Women In Wellness: Andrea Trank of Heaven Lane Healing & Creative Arts on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
…Spend time every day doing something you love. I love being outdoors. When I give myself that gift, I feel happier. Happiness leads to health. Not only find time for the activities you love, take the time to savor those moments by including them in a gratitude prayer or a journal. What we pay attention to will amplify in our lives. So, if you want to amplify your health and happiness — put your focus on it to amplify its energy.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrea Trank, Ed.S.
Andrea Trank covered the news for radio and television stations from 1980–1988.
In the early 90s, she decided to do something about the environmental catastrophes she witnessed as a reporter and became an environmental activist for groups such as the Sierra Club and Campaign California, and eventually starting her own environmental organization in Charlottesville, Virginia.
From the streets to the classroom. Andrea Trank received two advanced degrees in education and became a schoolteacher in Charlottesville Virginia.
In 2008 she left the Virginia classroom, moved to Florida to take care of her ailing mother, and continued teaching at the college level until she got sick. At this point, she trained as a yoga teacher, health coach and HeartMath trainer and coach and started working with people with chronic illness, gut issues and anxiety.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I grew up in a family with ten brothers and sisters. We were a “Yours, Mine and Ours” Family and there were lots of issues. However, I think being forced to deal with that many personalities and two religions (Catholicism and Judaism) served me well as I grew up. I felt the need from the earliest days of my life to make an impact on the world and I had such a strong will that I would use every obstacle and setback as ignition to work harder, learn more and fulfill my purpose, although I did not realize what my purpose was until much later in life. I originally thought I was to be a journalist. I spent ten years in that career before realizing it was not good for my health. As a highly sensitive person, I took the problems of the world home with me. They affected me deeply in ways that I did not realize until I started getting bouts of anxiety, serious gut issues and ultimately, autoimmune Hashimoto’s, a disease that affects your thyroid.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
In my current career the most interesting event happened when COVID hit. I was struggling to get clients and I was unsure of the direction I was taking. I was unclear about my niche — and because of my lack of clarity I was taking on clients that I was not meant to help and teaching yoga to people who were not appreciating me for my skills. I did not realize that I was affecting my own health by struggling so much and being uncomfortable with my path. During the pandemic, I really honed in to what I could do for my health and wellness and how to better serve. I took many training programs in HeartMath and in Yoga — narrowing down my niche until I really understood that all healing is ultimately dependent upon feeling safe. Nervous system regulation was a key component of healing. I entered a flow of both personal healing and work-related success. One big lesson I learned was that once I stopped worrying about all the minute details of my journey and trusted in something bigger than me, the path was laid out for me. I am not saying that I have not had to work hard. But now I work hard and show up every day without the feeling that I must struggle and claw my way toward a goal. The happier I am, the healthier I am. This is a big part of what I help my clients discover — how to feel good about their lives so that their lives and health will improve.
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The biggest mistake I made when I was starting was to force my ideas of healing on others. I thought I had to just teach them and then they would follow my advice and get better. I also believed that there were “right ways” to heal. Over time I have come to realize that healing is very personal and relational. My relationship with my clients is as big a factor in their healing as the advice I give them. So, developing the trust and learning to listen have become integral for me as I serve.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
I firmly believe everyone has the divine right and the ability to be healthy if they become empowered and educated on their own thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and choices. Those factors will either lead to wellness or to illness. I am passionate about helping people and I have a great deal of compassion for all people. I also love to inspire people by authentically sharing my own journey.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
1) Engage in HeartMath tools for emotional regulation. HeartMath uses a combination of breath practices, simple emotional awareness tools and biofeedback to shift our physiology, thoughts and emotions to ones that keep us resilient no matter what we are facing. HeartMath has been shown in more than 400 studies to improve health through creating more synchronization between the heart, the brain, the nervous system, the endocrine system and other internal biological and neurological systems.
