Words: Rachel Sharp

To anyone familiar with her trajectory, it would be easy to label Leah Simmons Australia’s queen of reinvention. From private schoolgirl to international DJ, record label boss, Pilates instructor, Instagram #fitspo star, Kundalini yoga instructor, and now mind-body-spirit innovator, the wife and mother-of-two has forged an unconventional but fabulous path.

I did some amazing stuff in my twenties through my music career,” she reflects. “I had a band in London. I sang at Glastonbury. I ran a record label. But when I tell my 12-year-old, ‘You know, I was really cool,’ he just eye rolls me out of his room.”

Reinvention is probably too fickle a word to describe the well-known Bondi Beach local. Rather, her dazzling journey over the past 20 years has been more of a gradual return to her true (dare we use that terribly overused word: authentic) self. But it’s all of those experiences, she says, that laid the groundwork for her latest business KAAIAA, a transformational workout program that’s fast gathered a cult following far beyond her former Sydney client base. 

Throughout NSW’s recent 15-week lockdown, Simmons livestreamed her daily 7.30am KAAIAA workout free on Zoom. The goal was to help her community stay mentally and physically strong, given the completely unique class trains the four pillars of health – mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual – in the same session through breath work, body work, meditation, and integration. What she didn’t expect was for there to be up to 700 people from around the globe logged in at a time. “I've got countless stories of people being able to finally connect to the brilliance that is inside them, the capacity that's inside them, this courage, this strength, simply by connecting to themselves through [KAAIAA] practice. For me, there is no better feeling in the world than that.”

We spoke to the fitness guru, who counts boxing great Mike Tyson and best friend Pip Edwards amongst her many workout devotees, about mind-body wellness, motherhood, and the bold gesture of swapping her glossy locks for a buzz cut last year.

We know you must get asked about this a lot, but can we start by asking about your hair? You've said before that you want to show that our existence goes far beyond the physical self. Why did you shave it off, and how did it feel afterward?

It's the one-year anniversary this month since I shaved my hair off. I guess some people would look at it like some sort of a statement, but it was a long time coming. I'd done a lot of work on myself to delve deeply into who I am, what I stand for, what my purpose is, and I had done a lot of inner shedding and cleansing. I really felt called to have a physical symbol that represented my change. We did a beautiful ceremony in Bali around the head shaving. My husband did it. We honored, we shaved it off, we sent it back to the earth. It was a beautiful, poignant, powerful, liberating moment for me. It was also the day I changed my Instagram handle from @bodybyleahsimmons to @iamleahsimmons. It was a rebirth.

It’s interesting you say that because many women probably wish they had the confidence to try it as well.

It's interesting, because so many people are like, ‘Oh, I could never do that’ or ‘I don't have the right head, my ears are too big, my head's too flat’. But if you do this, no one's looking at your flat head. All they're seeing is the confident, shining, magical light that's beaming out of your face because of this incredibly empowering statement you've made. Everyone can do it, anyone can do it, but you've got to do it at a time that's right for you. There's no going back for me. Never say never, but to be honest, I never have to go to the hairdresser or care about hair color again.

Let’s go way back to when you were a DJ for 18 years. How would you describe your former life?

Let's just say I'm so glad that social media didn't exist back then, because my former life was fun! All my school friends went off to university, but I was not interested in that. I wanted to go be a DJ and luckily, I had very supportive parents – after they picked themselves off floor, that is. I was able to go and explore that industry, and it was an amazing time of my life. I was one of very few female DJs in the late '90s, and it was work-hard-play-hard, living most of my life at night. I loved it and I still carry that love through to today. Everything that I've done in my life has led me to this point, whether I knew it or not. 

Something that you talk a lot about is our constant search for happiness. Through your work, what have you learned about what makes a happy person?

The search for happiness can end when you realise that happiness comes from inside you. Happiness doesn't have to be a lifelong journey. You can choose to be happy, [through] the way you view yourself. There might be some instant gratification things that give us a rush of dopamine or serotonin, the feel-goods, but lasting happiness – despite what's going on around you in the world – comes from connecting to an inner happiness. The question is, where does that come from? How do you cultivate that? The emotions that are attached to feeling happy are those higher vibrational ones like love, joy, peace, and gratitude. The ones connected to unhappiness are fear, shame, and guilt. The best way to cultivate those higher vibrational feelings within yourself is to raise your energy levels. That’s what lead to the creation of KAAIAA. I'm a firm believer in the way that you view yourself is the way that the world views you. If you can find that deep connection to yourself, you'll get that same energy reflected back to you.

You've spoken about how you used to think if you were thinner, you’d be happier. But at the time in your life that you were at your smallest, you were miserable. What was that period like and how did you pull yourself out of it?

I was running a record label in London and the music industry was going through a big shift, since iTunes had just started. I was about to turn 30 and after a long, hard stint over there, I moved back to Australia, but I didn't want to continue in the music industry. Every time I came back to Sydney to visit, my mother would drag me off to her Pilates classes because she'd take one look at me with my nightclub tan and be like, ‘You really need to sort out your life, bring some health into it’. I didn't know what health was, but I really resonated with Pilates and knew it would be my next chapter, so I trained to become a personal trainer, and did my studio certification in Pilates.

For a while, I was happy doing what I was doing, instructing in a great studio, with a great client base. But when I started to notice changes in my body, I fell into the trap of becoming hyper critical. ‘If only I had better six pack, if only my butt was a little bit rounder and perkier, my life would be better’. I mean, what an absurd statement, but that is what we were being sold by magazines and social media like Instagram, which was still new then. I got swept up in that wave of thinking, ‘Oh look, here's a platform where I can share my body secrets and help people’. 

