By Hannah Whitesides, Retreat Leader & Fear Management Specialist for our Company Virtual Retreats

Last week Ariana Rintz hosted a live Energy Balancing Session in the Tribe @ Project P. Being almost completely clueless about what this session would be like, I left in a state of intrigue and I wanted to know more. I had so many questions that couldn’t be answered with a simple google search because it was much more complicated than that. It became apparent that the answers to my questions lied within those who had been studying this sort of thing for some time. So, I sat down with Ariana one day and as we talked I realized that it’s not complicated at all, it’s actually quite simple and here’s why. 

While Ariana does many things, her primary goal is to have fun in everything she does and lead an extraordinary life! She is passionate about helping others create their own version of a vibrant life through mindfulness practices, nature immersion for stress and anxiety management, and mind-body wellness. For someone who tends to act before thinking, mindfulness practices aren’t my speciality so I didn’t really understand what these things meant. 

What do you think of when you hear the phrase, mind-body wellness? 

If you’re like me, it’s probably something along the lines of doing what you can to support a healthy lifestyle. During my conversation with Ariana, I came to understand that it’s much more than that and I was amazed at how important it actually is because the benefits of simply knowing about it can make a substantial difference.

Let’s start with the mind. “The mind is a very powerful organ and it can create all the experiences in our life.” Which also means that one of our brain's responsibilities is to create pain and alert you when there is a threat. When a person has experienced significant trauma, their body is unable to recognize that everyday things aren’t actually a threat anymore which leads to chronic pain.

Ariana shared with me that she has had chronic pain since she was 22, yet the doctors who she saw about this pain were unable to diagnose her because on paper and scans it looked like she was perfectly healthy.

So where is the pain coming from? Her body pain was coming from her mind and her memories without her consent. This is the part where we have to take a step back and recognize that stress and trauma are the invisible enemy. They carry the weight of the world on our bodies and can physically and mentally rip us apart piece by piece, yet people tend to neglect dealing with it because they can’t see it, because it doesn’t show up in a scan. It wasn’t until Ariana was introduced to somatic therapy that she began diving deeper into the awareness that only she knows her body and her experiences and it was time for her to help herself.

Somatic therapy is a form of therapy that seeks to uncover why your brain is sending your body pain signals when there is no threat. Here, a threat would be something along the lines of cancer, broken bones, etc. Once you’re able to uncover why your brain is sending certain pain signals, you can begin to retrain your brain and eliminate the invisible threat. 

How do you discover the reason behind the threat? 

By analyzing where you hold your stress, you can begin to relate that back to struggles and feelings you had when you were younger or when you were going through a traumatic event. For example, I tend to hold stress in my shoulders and neck. This area is in alignment with the Throat Chakra which relates to speaking, self-expression, and choice. So what is it about my life experience that caused my stress to reside in this area? This is the big WHY. Through speaking with Ariana and my own self-reflection, I came to realize that throughout my life I have always felt like the life I wanted to live and the person I wanted to be didn’t coincide with the socially acceptable standards and progression of a person's life. This inevitably led to me holding my tongue in many situations and not being confident in expressing myself in fear of being judged. 

As I have gotten older, my ability to unapologetically explore this side of myself has jump-started the healing process. However, by knowing and understanding the big WHY behind my stress and where it is stored, I am now able to really put in the work I need to in order to release those thoughts, feelings and stressors that have held me back for so long. 

So what does this all mean? 

1. It means that taking the time to get to know your body and how it responds to stressors and triggers are essential to solving the problem, not just helping the symptoms.

2. It means that just because you are a different person today, doesn’t erase the trauma you went through in your past. It fully lives on through your body as pain and triggers whether you acknowledge it’s there or not. 

3. Understanding the chakras and how they relate to your past is just the beginning. If you want to take control of these things, you still have to do the work. 

What is “the work?” 

In Ariana’s case, she practices mindfulness & meditation and nature immersion. Here’s how: 

Before she even gets out of bed, she starts her day by reading a page out of an inspirational book or using the Breethe app. By doing this, she is able to begin her day with a clear mind and calm approach to whatever the day has in store for her. She ends her day with a yoga session along with meditation. Some people may be like me and are wondering how she does this every day? What if one day she’s having a bad day and just wants to say, “forget it, who cares?” She explained to me that when she first started, her bad days would end in a cocktail and a tv show because that’s how she escaped.

It took a while of consistent mindfulness practices before she was able to actually turn to these practices when she’s having a bad day. So here’s the lesson, if you start meditating and you feel like it isn’t working, keep going because it is. Just like with anything, the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it and the more your body will begin to reveal to you which practices work best for you and which ones don’t. Mindfulness isn’t a one-size fits all. We’re all different, so what we need is going to be different and that’s okay. 

Another way Ariana practices mindfulness is by managing her stress and anxiety through nature immersion. Everyone always tells us to get out in nature, go for a walk, etc. But I wanted to know why? How does going outside help with stress?

Ariana mentioned a term called the “Attention Restoration Theory.” According to Positive Psychology, the last few decades have seen some empirical work on the idea that natural environments can restore and rejuvenate us, boost our attention, and keep us healthier. Ariana explained it like this. Picture yourself watching a sunset or watching birds, these types of things put you in the present moment, a stress free zone of soft fascination and you focus on whatever is in front of you. Think about the scent of pine trees whether it’s an actual pine tree or a scented candle. These types of smells put us in a state of calm because our body inherently knows we come from nature and it facilitates a connection between us and our roots. 

My conversation with Ariana put so much into perspective for me. I was so sick and tired of people just telling me to meditate and do all these mindfulness things but never explaining how or why. As a very logical person, I need supporting evidence before I believe someone when they say something works. Ariana gave that to me and I hope I reiterated it well to you. 

Ariana is Project Passport’s in house wellness coach and nature therapy guide so if you liked this interview and want to go straight to the source to learn more about this topic or anything involving her speciality, you can email her at ariana.rintz@project-passport.com or sign up for our Wellness Hub and gain access to coaching service information and all the wellness resources we have to offer. 

PURCHASE OUR DIGITAL WELLNESS GUIDE BUNDLE BY ARIANA HERE

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Project Passport is currently a proactive mental wellness company that aims to bring wellness retreats, workshops and other services to company teams and also help women create joy in their lives every step of the way. To learn more about our company retreats and services, click here. To learn more about our tribe community for women, click here. Our travel retreats will resume in the future as the world reopens.

Thumbnail photo by Chris Jarvis on Unsplash