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Paths to Healing, Wellbeing and Self-Awareness: An 8-week online course for women starting this January, 2022

Paths to Healing, Wellbeing and Self-Awareness: An 8-week online course for women starting this January, 2022

Taught by Teresa McGlashan, LMFT and Christina Giammalva, Somatic Counselor

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
     We are offering our life-changing course again this January. We’ve received very positive feedback on our previous courses and always continue improving. This one will be filled with useful teachings that make it easier to understand how to navigate your life and find inner wellbeing. We’re teaching what we’ve spent a lifetime discovering and embodying.
     This course fosters a community of growth and healing. We are all students and guides. We’ll learn together and laugh together (and maybe cry a little), and you’ll feel like you’ve been given the manual we all wish we’d come with to planet Earth.
     The work is personal, so the course is intimate, with a maximum of 8-10 (10-12 including us) women. The group will meet once a week for 1.5 hours. Each participant is also offered a private session. You will receive meditations, tools, and teachings in-between class. The classes will be recorded in case you can’t be there in person every time.
     Please join us and pass this invitation on to any woman in your life who would benefit.
Blessings and Love,
Teresa and Christina

Praise from former participants:
At times throughout my day, I think about the group and a rush of joy comes over me to think about such beautiful woman sharing space and being safe enough to open up to things that may be challenging otherwise. Janell NY

As a result of this course, a profound shift has occurred for me relative to understanding self-love. I have come to recognize that I have been exceedingly harsh to myself my whole life and have actively and frequently withheld love and kindness from myself. Carol CA

I’m more open, patient and understanding of where people are in their lives around me.  And I understand that I only have control over me and I have taken responsibility for my part in everything.  The tools we have been given have given me freedom from the jail I was in. Erin, France 

The constant reminder to drop into my body was super helpful. I thought the way the course was organized and presented was excellent so it was easy to follow along and participate. Katie NH 

I’m so grateful for the one-on-one session. The time you spent helping me figure out my Enneagram type was a gift and provides another lens. Teri, CT


WHERE: We’ll meet online using ZOOM

WHEN:  8 Wednesdays: Jan. 12, 19, February 2, 9, 23, March 2, 16, 23 

Please let us know if you would prefer 3:30pm-5:00pm Pacific/6:30pm-8:00pm Eastern OR
8am-9:30am Pacific/11am-12:30pm Eastern

COST: $675 (or 3 payments of  $225) Scholarships are available for those who need one.

SIGN UP/INQUIRIES: Send an email to Teresa at teresa@teresamcglashan.com or Christina at giammalvacf@gmail.com

During this course, we’ll work together to:

  1. Learn what causes happiness and unhappiness. Discover practices drawn from eastern philosophy, positive psychology, somatic healing therapy and neuroscience that grant access to deep feelings of joy, and release limiting and painful emotions and thoughts. See how shifts in our perspective can create powerful and long-lasting transformation in the experience of our psyche, our body, our nervous system and our relationships.
  2. Find and understand your own unique personality type. Self-awareness is the key to navigating life with more grace. This kind of knowledge allows us to better flow with life’s ups and downs and accept “what is” rather than our ideas of how it “should” be.
  3. Explore and address areas in which you feel stuck or contractedEveryone has an inner GPS system that let’s us know our own “yeses” and “noes.” Learn how we’ve been taught to override it and rediscover your innate capacity to make good decisions that are in alignment with your deepest knowing.
  4. Learn how to access compassionate witnessing and true understanding and acceptance. To meet our patterns and stories with love and acceptance, we need to understand who we truly are, and come to know the difference between our thoughts (the voice in the head) and our conscious awareness. (This is like an inner superpower!)
  5. Build a sustainable practice of wellbeing that enables you to enjoy the good times more and the hard times with greater perspective, understanding and patience.
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Finding Your Path to Fundamental Wellbeing and Healing: An 8-week course offered this February, 2020

Taught by Teresa McGlashan, LMFT and Christina Giammalva, Somatic Counselor

We are offering a life-changing course filled with core teachings that make it easier to understand how to navigate life and find inner wellbeing. We’re teaching what we’ve spent a lifetime discovering and embodying.

This course fosters a community of growth and healing. We are all students and guides. We’ll learn together and laugh together (and maybe cry a little), and you’ll feel like you’ve been given the manual we all wish we’d come with to planet Earth.

