Meet Ashley Howell Bunn

We recently connected with Ashley Howell Bunn and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Ashley Howell, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Resilience is an interesting word. I think it starts with survival and then hopefully moves into thriving in some capacity. I think I focused on surviving for a long time. My often unpredictable home life made me an anxious, hypervigilant, and people- pleasing child. This carried into my adulthood, and most of my twenties and early thirties were focused on creating safety for myself and my family through external success. This worked for a while, until it didn’t. I was falling apart internally, and suffered from mental illness and addiction. It wasn’t until I finally reached a breaking point, found help, rearranged my life, and found sobriety that I started thriving. But this didn’t happen in one miraculous moment of strength, it happened day by day, breath by breath. We all have the innate ability to survive, and I truly believe we all have innate ability to thrive. I think humanity’s resilience comes from the desire to live fully, to connect and care for others, to appreciate beauty. There were definitely practices that supported my healing and growth, like yoga, somatic practices, and writing; but our resilience comes from living day in and day out, from simply waking up to live and work and breathe and love another day.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Well, I do a lot of things ha ha. I am very lucky that I am able to combine so many of my passions to fill my days. I am a writer, yoga guide, somatic coach, and teacher. I combine these passions and occupations in a variety of ways. Through my business, Howell and Heal, I lead somatic writing workshops, offer somatic coaching, offer retreats, and guide yoga sessions. For my personal writing life, I write and publish poetry. I have one book of poems called in coming light, through Middle Creek Publishing, a forthcoming co-authored collection with Alexander Shalom Joseph titled Living Amends, and am currently working on another collection dealing with motherhood, recovery, and universal patterns of healing. I also teach writing at the Community College of Denver and serve on the board of Middle Creek Press, a Colorado-based eco-poetry press.

Hopefully, through my business, teaching, and writing, I am offering people a way to access their innate right to joy, creativity, ease, and connection. In my work as a somatic coach, I support people in getting to know how their nervous system works, and how to build awareness and resilience to the challenges and stressors of everyday life. Our nervous system controls how we view and interact with the world, and it controls our ability to thrive. When we can find ease in our daily lives through breath, creativity, rest and community, we can live and do our great work in the world. I think this is especially important in our current time. There is so much heaviness in the world, our bodies and minds are exhausted. In order to keep moving forward and create change, we have to be able to rest, create, and share. As Deb Dana, a Polyvagal Therapist and author, says, “a regulated nervous system is a path forward to healing individual and community well being.”

I am offering my first retreat with my dear friend Kaley Ramirez September 20th-22nd, and I hope to offer many more in the future. I will be teaching a somatic writing class at Petals and Pages in Denver on January 19th from 1-3 pm.

My website and mailing list are great ways to stay up to date on what I am doing!

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?

Curiosity, love for community, and willingness to take risks. These are what have been most impactful on my personal journey. I have always been a curious learner, and once I find something I love, I dive in head-first. This has helped me develop my interests into life-long passions. I love people, and drive for community has helped me in my own endeavors, and has allowed me to support others. In all of life’s ups and downs I have always been willing to take risks and try new things. This always comes with some failure and rejection, but also with gains and wins that I never imagined possible. I think my advice to people just starting out would be to foster those things that come natural within themselves, and to surround themselves with people who share the same values and visions they do.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

This is such a hard question. There are so many books that I love. I will have to name a few haha. My favorite spiritual book is When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, and the nugget of wisdom I would share is that to find joy in every moment-the sunshine, the rain, the dishes, the elation, the suffering. All of it is joy, because it is life. My favorite self-help book is Anchored, by Deb Dana, because she teaches how we can learn to befriend our nervous system. My favorite piece of fiction is Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks because it speaks to the beauty in the everyday. I can’t name a favorite poetry book because there are too many, but I love all my friends’ poetry especially, so everyone should check out the Colorado poetry scene because it is amazing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.howellandheal.com
• Instagram: @howellandheal
• Facebook: Ashley Howell Bunn

Image Credits

Violet Mitchell for photo of me reading