Professional Training
CTI Professional Coach Training
I received my initial professional coach training through The Coaches Training Institute, which gave me a solid foundation in core coaching tools and approaches. CTI is the world’s leading ICF accredited coach-training program. They have pioneered and contributed to creating the industry standards and ethical guidelines for coaching.
Since successfully completing my training and receiving the professional credentials CPCC and PCC (Professional Certified Coach), I've turned my attention to building a thriving coaching practice, and producing written and video content as well as my podcast “Tracking Yes” as a way to connect with like-minded souls who want to create empowered, meaningful lives.
CTI Leadership TRAINING
In 2013, I completed CTI’s Co-Active Leadership program, a 10 month long retreat based program designed to uncover and navigate the obstacles that inhibit us from showing up as our most creative and powerful selves.
This transformational experience has been hugely beneficial in my own life, as well as giving me awareness to empower my clients at an even deeper level. I stay connected with the essential learning of this program through serving as a mentor for participants currently engaged in the Leadership program.
Lucid Living coach training + Leading
Over a 2 year period I trained in Lucid Living’s Great Story Coaching and Emotional and Ego Mastery coursework, a journey into the complexity of how we make meaning with our stories, and then create our reality from them.
Following that I became a leader for their Coach Training program, teaching and supporting coaches learning how to navigate deep emotional and spiritual work with their clients. I also mentored groups of students undertaking the advanced Emotional and Ego Mastery curriculum.
Understanding the ego-fear that drives and perpetuates our disempowered stories has given me tools to unlock even the most resistant patterns of limitation in my own and my clients’ lives.
Neuro-Transformational Coaching
I am currently engaged in a 7-month long intensive training with BEabove Leadership designed to deepen awareness of why and how coaching works based on current scientific research and the developing understanding of the brain.
This advanced coach training covers the latest research in the neuroscience of human development and provides a host of innovative, brain-based coaching tools that are a road map for conscious evolution.
Mindfulness Training
For over 10 years I’ve belonged to a Sangha that engages in a weekly Mindfulness Training with a Dharma Coach. Through this insightful, ongoing practice I’ve become deeply connected with the methods and enormous benefits of staying present and grounded in my day to day life.
In bringing the wisdom of this practice to the work I do with my clients, I’ve observed the remarkable expansiveness that mindfulness creates in our worlds.
Conscious Healing - Thomas HubL
Working with clients addressing both collective and personal trauma through mindful and practical approaches, this training was facilitated by Thomas Hubl, whose lifelong work integrates the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science.
This course helped further develop the sensitivity, perception and stillness required to be the most effective ally and support in my clients’ healing journeys.
ANimism
My curiosity has led me ever more deeply into an experiential knowing that everything in the Cosmos is animated with Consciousness, and my relationship with the non-human realms is an essential source of guidance, wisdom, love and support.
I am deeply engaged with the work of Bill Plotkin and Animas Valley Institute, an organization that is deeply committed to a Nature-based path of spirituality. This work is founded in the philosophy that it is only through moving through and beyond our culture’s state of pathological adolescence and becoming fully embodied true adults that we will access what is needed to respond to the crises of our planet.
My study with them has included:
Online Workshops:
Preparing for the Journey of Soul Initiation: how to ready oneself for authentic Soul-encounter
Nature and the Human Soul: deepening understanding of Bill Plotkin’s Nature-based map of the psyche
Backcountry Retreats:
Coming Home to an Animate World: An immersion into a deep and intentional dialogue with nature in order to experientially understand our interconnection with the Cosmos.
The Way of Council and the Art of Mirroring: Relating to each other and the world from a soul-centric perspective that holds connection as our natural state of being
Sweet Darkness: Uncovering, reclaiming and integrating disowned shadow aspects of self
Deep Imagination: Accessing the power of imagination to engage in intimate conversation with the mysteries of Earth and Cosmos and the depths of psyche.
“Self-doubt is as self-centered as self-inflation. Your obligation is to reach as deeply as you can and offer your unique and authentic gifts as bravely and beautifully as you're able.”
― Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
ShamaniSM
I studied the practice and healing modali of Shamanism for 18 months with Julie Kramer, a teacher who has trained under highly respected Shamanic teachers such as Sandra Ingerman, Malidoma Some and Betsy Bergstrom, and has dedicated her life to training others thoroughly in deepening their relationships and ability to communicate with the spirit realms.
Through this training I learned powerful ways to dialogue with a wide and diverse community of spiritual beings whom have much wisdom to offer those of us moving in human form.
