Jenn Sophie Shields, MSW, RSW
2005 Danforth Ave M4C 1J6 Toronto, ON, Canada

Hi all! I hope that everyone is doing as well as can be in these strange and challenging times. It just so happens that this month I’m hosting the most corporate and organizational wellness workshops I’ve done to date, and I think we can all agree that with the sudden winter and Toronto lockdown. the timing couldn’t be more apt.... I’m particularly excited about a talk I’m facilitating that’s hosted through the University of Toronto School of Social Work (swipe for details!). This workshop is open to *all* U of T alumni, so please reach out if you haven’t received the invite and would like to join it’s free, and I get to share how I’ve applied some pretty fascinating research principles from yoga, attachment, and body-based therapy modalities into my work. I can’t wait to connect and share, and see you on the 30th! See more

If you really knew me you’d know that .. I’m sensitive. To the energy around me, to feeling tired, and Lord HELP ME if I’m hungry. I’m tickled to think of a birthday card I received once that sums this up perfectly a cartoon sloth clad in a leather jacket, captioned Born to be Mild. Needless to say that the election frenzy and 4:57pm sunset has had me feeling -wiped- over the past few weeks and I found myself having to implement some self-care strategies that I’v...e found to be trusted and true. I find it particularly helpful to front end self care around times that are sure to be stressful to avoid burning out later on because you can push through all you want, but the body doesn’t lie, my friends! On the hierarchy of self-care strategies is the base of caring for our bodies, which is why I always start here: STEP ONE: getting optimal sleep I saw a graphic that struck me the other day, about how humans are animals, and that while other animals respond to less light with sleeping more, humans respond by expecting people to increase profits and hustle to make it the holidays. I’ll hit snooze on that, please. Shifting to half-caff coffee, say WHAT?! Think about it, though. If your nervous system’s baseline is already revved up, do you think that adding a stimulant is a good idea? For me and many of my clients, the answer is a resounding no. This strategy has truly saved my sanity. By the same token, we can think about limiting or eliminating alcohol in particularly stressful times if the body is feeling depleted, a depressant is unlikely to resource you to feel better in the long run. Cooking and eating healthy food simply put, food is fuel for energy and optimal brain functioning. I just discovered this amazing lentil salad from Bon Appetite and it’s giving me LIFE this week!! When depleted, gentle movement, stretching, and walking are great. Exercise doesn’t have to be another area you kick your own butt in. So there you have it, folx. Encouragement to care for your body and to make that a priority over pleasing others or hustling your life away. Forever Mild, Jenn

Toot toot! All aboard the @brenebrown train! I know I’m running the risk of sounding cliché here, but when it comes to quotes, we can just leave it up to my social-work hero to shed light on the importance of a mental health strategy that’s been on my mind lately: the exercise of creativity. One of my favorite aspects of therapy is when my clients light up and tell me about the art forms, hobbies, and interests that they’re engaged in (and I’m consistently impressed a...t the many different ways that people can exercise creativity!!). I say light up because you can see somatically the difference that the pursuit of a craft or hobby can have on mood, affect, and sense of self. When people are creative, they must let their guards down, be flexible and spontaneous, and be vulnerable enough to share their work with others. I recently read my first book by Gloria Steinam, and she had a quote about writing as a form of creativity that really struck me. Steinam proclaims: To write is to bring an inner voice into the outer world, to believe that our thoughts are worth entering the thinking of others, and to make real what has never existed in quite the same way before. What could be a better path to self-value than that? You can replace writing here with anything that you choose. Lately I’ve been exercising my creativity by working on several presentations and workshops I’ll be facilitating, and I’ve been finding myself having a lot of fun attempting to make the material I’m sharing engaging and accessible to learn. This week I invite you to reflect on the role that creativity plays in your life. Maybe you bring awareness to having strayed from a creative endeavour, and can slowly incorporate it back . Have a great week, everyone! See more

Happy Monday, everyone! I hope you all had a lovely weekend I spent it paying back some serious sleep debt, purging the contents of TWO closets, and cooking with vegetables (!!) - it’s going to be a great week ahead, I can feel it! It also happens that I’m cruising into the week scared of the dark (thank you Hill House/Bly Manor) and, on a more serious note, I’m pondering the notion of sustainability and the relationship between the way we treat the Earth and o...ur bodies. This weekend I got around to watching David Attenborough’s A Life on our Planet and I urge you to watch if you haven’t already done so. While the first portion of the documentary showcases a grim, dying planet, the latter half outlines practices that have the power to halt environmental denigration (including sustainable farming and fishing restrictions, which I would love to learn more about). There was a line in the documentary, though, that I thought related SO well to mental health that I had to roll my dog off the remote, rewind, and write it down. Referring to deforestation, Attenborough says: Anything we can’t do forever is by definition unsustainable. If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates, ultimately, until the whole system collapses. I can’t tell you how many times clients have come to me with the cry that they can’t keep on living the way they are, feeling overworked and burnt out, stretched thin personally and professionally. I can relate to this on so many levels, and have described many practices in my own life (including working unreasonable hours) as unsustainable without giving much thought to what that actually means. When we think about unsustainable practices as causing irreversible harm to a system, we can consider that we have one earth, just as we have one body, and even if it seems radical to do so, we must take care as if our life depends on it.... because it does. Have a great week!

Hey everyone, I hope that you all had a restful Canadian Thanksgiving! This weekend I enjoyed an awesome time with friends by the fire, and running around the countryside with my fam. Although the gatherings were smaller than usual, I’m grateful for the health of those that I love. I’m also thankful for indulging in a wicked mid-day nap this weekend, which I haven’t done in AGES. Highly recommend! ... Today I wanted to share with you a skill taken from #EMDRtherapy called Accessing and Activating. That is, the ability to *access* positive memories and *activating* the accompanying pleasant emotions in the body. One of the things I challenge clients to do is come up with an inventory of positive memories this can be snippets of time spent with a loved one, a snapshot of a place in nature, or any thoughts that they can use to activate positive feelings in the body, on demand. I say that the ability to do this is a skill, because we can literally train our brains to strengthen the neural networks associated with pleasant feelings, which gives us something to put up against feelings of stress, depression, and anxiety. I understand that this may sound abstract, so here’s an example drawn from my own work. One of the memories that I summon up when I’m feeling overwhelmed is the way I feel when I read poetry by the late and great Mary Oliver. In her poem Wild Geese, she highlights that we as humans are ultimately put on this earth to just be, and that we don’t have to hustle all the time. The line in her poem that I *access* is: You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves Her work is so beautiful !! Whenever I read it, my body literally activates feelings of calm - it’s a neutral network that I’ve strengthened many times by coming back to it again and again. So, I ask, what are the memories that make you feel pleasant and calm? I challenge you to get clear and concrete, so you can use these resources when times are tough. Have a great day! See more