Ilana Grostern Coaching

03/20/2023

When I say aliveness, what do I mean? Aliveness is the opposite of numbness. It is the full capacity for responsive sensation, encapsulating the entire range of the human capacity to feel, from grief to joy. Aliveness is sensuality, eroticism, connection with the natural world around us, with people and with community. It is a sense that all is well with the world, and that the moments when things aren’t well are part of the ebb and flow of the way things are, part of a larger picture that we trust and don't seek to constantly control....

When I say aliveness, what do I mean? Aliveness is the opposite of numbness. It is the full capacity for responsive sensation, encapsulating the entire range of the human capacity to feel, from gri…

03/19/2023

The Art of Living Body First An Overview Introduction Our birthright is to feel wholly and vibrantly alive. From the moment we came into this world, our bodies guided us to express what we needed to feel complete and well. When we were small and helpless, it was our cries and our body language that cued our caregivers to meet our most basic human needs for food, safety, touch, and love....

The Art of Living Body First An Overview Introduction Our birthright is to feel wholly and vibrantly alive. From the moment we came into this world, our bodies guided us to express what we needed t…

03/14/2023

Coming soon! Use the sign up link to register and be notified when more information comes available.

Wholeness 101: Beyond Gender and Identity A 6-Week Online Group Coaching Experience for members of the Trans/Queer/GNC community Co-Hosted by Ilana Grostern and Zoë Galle.Day and Time TBA, beginnin…

03/13/2023

Wholeness 101: Reclaiming Your Agency Post-Abuse A 6-Week Online Group Coaching Experience Sundays from March 5 running through April 9, 6 – 8pmEST on Zoom. Who is this group coaching for? Abuse, both of the physical, and the less-evident psychological nature, are rampant. Whether you grew up in an abusive family dynamic, or found yourself in one in intimate relationship, the capacity to identify that you are being abused requires quite a bit of capacity to objectively analyze your own situation.��...

Wholeness 101: Reclaiming Your Agency Post-Abuse A 6-Week Online Group Coaching Experience Sundays from March 5 running through April 9, 6 – 8pmEST on Zoom. Who is this group coaching for? Abu…

02/01/2023

A little play on words for you this morning. I've been on a diet for the last few weeks and my mind is SHARP AF, so the double entendres are coming in fast and furious. Coherence matters. The word coherence implies the qualities of a unified whole. Matter is defined as something that takes up space and has weight. And the matter of being human involves being able to orient oneself in space and time - in otherwords, being able to locate ourselves in THIS moment....

A little play on words for you this morning. I’ve been on a diet for the last few weeks and my mind is SHARP AF, so the double entendres are coming in fast and furious. Coherence m…

01/30/2023

*Wholeness 101*
The premise of the work we do together in 1-1 coaching is to re-acquaint you with an internal experience of OKAY as a baseline state, and use that to benchmark your life against.

If you do not know how okay shows up sensation wise, you'll default to your intellect, which is not equipped to give you that information.

Towards the end of February I will be running a 6-week online group coaching course that walks you through the mechanics of okay, giving you the opportunity to practice in real time, and leaving you with skills you can apply right away.
While this group is aimed towards survivors of abuse, you do NOT have to a) share what happened to you, b) state that you've been abused, c) reveal anything about yourself that you don't want to.

SO.

If you've been living with low self-worth and a relentless inner critic, this group experience is for you!
Simply sign up here and you'll be automatically added to the waitlist. I'll send around an email to everyone who signed up so we can collectively determine the best day and time to run our sessions!

https://forms.gle/5N5CEbj6nXvR3TVz8

Please share this video or tag anyone you think might benefit from this Pay What You Can Afford group coaching opportunity!

01/25/2023

https://garysharpe.substack.com/p/stop-hammering-ourselves?fbclid=IwAR3bYXY8kJ1RTIO-NYLOpK6RjKl61UmcqdGjpnPl0N8WHg_FyFR6jWhE-jw

Why We Need to be Relaxed About Our Healing

01/16/2023

* Wholeness 101: Reclaiming Your Agency Post-Abuse - A 6-Week Online Group Coaching Experience *

Who is this group coaching for?

Abuse, both of the physical, and the less-evident psychological nature, are rampant. Whether you grew up in an abusive family dynamic, or found yourself in one in intimate relationship, the capacity to identify that you are being abused requires quite a bit of capacity to objectively analyze your own situation.

This course is for you if:

• You identify as a victim of abuse.
• You have accepted that you have been abused, and are unwilling to continue to subject yourself to the abuse.
• You have to continue to be in a relationship with your abuser (co-parenting, for example) but want to learn how to set boundaries.
• You have exited an abusive situation and are trying to figure who you are.

