We were lucky to catch up with Georgia Mitchell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Georgia, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
I’ve done plenty of starting over. I approach life like a work of art — when it feels like the current version isn’t working, I’ll try a bunch of revisions, but at some point if I decide the whole scene is off, I’ll chuck that draft and start a completely new piece. In 2022 I decided to leave the place I’d been living for the last 16 years, move to a new state and start a new career. I’d been through a divorce and had to leave several dreams behind as a result. I spent a couple years struggling to find my direction, and it became clear that I needed to thoroughly reinvent myself and the world I inhabited. Moving to a new location felt essential to that process, as we can easily become confined to the patterns we’ve built up in a place and with people over time. I don’t recommend this lightly, as some of us may have a tendency to run away from ourselves by constantly moving, but in my case it was an ideal approach. I needed the challenge of unfamiliarity in order to push myself past some of my limiting beliefs and behaviors. I’ve become much more outgoing as a result of the necessity I created. The move challenged me to get out, meet new people, and be proactive in building friendships and community.
In choosing where I was going to live next, I was looking for a particular feeling. I wanted a geography that felt both welcoming and comfortable, but also expansive. I’d been living near the North Cascades in Washington State and associated those mountains with a theme of rugged endurance I was ready to leave behind. Settling into the Willamette Valley, I almost immediately experienced a greater sense of home, ease, and connection than I had after a decade and a half in my previous location. With this new foundation, I have much greater access to my creative capacity, which I’ve been channeling into building a business. It’s definitely a case in which the successful outcome of one risk fed my desire and capacity to take another. The move has been one of the best choices I’ve made in my life, and therefore it’s built even greater trust in my ability to navigate unfamiliar circumstances and create opportunities for myself.
Because this culture emphasizes the intellectual and financial aspects of life, I think we tend to overlook the social and emotional, or in other words, relational elements of our decisions. Taking risks is often associated with being a heroic individual, but I find my risks are more about learning to belong. What happens if I give up trying to figure it out all alone? What if I find people who genuinely want to support me in being successful? What if I become more transparent about my shortfalls and allow those who have complementary skill sets to help me out? My experiences these last couple years lead me to believe it’s possible for each of us to find a place we feel we fit, whether it’s within a specific geographic location, relationship, workplace dynamic, role or vocation. The risk I recommend taking is the one that involves letting go of what you know doesn’t fit and being willing to sense out what you may only vaguely know you want instead.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I work in the realm of the body. Within the body we have access to everything we’ve been, everything we are, and everything we can be. Our posture, muscular holding patterns, and chronic tensions all come from the past. We can dramatically improve our ability to move toward who and what we want to be by exploring unfamiliar movement patterns within the body. My understanding of this has been developing since I started studying Qi Gong, a Chinese movement art, in 2015. I knew there were experiences that other people were having in their bodies that I was unable to access, and this was the beginning of me searching out how to find those states within myself. Qi Gong continues to be the core of what I teach and practice, though I’m expanding into new disciplines that further my ability to help clients and students access and reawaken sensory awareness and connection to the many structures and types of tissue within the body.
One problem I see so many of us struggling with in the modern world is a lack of movement, a lack of meaning, a lack of feeling, and a lack of joy. I say this is one problem because within the body these symptoms have a shared root: numbness that is simultaneously physiological and psychological, often resulting from traumas or neglect that leave us unable to access the full experience of being alive. This affects people personally but has deep cultural origins, and my passion is facilitating a re-inhabitation of our bodies in order to bring us back into relationship with a living world. There’s so much more wonder and delight available when we’re able to be in contact with our sensations. As long as we’re alive our physiology is engaged in dynamic flux, a living process that moves through us in tingles and gurgles and pulsations and waves. These moment-to-moment changes inform us about ourselves, our surroundings, and our relationships — and allow us to feel fully alive. They’re also key to recognizing the dynamic interplay of life around us, which helps us feel less alone in the world.
Working with me involves going beyond a concept of holistic health and wellness into direct experiential contact with your vitality as it moves within muscles, fluids, organs, and bone. Having this access opens the door to our capacity for self-healing. Bodies are inherently self-regulating, and developing an engaged proficiency in movement helps dissolve blockages and increase resilience. I offer classes and private sessions that provide practices and skill sets to help people inhabit their bodies, build sensory awareness, and develop confidence in their physical presence.
