept the real me, but it was me who hid behind the mask, and me who felt the need to wear a mask.
One day in meditation I realised something that shocked me. On the surface, consciously, rationally, I felt reasonably okay about myself. Subconsciously – I hated myself. Right at the deepest core, I hated myself. I felt completely unworthy of love. I was mired in a deep pool of guilt that I had taken on as a child in response to several things that had happened in my life.
This realisation started me on a journey to learn to love myself.
What if who you are wasn’t the problem, but how you see who you are?
It took several years and a second marriage breakdown to finally begin to truly love and accept myself for who I am. At first I struggled to even see myself as being allowed to see myself as worthy. One of the first things I had to do was give myself permission to think in new ways, and to give myself permission to be enough just as I am. I had had a passionate interest in wellbeing and personal development since I was a teenager, but this had all been based in a desire for understanding and perfection; a desire to do better, and be better, and to fix myself.
It is an ongoing journey, but an exciting one. I have observed that when you learn to love and accept yourself that life begins to transform for you. Things start to flow easily, sometimes magically into your life. Relationships become more fulfilling. Anxiety decreases and joy bubbles up continually. Life begins to work for you. When you feel good enough in yourself, then you give yourself permission to do what you love simply for enjoyment and let go of the need to be constantly doing things that are ‘right’, responsible or productive. You have more energy, because it takes energy to contain yourself, and it takes energy to protect yourself. When you don’t feel the need to do this so much any more, then that energy is released into your body and is available for you to use in other ways.
A big part of this journey for me has been accepting, forgiving and releasing resistance to my body; learning to connect with it and listen to it from a place of love and acceptance. Something that helped significantly with this was being introduced to somatic bodywork. My first experience of this was through Nia somatic movement, and since then I have accessed into the teachings of people like Peter Levine, Anat Baniel and many others. This has transformed the way I live in, and connect with my body in a way that gives me so much more vitality, juiciness and balance.
In 2021 I began my training as a VITA Sex, Love and Relationships coach which synthesised all of my previous research, training and life learning into a system that I could use to effectively coach others to also experience true love and inner vitality and glow. I bring all of my coaching and group session work together as a modality that I call embodied mindfulness.
What is embodied mindfulness?
Embodied practices connect into your entire neurology and nervous system and not just your cranial brain and conscious mind. For example, your body actually has three brains or neuron centres. The one we most often think about and pay attention to is the “head” or cephalic brain. We also have a heart (cardiac) and a gut (enteric) brain. Each has sensory neurons, motor neurons and neurotransmitters. They are able to take in information, process it, store it and access it when needed. They are all true brains.
Embodied work taps into the all information and wisdom of the body through the medium of sensations and emotions as well as thoughts.
Mindfulness is primarily about noticing the experience of the present moment.
It involves things like slowing down, specific focus, stillness, silence, being in the now moment and viewing all experience from the now perspective.
One of the key practices I use is somatic experiencing and movement which is a form of embodied mindfulness. It is using slow movement, or just awareness, to deeply observe what sensations you are experiencing in your body in that moment. One of the key aspects of somatic experiencing and movement is simply to observe and acknowledge the sensations and to let go of giving them any interpretation as to why they there, or what they may mean. It is like you are actively listening to your body and just observing and reflecting. It is giving your body a space to speak and express itself through its language of feeling and sensation.
Embodied practices work so effectively because they tap into your subconscious and unconscious mind which controls most of your behaviour, but which largely runs on auto-pilot without your conscious awareness.
This is where all the programming you took on when you were a child is held as an operating system.
This is usually the key reason why you find it hard to change habits or behaviours.
It is not that you don’t have enough willpower, or haven’t learned enough yet, or haven’t found the right answer. It is because you have programs running deep in your mind that you are not consciously aware of yet which are driving your behaviour.
A common example of this is that excessive overthinking and worry, and/or anxious people pleasing is commonly a response to being criticised a lot when you were a child, and you had to analyse everything you did in order to feel accepted by your parents and avoid being told off. You learned to be hyper-vigilant to read their energy and try to predict all the possible outcomes in order to create a level of safety for yourself. This became an imprinted programme in your subconscious; a deeply embedded pattern of behaviour. It is likely that you were not fully aware of what you were doing when you were young, and that as an adult you now think that it’s in your personality to be worried and anxious because you can’t seem to stop.
Through embodied mindfulness practices and coaching you can intuitively connect into that scared inner child programming and re-parent yourself to feel loved, good enough and safe to relax. When you transform your deep inner programming in this way, the change in your outer behaviour can often happen effortlessly and naturally.
Be brave enough to be yourself