Today we’d like to introduce you to Georgia Mitchell.

Hi Georgia, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’ll admit it’s been a rough road at times! While I was raised with everything I needed in the material sense, I grew up in a region known for poverty and white nationalism. My parents taught a form of Japanese natural healing that was still very new to the West when I was born in the ’80s. Since we lived in a rural, conservative area I felt I had to keep quiet about my family’s beliefs and practices. Looking back it’s easy to see how this sense of social isolation caused me to look for connection in other places, and I developed strong ties to the land. We lived on 86 acres of ponderosa forest without a TV or much access to media, and I formed strong attachments to the trees and other species I met in the woods.

Throughout my twenties and early thirties I continued to find the most solace relating to land. I spent a decade in horticulture and agricultural work. While it didn’t provide great financial returns, it gave me solid grounding in physical reality during a time I felt very internally confused. Working with plants taught me about cause and effect, about how my actions influence the world around me. I gleaned much of my understanding about life by watching, tending, and learning to propagate plants. Even with all our attempts to manipulate nature through chemical, genetic, and cultural interventions, the miraculous activity of photosynthesis is still a natural phenomenon. By the way, I highly recommend gardening as a way of anchoring one’s perspective in the living world. It’s a great antidote to all the mental confusion that gets generated in the social media sphere!

When I began studying Qi Gong and Chinese medicine in 2015, I had no idea what a turning point that would be. My interest developed with the hope it would help me heal the chronic illness I was experiencing at the time. At first I wasn’t sure anything was changing, but I kept practicing and studying and noticing subtle shifts in my experience. Eventually my fascination with the body became a motivation in itself. My first Qi Gong teacher encouraged me to keep pursuing my interests. His belief in me was instrumental in having the confidence to follow my desire to work in this field. Almost ten years later, I’m teaching Qi Gong and movement classes and seeing private clients. My studies have branched beyond Qi Gong, and I incorporate modern modalities that increase fluid circulation within the body’s fascial networks. This increases mobility as well as supporting organ function and overall tissue health, all of which are basically synonymous with the benefits of Qi Gong. It’s exciting to be working at this intersection of modern and ancient understandings of the body, and my hope is that being able to speak the language of both systems will help more people feel comfortable accessing these wholistic approaches to health.

In many ways I feel like I’ve come full circle. Now rather than trying to hide what I know about those “weird” natural healing practices, I’m having conversations and teaching about how they work and why it’s valuable to have simple tools to enhance our wellbeing.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It absolutely has not been a smooth road! In fact I’ve become a great advocate of failure. This probably sounds awful to most of you, but everything I’ve done that didn’t work out was crucial to me honing in on a career and life direction that feels fully aligned with my values and personal strengths. I think we’re far too afraid of failure in this culture; it’s really one of the best sources of learning. It gives us the opportunity to sort out what’s true for us from all the conditioning we receive from our families and society. Usually failure is defined by the ways we haven’t lived up to other people’s expectations, and I think there’s much more fulfillment possible in life when we learn to listen to our own internal sense of value.

Finding a career that both personally nourishes and financially sustains me has been one of my biggest challenges. I wouldn’t have ended up where I am now if any of the other paths I tried had gone the way I wanted. I also don’t think I would feel as excited and content with what I’m doing if I had remained in any of those other jobs or industries. As a younger woman I was also values-driven, but I wanted to work in a field that wouldn’t be written off as “woo-woo” or spiritual. Restoration horticulture was great because we were making a difference for the planet with methods that were based in science. It checked my boxes. I was passionate about my work, but I was also over-stressed and not very happy.

