We were lucky to catch up with Georgia Mitchell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Georgia, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
In my early 20s, someone told me I was the most out-of-body person they’d ever met. While I didn’t appreciate the comment, I knew I suffered from a painful lack of trust in myself and my ability to make life decisions. Two decades later, I have made embodiment my life path and with the opening of my new business, Confident Ground, it is also my work in the world.
The route to get here included a decade in the fields of horticulture and restoration. The gift of many hours of demanding physical labor was that I began to solidify a sense of my own capability. There was beauty associated with the exhaustion of spending all day pruning or weeding or harvesting: I could see the fruits of my labor right there in front of me. I felt a growing sense of pride in seeing those tasks well done, and learning that I could cultivate life with my hands.
Inhabiting my body at greater and greater depths over the years, and studying with those who have perfected this art through their own practice, I have recently discovered that confidence resides in the bones. This is not a unique discovery, but an experience that is available to everyone through embodied practice. A well-aligned skeletal structure and our somatic sensation of it come together as an expression of confidence. Learning to stand in this way makes a statement to the world: I belong here. I extend to my full height. I am aware of the space I inhabit. I have the ability to adapt. This is all we need in life. Everything else flows from it. This is the ground of confidence.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’m currently building a somatic facilitation practice, which includes teaching movement classes and seeing private clients. The focus is bringing people back into contact with physical sensation, grounding into skeletal structure and releasing muscular compensations, and accessing the insights this provides. We have all developed unconscious conditioned responses to situations and relationship dynamics based on our past. In order to continue adapting to the present we need practices that bring us into contact with how these responses show up in our physiology and tools for how to work with them and evolve the patterns that no longer serve where we want to go and who we want to be.
My larger vision revolves around developing facilitation packages for businesses and organizations to bring greater somatic literacy into the culture. In the modern world we approach almost all our problems mentally, while the root of our struggles actually lives in the body. We seem to have forgotten that our brains themselves are biological tissue. Our neurological development is completely dependent upon the world around us, the conditions we face, and the actions we take in response. The brain and body are one unit; the Cartesian split people talk about is really just an idea. It doesn’t actually exist in physical reality. The brain is embedded in the body. It has no other basis for existence. In this context I consider the work I do both highly practical and deeply subversive. We need to rediscover adaptive ways of living on this earth, and relearning how to inhabit our bodies is key to accessing the information we need to do so.
Through my long term study of Qi Gong, Chinese medicine, contemporary somatic practices, and the lifelong practice of natural healing handed down from my parents, what I offer people are methods I and generations before me have been testing for many, many years. Life and world conditions are always changing, and I approach this work with an appreciation for the wisdom of those who have come before me and the recognition that in order for traditions to remain alive they also have to remake themselves in the present. I welcome opportunities to collaborate and stretch myself and my work beyond our current comfort zones.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
If there has been a theme in my life, it’s that nobody else’s structure or path works for me. I have repeatedly had to find my own way, and being willing to step out into the unknown has become a defining quality. I think this is true for most of us, even those who tend to follow a more conventional path. We’re still always finding our own way, and nobody can navigate our lives for us from the outside. We all have an internal compass we’re following, even if we don’t recognize it. At the same time, I have found resonance and deep wisdom in the Chinese medical tradition, which has roots extending back thousands of years. I also carry a family lineage of natural healing from Japan, so balancing this paradox of individuality and tradition is very alive for me. Working in service to that which is larger than myself has always felt important.
If I have any advice for folks, it is to honor both sides of this coin: What are your traditions? Where are your origins? What lineages are important to you? And when must you step outside what is comfortable or familiar in order to develop the parts of yourself that are unique or don’t fit within the status quo? I think we tend to want to run away from these tensions, but it is exactly these polarizing forces that can give birth to our most creative responses. So creativity. That’s the third quality that has remained consistent in all my life stages. I can always come up with something new.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
Having worked in restoration for many years and having an interest in indigenous sovereignty and land rights, I would love to partner with folks who want to bring an awareness of the body and our somatic reliance upon ecology into discussions of land management and restoration. Again, I believe there’s a strong need to reconnect our experience of being biological organisms on a living planet to the ways we care for our earth. In a broader context, I would love to connect with anyone who is looking for methods to take their experience of the body out of a mechanistic box and learn to more deeply inhabit their lived experience. I can be reached at georgia@confidentground.com.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.confidentground.com
- Instagram: @confident_ground
Image Credits
Dan Haberly
