Today we’d like to introduce you to Mandy Bishop.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Mandy. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My work coaching and guiding others in nature, has really arisen out of my lifelong journey. I have always had a really deep connection with nature. Growing up, nature was a place where I connected with the trees and my plant friends, where I felt safe and comfortable to be myself. If I wasn’t dancing, you’d find me up in a tree or digging in the dirt. This connection shifted over time to include more adventure as I learned to kayak, backpack, climb mountains and rock walls. But the foundation was already set for me. Nature was a profound relationship and a place where I felt my truest self.
About six years ago, I survived a terrible bike accident in which I sustained a spinal cord injury and head injury that left me paralyzed from the neck down. After emergency surgery to remove the disc that was crushing my spine and fuse my vertebrae together, I began the long and slow process of recovery. Remarkably, I’ve regained almost all sensory and motor functions since.
Connecting with the body and connecting with nature have both been instrumental in my healing journey since that accident. For a long time, I was merely trying to find a way to feel safe again in my body and to let my nervous system regulate. It then became extremely important for me to try to understand why this had happened. I knew that this was a pivotal moment in my life and I needed to ask some very sacred questions about what the meaning of this was, and what this meant for me and my purpose in life. I ventured out into nature to seek the answers.
The explorations I journeyed into in my own healing have really formed the backbone of the work I do now with clients. I realized I was called to serve others who had been through traumas as well–to help them navigate the windy road of recovery that ensues after big life events. And I went to receive in-depth therapeutic training in nature-based coaching from Earth-Based Institute. I now have the honor of working with others who have been through traumas to integrate and to reclaim their lives so that they can move forward in a whole and empowered way.
Has it been a smooth road?
I would say that my road has been quite bumpy and winding. I have never been one to feel certain about my purpose in life. In fact, I’ve at times, felt desperate to figure out what I came here to do. For most of my life, I’ve been longing to understand how I could help serve others in some kind of meaningful way.
I’ve spent most of my working life in the service industry in some form or another, as well as in the arts. Obviously, life served me a huge bump in the road when I got into that accident. This may be partially why I was so very passionate to understand the deeper message in that for me. I had an intuition that this was a part of what it was I was here to do in this life–I just didn’t understand how until a few years later.
Once I found the clarity and the courage to begin to walk the path towards guiding others in nature to ask their own sacred questions, the road has gotten smoother. And now, even when the hurdles arise, the vision that is calling me is strong enough to keep me moving in that direction and making lemonade out of lemons.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
I’m a nature-based coach, and I help support people after trauma to integrate what they’ve been through. We partner with nature so that they can find calm and safety again, accept a new normal, reclaim their lives, seek out the gifts from the experience they’ve been through, and find meaning in their journey. With the focus being mostly on acute recovery of the physical/medical in this culture, what is often overlooked are the lingering effects of trauma on the body, heart and soul. This leaves a big gap. Once we’ve made it through the acute recovery, we are expected to return to life as normal. That is just not how trauma works within the body and psyche.
By skipping this critical step, we end up surviving our traumas but getting stuck in a trauma vortex of pain, shame and fear resulting in fragmentation, anxiety and depression. We have to recognize, acknowledge, grieve and praise these experiences, allowing them to complete their cycles and not get stuck. When trauma is approached from an indigenous perspective, it can be seen as a sacred initiation rather than a problem to overcome. We get to recognize the sacred journey we’ve been on as a critical passage in one’s life that holds purpose, meaning and medicine for our communities. And through this healing and integration become available.
I meet with clients in the natural landscape (in the wilderness) on a trail or open space. We first establish a relationship with the natural world, reconnecting with client’s sense of safety both within the landscape and within their own bodies. We go through clarifying resources and tools the client can use to help their body/mind when dysregulated to come back into a state of regulation and groundedness. From here, we will begin to explore through myth and medicine walks the journey the client has been on. We will work with the story as a rite of passage, honoring and letting go of the old, accepting what is present, retrieving the medicine bundle and preparing for what we are stepping into. Through this lens, we view the trauma as an initiation and begin to move towards integration, distilling out the gifts that are held within.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Right now, coaching is an emerging industry. Life coaching, in particular, is gaining credibility among the therapeutic and healing industry, as more and more institutions take accreditation with the International Coaching Federation seriously. Coaching is truly stepping into the arena as a life-changing, transformational therapeutic support for those that it is right for.
As for nature-connected coaching, I see this as more and more important by the day. As more of us recognize the disconnection that has taken place over the past couple hundred years between humans and nature, many people are realizing that their health and overall wellbeing and just enjoyment of life are intrinsically connected to nature. More and more people are seeking ways to reconnect to the land, and to themselves. For this, I think nature-based coaching is becoming a sought after support.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mandybishop.earth
- Phone: 720-277-1566
- Email: mandyvbishop@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mandyvbishop/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mandy.bishop.77715
Image Credit:
Mandy Bishop
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