The work is personal, so the course is intimate, with 6-8 participants. The group will meet once a week for 1.5 hours. Each participant is also offered a private session. You will receive meditations, tools, and teachings in-between class. The classes will be recorded in case you can’t be there in person every time.

Finding Your Path to Fundamental Wellbeing and Healing: An 8-week course offered this February, 2020

During this course, we’ll work together to:

  1. Identify techniques, drawn from Eastern Philosophy, Positive Psychology and the latest neuroscience that grant access to deep feelings of joy, and release limiting and painful emotions and thoughts (even on a rainy day)! See how tiny shifts in our awareness can create powerful and long-lasting transformation in all aspects of our life.
  2. Find and understand your own unique personality type. Self-awareness is the key to navigating life with more grace. This kind of knowledge allows us to better flow with life’s ups and downs rather than trying to swim upstream or through rocks. (Ouch!)
  3. Explore and address areas in which you feel stuck or contracted. Whether that’s in the area of career, relationship, physical health or meaning, we will identify the cause and the “cure” for releasing the culprits of our “unhappiness.”
  4. Come to know some of your core wounds, and some ways that healing becomes possible when we deeply befriend ourselves.
  5. Learn how to access compassionate witnessing and true understanding and acceptance. To meet our patterns and stories with love and acceptance, we need to understand who we truly are, and come to know the difference between our thoughts (the voice in the head) and our conscious awareness. (This is like an inner superpower!)
  6. Build a sustainable practice of wellbeing that enables you to enjoy the good times more and the hard times with greater perspective, understanding and growth.

WHERE: We will meet online using ZOOM, an easy to master way of seeing everyone in the class simultaneously.

WHEN: Monday, February 24, 2020 from 8:30-10:00am PT/11:30-1:00pm ET

COST: $600 (Scholarships are available. Please ask if it would help you to join the class.)

SIGN UP: Send an email to Teresa at teresa@teresamcglashan.com or Christina at giammalvacf@gmail.com

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The Healing Power of Unconditional Love

What is Unconditional Love? Unconditional Love is about loving regardless of the other person “deserving” it. In contrast to conditional love, which is about earning love through one’s behaviors, when we love unconditionally we offer acceptance, respect and kindness to ourselves or another whether or not we like or desire the behaviors or thoughts/ emotions/ feelings we experience.

So what good is this kind of love? From my experience, it is the magical formula of true wellbeing and transformation.

For example, a client (whom I will call Stacey) realizes she has lived with the subconscious core story that she is unlovable. As a child her parents were busy and neglected her, often not meeting important needs for attention and support. She assumed this meant there was something wrong with her. Until now, Stacey has subconsciously believed that if she’d been more lovable, they wouldn’t have neglected her as they did.

The Healing Power of Unconditional LoveIt is very common for children to mistakenly assume that the things their parents do and say are a result of their own inherent worth/ character/ loveability.  Once Stacey can meet her younger self with unconditional love and see the grief and fear and anger that have come from this misunderstanding, she is able to viscerally understand how acceptable and lovable this younger self is. She begins to replace a foundational core wound with a kinder and more accepting attitude toward herself.

It seems there is a hidden therapist within all of us that can bring unconditional acceptance to our thoughts and emotions. We all have the capacity to do this. We can step back from our feelings and thoughts and witness them without judgment. This sounds easy but when it comes to our thoughts and feelings, most of us automatically believe the thoughts that pop into our heads and the feelings that follow.

It is a huge step toward freedom when we wake up to the truth that our painful thoughts (and therefore our feelings) about ourselves (and others) simply aren’t true! They are misunderstandings from our childhood experiences or our family’s conditioning or from the culture at large.

Our suffering is directly related to our beliefs about ourselves–the more unloving and critical we are toward ourselves, the more we will suffer. The more we accept and love ourselves, warts and all, the more we will accept others and feel joy and delight in life as it is.

Orienting toward life from unconditional love can be one of the gifts of psychotherapy and counseling. Recognizing our basic lovability and healing the parts of us that don’t see things that way, starts a cascade of goodness. Life becomes a lot more enjoyable when this happens.

If you want to learn more about the healing power of unconditional love or share with me your own story, please be in touch!

