Seeking Inspirato with Marisa OlGrady-Kessner in St. George, Utah
Follow Marisa on Instagram, @GroundingSource
Cut
What are your favorite kinds of cuts? Why?
“Currently I am very into high waisted, loose fitting around the legs pants that are cropped. For winter I have been into baggy sweaters. In the warmer months I love a good crop top. I honestly tend to go with where the trends are pushing. I do currently love this look though because it is SO comfortable.”
Color
What are your favorite colors? The ones that you feel make your skin pop?
“Colors I love are usually loud, statement colors. I mean, I got married in red. For my business related photos I like wearing greens/ yellow that are more neon tones (they feel like they say joy to me) and when I want to feel cozy (like winter) I wear earth tones. They help me feel grounded & powerful.”
Cloth
Favorite materials? Why?
“I am a woman of practicality. If its summer I want something light that wont stick to me in the 110 degree St. George heat. If it’s winter/ fall I want to feel warm and held. It has a lot more to do with where I am at emotionally than it does with trends.”
Comfort
What do you feel most comfortable in, while feeling Clothing Confident, and why?
“I have this AMAZING pair of stretchy waisted jeans from Ann Taylor Loft that I can’t wear enough. They are so cute & so comfy. I feel like I can look professional and eat and take a nap all being totally comfortable.”
Enter This Season with Confidence
The changing of the seasons is nature’s nudge. It perks us up, prods us to see the cyclicity of things, and elbows us to take stock of what we have. As the north wind blows us into another holiday season, we’re roused from our routine. What worked last week (I’m looking at you, lightweight wool coat), won’t work next week. And just as our bodies shift in response to the seasons, so too must our minds.
Winter is here, and my bodily instincts are crying out for hot cocoa, rich desserts, and snuggly blankets wrapped around my torso while I lay limply and watch (yet another) murder show on Netflix.
Oftentimes, it’s easier to let our bodies lay dormant as we found them in the winter. We write off exercise because … the holidays … the events … the food …
Listen, I don’t blame you! In fact, please, pass the pie, and yes, I will take another helping of honeyed ham.
I am championing a new holiday season for myself and for you, too. I want us to enjoy the stuffing, while also keeping our bodies feeling good.
I am advocating for reducing our stress in order to improve the way we look at ourselves. Stress has so much to do with Clothing Confidence. Stress clouds our judgment and hinders our self-expression. Not feeling Clothing Confident? Maybe you should check your stress level before checking your closet.
Today’s feature, Marisa, is the kind of person you imagine to exist on the cover of National Geographic. She’s a voracious rock climber, a canoer, and above all, an advocate for getting outside and moving your body to reduce your stress.
Marisa’s focus in college was on the effects of wilderness expeditions on young women’s body image.
How is it that my path crosses with the most unbelievable women!?
Particularly now, when I might rather stay inside than venture out, I am prioritizing Marisa’s words and taking them to heart. I want to feel happier in my body and more confident in my mind this upcoming season.
Marisa rock climbing. Photo taken by her husband, 📸 @char.kess.photo. National Geographic cover by me.
Meet Marisa: Your Relatable Outdoor Advocate
Marisa’s background is in wilderness therapy. She took young people out to remote locations to immerse them in nature. There were no phones, no social pressures from friends, and no assignments other than to steep in their surroundings.
Now, Marisa’s company, Grounding Source (@GroundingSource), takes burnt-out, stressed-out women into Southwest Utah to take a breath:
“I help women who are burnt out on corporate life heal their stress & own their time.”
Marisa teaches women 1) how to understand and end their Stress Cycles and 2) to live more present, purposeful lives.
When a working mom of two looks at an email notification during dinnertime, she’s not being present with her family. When a sixty-hour-a-week girlboss neglects her personal life, she isn’t being purposeful with her time.
“I think the wilderness is the most underutilized resource that we have. It does everything that we need it to do.” - Marisa
📍St. George, Utah 📸 Maddison McKinley
Marisa is a wilderness professional who’s been guiding since she was a kid. She began canoeing expeditions at 12 and was invited to attend a 50-day arctic canoe trip in the far reaches of Canada when she was just 17.
When Marisa first walked me through her background, I thought the interview theme was an open and shut case: Here is a strong woman who has found empowerment through physical feats.
Well, not so fast. It’s actually more simple.
