GREETINGS!

Thank you for investing a few moments looking over the offerings I bring to the world.

Do you believe that what you bring to the world matters? Regardless of who you are and what you do… you matter! Over the years I’ve come to believe that the number one disease in the world is lack of self-esteem.

Subsequently what we do in the world … in our families, in our chosen area of work, as members of communities … education attained, income or status arrived at… we question this issue of “mattering”. We often do this quietly, silently undermining the joy we experience as we judge ourselves internally.

Most of us can readily create a list of things to change about ourselves towards some idealized and perhaps unrealistic standard. Can we as readily create and honor the list of our assets? How do we stay in balance as we seek to improve ourselves all the while remembering these positive assets? How do we manage change when we are often giving up sleep just to keep up with all that we demand of ourselves?

There are many options today. Of those, I offer coaching, yoga and bereavement support each of which is explained in more detail within this website. Honoring that we are amazing, complex and complicated beings, each aspect has rich growth potential:

• Coaching – working one-on-one with individuals has me marveling at how we each make choices, how our lives unfold, how the twists and turns that life delivers create fascinating tapestries.
• Yoga – this is far more than mere physical postures or asana that many think. As I delve deeper into the anatomy and physiology of the body, the deeper my respect goes that our bodies actually work as they do! Integrating the mind and spirit with the body is a lifetime of study and inspiration.
• Bereavement – the power of the human spirit to take the most powerful of blows to the mind and heart is continually inspiring. To watch as a bereaved parent rises from despair to working to change the world for the better… this sometimes feels almost miraculous.

Then there was Oberusel, Germany. Towards the end of March, 2003, my husband, Tom and I traveled to this small town outside Frankfurt. Tom had an engineering project that needed on-site attention. We stayed in a small business hotel in an area where few people spoke any English. Having long days alone, I did a lot of exploring. I started by looking in the phone books for relatives – on my mother’s side the Schoeny’s had come from Germany decades before. It is a rare US city that has this name in a phone book. But in Germany, there were pages of “us”! We were also fast approaching the first anniversaries of my son, Jim’s death and funeral. Many things were flowing through my mind during those long quiet days.

A friend had encouraged me to visit a nearby town where she was born. I arranged a cab trip that allowed me exploration time. Walking around that ancient town, admiring the architecture, listening to the language and sounds I was transported. I made my way to the ruins of a castle that a Kaiser had built for his widowed mother some 300 years prior. Sitting on the overlook in the shadows of the parapets, I watched large eagle-like birds soaring in the sun. I was enthralled with the look of the village homes spread below – so quaint to my eyes. I thought about all those Schoeny’s out there that might be distant relatives – family from which I had arisen – unknown to me. How far from Phoenix, Arizona I was! And, yet here was some of my family’s homeland. What if they hadn’t existed? Would I, now?

The following day I sat in a park like cemetery in the middle of Oberusel – ancient and new graves surrounded me in the most beautiful cemetery I’ve ever seen. I walked through this area each day to stretch my legs, admire the beauty, read the grave markers and understand the history that lived in this town. Each day I watched living generations come to clear away the winter decorations of fir and pine replacing these with fresh flats of pansies and bulbs. I had never seen a cemetery where every plot was a floral tribute to a beloved!

As Tom and I sat in that beautiful park-like cemetery on April 1st, there was a shift of consciousness. Like a kaleidoscope shifting its colored stones, I realized that every single person who had ever lived… who would ever live mattered.

• If the early traders had not come together each year in Frankfurt to move goods some 350 years before, if the Rothschild’s had not been the local money changers…where would trade and the banking system of the world be today?
• If the town of Oberusel had not survived the strafing of Frankfurt during WWII, would this beautiful landscape and cemetery exist for me to take solace and inspiration from?

And, on and on goes my thinking until I now live in the belief that each person matters – whether our names are in any history book or not.

In my coaching, I help clients to fully step up to their position of leadership beyond managing the daily tasks at hand. Together we figure out how to handle options such as career changes, marital shifts, issues with children, aging in a youth oriented world and on and on the list goes. Always it is based on honoring that we… each of us… matters.

Let’s have a conversation to start. If we are a good fit, we’ll decide how to proceed. If not, I’ll help you find the right coach. I maintain a huge list of specialists in many fields of expertise. I’m always glad to refer to other coaches whose specialties compliment mine as well as to practitioners of other areas of finance, counseling and so forth.

Hugs to you on your journey of discovery!

Barbara