Hi Friends,

New clients generally come to me for one of 3 reasons:

• Pain or movement issues

• Chronic disease or other ongoing medical condition

• Chronic Stress and/or mental health situations such as anxiety and depression

Lauren checked all 3 boxes.

Her first session? "This is witchcraft!" she said with excitement. You can imagine my glee, knowing that really, she's just good at applying information.

Last month her doctor told her that her mold levels were down...markedly. You can read more about that experience here.

So what happened between that magical moment 2 years ago and the tears of joy from her doctor's news? Perseverance.

It wasn't all magical. It wasn't always pretty. Sometimes it was a text saying she passed a parasite (yay!). Sometimes it was a session lying in bed because anything else just wasn't an option at the moment.

Lauren has experienced that messy middle in a way some of us can never understand. But the difference is that she choses to not be the victim, not be the martyr. She kept investigating and being curious. Lauren shows up for herself consistently.

Lauren's reflection:

"I call Amy a "good witch." I mean that with full reverence.

When I first came to this work, I didn't entirely understand what was happening — and two years in, I still don't always. That's part of the point. This work operates in territory that language hasn't fully colonized yet, which is exactly why it works.

I came to it through chronic illness. Illness has a way of demanding that you inhabit your body — that you stop running from it, stop outsmarting it, stop performing your way around it. Getting sick was, in retrospect, an invitation to re-associate: to come back into a body I'd spent a lifetime dissociating from, for reasons both personal and cultural. Amy's work gave me a vehicle for that return.

What happens in a session is genuinely hard to describe in conventional terms. I map points of bone or structure, and as I do, something softens. Fascia loosens. Becomes more fluid. Structures that have been holding on for dear life — sometimes decades — begin to release and reorganize. Old movement patterns give way to new ones. A body that learned to heal in stillness and quietude starts to move again, gently, with something like permission.

Over time, this has shifted my nervous system in ways I couldn't have engineered. Two years of weekly sessions have been two years of slowly, steadily unwinding from the chronic fight-or-flight that had become my baseline. More parasympathetic activity. More capacity. More of what I think of as — finally — rest.

I want to be honest: it's not always comfortable. There are occasional aches. Soreness that asks something of me. I'm still learning to receive that as feedback rather than threat — to sit with sensation rather than flee from it. That's the work inside the work.

Because this isn't just about the body. It's about mindset. It has taught me to lead with curiosity instead of control, to surrender knowing in exchange for something more genuine — something more humane. That orientation has radiated outward into my health coaching work, where I sit with clients who are navigating their own complicated relationships to their bodies, and remind them that their bodies are speaking — not attacking.

I refer clients to Amy's work regularly. Not just because it has been one of my most central healing modalities, but because it is a gateway to unknitting ourselves from the stories we've wrapped around our bodies. Trauma. Perceived limitation. Shame. The belief that we are broken. This work quietly, steadily asks: what if you just got curious instead?

Many of us have had adverse body experiences and just kept running. This work teaches us to stop. To ask. To listen. To trust — incrementally, imperfectly, and with compassion.

You don't have to understand it for it to work. You just have to show up."

Lauren Freedman is a certified health and wellness coach specializing in chronic illness, neurodivergence, and peri/menopause — helping clients build capacity for their lives through nervous system support, mindset work, and the compassionate reframe that they are not responsible for the systems that challenge them, but are responsible for learning to thrive anyway.

Substack: Chronic Coach Notes | Website: uninvisiblecoaching.com

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This content is for entertainment and education. Not medical advice, not therapy. Every topic here is basically crowdsourced from your lives, your stories, and your “please explain this chaos” requests. Thanks for all the brilliant newsletter ideas.