Ep. 58- Returning to Ourselves through Mindfulness with Ashley Williams

Transcript

Gissele: [00:00:00]

 Hello and welcome to the love and compassion podcast with Giselle. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives in our world. Don’t forget to like subscribe for more amazing content today. We’ll be talking about how mindfulness can actually positively impact a culture.

I’ll be speaking to Ashley Williams voted top 40 under 40 by styled weekly enrichments, magazines, daring women of 2018. Ashley is a certified yoga specialist. A creator of mindfulness plus movement, RVA implementing therapeutic interventions, programs and professional development training that combines social emotional learning, mindfulness and movement.

She’s also founder of bare soul yoga and wellness in Richmond, Virginia, intentionally created to make yoga and wellness accessible to the black community, but welcomes all communities. Please join me in welcoming [00:01:00] Ashley. Hi, Ashley. Hi

Ashley: Giselle. How are you? I am well. it’s, it’s, So beautiful outside.

I’ve been like bird watching as I like move from one place to the next and like all the different environments So I’m excited to like sit down in this moment and just take in taking this conversation and the house that I’m sitting in.

Gissele: Beautiful, beautiful.

And I think that goes to show like about the embodiment. So you not only teach the stuff you live it, right? Can you tell the audience a little bit about how it is that you got started in this work?

Ashley: Yeah. So my mindfulness journey, or I would dare to say, my, my love for being present in the moment and all the ways that one may maybe lead to it started for me in 2000 and 12, when I.

Really just kind of within a big transition of my life from, you know, collegiate life [00:02:00] to work, professional work life to moving new locations and really experiencing a lot of the transitions and the feelings and the sensations that came with transition. So moving in the ebbs and flows of daily life, moving in and out of feelings of like anxiousness, but then also moving in and out of feelings of connection and disconnection.

And I ended up having. A loss that of one of my aunts that was really dear to me. And on top of all of the sensations that were coming from the transitions that was another transition that really that created a lot of disconnection and a lot of heavy emotion. And so I found myself first at a yoga studio and in a class and moving my body.

And I just remember feeling that. Moment of connection with all of the sensations that I was experiencing. So all of the. The, the pain that I was experiencing, the sorrow, [00:03:00] a lot of the loss and the grief that I was experiencing I had a moment to actually feel it because for a moment I had withdrawn from it.

And that was also not a good feeling. And there was something about being present in the moment with my body. With my mind with the emotions of my heart that kept me coming back and from then it went from, you know, that, that yoga asana, that movement based practice to really diving deep into the study and the science of mindfulness.

And understanding, you know, MBSR, so Mindful Based Stress Reduction, and literally practicing it every day in my world. From the brushing of my teeth to the sipping of my coffee to mindful communication when I was around others. And then from there, honestly, it’s just really snowballed into.

Wanting to know more and getting curious about myself through the practices, wanting to dive deep and study the practices, wanting to then [00:04:00] share the practices and also not just, you know, the formal practices, but then also the benefits of, of being in relationship with these, like w