Meet Ashley Baer

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ashley Baer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Ashley, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
My resilience (10%) comes from something inside me as a child that was always within me, I was determined to survive, but the other 90% comes from the practice of Mindfulness and meditation specifically breathing and staying in the present moment. Breathing is the nervous system’s love language and through breath and these practices I transformed my life while surviving the trauma of my past. Specifically, the practice of present moment awareness helped me overcome anxiety, and depression, and helped me transform grief that I had suffered and struggled with since the age of eight when my mom took her own life. It was through present moment awareness and accepting and understanding that my mother’s suicide was part of her present moment and my present moment in 1978 and it was unchangeable. I did not have to suffer it over and over.  I had to first accept and process what happened in my life in order to transmute the suffering of it.  With my mother’s death, my family and safety were destroyed. I had thought Mom’s death was the worst thing to happen to me until my father married a stranger and she adopted us, and introduced verbal and physical abuse, gaslighting, locking me in my room, control, mind and food games, and from her family- there was sexual abuse. She destroyed what was left of my family and put me in foster care at 16 after I had suffered her abuse for 8 years.  I struggled from all of this as you might imagine and it showed up in my mental health, my self-esteem, and my ability to regulate my emotions or even show up for life. The mind affects the body and physically, I was sick with asthma, insomnia, and IBS in addition to my mental health issues of anxiety, depression and sometimes suicidal ideation because everything felt hopeless. We don’t want to make permanent decisions on temporary emotions.  I have healed those places within in me, and no longer need medications and no longer suffer from these physical and mental issues. I resolved the grief and loss that I had never been allowed to process because I had to shift into surviving. It is through allowing the difficult feelings that we transform them. We must feel “it” to heal “it”.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am always working on my own healing as that is a life long journey, but within my work, I have created a Mindful Breathing Program for a public-school system. It is a mindfulness program, I created, implement, and teach to leaders, teachers, and students in our district. I train teachers how to use the strategies of Mindfulness and Meditation in their own life first for self-care and resilience, and then I teach them how to implement these strategies in a classroom for focus and self-regulation which I believe is a life skill. Harnessing the breath is self-care and builds in the resilience so when difficult moments happen which they will, I am able to bounce back more quickly. When I am not working in my school district to teach these practices or offer self-care, I am speaking nationally to share the power and the research behind these practices to educators, school districts, and psychologists on why these nourishing practices need to be embedded in school systems. We should not wait to offer them which is what our society does. We offer mindfulness in prison, mental health hospitals, and rehabs. I want to switch that thinking by offering these tools on the front end such as in schools.

My program has gained international attention as I had recently been invited to the University of Bologna’s ISPA conference on Cultivating Well-being in a school district which is what I am most passionate about. I want our teachers and our students well. When I am not working in schools or speaking publicly, I share my story on podcasts, I volunteer with former incarcerated women to empower them with these practices, or I am working with clients one on one on how to handle anxiety, trauma, and difficult emotions. I am currently working on two books, one is a memoir of my complicated history, and one is a book I will co-author with a doctor who specializes in trauma.  I teach meditation on the app Insight Timer, or lead meditation on WisdomFeed.com. This summer I led a wellness retreat in Jamaica teaching clients the benefit of these practices for wellness. I will host my second wellness retreat next summer in Jamaica. I am so fortunate that my work is my passion, and purpose, and is deeply embedded in all aspects of my life.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Well, one of the number one predictors of success in life is focus, and the second is self-control which can both be taught through mindfulness. Three skills that were most impactful for me specifically was 1) learning to regulate my emotions and nervous system through breath and meditation, 2) acceptance of my past and what is, and 3) learning how to choose my thoughts by noticing my thoughts and choosing the positive ones such as gratitude for life.

The best way to improve on this journey is consistent daily practice in meditation and the understanding that if you can breathe, you can meditate. There is no wrong to meditation, and understanding that we are not “Clearing the mind” but noticing the mind. When we can sit with ourselves, and welcome all emotions, we are building resiliency and distress tolerance. It was the days I forgot to meditate that I understood how much I needed this practice to not be a prisoner to my thoughts, and how empowering it was to know that I can affect my mood, mental health, and my physical health by noticing my thoughts and taking ownership of them instead of being a victim to them. Accepting my past allowed me to let go of rumination of that past which enabled me to live fully in the present moment, and my whole life and health transformed.

To close, maybe we can chat about your parents and what they did that was particularly impactful for you?

This may sound strange but the most impactful thing my parents did for me was to be flawed humans. Their abandonment and inability to parent me made me dig deep to find my own healing and understood that if I did not take ownership of my mental health, no one was going to come in and do it for me. It was my foster parents who gave me safety. My mother checked out of this life when I was eight and from eight on, I no longer had caring adults in my life. My father abandoned his parenting duties when my mom died, and he allowed another person to mistreat me. He showed me how to be a better parent by protecting my children, keeping them safe, and providing unconditional love to them even when they make mistakes or disappointed me. Beyond my parent’s humanity which was riddled with dysregulation and suffering they showing me my strength. When I learned to love myself, through compassion I found the capacity to forgive them. Ironically, I helped my father transition from this life in a space of forgiveness and love. My voice telling him that he was forgiven was the last voice he ever heard. I never see my past as a hindrance.  My parents were my greatest teachers. They showed me my strength, my capacity for unconditional love and forgiveness which was a gift to me. Sometimes our purpose is hidden within our wounds.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
The pictures with the bell, the green house, and the field are by photographer Kristina Rolla @wanderstowonder and all others are myself.

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