What I’ve learned through experience is that the success of my decisions is highly dependent upon my ability to access and process information my body is giving me about situations I encounter. If for no other reason, I recommend developing somatic awareness for its utility as a life skill. The ability to integrate sensations with intellect results in a much fuller intelligence with which to navigate the world.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
A friend of mine once said she wished I didn’t have to keep proving my resilience. This was after I’d had a rollover car accident and a stroke within a four month period, in addition to moving to a new state. I had to laugh. I’ve had numerous calamities in my life, but the period leading up to and encompassing my move was particularly tumultuous. I was ready to stop testing my luck and survival instincts, too.
The gift of all this is that getting through it required me to thoroughly surrender the possibility of being in control of my life. It taught me to live from a much more receptive place. I tend to be a fighter, and can put up a lot of resistance if I don’t like the way things around me are going. In the moment these crises occurred, I had only split-second influence on the outcome, or in the case of the stroke, none at all. There was an instant inside each of these circumstances in which I clearly realized I had no idea what was going to happen next, or whether I would be intact on the other side. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. It is a wild, wild experience to lose the capacity to influence your own movement. People phrase this in different ways, but I would say my sense was that in those moments I was in other hands. Both in the hands of the people who were around me to respond and something larger that I don’t generally name. Through incredibly good fortune, I am even more intact on the other side, and my life has changed in ways I never dreamed.
Looking back from my current vantage point, I’m grateful for these challenges — first because I am still alive and fully mobile — but also because I learned things I wouldn’t have been able to learn any other way. While I have goals and desires, they’re less self-referencing and more open-ended. The opposite of resilience is brittleness, or being too fixed in our ways. I associate resilience with both agility and deep quietude, the combination of which allows us to notice, accept, and then swiftly, calmly respond to changes that are beyond our control. Situations we can’t control happen all the time; it doesn’t have to be something as epic as a car accident or medical emergency. Just spend time with other people and you can experience this dynamic any day of the week! It really can be a gift if we’re willing to approach the situation that way.
Reflecting further, I would say these situations also opened me up to the possibility of unimagined opportunities. If challenges this intense and unexpected could happen without my effort, why not something wildly wonderful as well?
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
We live in a culture that emphasizes institutional learning and knowledge acquired from books. It simply isn’t possible to approach the fields of embodiment and somatics from a strictly intellectual perspective. We may be able to borrow knowledge about the body without really understanding it through our own experience, but I don’t think this is going to get anyone very far. You have to put in the time to translate theory into your own physically embodied reality, and that takes repetition. You’re working with muscle memory, with the precision of movement and awareness, with your own capacity to sense yourself. I can only authentically guide people as far as I have gone into my own body. I could talk to you about being aware of each vertebra, but if I haven’t actually developed the ability to isolate and connect with each of my own, I can’t guide you into the precise sensory characteristics of that exploration. I’m just talking about the idea of vertebrae, which is not the same as directly experiencing them. No one can teach you this; it’s something you have to discover on your own through practice.
This is what feels most essential to me about working in this field: you have to keep up your personal practice of whatever modalities you teach. Besides the marketing and managerial aspects of running a business, I think the key to success and durability lives in being committed to one’s own continued development. This is probably true in every industry, but I think it looks somewhat different in somatics. This work is more full-contact sport than it is theoretical undertaking. What I mean by that is when you connect more fully with the experiences and responses of your body, you feel the impact. Your life takes on a new dimension because you’re in contact with your instincts. This can change the way you interact with people and how you make decisions. There is huge transformative potential available when working through the body, but you have to be prepared for your foundations to get rocked. It’s going to change you. It’s likely going to cause you to make changes. You might get a few bruises along the way, both literal and figurative, but as far as I’m concerned it’s totally worth it because the insights you gain as a result of direct learning are irreplaceable. Nobody else can replicate what you understand from experience.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.confidentground.com
- Instagram: @confident_ground
Image Credits
Dan Haberly