Holistic Life Coaching
Valerie's holistic life coaching is for you if you want to feel a better sense of well-being in your life...
in mind, emotions, body, relationships, energy and/or soul.
Everyone's needs are a little different.
For that reason, my style of holistic coaching encompasses a variety of traditional and complementary approaches.
Having many tools in my holistic toolbox simply means that I can individualize your coaching experience, and teach you the skills and tools that best match you.
Valerie can help you at multiple dimensions of your life.
For instance, I can help you in...
Mind - Maybe you'd like to quiet all those negative thoughts, think more constructively, and have more mental clarity and focus.
Emotions - You may want tools to manage stressful emotions, and to prevent them from becoming a problem in the first place.
Body - Perhaps stress has taken its toll, your whole body is feeling tense, and you'd like to know ways to relax other than alcohol or drugs.
Relationships - Most of us have relationships which need work or healing. Maybe you're struggling to communicate very well with your partner, family or coworkers, and could use skills to be more appropriately confident and assertive. Maybe you need to learn the right balance in setting boundaries with others.
Energy - You may feel sensitive to energies from others around you, even feeling them in your own body, and need ways to manage.
Soul/Spirit - Many of you long to deepen your spiritual connection, feel a sense of higher self or soul, or feel highly intuitive to spiritual energies but are trying to differentiate them from your own thoughts.
These are just a few of the many concerns that can be helped with holistic life coaching.
If you would like to take the next step, reach out and schedule a 30-minute free initial call, where we can discuss your goals for our coaching sessions together. That way I can give you a more specific sense of how I can help you, and if our working together is right for you.
Contact me in the way most convenient for you:
- Text or call, and feel free to leave a voicemail at 303-547-8327.
- Send me a message on my Contact form, and I will reach out to you.
If you want a little more information, scroll below. You will read more about Tools for Body, Mind, Energy and Soul.
Further below you will see common concerns that people seek help for, and ways holistic approaches can be used.
Check out my various coaching packages: holistic, spiritual, and even quantum psychology training for professionals.
Tools for Body, Mind, Energy and Soul
Body
Body. Chronic stress is linked to our western diseases because it causes inflammation inside. And then it cascades down from there into physical disease.
This is the mind-body connection, which Harvard Medical School began studying decades ago, way before the field of psychology. And while they are still figuring out how it all happens, they know it's real. Scientists in the new field of epigenetics have even found we can change our genes, when we heal our mind, something most of us were taught was impossible.
Imagine biting into a sour lemon. If you are like most people, your mouth immediately began to water. This is how quickly and how real the physical effects of your mind take place in your body. You aren't imagining the saliva. You really are salivating.
You can develop "conditioned" responses, like in the Pavlov's dogs experiment where he was able to train his dogs to salivate as soon as they heard a bell. This is what happens in post traumatic stress responses, where your body can immediately have a physiological response to a specific cue.
The label of "psychosomatic" used to be invalidating, doctors making people feel blamed for making up their symptoms. What we know today is how real and physical body symptoms are, whether the source for the response is real or imagined, or generalized stress.
There are many body-based or physical tools I can teach you for dealing with many causes of your stress.
Mind
Thoughts. Your thoughts do impact you. Just like when you visualized biting into a sour lemon and most likely immediately began to salivate.
Repeated negative thoughts become your autopilot response if you practice them regularly. Of note, anything you do repeatedly becomes hardwired into your neurology and physiology. This is because of "neuroplasticity", and how plastic or adaptable your nervous system is to its internal or external environment.
Maybe it's time for you to turn neuroplasticity around to your favor. Practicing constructive thinking then becomes your new autopilot. (Remember, everything we do repeatedly our body rewires itself for...so that it becomes autopilot for you. Your brain-body is trying to do you a favor.) If you need help, that's what I'm here for.
Emotions/Relationships. Your emotions are an amazing tool. They always reflect how much you are resonating with whatever thought, or thing, or person you are thinking about.
Feel-good emotions tell you it's a match. Feel-bad emotions, just as valuable, tell you it's a mismatch. Consider what a valuable tool we get from this when we know how to use it.
