This week’s guest has an answer for that, and it is not the one anyone expects. Kate Kendall has been teaching yoga in Australia for over two decades. She is the co-founder of Flow Athletic in Sydney, the author of Life in Flow, and the woman behind Active Yogi, and she walks into the cabin with a story that starts with vanity, ends with purpose, and includes one of Lee’s spookier intuitive premonitions along the way. Together they cover what yoga is actually doing to the nervous system, whether reformer Pilates has eaten yoga, why meditation is not supposed to feel blissful, and the idea Kate has built her whole philosophy around: the space between. In Womansplain, Justin arrives with the most 2026 question possible. GLP-1s. What are they, do they actually work for cravings, and should he be anywhere near them? Lee gives him the straight, mechanism-first answer, plus the warning about where not to buy them. And Irene has a rave. It is about Lee. She would like everyone to know that listening to this podcast is the closest thing to having a private nutritionist in your pocket, and she is the proof. ✨ In this episode we chat about: • Irene’s birthday box that sold out in twenty minutes, and why she has still got it. • How Kate went from a digital agency desk to her first yoga class in North Bondi, arriving for vanity and staying for the mental gold. • The teacher who handed Kate a permission slip to teach, and later told her opening Flow Athletic was a mistake. • Vagus nerve stimulation for beginners: gargling, singing in the shower, and humming bee breath. • Yoga nidra, the lying-down practice the wellness world has rebranded as NSDR, and why it might be the perfect entry point for people who cannot sit still. • What it actually means to be an active yogi, and why having all the gear is not the same as having a practice. • Has reformer Pilates eaten yoga? Kate saw the wave coming from inside her own studio. • What yoga is really doing to the body: fascia, the nervous system, and why the yogis were the original biohackers. • Why meditation is not meant to be blissful, and the ocean-and-air-bubble way to think about intrusive thoughts. • The space between: the philosophy Kate built from the pause at the bottom of an exhale. • Kate’s reframe that changes everything for Irene: what feels like boredom in stillness might actually be withdrawal. • Justin’s Womansplain question on GLP-1s: what they are, who they genuinely help, and what to do before considering one. • Irene’s rave, which is, for once, entirely about her co-host. 🎙 What’s Popping: Kate Kendall on Yoga, Meditation and the Space Between Meet Kate: Kate Kendall has been teaching yoga for over twenty years. She co-founded Flow Athletic in Sydney with her business partner Ben, which they sold last year, wrote the book Life in Flow, and now writes, teaches, and mentors under the name Active Yogi. Lee and Kate go way back: Kate reached out after reading one of Lee’s books, invited her into the studio to speak, and later swore by the gut healing protocol, which she still recommends to people today. The Premonition: Years ago, in full intuitive flight, Lee told Kate she was going to have a little girl, when it would happen, and the letter her name would begin with. Kate’s daughter Alice is now seven. Nobody in the cabin has a rational explanation and nobody is looking for one. Came for Vanity, Stayed for the Mental Gold: Kate is honest about where it started. She was working in a digital agency in the city, depressed, medicated, and about a decade into an eating disorder that had begun in her teens, when she walked into her first class at the Dharma Shala in North Bondi wanting long, lean limbs. She fumbled through it feeling like a baby elephant on a mat, then lay down in savasana and felt present for the first time since childhood. Walking home along the promenade that night, she stopped and cried, grief, she says, for all the times she had not let herself feel. She went back, and kept going back. The Permission Slip: Kate’s teacher Rick stopped her at the bus stop one evening and told her she would make a really great yoga teacher. She describes it as a permission slip she did not know she needed. She trained in India, started teaching, and years later the same teacher, a purist, told her that opening a combined yoga and fitness studio was a mistake. She respected the opinion and did it anyway, riding the exact crest of yoga’s popularity wave when Flow Athletic opened. Irene, the Beginner With All the Gear The Confession: Irene wants nothing more than to be a cool yoga mum. She has the mat, the outfits, the tracker, everything required to be a professional yogi except an actual practice. She has been to classes, felt good afterwards, and never caught the thing Kate is describing, the healthy addiction. The Vagus Nerve (or, as Irene Insists, the Vegas Nerve): The good news for anyone not ready for postures: the vagus nerve can be stimulated