Welcome! I’m Susan, a life coach, nature therapy guide, and facilitator who works internationally with individuals and groups. My work is to guide and support clients as they discover and embody their wholeness. I guide them as they connect with their true selves, becoming clear, authentic, and passionate about life. I use a depth-focused, nature-inspired approach to support whole-being transformation that extends beyond any singular personal or professional goal.
My Story
There was a time I thought I was fatally flawed.
For as long as I could remember others had said I was “too much”. I was too sensitive, too reactive, too intense. My attachments were always deep and intense. I had every reason to believe they were right. Although I would come to seek and find new behaviors that better served my true Self, I would also come to believe that my essence was not flawed. And that the more I connected to that essence the less I acted in ways that put me in needless conflict with myself and those I cared about. Conversely, I was more able to be direct about what really mattered to me and set boundaries around those values and needs.
At thirty-three, I was stuck in a career that had been unfulfilling for the last ten years. Most of my coworkers feared me, a reputation I’m sad to admit I earned with my moodiness and rage. I was a year into a relationship with a man who barely knew me, never mind loved me. My mother’s health was failing, and I had recently moved back into my parent’s home, a fact over which I had much shame.
One day the competing pressures of home and work finally reached a boiling point. While the thought of losing my stable income… and the identity I derived from my job, was terrifying I knew it was time to go. I resigned from my position and never looked back. A few months later I ended that relationship.
However, knowing where you don’t belong can be a long journey from knowing where you do belong.
This began several years of feeling utterly lost most of the time. I spent most of my energy trying to distract myself from reality and numb my feelings. I felt as though my life had been wasted and thought about all the potential I supposedly had. What good was it? Hope seemed to set each night with the sun, leaving me crying myself to sleep most nights.
My only consistent solace came from my frequent walks in nature. There, I saw trees crooked and twisted, yet thriving. A young tree emerged from crack in a boulder. The waves on the shore seemed to promise that this season in my life would eventually give way to another. When in nature, I experienced the same comfort that I had found wandering the Pocono Mountains as a child.
Scattered throughout this dark night of the soul were other moments of hope, tiny revelations that would later become significant, and steps toward myself that felt useless much of the time. I had one such moment of light one night while searching the internet. I happened on the Hero’s Journey and the work of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell & a little-known psychologist, Kazimierz Dabrowski. Together they presented ideas that proposed that anxiety, depression, severe self-criticism are not symptoms of disease, but of potential growth. They suggested that there must be a period of destruction or isolation prior to new growth. Dabrowski also asserted that being emotionally intense and sensitive are a necessary component of what he termed “advanced development”, a concept akin to fulfilling your calling. This opened the possibility that maybe the parts of myself that I thought were undesirable were in fact, valuable.
Perhaps, just perhaps, I was whole, and there was no part of me that needed to be carved out to be okay.
I had no way of knowing when I read those words I was at the beginning of just that kind of destruction and isolation. Despite outward successes like receiving my life coach certification and finishing my bachelor’s degree, I felt despair that wouldn’t lift. Several years later I emerged, willing to follow inner guidance wherever it led. My personality and life changed dramatically. Every challenging circumstance became fuel for future growth. It is truly darkest before the dawn, and often the dark is needed before we can find the light within ourselves and the world around us.
This experience strengthened my desire to help others trying to find their true selves and live their purpose.
I continue to be inspired by nature. I believe that it is by reconnecting to the wild, uncensored parts of ourselves that we are able to form true connections to others, and to the natural world. In discovering who we really are, we become who we are meant to be.
I am a Certified Professional Coach (ICF), and a Wild Woman Project Circle Leader. I also have my bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Stony Brook University. I am also a Certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide trained by ANFT. However, I believe my most valuable credential is my own journey from feeling broken to wholeness and my heart-fueled desire to help others become the best and truest version of themselves.