Welcome to 🍂Finding Your Way🍂
Blending Mindfulness and Healing Science For Post-Traumatic Growth
“As you walk, the way appears.”—Rumi
Your path. Your pace.
As Tara Brach beautifully describes it:
“Mindfulness can be described as attending on purpose to our moment-to- moment experience with a non-judgmental, interested, friendly presence.”
Thr.ough my own healing journey, I’ve seen how mindfulness and the science of healing can work together— like medicine for the nervous system. When we feel safe, our bodies soften, our minds quiet—and healing begins.
This is the heart of my work:
Holding space for women to reconnect with their strengths and wholeness.
Why Post-Traumatic Growth Coaching?
When we experience trauma, our nervous system adapts to protect us. These survival responses—like fight, flight, or freeze, are intelligent adaptations to threat. They helped us to get through overwhelming experiences, but over time they can become patterns that leave us feeling stuck.
Coaching offers a path to gently shift those patterns— cultivating safety, connection, and greater ease in the present moment.
My Approach Is a Blending of :
Mindful Awareness
Practices and tools to help you connect with the present moment with more ease
Interpersonal Neurobiology
At its heart is integration —linking together the different parts of your inner and outer experiences to promote clarity, resilience, and well-being.Polyvagal Theory
Science-based insights and tools to help you understand and regulate your nervous system-- so you can feel more grounded, safe, and connected.Self-Compassion
Practices that help you meet your experience with warmth and non-judgement— softening the inner voice of self-criticism.
What You Might Experience:
Gentle, body-based practices to help you feel grounded
Mindful strategies to bring more ease and clarity to your daily life
Simple, science-informed tools to regulate your nervous system
A deeper sense of resilience, wholeness, and connection
🌱 At your pace. In your time.
Take care,
Esther
If you'd like to learn more or have a question, I’m here and happy to connect.
Soothe Your Nervous System
Feeling Distracted, Overwhelmed, or Disconnected?
These sensations may be your body’s way of signaling unresolved experiences still held within. Even after trying various tools and techniques, it might feel that something is still missing. You long to feel calm, joyful, present— with more ease.
Through post-traumautic growth coaching, you'll learn how to gently regulate your nervous system using practices rooted in mindfulness and neuroscience. You’ll also find connection in a community of likeminded women.
You’re warmly invitated to join this supportive space, guided by Esther Brandon’s compassionate, evidence-based approach to healing and post-traumatic growth.
If you have a history of trauma you might:
Be seeking meaningful connection with others walking a similar path
Be feeling both the anxiety and excitement of discovering your purpose and taking the next steps on your path
Be experiencing moments of overwhelm or feeling unsafe in the world.
Know that healing is possible— maybe you’ve started the journey, or you’re not sure where to start
Be tense or easily triggered by small everyday situations
Find connection challenging
Who I Serve
Understanding Trauma and the Path To Growth
Trauma isn't always about one single, dramatic event. As I learned from Dr. Peter A. Levine — trauma expert and founder of Somatic Experiencing®, a body-based healing method — trauma isn’t defined by what happened to us, but by how , it affected us inside, especially in the absence of an empathic witness to help us process it.
The word trauma originates from the Greek word for wound.
According to Dr. Judith Herman, another leading voice in trauma research, trauma can be understood as “anything that overwhelms our sensory capacity to adapt to our experience.” In other words, it can arise from experiences that felt like too much, too fast, or too soon— moments we couldn’t fully process or integrate at the time.
These unprocessed experiences often stay stored in our bodies and nervous systems, subtly influencing how we feel, respond, and relate to ourselves and others.
When you are ready, healing involves softly reconnecting with these stored experiences. Through movement and body-centered practices, — we can make room for sensations, and for beginniing to notice whatever is there. In this spaciousness, the nervous system can begin to soften, release, and find its natural balance again.
This is the heart of post-traumatic growth: a path of integration that leads us back home to ourselves.
With the right resources, your nervous system has a natural capacity to heal. Together, we’ll create a safe enough space to nourish your healing, strengthen your resilience, and support your growth.
What to Expect in Our Sessions and Groups
Growth and healing take time. They unfold gradually, supported by a sense of safety, small manageable steps, and a soft knowing of when we’re ready to reconnect and begin to repair. Our work together creates space for that process to happen with care.
Blending Mindful Awareness and Science
After a traumatic event or experience, life can feel tender and overwhelming. The nervous system is often more sensitive — easily triggered, and slow to calm.
