I have been supporting individuals in a number of capacities for many years now. I’m a small business owner (www.applecheeks.com for those who are curious), and I was also a certified Whole30 coach (www.whole30.com) for a while. In 2020, I decided it was time to earn a coaching certification so I could begin to focus on what I’m here to do, and I enrolled at Concordia University here in Montreal. I’m done that program, and next week I’ll begin the Gifted Psychology 101 training with Intergifted in Switzerland, which I’m really excited about.

My daughter’s experience of having expressions of her gifted misalignment misdiagnosed as mental illness, and my experience as her mother, led me to realize that I’m meant to work with the gifted community both as a community member, and also as a space holder, a listening space, a safe space, and in a more professional capacity.

My official designation – Self Attunement Coach and Dialectical Being Teacher.

Coaching as a profession is not regulated. Anyone can call themselves a coach. But the key feature of the practice is that client is the expert on themselves, and the coach’s role is to evoke deeper awareness.

I evoke awareness of the felt self, to put it simply. For those not familiar with Eugene Gendlin’s work, here is a summary of the concept. 

I’ve chosen to work with the gifted community because I think we are much more susceptible to the Cartesian split than the average individual, and we suffer much more profoundly because of it. For those of us with high intellectual capacity, we put so much focus on what our minds can do that we lose touch with the innate guiding wisdom of the body. And this means we are engaging with ourselves and with our environments sub-optimally, to put it mildly. Which means that we are expending a lot of energy on the wrong things because we’re asking our minds to do many things that they are not designed to do.

The mind may be the executive centre, but the body holds the truth of who we are. The more time we spend in the mind, the harder it is to understand who we are. The focus is on who we are being, with all the judgement that comes with the territory of being anything other than who you are. 

Together we will data mine – objectively accessing messaging from the body that is only available through moments of stillness. We can work with any subject that is alive for you to tune into what you can’t hear because you haven’t yet connected with the language of your body. We will nuance that very broad felt sense and understand its individual elements, and we will connect you with your natural state of resonance. Through this nuancing, we will help you to notice when move from resonance into dissonance, and how to course correct.

The next step of our work involves what I call Dialectical Being, or making the space to tolerate the multiple contradictory states of the human condition. This concept relates to creating spaciousness, and allowing vibrations to pass through our field without attaching. We can then move into noticing when other vibrations – from people, places, situations, etc –  keep us in resonance, or move us into dissonance within ourselves. 

What I hope to offer the world, through my work, is greater default resonant states. From resonance – which can also be described as consciousness – we can make intentional decisions that align us with our purpose. And when our choices are responsive rather than reactive we gain an increasing sense of agency, and we can trust ourselves to steer our own ships.

I suggest that interested clients book a free 30-minute intro session with me so I can get an idea of what your challenges are, explain my own methods a bit more, and make sure that we are a good fit. After that, I suggest booking five sessions, weekly if possible, so we can step into partnership.