When I completed my MBA degree at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in 1994, I felt incredibly lucky to be chosen to join Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). One of the leading management consulting firms that had recruited me! Because I questioned my strategic planning abilities and analytical skills, I wondered if they had made a hiring mistake.

A year after joining the firm, I received my first performance review. Although it was positive, I started to contemplate whether I wanted to be on the career track to become a partner in the firm.  As I look back now, I recognize that I was following a “should” path with my life, not listening to what I really wanted to do.  I never really enjoyed much of the work in management consulting, yet I wanted to prove to myself that I was capable of the same work as my fellow MBA grads.



Although I knew it was a career-limiting move that would impede my development of the classic strategy consulting skills, I was always happiest to be staffed on projects that involved more qualitative or “soft” skills, such as helping clients execute organizational change initiatives. I found these projects easier, and dreaded the intense objectivity required by quantitative projects.  Sometimes, I would intentionally feign illness when I knew that the staffing manager needed to staff a consultant on a quantitative project. I wanted to be out of his purview when he assigned the work.

The longer I stayed with the firm, the more conflicted I grew about whether or not to leave. The money was a constant draw, as I was earning nearly four times what I had earned before completing my MBA.  Whenever I grew frustrated with the work, I thought to myself, “Yes, but the money is so great!”  Imagining life without that huge salary was terrifying, and kept me frozen in place.   I always compared myself unfavorably with my colleagues, scared that I did not have strong analytical skills.  So I worried that if I left the firm, I would be at a deficit in the employment marketplace, because I imagined that I lacked the skills the hiring managers would expect from someone who had worked in management consulting.  I flipped back and forth, thinking I should leave the firm and then convincing myself to stay.


Rare was the day at work when my shoulders did not ache. I simply attributed that pain to sitting at the computer for six to ten hours a day.  Nausea and digestive pains were my frequent companions, and their impact seemed more forceful when I was staffed on a project out of town.  At the time, I simply rationalized the intestinal aches away by assuming they were caused by eating hotel and restaurant food, instead of my own home-cooked meals.

About three years into my time in management consulting, I was involved in a car accident. As I drove home from San Francisco International Airport, returning from a client engagement in Southern California, I was rear-ended by a drunk driver.  Although the accident was not serious, I started getting painful migraine headaches immediately afterwards.  My doctor wanted to run diagnostic tests, but I would not allow it.  I was determined to show how tough I could be.  I was not going to let mere headaches keep me from working on what I thought was an extremely important client project, one that seemed to assure me a promotion!  Then, two weeks after the car accident, I passed out in front of a group of clients.  The pain in my head was overwhelming, so I literally fainted while making a presentation. The project team took me to the hospital to check my health.


I ignored the migraine symptoms, continuing to push through them so that I secure a promotion, even if I was conflicted about moving ahead at the firm.  To my project team and to myself, I pretended. I acted as if I was fine.  Fortunately, when I received a doctor’s orders to take a month off from work to relax and recuperate, the managing partner of my office insisted that I follow his professional guidance.

Deep down, I was torn. On the one hand, I wanted to demonstrate to my project team that I was as strong as everyone else, and that I could fit into the workaholic culture by continuing to work.  Yet on the other hand, I also wished I could simply find work that was more fun, or that I could even stop working for a period.

During the time off, at the behest of a friend, I attended a workshop at the Institute of HeartMath, a program designed to help people relax. I learned how to really listen to my heart and to pay attention to the tensions in my body. It became evident to me, viscerally and in my bones, that I had established a set point for tolerable stress that was unrealistic and unsustainable.  When my leave-of-absence ended, I asked to be transferred to a new job within the consulting firm, one where I did not have the constant demands of clients.  I was charged with establishing a new internal MBA-style training program for the firm, a project that was much more enjoyable and less stressful.

I left management consulting altogether at the end of 1999, when I moved back from Seattle to the Bay Area with my then-husband.  It was the dot-com era, and I joined an online learning company as a marketing director, helping corporate universities to foster learning and creativity, two issues of importance to me.  What I did not know then was that a little more than a year later, not only would that company dissolve, but I would face a total life crisis.  Chaos took hold during five-week period starting in February of 2001.  I left my marriage.  I moved out of our house and into a temporary apartment.  Just two days after the move, my father sustained a traumatic brain injury.  Fortunately, he has recovered.  During the course of his month-long hospitalization, I had two surgeries.  While recovering from the second surgery, I found out I had been laid off from my job, due to the downturn in the economy.

