A Holistic Approach

Awareness is your superpower. Your awareness is like a spotlight that directs your energy or life force. Whatever it is that you shine the light of your awareness on or give your attention to, you create more of in your life. The light of your awareness is your power to heal yourself from past traumas, habits, thoughts, beliefs that don’t serve you.Most of us have never been taught how to direct our attention to what we consciously intend. So, we spend most of our lives giving our attention and energy to the things we don’t want and then feeling stuck, unable to move forward when we find ourselves unhappy with our life circumstances.

Presence is the ability to bring our awareness to the present moment to all that is arising in us, our feelings and felt sensations in our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts. When we are present, we have all of the resources available to us to perceive clearly, to receive the wisdom of our body, to allow our emotions to flow fluidly through us and to move forward with the confidence of an anchored knowing of what is true for us. The challenge is that we spend most of our time triggered by what arises in our lives, giving our attention to what triggered us, how we feel about it and what stories we tell about it. The power of the present is lost because our triggers have hijacked our awareness.

One part of the solution to this conundrum is attention training: to train yourself to direct your attention to where you intend. The challenge is that most of us don’t know where we put our attention most of the time. This is even more true today than ever with every smart device, business, and media outlet vying for our attention with the intention to hold it once they have it.

Another part of the solution is to bring our attention to our bodies. Our bodies hold the patterns of our lives, our habits of attention, the armoring of tension from our life experiences. Our bodies directly affect our minds, how we experience, perceive and respond to the world around us. They impact directly how we feel. The relationship between our minds and bodies is bidirectional. When we bring our attention to our bodies, listen to what they have to tell us, and work with them to heal old wounds and traumas, and work with them to retrain ourselves to living in a new, more resilient way in our bodies, we then support the capacity for our minds and emotions to settle and become more resilient. It’s not so much mind over matter, a pervasive belief in our culture, but rather working with mind and matter collaboratively and compassionately.

Consider yourself one of the lucky few if you have discovered and maintained a meditation practice as meditation is in part attention training. Meditation helps us build and maintain a relationship with that part of ourselves that can witness where we put our attention and witness what is arising in us in the present. However, many people find it very difficult to translate the skills they acquire on the meditation cushion into the chaos that is modern life. So, we experience peace on the meditation cushion but then lose it when something in our lives triggers us.

I have cultivated an approach to support people in becoming unstuck that is based on decades of my own life experience and study of many paths in an effort to resolve my own challenges. Specifically, this is what I offer is to explore with you:

  • where you habitually put your attention, what triggers you, where your attention goes when you are triggered;

  • how to develop the witness in you that can identify when, in the midst of your life, you are triggered;

  • the felt sensations that arise in your body when you are triggered and what your body has to tell you about that;

  • what emotions arise when you are triggered and what the needs and wants are that exist behind your emotions;

  • skills that support you in returning to presence when you are triggered;

  • developing skills to support you in effectively and nonviolently communicating your needs and wants to others;

  • identifying and measuring what you truly intend for yourself, that which brings you into alignment with your highest self;

  • using the breath work to guide you back to your body and the wisdom and experiences it holds to help you identify and resolve the triggers and traumas that continue to influence and limit your life.

  • supporting your body and mind in developing new habits, new neural pathways, and more nervous system resilience to facilitate enduring change.

Using these combinations of skills and practices, I support you in moving through the parts of your life where you feel stuck to a more peaceful, aligned and authentic place, a place of truth and alignment. You may already have many of these skills, that’s great. We will start wherever you are and go from there.