It's sad how many of us learn to numb or ignore our emotions, instead of listening to them earlier than later. I can help.
There are many tools I can teach you to calm, focus and retrain your unhelpful thought and emotional patterns. And you can learn to feel and let go of intense emotions naturally.
Energy
Energy. I bet if you're like most people, you have been taught you are made of cells. But cells are made of atoms, and atoms are made of subatomic particles that are really nothing but whirling bundles of energy.
Yep! You are really nothing but moving, pulsating bundles of various kinds of energy. That's what the quantum revolution in physics has done for our 21st century understanding of who we are.
First, let me point out that your nervous system - those nerves and neurons which are responsible for communicating with your entire body - communicates using electrical energy. It is this energy, and the information that it carries, that actually determines what happens in your biochemistry.
Electrical energy can generate magnetic energy (actually, it works both ways), and together they weave a tapestry called our electromagnetic field. These energies are used by your doctor when they run tests, like EEGs, EKGs, CT scans or MRIs.
There is much more to this story, but let me just say that every thought you think, each emotion you feel, every movement or nonmovement of your body, each corresponds to a specific energy pattern, which has cascading effects at the level of your physiology.
This is the fundamental layer we focus on in energy psychology. What we have found is that when you shift the energy pattern that underlies all physical forms, the structure of the physical form changes. So when you change at the level of mind, emotion or soul, then your physiology changes to correspond with your new state. Even the expression of your genes. I can teach you various energy-based tools for healing.
Soul
Soul. If you are one of the over 80% who believe in a higher realm of beings, deceased loved ones, angels and God, this section is for you.
Consider that we really do have a higher self that is the source of our intuition, and that spiritual beings really may be trying to communicate with us.
Do you know how to listen to your intuition, that still small voice from the higher realm? It's not the same as your gut reaction (it's no surprise medical model researchers confuse these two), which is your autopilot instinct of your physical body. Your intuition requires a quiet mind to hear it because it's so subtle. This is why you need to learn to stop your thinking and still the mind, to make it open and receptive to higher messages.
For those of you who have had direct experiences with this higher realm, you may now have more subtle energy awareness, and may need help integrating these extra perceptions into your life.
For those of you who would like to begin having more direct experiences with this higher realm, know that it is something you can learn, practice and get better at.
Aligning with this higher realm, the source of your soul self, is the path to finding joy.
I can teach you many soul-based tools. Tools you can use to re-connect with that higher aspect of who you really are, and live from there.
Coaching package sessions are tailored to your individual needs. We work on your goals for your life, not my goals for you.
Be nurturing and patient with yourself as you transform in mind, body, energy and soul!
Below are common issues that people seek counseling or coaching help for. Contact me or text/call me at 303-547-8327 to learn more and to schedule your free 30-minute initial call.
Self-Esteem
You may routinely feel self-doubt, and it seems to be holding you back from making decisions about relationships, career and life.
Holistic coaching can help you recognize your strengths, celebrate your achievements, and love who you are. You can even learn to reconnect with your inner essence that inspires, creates, and lives fully with purpose and clarity.
Email me, or call me at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more!
Anxiety
You may feel fearful about the future in many aspects of your life. Some people dread being in social situations. Others may experience intense reactions to places or things. Your heartbeat begins to race. Your palms may get sweaty. Breathing can become difficult. Your body's responses rage out of control and you suddenly feel limp. These are the varied faces of fear, anxiety, panic and phobia.
Anxiety is a normal reaction to uncertainty and danger, and can be addressed within coaching sessions. But when it begins to happen too frequently, take over your life or weaken your health, it is time to seek help from professional therapy. Holistic counseling can help you sort out your symptoms and heal the root causes of your anxiety. For instance:
- You may have to rule out hypoglycemia, whose symptoms mimic anxiety, such as nervousness, sweating, palpitations, irritability, decreased concentration or mental confusion. If you do have hypoglycemia, nutrition therapy is essential.
