Alison's Approach
The First Principle
My work starts with a simple yet profound insight: our transformation can be understood and accelerated by connecting with our innate intelligence as one whole, interconnected and integrated system that supports our healing and growth.
This innate intelligence can be seen as a regenerative potentiality that is always working to self-heal, restore balance, seek wholeness and growth, and adapt to both survive and thrive.
When we listen to our body’s innate intelligence and understand that it functions within regenerative (which by nature is transformative) processes, we are then empowered to transform and re-write our script.
Trauma-Informed Understanding
I felt completely liberated when I began to understand how our nervous system responds to threat—how the mind, in turn, develops protective patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. These patterns remain in place until we learn to release the stored shock in our bodies and reshape the narratives that accompany it.
To me, understanding trauma and processing it is both a fundamental right and a responsibility we owe to ourselves and each other. This allows our self-awareness to expand and evolve, making it one of our greatest superpowers!
With this awareness, life's pain and losses (which are inherent in the human experience) become something we can gently work with and grow from.
The Starting Point
With every new client, I begin by exploring three key questions: What past adverse or traumatic experiences have shaped you? What is and isn’t working for you in your life right now? And what do you want to create for yourself, your relationships, and your work in the future? These questions lay the foundation for deep, transformative growth.
From this starting point, I support individuals, groups, and entire organizations to transform from the inside out using many different therapies, leadership tools and somatic practices.
Curated & Customized Transformative Experiences
With over 35 years of experience in teaching, healing, facilitating, and coaching, I’m passionate about designing customized transformational experiences. These can range from a single hour to three days or even a full year, tailored to the audience’s unique challenges, goals, and aspirations.
Somatic Awareness, Aliveness & Wholeness
I coach, hold space, challenge, heal, and guide my clients to prioritize both their health and wholeness—no matter the pain or crises they are facing. Through this work, fragmentation from the past can integrate into present wholeness. Greater aliveness, tranquility, meaning, and a deep sense of belonging in every aspect of their lives, relationships, and purpose can grow.
A somatic approach is essential for sustainable change. We can’t bypass biology. I support people to cultivate nervous system health by teaching them how to understand and shift their “state of being” to enhance emotional regulation, resilience, and reciprocity.
Somatic work enhances interoceptive awareness—the ability to feel and track bodily sensations that enable us to become more fully embodied. By working with the nervous system and integrating somatic practices, we create a strong foundation for healing and lasting transformation.
Coherent Sensemaking, Enlivening Narratives, Empowering Habits
Working with our minds is essential for true transformation. The narratives we hold shape our reality, and if we want real change, we need new stories to support it.
Our thoughts, beliefs, and mindsets influence everything—from our moods and communication styles to what we value, stand for, and practice in our daily lives. Many of us have an active inner critic, unhelpful beliefs, and ruminating thoughts that quietly shape how we feel about ourselves, how we show up in relationships, and how we engage with life as a whole.
A core part of my work is guiding clients to redefine their sense of identity and reimagine how it shapes their relationships, personal growth, and leadership. In my experience, this need often arises during major life transitions—times when old narratives no longer fit, and a new, empowered perspective is essential.
A Safe Container
Transformation happens when people feel truly safe, supported, and empowered. In our work, I cultivate a space—a “container”—where transformation can unfold naturally. I hold this space with my full embodied presence, deep compassion, and an openness to infinite possibilities for change. This container is not mine alone; it is a sacred, co-created space, shaped by both my clients and me.
Expect a calm, supportive container that prioritizes your well-being, wisdom, and wholeness.
Once connection and trust is present, I then harness powerful trauma-informed, transformational processes and practices—drawn from EMDR and the healing principles of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy as well as my work in leadership development and team effectiveness —to build resource and resilience, release what may be stuck, stressed or frozen, and renew with feelings of calm, connectivity, and coherence.
MY ROLE
I connect and support my clients through 1-1 sessions and in large group settings, using various elemental roles. I am a guide, a teacher, a mirror, a healer, a witness, a therapist, a mentor, and a leadership coach, depending on what is most useful and appropriate for each client's growth and well-being.
I meet my clients where they are and co-create a transformative journey that is appropriate for them based on their past experiences, current capacity, lifestyle and challenges, and what they want for their future.
Working together with commitment and curiosity, clients learn how to connect with their innate wisdom to self-heal, grow and feel more liberated as whole human beings. My clients discover that the answers are on the inside and they are capable of resourcing, releasing, re-wiring, reorienting, repairing, renewing and regenerating themselves, their relationships, and their purpose.
The Underlying Theory
All my tools and approaches are informed by Bio-Transformation®, an original and cohesive theory co-developed by my transformation partner and me—a leadership practitioner & author—for leading and landing lasting, positive change in individuals, teams, and organizations.
Bio-T works from the inside out in order to adapt to the outside-in changes in our complex, disrupted, and crisis-hit world. Bio-Transformation® is underpinned by the latest brain, behavior, and complexity science integrated with trauma-informed therapies and wisdom practices from the contemplative and embodiment traditions.
At the level of everyday leadership and life problems, Bio-Transformation contains a step-by-step pathway and set of practical exercises to support people in transforming stress, adverse experiences, developmental trauma, and protective patterns that are showing up as chronic emotional or physical pain, persistent negative thoughts, addictive behavior, personal and family crises, relationship breakdowns, and major leadership challenges.
Bio-T also underpins our rigorous leadership curriculum that seeks to accelerate and amplify the development of individuals towards ever-higher degrees of transformational capability so leaders can become more self-aware, adaptive, relationally intelligent and solve ever-more complex problems with ease and flow in their teams, organizations, and systems.