Death and Grief Training
I worked intensively with Sarah Kerr, PhD, Death Doula and Ritual Healer, and the founder of The Center for Sacred Death Care over the course of 2 years. Her guidance shifted my orientation to death from fear-based to trusting it as a sacred and essential aspect of life. My studies with her included one on one coaching and several specific trainings on death including:
The Soul’s Journey Through Death and Loss
Awakening the Archetype of the Deathwalker
Crossing the Veil
Grief and Loss as Initiation
What Happens After We Die
Subtle Energy Principles for Sacred Deathcare
Her compassionate and skillful mentoring supported me in one of the most sacred experiences of my life: creating powerful ceremony and ritual as I accompanied Lily, my canine partner and spiritual ally of 16 years, in her process of dying.
Trauma and Awakening
Dr. Gabor Mate and A. H. Almaas are insightful and wise teachers, one in the realm of trauma and the other in mindful inquiry into the depth of our present moment experience. They’re leaders in their fields, and created this training to share their findings on the importance of bringing compassion for our trauma to our ongoing journey of spiritual evolution.
This course was an exploration into what’s essential to understand about how trauma impacts and influences us on our path of awakening, and how to hold and honour both as significant aspects of who we are.
Radical wholeness
Philip Shepherd is a clear and wise teacher of embodiment.
His training is designed to move us beyond ‘bringing our awareness to the body’, and instead become aware from our bodies, specifically by dropping into the pelvic bowl—the grounded place of presence within us where embodied wisdom lives.
Our culture and our fear teach us to desensitize to discomfort and to challenging aspects of self by numbing and attempting to control life. This work encourages us to open our sensitivity to fully feel and integrate our experience, moment by moment. It cultivates a felt relationship with the world that is much more joyful and freeing than a head driven, self-referential reactiveness .
The tools and exercises I learned in this training have been invaluable for my coaching practice. They are creating much greater presence in my clients, and supporting them in getting out of their heads and into the wisdom of their bodies.
The Diamond Approach
The Diamond Approach is a process of inquiry into presence itself.
When we follow our knee-jerk response to fix, change or control a challenging experience, we think we’re moving toward comfort and safety. It doesn’t work. Trying to shift what’s happening, both inside and out, fuels and strengthens a distorted perception that leads us toward fear and away from well-being.
I love this training by A. H. Almaas—it’s an invitation to stay with yourself, get curious and go straight for the discomfort, and it deepened my conviction that going IN to our experience is the portal into intimacy with our true nature, our expansiveness and our creative power.
Byron Katie - the Work
I’ve studied in Byron Katie’s 9 day “School for the Work”, and her 5 day “No Body Intensive”. These programs are intensive investigations into the nature of the mind. The first explores the influential thoughts we create from our experiences of trauma and culture, and the second questions our limiting thoughts about identity itself.
Both inquire into the complex world of our stories to better understand how they impact our experience of reality.
This coursework supported me in accessing greater clarity about my own ego maneuvering, freed me from a long list of constricting beliefs and gave me an additional structure to support clients in moving beyond ego narratives.
When used as a lens and not an ideology I find this form of inquiry to be a very effective tool for moving out of ego identification and coming into a greater sense of presence, agency and creativity.
* I proceed with discernment when engaging in The Work. I hold that there are real world, painful circumstances outside of our control, and that an individual’s lived experience must be honoured and validated at the same time that we embark on an exploration of how beliefs they carry may be creating additional, unnecessary suffering.
Martha Beck’s LightWriting Masterclass
In 2017 I took Martha Beck and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Write Into Light program. Over 6 months we did 12 writing projects that were designed to help us write in an authentic, compelling way—learning to place as much attention on our reader as ourselves.
The course culminated in a live retreat with a small group of participants at Martha’s North Star Ranch. We were coached, supported and called forth to brainstorm ideas and write in community as we found our unique voices and messages.
It was life changing, course changing and a fierce invitation to bring my voice more fully into the world and inspire others to do the same.
Everything Else
podcasts, Videos, bookS and Emergent conversations
I’m endlessly curious about what makes us tick.
How do we raise our awareness about the constricted patterns and beliefs we’ve taken on through personal trauma, misguided aspects of our culture and our own distorted ego narrative?
And what are the tools that support us in moving through them to recover shadow aspects of self, reconnect with our essential selves and embody and express our unique magic?
An essential part of my spiritual and professional practice is engaging with new wisdom each day through studying ancient teachings, current thought leaders and my own growing dialogue with mystery.
This devotion supports my deepest passion—allowing the curiosity of aliveness to ignite greater possibilities in my life and the lives of my clients.
*Note: Scroll within the box above to see the full list of episodes.
“Flow” - The Mandala Project: #55
Flow is what you feel when you’re holding a stable, steady centre while the currents of the universe are swirling around you with infinite possibilities of disruption.