- Movement or exercise can help anxiety by balancing out the body's oversupply of energy and stress hormones.
- Guided imagery, meditation, yoga, biofeedback and other mind-body relaxation strategies can often be as effective as anti-anxiety medication.
- As you learn how your thoughts, and the meaning you attach to events, are creating this mind-body physical reaction, you will feel increasingly empowered to prevent anxiety reactions from occurring.
- Bioenergetic techniques can help you unblock energy from areas in your body that tend to hold fear and panic responses. It's similar to resetting a biological clock.
Email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more!
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
You struggle to keep your focus and attention on the task at hand, even with topics that interest you. You may feel that job after job bores you, so you switch around frequently, perhaps making the decision impulsively.
Some of you appear hyperactive to others. You might find yourself jumping from one thing and bounding to the next. In relationships, you find yourself leaping from partner to partner; maybe they tend to be the ones that leave, complaining you aren’t ever reliable, or you seem to be the one who cuts the relationship short out of boredom, and off you go to the next love interest.
We all get bored at times and find ourselves distracted. We can address that in coaching. But if your problem with inattention has significantly affected your life, then it is time to get help. You can search for therapists on PsychologyToday. Holistic counseling offers the following solutions:
- Assessing for giftedness is important. I believe that many clients who have been diagnosed by others as ADHD are actually gifted, and need the appropriate level of stimulation. You may need to learn how to channel your creative energy.
- You may need to learn how to deal with higher consciousness, which brings along with it a higher set of values and creative urges. Some of you in higher consciousness test to be gifted, but others of you don't because you need a "different chart", so to speak.
- Nutritional assessment is essential. Many clients who have struggled with ADHD have been found to be addicted to sugar. Their diets are largely simple refined carbohydrates, and are deficient in needed vitamins and minerals. This can affect the nervous system, lead to hormonal imbalance, and result in mood and behavioral symptoms.
- Psychoeducation and behavioral therapy are primary. You will need to learn how the brain re-hardwires itself continuously (i.e. brain plasticity) to meet the demands placed upon it, so that you can retrain it. In our society, with so many people reared with wild special effects television, highly interactive video games/computers, and the like, it is no wonder that the brain can no longer relax. You will have to reprogram it and I will teach you how. My clients have found significant relief from this treatment alone, though it does take some time.
- Behavior management and social skills are essential for helping young people to manage school and home tasks, and adults to organize and perform better especially at work.
- You will want to rule out concussion or other brain injuries, perhaps from sports you have played in or accidents you have had. Some neurofeedback modalities can help, even when the usual hospital care can't. And hospital staff regularly seem to miss concussion diagnosis.
- Coping skills can help you deal with frustration and stress.
- Mind-body techniques and counseling can help with the accompanying depression, anxiety, or self-esteem issues that tend to arise.
- Bioenergetic techniques may be useful in “resetting” your biology.
- If you feel you must, medications are available to help. They can provide relief until new “reprogramming” skills and bioenergetic exercises help you re-hardwire your mindbody, and your neurotransmitters (e.g. dopamine) adjust. Because long-term effects have not been studied, most of my clients prefer to not medicate their children or teens due to the risk of side effects or suicide, except in cases of extreme aggression. Adult clients have sometimes chosen to use medications temporarily to be able to function better at work.
- Family treatment is extremely important. Most parents of ADHD children are overwhelmed. Families benefit from communication in a structured setting. Parents can learn more helpful techniques for setting boundaries and limits, establishing age-appropriate rules and following through. In addition, parents often need help becoming more consistent and calm in the home, since chaotic energy is passed around from parents to children, as well as from children to parents.
Email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more!
Chronic Stress
Living with chronic stress is the way of our times. Hectic schedules, high expectations to do more in less time, messages that we are supposed to be perfect and please others, job performance anxiety, apprehension over being laid off, worries about paying the bills, fear for the safety of those we love, concern that others will criticize and laugh at us when they find out we’re “not good enough”…these are the daily stressors that we live with, and they pile up over time. Pushed beyond our limits, we still don’t find time to relax and enjoy ourselves. We develop aches and pains, and the next thing we hear is that we have a medical condition that requires extensive treatment. Coping with chronic pain and the stress of multiple doctors telling us we need one more drug or one more surgery is often more than we can bear. This does not have to be.
