Graceful
Coaching
Graceful Coaching
Crip Doula ~ Facilitator ~ Integration Coach
Welcome to the sacred art of radical, devotional self-care. I offer low-income coaching and facilitation from a compassionate, trauma-informed landscape, providing you with a landing place to heal by embracing the innate worthiness inside us all. Come explore, learn, play and integrate day to day life and transformations!
I also offer workshops, webinars, and consultations for professionals and organizations seeking to create safer, more accessible spaces and learn about disability, ableism, and how to be in solidarity.
What is a Crip Doula?
I understand the term crip doula to be birthed of disability justice. We reclaim and empower ourselves with the word "crip", short for "cripple". Similar to birth and death doulas, and also known as a disability coach, a crip doula is a person with a disability who supports a newly disabled person come to terms with their new reality by means of holding space and sharing resources. As a crip doula, I mentor, coach, and model the inherent worth of disability, having gone through a similar journey and by continuing to live a full, joyful life.
I know what it's like to be treated as defective in the ableist world. Western medicine is limited with its emphasis on singling out symptoms to be fixed and conditions to be cured, and when that can't happen we are left alone, in pain and exhausted. Many times, our families and friends need us to be "super crips" who keep up with the able-bodied or completely dependent on them, and strangers dismiss us. We are often under-resourced and isolated, invalidated, judged and shamed for our circumstances. I advocate for the celebration of our visible and invisible disabilities, including trauma and neurodiversity.
We are exceptional, loved and needed because of our diversities (including disabilities), not in spite of them.
Integration
I rewrote my story by re-evaluating what healing means, embodying and integrating my experiences, and treating myself and others as whole beings full of intrinsic health. I allow disability to be one (very present!) part of a full life experience and encourage you to do the same. Being active in our healing and live takes appropriate support from many modalities, starting with listening to our own bodyminds and inner wisdom. With awareness of the ways our internal, expressed and perceived intersectional identities and accompanying social injustice affects us, I support your well-being by exploring hidden gems: the power to heal is already within you.
All humans have bodyminds. There is an interconnectedness and interrelatedness of body and mind, an intuitive eagle view of wholeness that includes the synergism of physiological, mental or psychological, emotional, and spiritual. With disability, we happen to be spoonies, and there is so much worthiness and wisdom to be discovered. The world is imperfect, yet by doing our part, we can create space to be our authentic selves, embrace our disabilities, honour our access needs and live joyful lives full of radical, devotional self-care.
I firmly believe that self-care is an act of kindness, to ourselves and others. There is magic in honouring our true capacities. When we heal ourselves, we are healing the world.