2) Get toxins out of your life. Eliminating toxins from all sources you can control like your food, your water, your personal care products, your home, your cleaning products, etc. This is not easy to do. It is expensive and it takes time. So, I advise my clients to start with the lowest hanging fruit. What can you afford and are willing to change? For me, it started with going all organic. Then I changed out my water system. Then I replaced plastic containers with glass ones for food storage. Then I stop using fragrance and hair coloring and over the counter medicines- replacing them with essential oil-based alternatives. One by one, I shifted from a toxic lifestyle to a clean lifestyle. We don’t use pesticides on our lawn even though we live in Florida. We take our shoes off at the door. We changed out our blue tooth electricity meter to the old fashion meter instead of allowing it to be electronically monitored all the time. We put air filters in most rooms in our home. This was all done over the course of ten years as we could afford it. We stopped going out to eat and cooked more both to save money and control the quality of the ingredients we put in our body. We bought local organic vegetables whenever we could. Every lifestyle decision you make impacts your health. However, having said this, I believe that you don’t want to fret over these things because if you get your nervous system feeling unsafe, this will hamper your health.
3) Practice yoga or some other breath-based mindfulness practice as often as possible. These practices work on you in multiple ways — through your mind, body and your spirit. Breath is the most accessible way to change your nervous system and your physiology. Mindfully breathing also focuses your mind and gives you greater access to your Heart’s intuition which many believe is the window to your soul. I have been involved in some sort of yoga practice since I was first diagnosed 35 years ago with gut issues and anxiety. Through these practices I have been able to successfully stay off medicines and live a more fulfilling life.
4) Eat real food. The word diet means something very different to me. A diet is eating the food needed to thrive. This is different for most of us, depending on your health conditions, your genetics, your cultural biases, your age and goals. However, there are a few cardinal rules including:
• eat real food, not processed foods,
• pay attention to how the foods make you feel. In other words, notice signs and symptoms of discomfort after you eat including a runny nose, itchiness anyone, fatigue, change in mood and change in poop.
• Eat locally and seasonally when possible
• Learn to prepare your foods if you can. Preparing food with love is very healing.
• Substitute ingredients to make your favorite foods healthier for you so that you do not feel deprived.
5) Spend time every day doing something you love. I love being outdoors. When I give myself that gift, I feel happier. Happiness leads to health. Not only find time for the activities you love, take the time to savor those moments by including them in a gratitude prayer or a journal. What we pay attention to will amplify in our lives. So, if you want to amplify your health and happiness — put your focus on it to amplify its energy.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
1. Every part of your journey is valuable even the “so-called” negative parts. I always believed this myself but did not always express this to my clients.
2. There is no magic bullet to healing. I think many people believe that it will be some sort of overnight change that will help them heal, but it is a process, and this process can be enjoyable if you have the right attitude, beliefs, thoughts and emotions about it.
3. People really resist change even if what they are doing is hurting them. I have realized that timing is everything when it comes to changing your health and so I no longer feel like a failure if I have not been successful with a client.
4. Just because you are in a heart-centered business, there will be people who willingly or unwillingly try to thwart your progress. I unfortunately have learned that there are many people in this business who are more concerned with making money than healing like any other business. It is up to me to be very careful with whom I associate with to maintain my own integrity and reputation.
5. It takes time to figure out how to best serve. Often what you thought you would be doing when you started is not where you end up. I would have liked knowing that the road would not lead me down a straight path only so that I would not have fretted when I went down a wrong path and then had to retrace my steps. In other words, in my business and in my own healing journey, I have changed so much and learned so much along the way and I am so ever grateful for all the twists and turns that have led me to this day.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
I have been an environmental activist my whole life. I continue to support those causes when I can. However, I truly believe our mental health crisis is the elephant in the room. As long as we refuse to acknowledge that nearly all of us have been traumatized by life during the past few years and work to emotionally self-regulate, we will not be able to fix any of our other problems. To work together and care about each other, we need to get back to nervous system safety again.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
They can subscribe to my newsletter. Each week I write new blog and post other useful information about mental, physical and emotional health. I also provide free recipes and do a monthly free HeartMath meditation. You can sign up on my website at https://heavenlanecreations.com
I am active on Social Media….
Facebook @heavenlanecreations
Intagram @heavenlanecreations
LinkedIn @AndreaTrank
Twitter @Heavenlanetrank
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreaTrank
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Women In Wellness: Andrea Trank of Heaven Lane Healing & Creative Arts on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.