Choose954 #Podcast Episode 71 With Ro Ferrelli

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqGi7ayr2R8&list=PLOQvdw7d0cd9RZZkd2lZy2hmrnJv-cfLI&index=30

Evan: We are back here on the Choose954 podcast, episode 71, with local artist, Kundalini yogi, and coach Ro Ferrelli, here from her beautiful home studio gallery in Sunrise, Florida, yes, up here in Broward County. If you didn't know about Choose954, we started a social movement to cultivate culture and community here in Broward County, where I'm very proud to be born and raised. Our goal is to keep people informed about all the great things going on within the arts and culture, making this a better place to live and not just a better place to vacation. The point of the podcast is to connect you with interesting people like Ro who do really cool things in the community. And as you'll find out, Ro is our upcoming AAF Creative Zen speaker this Friday morning, January 14th. We'll talk about that a little bit, but without much further ado, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself at a high level?

Ro: Yes, well, thank you so much, Evan, for this opportunity. I am a fan of Choose954 and a fan of yours, so it's great to be here. A little bit about me: I am a coach, and at heart, I'm a personal development junkie. For years, well over a decade, I've been immersing myself in the conscious studies of the mind, growth, and becoming better versions of ourselves. So, I am a coach, I specialize in working with women, and I'm also a Kundalini yogi. A lot of the work that I do intertwines different types of ancient meditations, breathwork, and yoga practices. And then I also create art, so this is like my fun playground. One of my zones of genius is to create artwork, and I specialize in resin and mixed media. This piece that we're sitting in front of has a lot of crushed glass and crystals that I've had imported from all over the world. This is actually calcite, called emerald green calcite, from Durango, Mexico, and my quartz crystals mostly come from Brazil. So, yeah, that's what I do.

Evan: I mean, there's so much going on here in this piece, but we'll get to the artwork. Before you were an artist, how did you get started on this whole journey and going down the rabbit hole?

Ro: Well, I had a spiritual awakening when I was 27, and I'm 40 now. So, I started asking those deeper life questions that led me on the path of hiring coaches for myself, reading probably thousands of pages in books, listening to podcasts, and just going down the rabbit hole of personal growth. It was just something that woke up in me. I do have a YouTube video that tells my personal journey, called "The Whole Enchilada: My Spiritual Awakening," so if you Google or YouTube that, it'll come right up. That's a really interesting story. As far as the art, I have this problem where I have big wall spaces, and in Florida, the houses have a lot of vaulted ceilings and big empty wall spaces. So, I was a customer first, and I was looking on Instagram, scrolling through, and I saw the most beautiful geode resin artwork. I was inspired by an artist in Germany, and I reached out to her. Now she's very well known in my resin community. She has her own line of products, hundreds of thousands of followers, and her pieces are really expensive. It would have been $12,000 to $15,000 for me to bring in a piece of her artwork, and I thought, "You know what? It's totally worth it because it is the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen in my life, but it's not in my budget right now." So, I decided to see how I could start creating these myself, and I got inspired. I've always been an artist at heart. Ever since I was a little kid, I was always drawing, and the only thing I wanted for Christmas was paint and art kits, those little suitcases that you open up with all the markers. That's the only thing I really cared about. So, I've always been an artist, but I tucked it away for so many years. Then, really, I was just inspired by another amazing artist, and I got nerdy with it—got some Excel spreadsheets, used a lot of different tools and processes, and then I came up with my own style. That was about three years ago; it wasn't even that long ago.

Evan: Amen, and we're very, very impressed. I mean, I see a lot of work, and I do not see a lot of work like this. I know it takes a lot of time, a lot of patience, and a lot of ingenuity, so kudos to you. This is here in Ro's home, but it could be in your home as well. Aside from the art and the coaching, as I've shared, I've gotten into yoga over this last year, and I don't find so many people talk about Kundalini yoga. Do you want to talk a little bit about your Kundalini yoga?

Ro: Yeah, so a kind of a joke in the yoga community from Kundalini's is that Kundalini is the real yoga. We kind of say it's the yoga that's... I mean, yes, there are all branches of yoga; they're thousands and thousands of years old. Kundalini is about five to eight thousand years old. It has a lot of really unique traditions, like wearing all white—there's a reason for that. It's actually expanding the auric field when you're wearing all white. Turbans—you see a lot of Kundalini yogis wearing turbans. There's a science behind that too. Everything that they're doing in Kundalini yoga is backed by science. They actually did a really cool white paper by the Alzheimer's Association for a meditation called a Kirtan Kriya, which reverses Alzheimer's. You don't see anything on the market that talks about that because it's free. You can sit in your living room and do this meditation for 11 minutes every day, and if you're someone who has that running in your family or something you're struggling with, or you're at that age, this will start to reverse the effects of it. They're really powerful meditations, and I just felt called to do them. But I realized that not everybody feels aligned with it, and that's okay. I think what's most important is that you just find something, some way—we were talking about this earlier—something to give back to yourself every day. There are a million different types of meditation; Kundalini is just one of them. So, try it out if you feel intrigued by it.

Evan: Amen. And yeah, there are so many different branches and different strokes for different folks, but it is tried and true—thousands of years old practices. I'm glad that you found benefit from it and also pass this along to other women and other people. Can you tell us a little bit about some of your coaching practices and offerings and how you assist women and people looking for some guidance and help?