“It is physical feats, but I think, more importantly, it’s the wilderness. I think the wilderness is the most underutilized resource that we have. It does everything that we need it to do.”
When Marisa says “wilderness,” she doesn't mean you have to find an uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region to find peace. While she does take women out to the desert to heal for hours at a time, the benefits of being outside exist everywhere, even if you live in New York City.
Being outside is medicine. You’re removed from screens, you’re receiving Vitamin D, you’re breathing fresh air, and above all, you’re giving yourself an actual break. Not a scroll-break on your phone, which research has proven is damaging to your mental health (see Doomscrolling), but an actual moment for your brain to heal.
Marisa’s FUCK ring is a playful physical reminder of the role stress plays in our lives 📸 Maddison McKinley
“The wilderness is a powerful beast, but we separate ourselves and put ourselves in concrete boxes, and put a lot of value in other things, but the wilderness just works. That’s why I use it for my business. It heals women, and you don’t have to do anything. You can literally just be alone in the wilderness for 24 to 30 hours, and your life will change. It just fucking works.”
The fine print to Marisa’s satisfaction guaranteed claim: no phones.
You surrender access to the outside world as soon as you begin your expedition. This might be the greatest gift of all. I can honestly say I haven’t been without my phone for more than 24 hours, so 72 hours in nature with no access to the outside world? I might end up building an entirely new life.
That’s actually not Marisa’s purpose, though. She’s not some woo sage telling you to leave your corporate job and the conveniences of modernity. Her measurement for success isn’t the number of women who walk away from her retreats upending their lives.
Rather, she knows she’s done her job when women walk away in the driver’s seat of their decision-making, empowered to set their own boundaries.
What’s the connection between Marisa’s work and your self-image? When we’re stressed, we don’t see ourselves as we are. We see the clouded version. This extends into how we dress and our Clothing Confidence. We can’t see the woman through the fog.
Stress Cycles and Clothing Confidence: The Undeniable Connection
Sometimes we justify unhealthy patterns by claiming they are self-care. We procrastinate work to “unplug” with TikTok. We don’t take time to adorn our bodies and love our look because we are “unwinding” in all-day sweatpants. When we do this, we subconsciously take that stress on elsewhere. We’re living on borrowed happiness and contentment.
“We ignore things, like our stress, and we cope and do things to feel better, which make sense. I mean, why wouldn’t we? But, when you learn a different way, then your only responsibility is to act differently. And that’s the only choice that you have.”
When we “ignore” what we’re wearing, or we claim we “don’t care how we look,” we are operating under a notion that we are invisible to ourselves and others. We think that no one will care, that nothing we wear matters.
Ignoring personal style is actually more effort than facing and loving it.
We internalize the way we express our personal style, just like we do stress. All energy has to go somewhere. When we ignore parts of life, including self-expression, they mount like dunes in the desert. It takes more energy to ignore deadlines, clothing, and creating boundaries than it takes to face them.
Sometimes when we’re in a stressed cycle, we can’t make healthy decisions.
Marisa is going to talk through how to fix our mental states so that we can face our decisions, including Clothing Confidence, and own them as a part of our identities.
Spotting the Beginnings of a Stress Cycle
“There’s a lot of things where if we fail to recognize them, then we’re failing to recognize the system as well.”
How do you think of stress? Do you see it as the enemy? A necessary evil? Unmanageable?
What are the words you use to describe your own stress?
I think of it as the static anxiety ball that lives rent-free in my head. The metaphorical chair I keep piling clothes on. The claustrophobic mess drawer in the kitchen that contains a thousand electronic cables I can never find the corresponding device to.
The feeling of no stress, then, is when the proverbial clothes are neatly folded, the chair is available for sitting, and the drawers have been Marie Kondo’ed. Joy, sparked.
But often, without the discipline to Kondo those drawers, we envision the glass of pinot at the end of our day as the answer to the end of our stress. This is not sustainable. Pinot can not fold clothes. Your stress will still be sitting on that chair come morning.
Stress is inevitable, so instead of avoiding it, Marisa coaches us to befriend it. Like with any good friend, we have to get to know our own Stress Cycles intimately.
Marisa thinks of these Stress Cycles as stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Stress has a plot-like structure that craves resolutions for its conflicts, denouments for its climaxes. However, if we resist the plot of our stress, if we refuse to cross the threshold and meet the challenge, we become stuck in the middle of our own story.