Through my own trauma recovery, I learned the powerful impact of blending mindful awareness with science-based practices to restore balance, calm, and increase resilience. This blending is like medicine for the nervous system. When your nervous system is soothed, your body relaxes, your mind becomes clearer, and your whole system— your heart, brain, lungs, and gut shift into a state where healing and growth can take place. In both group and individual sessions, we gently weave together the following practices to nurture healing, resilience, and growth.
Mindfulness, Backed by Science
Mindful awareness is the natural capacity we all have to be aware of the present moment we’re in. Like a muscle, this awareness strengthens with gentle, consistent practice. Even short pauses—just a minute or two— can calm the nervous system, increase clarity, and restore balance. These small mindful moments throughout the day help ground you and increase resilience.
Mindfulness can be described as attending on purpose to our moment to moment experience with a non-judgmental, interested, friendly presence. (inspired by Tara Brach)
Self-Compassion Tools
Self-compassion creates a sense of inner safety, making it easier to try new things without being distracted by fear or an inner critic. When we meet ourselves with kindness, we become more resilient and it cultivates our well-being. Self-compassion is not self-indulgence— it’s strength rooted in both gentleness and fierceness— fierce like a mama bear protecting her cubs.
Science-Based Insights and Practices
Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB)
We explore how the mind, body, and relationships can be gently integrated with awareness and care. Integration— the linking of different parts of our inner and outer experience—is a key foundation of health and well-being. It strengthens our capacity to meet both difficult and joyful times with clarity, self-awareness, and resilience. Trauma can create disconnection. Integration helps restore your sense of wholeness.
Polyvagal Theory
You’ll learn about how the nervous system responds to safety and threat— and how physical sensations— like tension, pain, restlessness— relate to those states . At the heart of this system is the vagus nerve, which acts like a communication hub—signaling whether your body engages in calming or protective responses.
What Clients Are Saying
A Window Into My Story
“Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We feel more alive.
We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation and healing.”
– Jon Kabat Zinn
A Glimpse Into My Healing Journey
Through my own healing, I’ve come to understand how deeply our early childhood experiences shape the way we feel, connect, heal, and grow—throughout our entire lives.
As a child, I longed to feel emotionally safe and connected. Like many highly sensitive children, I experienced anxiety and often felt alone in my inner world. My mother and I shared what neurobiology now recognizes as an insecure attachment. Though we loved each other deeply, our relationship was often marked by misattunement and misunderstanding.
Years later, when she gently asked me for forgiveness, I was able to meet her with compassion. That moment of shared vulnerability became a turning point—a doorway to reconciliation and wholeness.
Rooted in Science, Grounded in Compassion
My path deepened as I immersed myself in the science of healing—Interpersonal Neurobiology, Attachment Theory, and Polyvagal Theory. One of my teachers, Dr. Dan Siegel of the Mindsight Institute, offered a framework that helped make sense of my experiences. He teaches that healing begins when we feel:
Safe, Seen, Soothed, and Secure—the 4 S’s of secure attachment.
These are not just childhood needs—they’re lifelong. When we feel these qualities, we build the foundation for connection, resilience, and inner trust. I often describe them as the water and nutrients that nourish the garden of our well-being. 🌱
A Journey of Mind, Body, and Spirit
Mindfulness became my anchor more than 35 years ago, beginning with a workshop led by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Over time, I wove together somatic healing, Jewish mindfulness practices, ancestral wisdom, and trauma-informed science.
Through my own recovery, I’ve come to believe that healing and repair are possible—at any stage of life.
Ten years ago, a breast cancer diagnosis brought this belief into sharper focus. Held by a loving community, I felt safe enough to be still—grounded enough for childhood memories to resurface. Grief opened space for clarity. Loss softened into love.
From Wounds to Wisdom
Within the wounds of my attachment story, I began to uncover seeds of resilience—a fierce, compassionate kindness toward myself and others. I reclaimed my strength, rooted in clarity, courage, and compassion.
This is the heart of Post-Traumatic Growth: not just healing, but returning to wholeness—with greater wisdom, compassion, and capacity to thrive.
An Invitation to Walk With Me
If you’re meeting grief, illness, life transitions, or other traumatic experiences, I invite you to walk this path with me—a path of reconnection, healing, and coming home to yourself.
The gift of healing trauma is that the woundedness becomes a gateway to freedom, healing and love.”
— Tara Brach
Art by Vicky Alvarez