Ro: Yeah, so like I said, I specialize in working with women. Right now, I just finished a program called "Get Your Sh*t Together." It was a two-hour virtual workshop, and that was a lot of fun. That was last weekend, but I have something coming up that I'm not even sure if I'll be able to release this year. I want to do an immersion program, like a six-month immersive program for women who are really looking for creating radical change, whether that's in your relationships, finances, career, or finding and following your purpose. I'm really excited about that, but I'm in the early stages of planning it. I usually do group programs throughout the year, but I don't have anything on the books right at this moment. However, I do take one-on-one clients. So, it's one of those things where you kind of have to sign up for my newsletter and follow along to see what appeals to you.

Evan: So, why do you choose 954?

Ro: You know, I love South Florida. I love being here. I love our weather—everything's green, everything's blooming all the time. I do miss seasons sometimes, but in general, I love living in South Florida. We have the best beaches, we have a great arts culture cultivated by Choose954, supporting local artists. I love being a part of that. I love what you're creating. I've always said that from day one—like, I think it's really cool. Seriously, you just came up out of nowhere and started doing all these amazing things, curating this community, and I'm proud to be a part of that.

Evan: Amen, and you were there at the beginning. You've been coming to these events for years, so I appreciate your support. If you want to hear the full story or more of the story and get some inspiration and see some of this beautiful art in person, we encourage you to join us for AAF Creative Zen this Friday morning, January 14th, at General Provision in downtown Fort Lauderdale. It's a free event. We do this—it’s a mini TED Talk, a monthly breakfast lecture series to connect, engage, and inspire our creative community one Friday morning a month. Free event, free coffee, free guided meditation by my guru, coach, and friend Chloe Revell, aka The Gemini Rising. So, we hope you can join us for that. What other things do you have coming up that they should look out for?

Ro: I do have one event at the end of the month in January—the 25th and the 27th—at Gallery One, which is the DoubleTree owned by Hilton on Sunrise Boulevard. We have the home exhibit, and I’m going to have two pieces featured at that exhibit. Those are going to be some great events, so if you’re just looking to come around in the community and view other artists too, there are going to be lots of local artists who do amazing work. So, come out to that. That is the 25th and the 27th of January, I believe, around 6:30 p.m. Yeah, 6:30 p.m. So, come out, bring your family, and have a drink with us. Hope to see you there.

Evan: Shout out to the Keislers, Robert and Carol, big supporters. They’re opening the walls—Robert's the GM of the hotel, and his wife Carol curates the exhibits in the hotels. They open up their walls to local artists to display, and they’re also opening one of the meeting rooms for the resuming of our annual Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy Panel discussion about the arts, cultural, and creative economy specifically in Fort Lauderdale and Broward County. We actually have a really nice panel with the executive director of the culture division, Phillip Dunlap, our brand new film commissioner for Broward County, who just left Miami-Dade County to join us, Sandy Leiterman, who’s known, our third panelist, and my business partner, Andrew Martineau. We’re very excited to have her. She’s very knowledgeable and has contributed immensely to the creative economy in Miami, the film industry—she’s been a part of all these great movies that have been shot in Miami: Bad Boys, Fast and Furious, so on and so forth. She’ll be on the panel, and that’ll be at the Gallery One Hotel on Tuesday, January 25th, at 6:30 p.m. Another free event during Fort Lauderdale Art & Design Week. If you didn’t know about Fort Lauderdale Art & Design Week, we created this umbrella week to include all of the arts and culture institutions that we support throughout the year, but we want other people to support as well. By having a week of people focusing and hopefully coming out and supporting the arts, using the hashtag #FTLADW, taking pictures, telling their friends, getting people to go out—hopefully that can encourage other people to support the arts throughout the year. It’s a self-guided discovery tour of the arts, but we program different events to happen every single day. So, there are studio tours, exhibits, parties, spoken word events, and one of our bike tours is taking place Saturday, January 29th, from 4 to 6 p.m. before the art walk. To find out more about Art Week, you can log on to www.ftladw.com, follow Fort Lauderdale Art and Design Week on Instagram and social media, and you can see a lot of the great events that Ro happens to be participating in. We appreciate all the participation from Broward County Cultural Division, Brightline, and all the people that support the week.

We have our Fort Lauderdale Night Market going on every Friday night from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Peter Feldman Park in Flagler Village. It’s a great opportunity to support handmade, self-made, remade artists, vendors, the people that are making the handmade honey, soap, and jewelry—the dreamers, the doers, the passion pursuers, the entrepreneurs. We give them a platform to display their crafts and creative outlets, hopefully getting discovered. It’s in Flagler Village, on the corner of NE 3rd Avenue and 6th Street, right in the middle of those new apartments. You can find out more at fortlauderdalenightmarket.com. Great free event, we’ve got some live music, free yoga—Marty B, thank you very much.

And hopefully, you’ll join us for Creative Zen this Friday morning. There are plenty of other great events going on.

Ro: Yes, come to Creative Zen this Friday morning. What time?

Evan: Doors open at 8:30. The talk starts at 9. You’re out of there by 10. If you need something to tell your boss, we’ve got a whole slew of things that are all true: you’re getting inspiration, connection, networking. Where can they find you on social media?

Ro: Yes, so please connect with me on LinkedIn. I am definitely posting there regularly and really trying to build more of a community on LinkedIn. So, you can find me at linkedin.com/in/roferrelli, that’s R-O, and then my last name is F-E-R-R-E-L-L-I. You can also find me on Instagram at @roferrelli.

Evan: You can find me at Choose954, at @evanston13, at Fort Lauderdale Design Week—all that good stuff. We appreciate you tuning in, and hopefully, you can support a local artist, be a part of your community, and continue working to make this a better place to live, not just a better place to vacation.