An important experience that fueled my explorations about the body occurred when my father was in the hospital, the day after his major head injury. He had regained consciousness, but was still not oriented to place or time. He was also experiencing amnesia.  I prayed for guidance, and felt a strong impulse to take one of my father’s hands and sandwich it between two of mine.  That was a very intimate gesture for me to initiate with my father, both because he was unconscious and I could not first ask his permission, and because his tendency was to be somewhat physically reserved with me.

I had the strange experience of feeling and seeing a purple spiral of energy emanate from the center of my heart and wrap around me and my father. Thirty seconds later, and I saw and felt purple spiral energy radiate out of my dad’s heart and wrap around both of us.  Within a few months, this unusual experience led me into totally new realms. I began explore hands-on healing. Those trainings initiated me into deeper, more conscious awareness of my own bodily sensations as a way to sense energy and cultivate my own guidance.  I believe these experiences paved the way for me to discover somatic psychology.

Looking back on the five-week period, it is clear that I experienced an enormous amount of trauma in a brief period. I was left without a job, a marriage, or a home.  On the positive side, I was able to start my life anew.  I began telling friends and family, “I do not want to wait until I am a 70 year-old woman to finally study psychology.” I had earned both my undergraduate degree and my first master’s degree in business administration, two career stepping stones that were supposedly “safe” and along the “right” path in life.  By choosing to study psychology, I was finally taking steps to do what I desired.  I was following my authentic impulses, rather than societal “shoulds.”



However, when I started looking at psychology programs, as I had done many times before, I was surprised that they held little or no interest for me. While I was at a friend’s home, I found a book called Molecules of Emotion.  The title grabbed me.  I felt energized and alive as a read about the intersection of emotions-which had always fascinated me-and science.  I asked to borrow the book, which introduced me to body-psychology, otherwise known as somatic psychology.

My discovery lead me to an information session about earning a master’s degree through John F. Kennedy University’s Somatic Psychology program. I imagined that I would be enrolling in their program.  I felt only the tiniest doubt about attending the school.  But something felt not quite right, even though the cost and the commute and the schedule all lined up in my favor.  When the facilitator at that session mentioned that Santa Barbara Graduate Institute (SBGI) offered a PhD in Somatic

Psychology, I left the session almost immediately.  I drove home a little too fast.  Excitement propelled me up the stairs to my computer to research SBGI online.  The next day, at the encouragement of my mother, I called the president of SBGI, Marti Glenn, to discuss enrollment. It was September and I wondered if I could still enroll for the courses that started in October. Marti and I spoke for a full hour.  In my heart, I knew I would be accepted.  Marti liked my background, and I felt so positive and exhilarated about the program.

I did not really know what I would do with a degree in Somatic Psychology. But I thought, “I have to do this now.”  I felt compelled, in a positive way, to follow this path.  A speedy energy ran through my whole body, bubbling and percolating in me, directing me to follow a magnetizing curiosity.  I continued to feel that energy as I investigated and experimented with doing work at the intersection of business and somatic psychology.

In the aftermath of a divorce, my father’s near-death experience, my own health issues, and losing my job, I followed the impulses that truly pulled me. I could not think very logically, which seems, now, like a blessing.  Nine months after my husband and I split up, I started my coursework at SBGI.  Simultaneously, I experienced clinical depression that lasted nearly six months.  Despite being very happy to be at SBGI, I found it challenging to wake up in the mornings.  I would cry for hours, and felt like the weight of the world was on my shoulders.

In retrospect, I see that it was probably good for me to get to a low point, because it forced me to take more time for myself so I could better understand my needs.  During that time, I found a practice during that has been life-changing for me:  Sensory Awareness. I loved being part of group sessions with my classmates at SBGI. I reveled in paying attention to exquisite little details of how my body was moving or sensing.  I noticed the richness of my inner experience.  I discovered how to focus my awareness on my impulses.  I started questioning the ways in which I came to know something-was that knowledge intellectual or innate?

During the first semester, Judyth Weaver, who co-founded SBGI, guided our class through a particular physical exploration. Although I do not recall the details of the exploration, I vividly recall the hot anger and distancing loneliness I felt inside.  During the debrief of that activity, I voiced to my classmates that I was irked and frustrated that my experience of the exploration was not similar to theirs.  I truly felt left out, as though something was really wrong with me for being different.  Instead, Judyth gently helped me to see that each person had their own unique perception of the sensations and emotions that would arise from this activity, and that circumstances were exactly as they should be.  A lightbulb went off inside of me!  I did not have to conform to some outside standard in life.  My own inner experience mattered.  This state, of knowing what was real and true and organic for me was perfect and natural.  My sensations and perceptions were supposed to inform me of my tastes and preferences.  What a joyful and life altering discovery!  Since that moment, my life has felt richer, more personal, more awake and aware.  And, of course, I want to share with the world how the simple practice of noticing can bring personal freedom.  Following my simple instinctual urges opened up my world and my energy.  By contrast, I had been pursuing money and prestige, something that is not so innate, and had closed me off in many ways.