Through biofeedback, mindfulness and relaxation strategies, stress-reduction and other holistic counseling and coaching approaches, learn how to:
- Bring yourself into a state of relaxation
- Reduce existing pain and stress levels
- Discover the root issue that for you created this exhausting way of life in the first place
- See things from a fresh perspective
- Change your mental and emotional reactions to stressful situations
- Use movement/exercise to release natural endorphins
- Support your body’s ability to relax using food and nutrition
I can support you as you create a new way of being that feels not only realistic to implement, but also authentic, balanced and energized.
Email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more!
Insomnia
Over time, not getting the right kind of refreshing sleep can result in mental and emotional imbalances. But it can also work the other way, for instance, when anxiety, fears, and traumas keep you awake at night. Together, we can help you discover what is at the root of your sleeping difficulties and come up with a plan that feels right for you. After ruling out medical conditions that cause insomnia, there are many intervention strategies you can use as an alternative to medication. Holistic counseling and coaching can assist you with:
- Stress reduction and relaxation techniques
- Environments and routines that promote faster and deeper sleep
- Changing behaviors that affect the brain's ability to wind down
- Foods to choose and to avoid
- Tools to keep your emotions regularly in the "feel good" states, and to bring you back there when you feel yourself getting stressed or feeling "bad"
- Ways to interpret dreams or nightmares, especially those that are recurring and trying to communicate messages to you
- Methods to help you go deeper, if ready, to uncover hidden stressors you may have repressed or suppressed, or may be minimizing as a part of your sleep issues
- Additional complementary methods to consider
Email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn even more!
Young Adults and Teens
Holistic counseling can help your son or daughter address concerns about anxiety, stress, depression, self-esteem, divorce or parental separation, insomnia, nightmares, bullying, poor school performance, trauma, distractibility, short attention span, hyperactivity, impulsivity, identity struggles, life skills, relationships, or teen parenting.
Severe Depression or Aggression
If your son or daughter is suicidal or homicidal, please call 911 or go to the emergency room for immediate medical care since I do not provide emergency services.
Know that sometimes we do need to intervene on behalf of someone we care about, and that sometimes we need the blessing of medicine, hospitalization or residential treatment during critical moments.
For Parents:
Family sessions with a skilled professional therapist can help you improve your relationship with your teen; structure activity as well as down time for your children; prevent video game, internet, cell phone and other technology addictions; and learn how brain plasticity, nutrition, and exercise affect mental health.
While I am no longer providing mental health treatment, PsychologyToday is a great way to search for therapists in your area.
If your teen is going through the normal pains of growing up, and you think they could benefit learning key life skills through a holistic coaching approach, email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.
Mood Swings/Bipolar
If you experience moods that fluctuate from feeling really low to really high, you may be experiencing bipolar mood shifts. Some people bounce from depression to high irritation or anger. Others may feel extreme impulsivity or a mania that feels like being in fast motion.
If this sounds like you, you may first want your physician to rule out the following:
- A medical condition may be creating these symptoms
- Certain types of eating and digestive patterns, nutritional deficiencies and food allergies can actually lead to symptoms such as depression, irritability, anger and anxiety
Holistic counseling ways of treating bipolar causes and symptoms without medication may include:
- Bioenergetic methods, which may be particularly helpful for insufficient movement and circulation that can lead to depression-like fatigue and biochemical imbalance (e.g norepinephrine). Through these tools, you can also learn how to see yourself and your relationships in terms of energy flow, a flow that is usually too little, then pendulum swings to too much, and rarely feels balanced.
- Training in mind-body relaxation strategies, including yoga, biofeedback, and mindfulness meditation.
- Psychoeducation and behavioral therapies can help you retrain your brain, which rehardwires itself continuously (i.e. brain plasticity) to meet demands placed upon it.
