Leigh Hurst On Mindfully Ageing And The Opportunities Created By Healthy Living Practices

Leigh has been guiding people all of her life. She came from a home of violence, drugs, alcohol and suicide. At 18 years old she was pregnant with her first child and in a very toxic relationship.

At 24 years old, she had 3 children with the same person and decided she needed to motivate herself. That's when she enrolled at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. At the time her children were 5, 4, and newborn. At that University she earned two degrees. One in Psychology and the other in Social Work, all centered around Gerontology. During her college career she also attended USC to work on her Master's Degree in Gerontology. The thought behind studying aging was to teach people to age with grace and ease. In 2012 she began this business as Awake & Aging with the thought behind it for teaching people how to consciously age. Later rebranding to Purposeful Living helped people to understand the concept of connecting them to their purpose, while helping them become the best version of themselves. Now, she helps people become aligned with themselves, breathe, heal with guidance, sound healing and energy work.

Leigh discusses why it is important to support people to align with the best version of themselves and the wisdom behind embarking on the lifetime journey of achieving inner healing and growth.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to the work you're doing today?

[Leigh Hurst] - With gerontology, my interest in the field hit me at such a young age. I was three or four and constantly visiting my great grandmother when I noticed that people didn't talk about aging. People didn't have solutions for aging, and I'm not talking anti-aging, I'm talking about healthy and conscious discussions around the aging mindset. Then I thought I'll go to school to become a teacher, so I sat in my son's first grade class. The children were jumping on their desks not listening to the teacher, so I told the teacher I'm not cut out for this. I still knew I wanted to be a teacher, so then I tapped into gerontology, which is study of aging. That was in the 90s, and there were many times I would go to class at university, and it would be just myself and the professor, no other students. Nobody wanted to attend those classes, but in the United States we have so many baby boomers aging daily.

This is probably worldwide, and no one has any solutions. People want to tap into this market and make money with anti-aging products, they make you think you must have the latest gadgets to keep up with your blood pressure or diabetes. There's a market for that, but why isn't there a market for helping people to age mindfully?

This is still my goal, even with our rebranding around Purposeful Living. If you help, guide, and teach people about what it looks like to be their best selves and give them tools like healthy diets, morning practices (meditation, yoga, setting intentions) and evening practices (looking at who supports them, socialising, shopping at good grocery stores), we could have such a different society worldwide. We could have people living their best lives as they're aging.

Can you tell us about the challenges and opportunities you see in the work you do?

I met someone from Australia back in 2011, and that person showed me different ways of living a better, healthier life. I went home from his workshop and decided I was going to get rid of my television. Since then, I haven't had television in my house. I then decided I was going to go vegetarian, because I had struggled with food my whole life. I was malnourished and kept away from food, but that's a whole different story we don't have time for. Food was not in my awareness at the time, but I decided to go vegetarian, and then in 2014 I went vegan. I have never pushed this on anybody, it's just my lifestyle and part of my practice. But I'll tell you what, to name a positive opportunity, when I go to the doctor and she wants to run a test, one of the things she always says is I have no cholesterol. Why don't I have cholesterol? I don't eat meat or dairy products; things like that, even little tweaks can be life changing. People always tell me, "I can never be vegan." You know how many times a day I hear that? Nobody is asking you to, what I'm saying is what if you did meatless Monday? What if you learnt about the source of where your meat comes from? When you're putting things into your body, does it have to be prescription medicine? Is there something else you can take for blood pressure instead of pharmaceuticals?

How do we teach people to think outside of the box and not be led by what the television or society tells us we need to be doing?

I never push, what I do when clients come to see me is listen and create a board. I do all this writing, and in the centre of the board, I might put mindfulness because that's the journey they're on. We give them that board to hang up in their kitchen or bathroom mirror, and the board places mindfulness at the centre and things like morning meditation, prayer, meatless Monday, taking a walk or not allowing stress into your life. Doctor's appointments as we age become about going to one doctor to get a certain medicine and because of that medicine you create five other things wrong with you, so now you must see five other doctors. We're almost like a hamster on a wheel, so how do we get off this wheel? All I'm saying is we have this life, so how can we make it better? How can we not be led by television, politics or whatever you want to call it? We have our own brains, and mindset is everything. I don't know what they call it in Australia, but parents of the silent generation (those people who are now 80-90) didn't live like this. Their parents went and got sugar, shared a meal, or traded things from their gardens with their neighbours. But now we must be careful of what we're putting into our system. My other interest is around death and dying, I always tell people we die how we live. Are we living and dying a comfortable death, or are we struggling and why? Why are we struggling in this death process we're going through? The different chemicals and the things they're pumping into our systems are impacting this process. I know people don't look at death as a beautiful journey, but it truly is.

Within projects you have done with Purposeful Living where have you seen shifts within the community?

I’ve seen shifts within the people who want to be here, people who have a vision and want to share that with the world.

I've had interns and volunteers my whole life, and what usually happens is they might work with me for free or for university credits. But one of the things they do now is they take that experience and springboard to create their own businesses centred around higher consciousness or thinking.

It might even just be something to do with clothes, but they’re not mass-producing clothes or anything. They are more tapping into the heart energy and a place of higher thinking to create those businesses.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive social change?

One of the things I've been going to for probably 13-14 years is usually held in San Francisco, but they've also held it in New York and Hawaii. I invite people to look up Wisdom 2.0, because I use it for my own learning. They have big name people at Wisdom 2.0, it's where spirituality meets technology. They might have someone like Eckhart Tolle paired with [Mark] Zuckerberg there, and what a contrast that is. Then they have little spinoff classes to keep you updated with practicing your meditation and things like that. They are creating such a great shift in the world with their big conferences and little classes.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

When I was diving into this journey, the first important author was Michael Singer. The Untethered Soul will bring about change in your life. Of course, people probably get tired of hearing about Eckhart Tolle’s Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (A New Earth), but I read a paragraph of anything in his book’s every morning when I get up. This just brings that mindset together. If anybody is struggling, Byron Katie’s Who Would You Be Without Your Story? is amazing. She's a tough cookie, I've seen her many times at Wisdom 2.0. There is also her other book Loving What Is, and she has the loving your neighbour worksheet. I've seen her 13-14 times in San Francisco, and she is a stickler. She doesn't let your mind get away with nothing, she will call you on it.