Since that pivotal embodied experience, I have less of a need for the outward “safety” I used to feel when I would accumulate possessions, because I know, innately, that I can readily generate wealth by tapping into my core energies.  I feel as though in my prior work, as a management consultant, I had been chasing after the surface of myself.  In other words, I was concerned with what I looked like on the surface and what others thought of me.   Now, I care more about what’s going on in my depths.  I think my marriage was a good barometer of that too that-I experienced very little emotional intimacy.  Now, know how to feel that intimacy with a partner, but, more importantly, I know myself intimately, from the inside out.  I know not just my ideas about myself, but I can really feel into myself and make sense of my sensations.  That’s the most exquisite thing to me-that we have skin and we can feel ourselves, and know our needs.

I believe I had been striving for intimacy and authenticity, but did not find those qualities in my career. In retrospect, I do not think that the business life that I was living was very authentic.  I look back on my life and recognize that I learned how to withhold.  I learned to fit in.  I thought I was supposed to “play a game.”  My unconscious rationale for entering the business world is now conscious.

I grew up in a family that regularly told me, “You are too emotional.” And what I now know is that they should have put the words “for us” on the end of that.  “You’re too emotional for us, for our comfort.”  Unconsciously, I believed that if I entered the business world, it would be a good training ground for me to learn to modulate my emotions.

My last consulting firm, Andersen Consulting, was a place where people could be very businesslike and very matter-of-fact. They were nice.  They were friendly too.  So, I thought it would be a good place to become socialized to be appropriately emotional.  My colleagues were not automatons, although we were teased about being “androids.”  I do not I think became an android, but I definitely held back pieces of myself in that environment.  I thought that if I was in that culture, I would learn to be more even-keeled like the rest of them.

I now know that I have to find my path in my own way.  And I have to trust my inner guidance. And I am more readily able to trust that, largely because I know how to literally feel my way through life, from the inside out.  I don’t think I would have even known what those words meant ten years ago, when I was fully immersed in the corporate life.  I would have brashly announced, “Oh, I trust myself.  I’m smart.”  Perhaps I trusted myself with insubstantial decisions, like where to cross the street, so that I would not cross in an unsafe place.  My trust would have been a very pragmatic, logic-based trust, instead of a deep trust in the flow of life.  I believe I have an inner sense of trust now, and it stems from learning to feel my own sensations and knowing how I literally “feel.”  That also “informs” me, both in a literal and a figurative sense.


I came to do the work I am doing as a career coach somewhat serendipitously, yet very much because I kept doing activities I enjoyed.  I wanted to work part-time during my studies at SBGI.  I called the Career Center at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, where I had completed my MBA degree, to ask if I could help out in some way.  I became a contract employee, and, ironically, helped students to prepare their resumes and interview for management consulting jobs-my old world.  On the side, some students would come to see me to ask about my career transition, from management consulting to studying psychology.  I quickly caught on and understood that they were really asking about how they could make their own significant career changes, rather than getting caught in so-called “conventional jobs.”

I asked if I could start counseling these students, and the school agreed to let me do so. When I would work with a student who felt particularly “stuck” I started integrating mind-body techniques to help them get clearer.  For example, I might tell a student who was trying to decide between two different job offers, “Imagine that you are already working at workplace A, and check in with the sensations in your body, and notice what you feel, and then do the same thing with workplace B” and then encourage the student to continue to pay attention “from the neck, down,” to gain further insights.  Or if a student felt particularly nervous about an upcoming job interview, I might help him practice “speaking from the belly,” instead of from his brain, and notice how that new technique impacted him.

I noticed that I would feel much more energized and excited after a session, compared to simply reviewing resumes and cover letters.  The students who had experienced my embodied career counseling work began to tell me, “You should do this work on your own.”

This time, their should felt like a want to, instead of an obligation. The students’ comments strengthened new idea for a business that was germinating inside me.  So, after completing my masters degree at SBGI, I launched my own career coaching practice, which I call “Work from Within,” in 2005.  The name literally came to me, “from within,” in a dream-after three days of trying to name my business using only cognitive techniques.  Shame on me!

Since launching Work from Within, I have had an ongoing fascination with the transformation process, and the impact of the felt sense in career and life transitions. My research and deep work with clients allows me to delve deeper into this area of interest, and to share what I learn, so that I can benefit others.