Being stuck can become intolerable. Have you ever thought:
“I’m just going to QUIT!”
“I’m just going to LEAVE him!”
“I’m just going to dye my hair and move to another country with a new name!”
These ultimatums come from a place of chronically evaded stress.
When women come to Marisa, they are usually stressed out, burnt out, and tired, but above all, they are seeking a change.
“They don’t know what it is, but they know this isn’t life.”
They’ll soon come to find that the change isn’t about the externals (the jobs, the partners, the hair). It’s about the way you internally manage the externals. It’s about the way you cope with stress.
Learning Your Stress Cycle
The urgent and impulsive behavior you are tempted to engage in when stressed might look different from mine, but we both need to be able to recognize it when it’s happening so that we don’t make rash decisions and go off the deep end.
Think about a stress cycle like the recycle arrows as opposed to a chart or graphic. We will always experience stress, we simply have to tell our bodies that it doesn't need to be in stress response.
📸 @Pixabay
Beginning
Physiological changes: These are the physiological changes that happen when we are in stress response:
Epinephrine acts instantly to push more blood into your muscles
Endorphins help you ignore the discomfort
Your heart beats faster = blood pumping harder (blood pressure increases)
Breathe more quickly
Muscles tense
Sensitivity to pain diminishes
Attention is on alert; focusing on short-term, here-and-now thinking
Senses heightened
To maximize your body’s efficiency in this state, your other organ systems get deprioritized: digestion slows, immune function shifts, growth & tissue repair decreases as well as reproductive functioning
Middle
You recognize the stress and make a decision.
End
We will always experience stress, we simply have to tell our bodies that it doesn't need to be in stress response. Ways to complete the cycle:
Movement (ideally 30-60 minutes but even a good shake will do!)
Breath work
Positive social interaction (with anyone, it could be as simple as chatting with the check out clerk)
Laugh
Cry
Affection
Creative expression
All of these above tells our bodies that the world is safe again and that we don't have to be ready to sprint away.
“It’s impossible to think clearly when you’re in a state of stress. So unless you start completing your stress cycle you can’t make sound decisions that are going to be helpful.”
This doesn’t mean your stress has ended forever, but if you can become acquainted with your Stress Cycles, you’ll reduce your chronic stress and move through life making the decisions that work best for you.
Moving Through Decisions, Through Movement
Life can feel external when you’re too focused on what others think and what others feel. What about what you feel? It can be easy to operate from an external sense of self, where things are happening to you.
Where you feel out of control.
I’ve felt like this recently, and for me, it looked a bit like this: I’m asking other people for their opinions when I haven’t given a situation much thought on my own, and I allow them to dictate my future.
Other times I’ve felt so far outside of myself that I feel the sensation of spinning. I’m on a merry-go-round with no ability to dismount the horse and get out of the carnival. It feels like I don’t have enough time, and at my core, I’ve lost a bit of who I am and of my purpose. Where’s the tether?
Managing your Stress Cycle from the couch, as you sink deeper and deeper into your head, might give you the false sense that you’re making a lot of headway. In reality, if you just get up, open your door, and go outside to move your body you are in a better physiological position to let your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and decisions move through you. You’ll be closer to a place of fulfillment.
“Everyone feels better when they go outside… It just works. You’re more productive, more creative, you’re more efficient in your work. Literally people will try to jam out another email that take them 3 hours, instead of 1 hour, to write and what they could have done to be more efficient is literally go outside and let their brain physically heal from all of the stimulation and decision making it’s been doing.”
I’ll leave you with what sold me on Marisa’s ideology:
“In my mind it’s like, once you know, you fucking know. You can’t unknow things.”
Now that you’ve heard it from Marisa, you can’t be “unignorant”! Happy trails.
A Huge Thank You!
To Marisa
Thank you for sharing all of your knowledge!
Follow Marisa on Instagram (for daily reminders to get outside and end your Stress Cycle!) and visit her website to book a coaching session, download her Burnout Guide, or attend a Solitude event in Utah!
To Charlie
Without taking Charlie’s amazing photography class in St. George, I would have never met Marisa! I am so grateful to know these two phenomenal souls. Follow Charlie on Instagram for all kinds of extraordinary photos and adventures.
