Month: December 2022

The Benefits of a Transformational Retreat for Mind, Body, and Soul

Posted on by impact@katiesandler.com

How often do you get the opportunity to connect with yourself? Do you often feel overstimulated, stressed, and like you can’t catch a break? According to the American Psychological Association, stress and burnout are at an all-time high. This isn’t something to take lightly – stress wreaks havoc on your physical health and overall well-being. While there’s no one way to fix our lives (that wouldn’t be real life on planet earth, friends), there are many things we can do to provide ourselves with the circumstances to heal, rest, and restore. 

Enter retreats. A proper retreat provides the space and time for a total body and nervous system reset. If your retreat is held by experienced teachers and practitioners, they know how to create and hold space for mind-body healing. Not to mention that the locations themselves can be incredibly healing and are set up to help you find deep rest and transformation.

Retreats are so much more than just another vacation. Backed by my methods and held in highly curated destinations worldwide, these experiences are engineered for your greatest well-being. Retreats are more than just a vacation, they’re an investment in yourself. When done the right way (or at least the way we like), they provide an opportunity to unplug, change up your environment, and help you press the reset button on your life. 

So, why do we, at The Impact Retreat, retreat?

  • Mindfulness: We learn tools and put them to practice in real-time. We can also practice being more mindful when disconnecting from our busy lives and to-do lists.
  • Reconnect to self: We need to slow down to reconnect to ourselves, to meet self, to return to self. It’s the only way.
  • Reconnect to land: To slow down and reconnect to ourselves and the environment/land. We must slow down to speed up – it’s physics. Rarely do we have a space to truly do this!
  • New experiences: To be curious and mindful. Traveling to different places often brings us to the present moment. We become more open and, thus, more here in the now which brings more inner peace.
  • The people: To connect with like-minded people and create a sense of community.  Due to differences in environment, culture, and values, many people feel disconnected from others. The desire for this is something many people crave, and retreats help create a sense of belonging. 
  • Intentional time: Step away from the buzz of daily life and make time to contemplate, gain awareness and insights, and learn how to implement them moving forward. Most of us are running on autopilot, living in the past or the future, and taking intentional time falls by the wayside. Retreats are intentional in that your time on retreat is mindful, thoughtful, and has a greater purpose and impact. 
  • An affair with food: Food is our source of energy! On retreat, we connect with, heal, and take time for our relationship with food. This mindful practice is often lost in day-to-day life, and retreats help bring it back. If you’ve eaten too many meals in a hurry or in front of your laptop, you get it; we all need this.
  • Adventure: To explore, learn, and shift perspective. Spending time in new places and less familiar cultures adds to our repertoire of experiences and can teach us to be more understanding and compassionate. It will also broaden your perspective on humanity. 
  • Inspiration: It’s often a time to become creative and re-energized. As we meet with ourselves a bit differently, we open up to inspiration more easily. You may leave ready to start that next life chapter, create a new boundary, and/or take up a new project, whatever it may be.

Are you ready to retreat?

We’d love to hear from you. Click here to see our group and solo retreat offerings.

Is Your Nervous System out of Whack?

Posted on by impact@katiesandler.com

Why It’s Critical to Tend to Your Body’s Command Center

So much healing comes down to the state of our nervous system. You can do all the therapy, take all the supplements, and say the affirmations – but if your nervous system only knows destructive or unhealthy patterns, you may find the same situations happening as if on autopilot. Sounds frustrating, right? Thankfully, many tools are at our disposal to help balance our nervous system and strengthen its responses.

Firstly, what is the nervous system?

Think of your nervous system as your command center that handles messaging between your brain and the rest of your body. Amazingly, rendered in photographs, it looks a bit like a tree with its roots (the nerves) extending throughout the body. The nervous system includes your brain, spinal cord, and a complex network of nerves, and its communication helps control all the body’s functions. 

A glance at nervous system health reveals something those in medicine and psychology know well: everything in our bodies is deeply interconnected and affected by the state of its components and parts. If your nervous system is dysregulated by chronic stress, your entire body and its systems will also be distressed. When your nervous system is healthy and functioning optimally, just about everything else in your body works better. For example,  your immune system is stronger and better equipped to fight illness (another level here: getting sick often causes us stress), sleep improves (along with a host of mental and physical states contingent on our sleep, aka just about everything), our hormones stay better balanced, our digestive systems work more smoothly, and inflammation decreases. In general, the body heals and functions optimally. 

Sympathetic and parasympathetic.

Our bodies evolved 10,000s of thousands of years ago to respond to dangers in our environment – fast. For better or for worse, the echoes of this evolution still tend to run the show, even though most of us aren’t trying to escape a tiger on the savanna and are more worried about, say, performing well at work. Our sympathetic nervous system triggers the “fight or flight” response. This activates your heart rate, dilates your pupils, and generally gets you going in many ways with the aim of helping save your life in the face of a threat. Problems (i.e., anxiety) often happen when normal, modern-day stressors activate the sympathetic nervous system sending you into fight or flight. Many people who grew up in unsafe or emotionally unstable home environments know these feelings well, and their nervous systems may need extra attention.

The parasympathetic nervous system helps restore calm and equilibrium. It’s often dubbed the “rest and digest” to the sympathetic system’s “fight or flight.” This is where we like to be to feel calm and good. I have some tips below to help activate this. 

How to tell when your nervous system is out of whack:

  • You feel easily triggered and reactive 
  • Your sleep is way off
  • You almost feel addicted to doing – being in a state of rest makes you nervous, even if you know you need it
  • Chronic muscle tension
  • Tension headaches
  • You struggle to focus and with decision-making
  • Your breathing is often shallow
  • You suffer from frequent bouts of anxiety 
  • You have chronic indigestion 

Ways to help regulate your nervous system:

  • Deep breathing Try the 4-7-8 technique, or simply exhale longer than you inhale
  • Cuddle with an animal and/or loved one
  • Soothing scents and sounds
  • Exercise and movement
  • Therapy coupled with mindfulness and/or MBSR
  • Take a bath or lounge in a steam room – water of any essence is soothing
  • Protect your nerves with B vitamins and soothe the body with magnesium
  • CBD, Kava, and marijuana may be used to help soothe and calm the system. Always consult a doctor before trying something new 🙂 

I hope this helps you better understand how critical it is to tend to your nervous system – and remember that your body is a brilliant mechanism, but one that does need some love to overcome evolution’s wiring. 

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