without a single downward dog. Gargling, singing in the shower, and humming bee breath all activate it, which is part of why these odd little habits leave people feeling calmer. Yoga Nidra and NSDR: The practice Irene did not know she was looking for. Yoga nidra involves lying down for twenty to forty minutes while a voice guides you systematically through the body, relaxing it so deeply that brain waves slow right down. The trick is not to fall asleep. The wellness world has rebranded it as NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, but it is yoga nidra, it is ancient, and guided sessions are freely available on apps like Insight Timer. Research also suggests doing it after a day of learning helps the brain retain information. What Makes a Yogi: For Kate, a yogi is not someone with all the equipment. A yogi is someone who endeavours to practise presence. She knows people who have never stepped on a mat whom she would call yogis, because of how present they are with the person in front of them. Irene concedes this is precisely her problem: all the gear, and a daily failure at being present. The Active Yogi Philosophy Living It Off the Mat: Kate is blunt that there is a lot of fake yoga around: the gear, the green smoothies, the aesthetics, with the point entirely missed. An active yogi is someone actively living their yoga off the mat. For Kate that means presence, lifestyle, and above all service. Before every project, including this podcast, she checks in with herself: am I doing this to look good, or to be of service? Irene’s Duality: Irene owns hers openly. Half of her is the purist who lives a genuinely toxin-free existence, and the other half loves every bell and whistle the commercial wellness industry has to offer. She suspects the second half disqualifies her from true yogi status. Kate is not so sure, and points out Irene is probably living more of it than she thinks. Has Reformer Pilates Eaten Yoga? The View From Inside: Kate watched the Pilates wave arrive from inside her own studio about five years ago. Flow already offered reformer Pilates in a small room, outgrew it almost immediately, and ended up hiding reformer beds behind a curtain in the yoga room. She is candid that like every wellness trend, she half expects the moment it dies and leaves everyone holding very expensive beds. Why Trends Turn: Kate and her business partner used to try to predict the turns and eventually gave up. Trends are a mystery. What she does observe is that yoga is the thing people always circle back to, it has been around for thousands of years, while Pilates is currently offering strength to a huge number of women who would never otherwise have found strength training. Breath work, meanwhile, is having its own hot moment, which Kate reads as a sign of the times: another doorway into nervous system regulation for people who will never sit on a meditation cushion. What Yoga Is Actually Doing to the Body The Original Biohackers: Kate returns to her first class and asks what actually cracked her open that night. The answer is a stack of things: the breath, the way the body moves and the joints stack, and the tending of fascia, the connective tissue she describes as a superhighway of information. The yogis, she says, were the original biohackers. They knew that putting the body in certain shapes and breathing in certain ways created a desired outcome, and the science is only now catching up. The Body Stone: Her name for the state at the end of a good class: the whole body relaxed, the mind sharp. Lee, a yoga teacher herself, adds the feeling that every cell has new energy, and makes the case for keeping the practice simple and honest rather than tricked-up and competitive, a direction she thinks parts of the yoga scene have drifted over the last fifteen years. Poses of Note: Kate’s long-time favourite is pigeon, the great hip opener and, per some schools of thought, the pose most likely to produce an unexpected cry, since the hips are said to hold stored emotion. Lately she is loving wheel, which demands prepared shoulders and hip flexors. For absolute beginners, her pick is cat cow: all fours, hands under shoulders, knees under hips, moving the spine through flexion and extension, exactly the way a cat does, because cats know. Volunteer Yoga at Whale Beach: Lee mentions filling in at the volunteer class she supports at Whale Beach Surf Club, average age seventy plus, taught entirely by feel with no set list. Kate’s eighty-three-year-old mum still practises weekly with her own teacher in the country. The point lands itself: this is a practice for every age. Meditation Without the Mystique Resistance Is Normal: Kate resists meditation some days too. Her meditation teacher Jackie, of The Broad Place, tells a story about reporting to her own teacher. A blissful sit: good. A choppy, horrible, unfocused sit: also good. The point of meditation is not what comes up. The point is the willingne