- When needed, cognitive-behavioral therapies help you realistically assess others' motivations/behaviors, and choose more useful social/behavioral responses.
- Nutritional support.
Check out PsychologyToday to find a professional counselor to treat a mental health disorder. If you feel you have mood swings that can be addressed through coaching, email or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.
Life Transitions
Most of us will face some level of difficulty as we transition into a new phase of our life. Perhaps you are adjusting to a new life without your former spouse. Maybe you are seeking a new career, or are retiring from the work you performed your entire life. You may be having a new baby, and are struggling with the changes a growing family brings.
Holistic coaching can help support you through the discomfort that transition brings, and offer you new perspectives that may transform an ending into an inspiring new beginning.
Email me, or call me at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.
Obsessions and Compulsions
Perhaps you find yourself ruminating on certain thoughts over and over, and you can’t let it go. Maybe you find yourself repeating certain behaviors ritualistically because it makes you feel better. You tend to feel highly anxious, and may begin to be depressed because of the time these rituals are taking in your day.
If so, holistic counseling offers:
- Mindfulness meditation strategies that help you change where you focus your attention and find immediate mind-body effects
- Behavioral therapies, like exposure and response prevention, as well as skills training to help you learn to cope with your worries and anxieties with a new set of responses
- Cognitive therapies that help you challenge beliefs that may no longer serve you
- Bioenergetic and movement therapies that have been found to help balance out the body’s neurotransmitters (e.g. serotonin) without the use of medication
- Nutritional support that helps you decrease feelings of anxiety within the body
- Somatic and spiritual therapies, which help you see how your outer attachment to certain thoughts and behaviors may reflect deeper difficulties at a spiritual level
If you suspect you need treatment for a mental health disorder, check out PsychologyToday for find a therapist near you. If you feel you have more normal levels of negative thoughts and behaviors, and would like to benefit from coaching, email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.
Career Issues
Confused about what kind of career you want to pursue? Tired of your old job, and seeking something more meaningful? Frustrated that you can’t seem to earn the money you feel you deserve? Feeling stuck and angry that you have been passed over for promotions time and time again? Thinking of starting your own business? Or, maybe you like your current job, but are completely exhausted from the stress.
When you are aligned with your soul consciousness, it feels imperative that your career be an extension of who you are, that it be meaningful to you and that it helps the greater good. Holistic counseling helps you become more clear about what you've been doing because of others' external influences upon you, and what your soul calls you to create in your life.
If you would like to learn more, email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation!
Trauma/Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Whether you have experienced one significant traumatic event or a series of traumas over your entire lifetime, you can benefit from holistic counseling:
- Bioenergetic methods can target the places in the body where trauma gets stuck, and move it energetically.
- You can use imagery and somatic focus to listen to the body and give it what it needs to release the trauma.
- You find new ways to cope and react to your distressing thoughts and emotions.
- Your increased ability to be exposed to anxiety-producing events helps free your life.
- Biofeedback and mind-body tools can help you gain conscious control of your stress response.
- Foods and nutrition can rebalance the chronic stress environment of the body.
- Mindfulness meditation and other stress-reduction strategies promote relaxation.
Check out PsychologyToday for a skilled trauma specialist if you suspect you need treatment for a mental health disorder. If you feel your traumas are in the past, and you are living a normal life, but want to check out the ways coaching can help you free yourself of past patterns, email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.
Optimal Wellness
Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired? (Forgive the pun!) Let’s face it…it’s tough to take care of ourselves in this society. All around us are pressures and constraints – work more, eat quickly, transport children, check email, clean house, do errands, spend less money, make more money, find quality time to be with family…the list could go on. Stress on your body mounts, and you feel exhausted. With time, illness follows.
Holistic counseling and coaching can help you:
- Differentiate your wants, needs, and have to’s so that you can set priorities for your time
- Get 8 hours of sleep and still have 16 hours for your priorities
- Improve restorative sleep
- Eat to feel great
- Maintain a healthy weight without restrictive dieting
- Increase energy, as well as facilitate emotional and physical healing
- Find movement exercises that you enjoy
- Be happier in your work and social life
- Connect with your soul essence, the primary source for your life energy
- Find balance so that your mind, emotions and physical body are in service of your soul's highest callings
Email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.
