About My Coaching Work

The goal is to help people return to presence, inner resourcefulness and embodied capacity, so change can unfold from wholeness rather than deficiency.

Most efforts at transformation fail not because of lack of discipline, energy or time. They fail because they start from the premise of self-deficiency. And no matter how much we improve, it’s never enough because the starting point is still: something is wrong with me. Then we try to improve the way we improve and improve the way we improve our improving. There’s no end to this.

That’s not how I work with my coaching clients.

Instead of reinforcing the cycle of inadequacy, I guide them to a place of presence and inner resourcefulness. A place where they are not a problem to solve but a mystery to explore. A place where they don’t feel deficient and where nothing essential is missing. It’s a place of creativity, compassion, courage and determination. And from there, change does not have to be forced. It can unfold.

We all have that available to us, we just lose touch with it due to early life trauma and cultural conditioning. So the work entails understanding, contacting and dismantling those ego patterns that once helped us survive but are now keeping us constrained. Instead of getting lost in the never ending stories that our mind tells us, we dive deeper into the body and somatic experience.

I use a number of tools for that: Internal Family Systems methodology to understand protective and hurt parts and Gendlin’s Focusing work to access the deeper layer of felt senses and the movement beneath the narrative. The work continues deeper into presence through somatic sensations of the body where inner capacity for healing and reorganization can take hold and it’s informed by the A. H. Almaas’ Diamond Approach. I’m a student of Steve March at Aletheia Academy.

I focus on creating the conditions for change which involve safety, trust and being connected with my client, their parts and the process that unfolds beneath the surface. I function as an anchor of presence and resourcefulness that reassures the nervous system that change is safe and possible. This creates conditions for memory reconsolidation, which is a contemporary evidence-supported understanding of creating lasting change in the mind and body.

The goal is not just to give a client a different experience but to practice a model of inner relatedness that can then be further practiced and deepened on their own. We slow down enough to track subtle emotions and sensations. We reduce the noise enough to disidentify from overwhelming patterns. Then we track them, observe them, understand them and contact them giving them the resolution they are seeking.

This allows the client to take the center seat at the helm of their inner landscape, rather than be swept away by it. The habits of slowing down, observing, contacting and integrating continue to serve them in all areas of their life and relationships improving their emotional intelligence, presence and centeredness.

A single experience can sometimes create dramatic change and initiate a feedback loop of growth that takes a life of its own. However, that’s not a reliable vehicle most of the time. Transformation requires dedicated practice. The sessions function as a way to model the practice and give the client skills that they can further develop and deepen on their own. I provide guidance on how clients can build and nurture these practices in their daily lives.

My work is grounded not only in study but in lived experience. I have spent years healing from severe childhood abuse and neglect, rebuilding my body, nervous system, relationships and sense of self from the ground up. I know what it means to change not as an idea but as a lived, embodied process.

My background as a bodyworker allows me to include touch when appropriate and helps clients who have trouble accessing transformation through conversation alone. My experience with movement training can also support my clients’ somatic work and help build nervous system capacity for change and grief. I’m a longtime student of Ido Portal and I’ve been able to rehab my body from severe physical trauma such as broken spine and knee and restore a high level of functionality.

This matters because the work often touches vulnerable places. My work is not therapy, but I have a lot of experience with therapy and deep inner work. My own healing journey has taken me through hell, so I know how important it is not to wander that territory alone. I have also spent hundreds of hours on a suicide prevention hotline, so I am not intimidated by the darker corners of the psyche. I know pain. I know trauma. I know despair. But I also know there are better ways to heal than isolation, force and endless self-analysis.

Overall, my approach is potent because it integrates body, mind and emotional modalities. In my experience, they are much more powerful together than they are separately. Touch, presence and movement are the most effective medicines I know in helping what’s alive return to itself and continue unfolding.