Guiding By Lauren
You Can Understand Yourself Perfectly and Still Keep Making the Same Mistakes.
Positive Psychology meets the body. And change becomes something you practice, not just something you talk about.
You know what you should do.
You've read the books. You've thought about your childhood. You've figured out why you react the way you do.
And then something happens.
Your husband says the wrong thing. Your adult child doesn't call. Someone questions your competence.
And there you are. Reacting exactly the way you promised yourself you wouldn't.
Insight is wonderful. But insight doesn't necessarily change behavior.
That's where my work begins.
I bring together Positive Psychology, Jungian depth work, character strengths, and embodied practices—breath, cold, heat, and movement—to help women meet stress differently and make more conscious choices.
Not because stress is going away.
Because it isn't.
I'm Not Going to Tell You How to Live Your Life.
By midlife, you've probably had enough people doing that.
Children grow up. Careers change. Parents age. Relationships shift. Bodies become less predictable.
And the roles you've spent decades performing may no longer fit.
Sometimes these changes are welcome.
Sometimes they're devastating.
Often they're both.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, you begin asking a question you may not have had time to ask in years.
What do I want now?
For more than 20 years, I've worked with people navigating change.
I've learned that most women don't need another expert telling them what to do.
They need someone who can listen carefully, ask questions they haven't thought to ask, and help them recognize the wisdom they've already earned.
That's why I think of myself as a guide rather than a coach.
I'm not here to give you a map for your life. I'm here to walk alongside you while you figure out where you want to go.
And sometimes, we're going to get into cold water.
I'll explain.
Cold Water Doesn't Care How Much Therapy You've Had.
Step into cold water and your body has an opinion.
GET OUT.
Immediately.
Your shoulders rise. Your breathing changes. Your mind starts negotiating.
You can know everything there is to know about stress and still react this way.
Because your body doesn't care how intellectually sophisticated you are.
But here's what makes cold interesting.
With appropriate guidance, you can learn to stay present with the sensation.
You breathe.
You notice.
You discover that the first thing your body tells you to do isn't necessarily the only thing you can do.
There's a moment between reaction and response.
That's the moment I'm interested in.
Not because I want you to become an accomplished cold plunger.
I want you to recognize that moment when your partner annoys you, when something frightens you, or when life doesn't go according to plan.
Cold gives us a place to practice meeting manageable stress. Breath gives us a way to work with our response. Heat introduces recovery and restoration.
Together, these practices support adaptive stress training and healthy longevity.
And they teach something that can be surprisingly difficult to learn from a book.
You can experience discomfort without automatically surrendering your ability to choose.
Midlife Is When You Finally Have Enough Information to Make Better Decisions.
I work primarily with women in midlife and beyond.
Not because I think this is when women begin to fall apart.
Quite the opposite.
By now, we've lived.
We've made mistakes. Raised families. Built careers. Loved people who disappointed us. Disappointed people we loved.
We've lost things we thought we couldn't live without.
And somehow, here we are.
We have accumulated something enormously valuable.
Evidence that we can survive change.
Yet our culture seems determined to convince women that aging is primarily about losing things.
Youth. Beauty. Energy. Relevance.
I'm interested in what we're gaining.
Perspective. Discernment. Self-knowledge. Freedom.
And perhaps the most important thing of all.
The ability to stop organizing our lives around what everyone else expects of us.
Maybe you're navigating a major transition.
Maybe you've spent so much time taking care of other people that you've forgotten what you want.
Or maybe nothing is particularly wrong.
You simply have a persistent feeling that the life you're living isn't quite the life you want to continue living.
That's enough of a reason to begin.
You Don't Need to Turn Wellness Into Another Job.
I have no interest in giving you 14 new things to do before breakfast.
You don't need an elaborate morning routine.
You don't need to spend heroic amounts of time in a sauna.
And you certainly don't need to become someone who posts videos of herself sitting in ice water.
Unless you want to.
What matters is finding practices that fit your body and your life.
We might work with breathing patterns that help you settle before sleep.
We might explore how you respond when you're overwhelmed.
We might use Positive Psychology to identify strengths you've stopped recognizing in yourself.
We might look at recurring patterns through Jungian depth work.
Or we might discover that the most important thing you need to practice is recovery.
Stress isn't always the problem. Sometimes the problem is that we never give ourselves permission to recover.
This isn't about doing more.
It's about becoming more conscious of what you're already doing—and discovering what you might choose differently.
I Don't Think You Need Fixing.
I think you've probably spent enough time trying to fix yourself.
Our work isn't about turning you into someone more productive, more disciplined, or more impressive.
It's about understanding the patterns you've developed, recognizing the strengths you already possess, and learning how to respond to life with greater awareness.
Sometimes that means a difficult conversation.
Sometimes it means asking a question you've been avoiding.
Sometimes it means standing beside you while you breathe through the first shock of cold water.
And sometimes it means doing less.
I'm not interested in helping you become the woman you used to be.
I'm interested in the woman you're becoming now.
How We Work Together
We meet individually on Zoom, wherever you happen to be.
Our conversations draw on Positive Psychology, Jungian depth work, character strengths, and practical approaches to nervous system regulation.
I listen. I ask questions. I offer perspective and practices.
You bring your experience, your curiosity, and your willingness to explore what might be possible.
You don't need to arrive with a clear goal.
Sometimes figuring out what you want is the work.
Individual 60-minute session — $150
Package of four sessions — $495
A sliding scale is available. Please contact me if cost would otherwise prevent us from working together.
Let's Start With a Conversation.
You don't need to know exactly what you want to change.
You don't even need to be certain that anything needs changing.
Curiosity is a perfectly good place to begin.
After scheduling, payment can be made through Venmo. If you have questions or need help arranging your sessions, please contact me.