Every time I took 50 photos to get the one photo, it never dawned on me that it was the process that I should be sharing, not the result. It got to a point where I'd almost disconnected from myself to keep up this public persona to the point my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, was just like, ‘What the f*ck is going on with you? You are so angry. Who are you?’. That was the slap in the face when I realised I'd sacrificed my true self for the fake self that I was trying to put out there. That was a very humbling moment in my life, but it was also liberating because I was like, ‘Wow, okay, so there's some other work to be done’, and I wanted to try and get back to who I am. 

You make it sound so easy, but that can be a difficult process for anyone, especially if your career relies on a degree of self-promotion. How did you find your way back to yourself?

It's easy to be yourself when you like yourself. We give out so much energy and so much love to the other people, and we give everybody else our time, but when are we there for ourselves? How much do we give ourselves the attention we deserve? Because we think of it as an egoic, selfish thing to do that, but it's not. The the most unselfish thing you can do is give yourself some time to cultivate the relationship that you have with yourself. Because as I said, the way you view yourself is the way the world views you. Your one job in life is to love yourself. That will, by default, shine out into everything else in your life.

We can’t wait to hear about the beginnings of KAAIAA, but let’s start with the concept you call true fitness, what it means for you, and how you've incorporated it into your business.

The word fit is usually linked to a physical state, but for me, true fitness extends to a much broader scope than just how fast you can run uphill or how many squats you can do. I spent quite a lot of time in Bali, where I was fortunate to be introduced to a body of work by a guy called Mark Copeland, who showed me the concept of the four pillars of health, which are mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. 

The health of one pillar directly affects the health of the others, so you can't just put all your focus into one area then expect to be firing on all cylinders. We are so much more than just a body. We’re energy, we're thoughts, we're feelings, we're relationships. But what category does all that fall under? It’s not physical. It's metaphysical, or soul. So I created KAAIAA as a way to tick all of those four pillars in under an hour. Done consistently, it will change more than your body. It will change your life. It will change the way you felt about yourself, your conversations, your decision-making, everything.

As we speak, you’ve done 72 days straight of free KAAIAA classes over Zoom to give back to your community. What did you learn through this experience?

That people crave connection. It really has opened me up to this beautiful, wonderful world of community and vulnerability and rawness and honesty and compassion. Strangers meet each other in our Zoom class but feel held and seen and heard. That, to me, has been the most satisfying thing that has come out of it. The classes can get emotional, and I cry all the time. Sometimes I’m bawling, but it’s real. It’s exactly how I’m feeling. 

On that note, one of the biggest things that holds most of us back in life is caring what people think about us. How have you gotten over that?

You’ve got to ask yourself why, because as I said earlier, everything is a reflection. If you're worried about coming across a certain way to somebody else, then it's something inside you. If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that you cannot control what’s out there, and that includes other people's reactions to you. Dita Von Teese once said something amazing that I'll never forget: You could be the juiciest, ripest, plumpest peach in the bowl, but there's always going to be someone who hates peaches. We need to spend less time worrying how our actions are going to be perceived and more time cultivating an authentic action in the first place. That will alleviate all those feelings of self-doubt, self-deprecation, and just allow you to live your life from a place of freedom.

Going back to when you first became a mother, can you tell us how it changed your world and the way you thought about yourself?

My experience of motherhood the first time around was vastly different to my experience of motherhood the second time. I have an almost 12-year-old son and a three-year-old; two different fathers, two different relationships. When I had my son, it was at the height of my obsession with work and I was in the trap of caring about how I was perceived by the outside world, not how I perceived myself. My relationship broke down quickly after I had my son. There was a lot of resentment, a lot of blame, and I was harboring all of this anger, not realising it was [radiating off] me into my child. Children are energetic sponges. They don't know what you're saying, they know how they're feeling when they're around you, from the energy you're giving off.

I’m grateful my relationship with my ex has been healed completely. We co-parent so incredibly well because we've put the time and the effort to work through our sh*t. Then I have this little three-year-old fireball girl who reflects me and my husband. I was able to repair the relationship with my son because of the relationship we all have together now as a family. That thing about cultivating that relationship inside you – it just automatically filters out into your kids, your partner, your friends, your everyone. 

We're currently in lockdown in Sydney and Melbourne. Most people have lost track of how many weeks we've been here. What’s your advice for keeping our mental health strong?

Stay in the present moment. If you feel yourself spiraling down into a rabbit hole of scenarios, bring yourself back into the present, do some slow, deep breathing. Am I okay in this moment? In this moment, am I okay? And I think that you'll find that the answer is inevitably always yes, and then it's a little bit of a reset for you. If you're feeling overwhelmed, turn off the media, take a break. You're the only one that's going to be able to understand and reset yourself, and that happens through practices like mindfulness, breathing, meditation. It doesn't have to be 20 minutes; it can be two minutes. But it's a really great way to just switch off that persistent noise that happens externally. 

How can our community join one of your online KAAIAA classes, or better still, a session in person?

If you head to my website, KAAIAA.com, you'll find two buttons on the home page. One is for the free live Zoom classes, and the other is a link to my on-demand platform with over 40 different workouts. That's a way for you to do a class whenever you want, in your own time. I'm working on a virtual studio for beyond lockdown, because not everybody's going to be able to travel to my studio in Bondi. That virtual studio will continue to support the community we've created in this online space. I've done a lot of research into virtual studio online platforms, and what people love about them is realness and interaction. I come up to the camera and say, ‘Oh, hello Sal. I can see you’. That's just what being in a class with me is like. Whether it's in real life or on the computer, that's my class experience. Sorry, not sorry.