At You Are Whole Coaching, we work together to re-member trust.

Trust in yourself.

Your instincts. Your understanding. Your body. Your roots. Your path.

Your sense of connection to life, within and without.

As odd as it may sound, when we work together, my goal is to become totally unnecessary to you.

As we work together, you will develop a sense that you have what you need, an ability to trust what’s alive in you as you navigate life, and a set of tools to aid you on your way.

Connection restored, you simply won’t need my support anymore.

Trust is the crux of everything we do together; abiding trust in your interior life, your inner guidance system, inner rudder. We will co-create a space that allows you clarity.

There’s something almost magical in being witnessed; truly seen, heard, reflected, and understood. From that space, healing unfolds.

What would it feel like to trust your innate rhythms again? To relax into trusting what’s inside you? In work, in relationships, and in creative expression? To touch bases with you, beneath all the exhausting layers of expectations, “shoulds,” and “supposed-tos?” To design a life that lines up with your experience of who you are?

Honestly, I can’t wait to find out together. :-)

What’s BodyDreaming?

BodyDreaming is a client-centered approach to regulating the nervous system by connecting our awareness to inner resources (images, sounds, memories, etc.) and outer resources (objects in our environment such as art, sound, nature, etc.). While I am not qualified to host BodyDreaming practice as a part of any therapeutic process, I have found it to be truly powerful in both coaching and creative contexts, and would love to share my understanding of it with you.

BodyDreaming allows us to root ourselves in the present and regulate our nervous system with an embodied gentleness and curiosity. With practice, we forge a “secure attachment relationship” with our own bodies, healing the residue of past attachments patterns that may no longer be serving us. With the help of Marian Dunlea, I am collaborating with colleagues at the University of Michigan and the Royal Irish Academy of Music to develop approaches to music pedagogy/therapy rooted in the practice of BodyDreaming, as well as other somatic modalities.

Coaching Specialties and Faith Transitions

While I have several coaching specialties (creative work, self-discovery, self-awareness through parenting) I especially love working with people in the midst of a faith transition.

I know what it feels like to feel that your faith-identity is your whole identity; to be told your whole life that you are broken; that the only way you will find healing is through this practice or that savior or this ritual or that leader; to follow their instructions to the letter with all your heart (only to have the desired healing fail); to wonder if you are so broken that even god/guru/church/group can’t help you; to give your all to your community; and to have it all come crashing down around you, with no maps or models for how to move forward.

Sometimes we hear this soul-wrenching experience referred to as “deconstruction.”

If this resonates with you, let me just say: You are so, so brave. I see your hurt. I see your confusion. I have some sense of your grief.

And…

I promise you that, on the other side of this, your life can be more alive and full of meaning than it ever was before, whether your path leads you to stay or leave the group.

My unique approach to partnering with someone amid a faith transition is client centered and client led—a significant shift for anyone coming from a life previously centered around external authorities (political, religious, therapeutic, or otherwise).

While, for some, reconstruction (building new beliefs to take the place of the old) can be a helpful step, in my experience, it often does not lead to a sense of healing. And that’s where I part ways with other providers.

Many of us find ourselves caught in a painful cycle of disillusionment, alternating back and forth between the pain of deconstruction and the hope of reconstruction—a kind of endless bargaining with the grief from losing our whole sense of self. From behind clasped fingers, we peer out, hoping to find something out there that we can believe in/attach to, something that might fill in the loss of our previous faith identity. We carefully build another set of beliefs, but it feels so tenuous. And when it all falls again, the grief returns. (For my tarot-inclined friends, it feels like living the Tower card again and again.)

What’s more, many of these faith organizations/leaders filled us with crippling fears that persist in us. “If you didn’t have us (the group/church/organization/leaders), who would you have? Where would you go?” Which is really the same as saying, “You know you can’t live without us. ‘The world’ really is that awful. ‘The Other’ really is that scary. We—the group or leaders— really are that amazing, the only haven on earth. And you really are that weak and helpless without us.”

And so we find ourselves getting pulled back into a cycle we may not longer want.

For those feeling trapped in this cycle of reconstruction/disillusionment, we can explore other client led paths through the lens of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls “the Life/Death/Life cycle.” (Remember, it’s a three-part cycle—Life/Death/Life. I’ve never come across a Life/Death pattern in any myths I’ve read. Maybe that says something potent about the stuff we are made of.)

For many, a more helpful map might look something like this:

Deconstruction > Grief > Rooting into One’s Center/Alive-ness > Self-Discovery > Intuitive Living

No reconstruction. No new creeds. Just a genuine connection to what’s real inside you. (I promise you, it’s more than enough.) Regardless of where your path takes you, I support you. I trust the inner lives of my clients, whether that guides you deep into the secular, the religious, or anywhere in between and beyond.

We explore a variety of maps/models together, remembering always that, “No models are true, but some are useful,” so that the central locus of power remains with you. Some of these maps could include mindfulness, Jungian, mythopoetic, dreamwork, esoteric, ancestral, and/or creative practices. We remind ourselves of the very skills that helped us see through the harmful patterns in the first place. Many find strength in learning to recognize patterns of grooming and abuse as they gain confidence in their inner rudder.

Through all of this, something is new: Your values lead the way. The clamoring voices outside of you no longer get to occupy “the territory of yourself.” You claim your inner authority, sovereign-of-yourself. You toss out any part that does not resonate with you. You weave together the threads of your life and spirituality in a way that’s full of meaning—not for those around you—but for you. And the strangest thing happens: you feel more connected than ever, by simply being ordinary old you.