I continue to hold huge respect for folks who do physical labor because it is a darn hard way to make a living. Around 2020 that all started catching up with me, and I had to seriously reconsider what I was doing and why. I realized I never quite felt like I fit in the restoration industry because I have a way of viewing the world that doesn’t always jive with an emphasis on data-driven results. I certainly appreciate science, but it can require a level of objectivity that doesn’t place much value on people’s direct experience. I wanted more room in my work for my heart, and to make better use of my ability to connect with people. Working with the body, it’s obviously important that the methods we use have strong theoretical and practical foundations. And when I’m in my office with a client, it also really matters that they can feel me relating to and validating their subjective experience.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Confident Ground?
When I first started developing my brand, a friend asked me how I wanted people to feel when they interacted with the business. I immediately replied: “confident and grounded.” So that’s the origin of the name! There’s a particular experience that arises in the body when we can maintain consistent sensory awareness of our bones, musculature, and overall internal state. It’s easier to feel belonging, anywhere you go. Social situations used to be challenging for me, and these days I can walk into a Chamber of Commerce networking meeting and feel quite relaxed. It’s because of how comfortable and familiar I am with being inside my own skin. External circumstances feel far less threatening or overwhelming when the body is functioning as an integrated system and thus has the ability to regulate itself. These are the skills I teach, based in modalities I’ve found to be effective in generating this internal confidence and coherency.

Being deeply rooted in the body takes the anxious tension out of the survival response and allows us to more accurately asses real versus perceived danger. There’s a difference between hyper-vigilance and highly tuned somatic awareness, and when we have more sensory perception we have less need to be constantly on guard. When situations or people trigger us, it’s largely because we’re having an internal experience in response that we believe we can’t handle. All the work I do, whether it’s teaching Qi Gong and functional movement or guiding a client through a dynamic stretching session, the purpose is to facilitate a rediscovery of strength, resilience, and agency. Your body is perfectly designed to survive. The trick is learning to trust its inherent capacities and instincts so that you can use them to help you navigate the world.

I want us to get good at being human again. Survival responses are a natural part of life, but we don’t have to get stuck in them. I hold the focus on what’s possible when we step beyond our current limitations and into unfamiliar territory. Living in and from the body is key to rediscovering capacities you may have forgotten you have. My work is to give you skills and practices that help you remember how confident and grounded you are.

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
There are so many possible types! I’m highly relational, and so I tend to think of success in terms of the health of the relationships I create in my life. This includes all types: familial, professional, social, romantic — and not to forget relationship with myself and however I define my connection to that-which-is-larger than me. We tend to emphasize financial success in this culture, but I think we need to redefine wealth and success in more ecological terms. As a biological organism, I can only be successful if I’m living on an ecologically intact planet. I personally don’t believe human life has a great chance on Mars. I’m certainly not interested in living there! We underestimate the importance of relationship with other species as a contributor to what makes us human. So I see my success as whether I am contributing to the health of my environment. This might involve planting pollinator friendly plants in my garden as well as my work supporting people to have healthy, embodied relationships with themselves. I do believe we need to work on the inside in order to change the outside, but I also believe we can’t stop with the inside. The overall purpose of getting healthy ourselves is so we can contribute to the vitality of the larger whole — whether we’re working on the political whole, the social whole, the ecological whole, or whatever. We need healthy and successful relationships in all these spheres!

I want to say a little more about how I define this health and success. Flourishing can only really happen in the absence of pressure and coercion. We spend so much time and money trying to make our bodies be something they’re not, and then we often extend that forcefulness to making other people and nature be what we want. I see us all being able to make a lot more progress toward fulfilling our needs and desires if we spend more time celebrating and appreciating ourselves and others as we are. I want more of our relationships to be based on mutual appreciation and lifting each other up, and one of the ways to get there is to start cultivating that relationship with our own bodies. These forms we inhabit are beautiful and wondrous creations, and there is so much we can do in this world specifically because we have a body to run around and do it all!

The last thing I want to say about success is that it includes all the people who have a difficult time achieving conventional milestones because they’re spending so much time and energy on basic survival. As biological organisms, survival is our number one achievement. If you have survived difficult circumstances, the fact that you are still here is a magnificent success. I think survivors of all types deserve more shout outs.

Pricing:

• Dynamic Stretching Session | 75 mins | $125.00
• Fluid Movement Session | 75 mins | $90.00

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.confidentground.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/confident_ground/