Depression
Bedrotting or longing to sleep all day? Struggling to get up and face another day? Not sure why you are crying so much? Have your eating habits changed? Do you feel little energy or motivation?
Depression can take many forms. Some people have felt gloomy their entire life and don’t know why. Others have noticed more recently that they just can’t shake the sadness, and are beginning to feel hopeless that things will ever get better. Perhaps they wonder if the world would be better off without them.
Holistic counseling can help you do more than reduce your symptoms.
- A medical condition may be creating these symptoms.
- Your depression may really be grief over loss. Not only loss of a loved one, but loss of a job, loss of your physical vitality, loss of a relationship, even loss of self.
- Nutritional therapies can improve certain types of eating and digestive patterns, nutritional deficiencies (e.g. Omega-3 fatty acids) and food allergies that can actually mimic depression.
- Bioenergetic exercises can improve movement and circulation, which appear to increase endorphins (feel-good hormones), energy levels and motivation, as well as rebalance other chemicals like norepinephrine and serotonin.
- Light and other energy-based therapies can improve depression associated with seasonal changes, weather patterns and geomagnetic stress from fluctuations in the earth’s rhythms.
- The inability to relax may lead the body to feel chronically drained, for which mind-body relaxation or meditation strategies are especially useful.
- Chronic anxiety may have turned into a hopelessness that now looks like depression.
- Spiritual/transpersonal counseling can help you reconnect with your soul essence, from which most people feel disconnected. I have actually come to see depression as most often a state in which the soul has been de-pressed, pressed down upon, suppressed and ignored. You can learn how to reconnect, listen to the voice of your soul, hear its messages for your higher life, and overcome the fear that holds you back from living a soulful life.
If you suspect you need treatment for a mental health disorder, check out PsychologyToday for a skilled therapist. If you feel you are living life normally, but going through a time of sadness, and want to discuss if coaching is right for you, email me or call me at 303-547-8327.
Severe Depression
If you are feeling suicidal or homicidal, please call 911 for immediate medical care or get to the emergency room, since I do not provide emergency services. Know that sometimes we do need the blessing of medicine, hospitalization or residential treatment during critical moments.
Check out PsychologyToday to find a therapist near you.
Spiritual/Transpersonal
Many of us get to a point in life where we begin to question the life we've been living, or what we've been taught to believe as a child. Whether about science or a particular religion or a philosophy we've read about lately. What about you?
Do you ponder about the meaning and purpose of your life? Do you wonder about whether or not there really is a higher realm? Have you ever had out-of-body or other unusual experiences that you could not explain, and worried that others would think you were “crazy”?
Perhaps you find yourself questioning and want to discuss your thoughts with a “neutral” person who would understand and not judge. Someone who would deeply listen and encourage and support your deepening awareness.
If you seek spiritual coaching, within the context of your own beliefs, I would be honored to support you as you contemplate these mysteries.
Email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.
Caregiver Stress
Your loved one has been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and your life has changed. You worry and grieve, and shift through a myriad of emotions. You begin to wear down, feeling overwhelmed and stressed. You may have rescheduled your days or reprioritized your goals. Likely you have spent much time researching possible treatments or alternative options for extended care.
Or perhaps you are among the nearly 17% of Americans who are providing unpaid care to an elderly adult, whether your mother or father or another family member or even a friend. It is stressful enough when caregiving from a bit of a distance, but when caregiving full-time within your home, it is exponentially so. You are always on the clock, and everything in your life can feel effected.
I know. I've been through it multiple times.
If you could use help during this stressful time, holistic counseling or coaching can:
- Support you through your grief, sadness, overwhelm, and anger
- Help you understand the various stages of caregiving you may go through
- Help you find your balance and self-care, which seem to disappear when caregiving full-time
Email me, or call me today at 303.547.8327 to schedule your free initial 30-minute consultation and learn more.