Our 6-weeks together will stay within the bounds of coaching, meaning that this is not a diagnostic arena, it is not a therapy space, and it is not a support group. It is a space in which you can expect to be treated with kindness, dignity, respect, and in which you will be believed.

Together we will engage in somatic practices, supported by information about what abuse does to the developing nervous system, and the pathways to reclaiming your agency. The focus will be on reconnecting to interoceptive awareness (the capacity to feel what is happening inside of you) as a means to return to the present moment where you know you are safe from harm, and building outwards from this awareness to begin to the define what is most important to you, and gain clarity on what you want your life to look like moving forward.

In session learning will be supported by small, optional assignments in between sessions, which will encourage integration of concepts.



Interested in learning more? Contact me through DM or through my website.



This is a Pay-What-You-Can-Afford opportunity.

Ready to enroll? Get on the waitlist by signing up at the link below, and you’ll be contacted when more information becomes available.

https://forms.gle/exwnYSywrDJ7Sbja7

12/12/2022

Did you know you’re living in a bypass?

The problem with not valuing the input from the body and defaulting instead to the story ABOUT the body is that the second we engage with a stimulus we go directly to OUR value. As humans.
Isn’t that nuts? And yet it’s how you live your life. Because you weren’t aware there was any other way.

So instead of dealing with health issues as they arise, and seeing them as they very value neutral messengers that they are, we make them into us as moral failures.

Sound like a stretch? Think about it. Your shoulder hurts because you’ve kept exercising on something that was once a twinge and now is a torn ligament. And now you feel like no one will love you because you are forced to rest and might lose your muscle tone. I’m sure you can think of many other similar examples.

Slide 1 is the pathway we walk so often that we live in the bypass as demonstrated on slide 2.

Our wellness depends, however, on being able to stay for a bit in stimulus —-> sensation —-> sense making FOR AS LONG AS IT TAKES to build a new story of value about the sensation itself. Full stop. And to keep our personal worth out of that equation.
It’s doable. I’m walking people through this novel way of relating to themselves daily. I do it myself. You can learn as well, at any time in your life.

Your symptoms do NOT determine your worth. You do that. On your terms. And you remember that you can be well.

12/08/2022

Is there a more confusing, more nebulous statement a person in a position of authority can make to a person coming to them for wellness support? While well intentioned, statements like this only add to the internal chaos most people are experiencing.

Why? Because “feelings” is the wrong word to use. To feel is to experience sensation. And what we label as emotion, ie - the cognitive translation of sensation, always originates in the body first, as sensation. But the bodymind connection is not established, and so instead of a clear picture of what is going on we get static, AKA anxiety, depression, dread, etc.

Being able to:
A) Notice the sensations of the body (aka interoception),
B) Attend to them - hold attention on them, observe them - without needing to act on them assuming no immediate risk to the self,
C) Develop a new story of value of the sensations of the body and update the habit of mind to corroborate the evidence

is the key to “feeling your feelings”. If you don’t work the body into the equation as the ORIGIN of your distress/discomfort/disease, then being asked to “feel your feelings” will continue to be experienced as a failure on your part to figure yourself out.

Think of this approach as skill building - something it was your birthright to learn during your early developmental years. For many reasons, you were denied access to your birthright, and now is the time to reclaim your authority.

It’s never too late.

11/04/2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/opinion/sunday/how-culture-shapes-our-senses.html

Anthropologists and psychologists are finding that sensory perception is culturally specific.

10/24/2022

In all my years as a growth-oriented individual, I missed one universal truth - wellness is incidental. Our current cultural hegemony promotes the concepts of self-help and self-care as absolute requirements, but the mindset around them is always pass/fail. I have not met a single client to date who believes that they are doing enough - enough driving past comfort levels, enough self-shaming, enough doing the things they really don’t want to do and…...

In all my years as a growth-oriented individual, I missed one universal truth – wellness is incidental.  Our current cultural hegemony promotes the concepts of self-help and self-care as…

10/11/2022

Labels are temporal. They exist relative only to the time and place in which you find you self. They are contextual relative to setting, not to YOU. They are helpful for setting yourself in the context of zeitgeist, but don’t tell you very much about who you are.
In another time, in another era, in another universe, would the labels you use to identify on the daily be relevant? Which parts of you would be with you in another era, and what would you be valourized for?

09/29/2022

Possessed by a gift ---> Possessed of a gift

09/16/2022

“The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.”

~Erich Fromm

09/07/2022

Join Wombs with a View - Maternal Musings with Jenny Bee and Friends and me for part two of our five part series on Nervous Systems 101. Today’s topic is Do Less to Be More!

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=626168152446143&id=108096780919952