Why It's Hard to Be a Modern Couple (and what you need to learn to be successful)

Why It’s Hard to Be a Modern Couple (and what you need to learn to be successful)

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.   –Rumi

You may have heard the expression, “you can be happy or you can be right.”  I find that one of the primary blocks to wellbeing in relationship seems to be the longing we have for our partners to acknowledge their wrongdoing and admit to the rightness of our point of view. The unlikelihood of this happening doesn’t seem to deter couples from gamely struggling onward, as if there were actually a chance that their partner could or would surrender their own point of view.

It turns out that many of the things that we humans think of as right and wrong are matters of opinion. It’s understandable that we think our opinions are true given that for most of human history we’ve tended to marry people from the same culture or tribe. This prevented many conflicts. People from a similar background are more likely to agree on how to be a man or a woman, how to raise children, how to prepare food, and who is in charge of which life arena.

Why It's Hard to Be a Modern Couple (and what you need to learn to be successful)Modern relationships bring together people who have different backgrounds and conditioning. Without the tools to work through differences, relationships often sour and resentments build up. So how do we work through differences? How do we let go of being “right”?

There seem to be two important first steps. One is learning how to talk about differences without blaming or criticizing your partner. The second is being willing to address and work on the concerns of both people. These steps teach us to understand different perspectives and allow us to engage in authentic communication that gets to the heart of our needs.

Marshall Rosenberg’s Compassionate Communication is one great tool for learning how to communicate authentically and without blame.  One simple way of evaluating if you know how to do this is to see if what you are saying is inarguable. For instance, “I felt sad when you said that” can’t be denied while “you are always saying sad things” is arguable. “My chest feels tight and I’m afraid” is inarguable. “You treated me badly” is likely to be denied by your partner.

A lot of couples try to solve the problem of differences by withholding their complaints from each other. This doesn’t work any better than blame or criticism. The good news is when we communicate authentically and listen without becoming defensive, it opens us up to real understanding of ourselves and our partner. This leads to more love—and more love equals a lot more fun.

Waking Up: Relevant to Psychotherapy?

Waking Up: Relevant to Psychotherapy?

What does it mean to “wake up”? What does psychotherapy have to do with waking up and does waking up have anything to do with finding a life purpose? Does it have anything to do with healing? Thanks to people like Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now), Oprah Winfrey (Super Soul Sunday), the Dalai Lama, Adyashanti, Byron Katie and many others, the idea of waking up has made it into the mainstream.

For some people waking up simply refers to what happens every morning. For others it means waking up to our true nature. For others it means recognizing something important that we’d been unaware of previously.

Waking up is an important part of psychotherapy because waking up to what is actually here (previously unseen) allows change to happen. Waking up means that we gain a more accurate perspective. Like waking up in the morning, we realize we used to be asleep.

In the psychological realm a person becomes aware of the internal beliefs and patterns that have been behind the choices, behaviors and experiences of life. In the spiritual dimension a person can awaken to what is always present and yet rarely recognized–awareness itself.

IMG_3944
A client (who we will call Stacey) realizes she’s lived with a core story of being unlovable because her parents were busy and didn’t spend much time with her. Children assume what happens around them is their fault. When Stacey looks deeply, she can see that their busyness had nothing to do with her. Through seeing this deeply, she is able to reconnect with her inherent lovability.

Or there’s Michael, a client who realizes that he has many thoughts that turn out to be untrue upon closer inspection. Things like “I need to be able to change the things I don’t like.” Or, “it is unbearable to feel helpless.” Michael wakes up to his innate capacity to become aware of his thoughts without always believing they are true. He discovers that he can question thoughts he has automatically acted upon and consciously choose a different perspective.

Waking up is one of the most remarkable things that human beings can do. Through self-reflection our lives change and infinite possibilities open to us.

Diving Deep: Learning What Lives Below the Surface

Diving Deep: Learning What Lives Below the Surface

Moving couples from conflict to compassion

Over the years, I’ve seen that couples are fighting imaginary foes. Each has their own interpretation of what has happened and only when they reveal to themselves and their partner what is going on below the surface do understanding and compassion become possible.

To share an example, my clients Lynn and Steve (not their real names) had a fight one night because Steve told Lynn he would be back at a certain time and he was late. Typically in a case like this, the couple thinks they are fighting about the details—in this case whether it was reasonable for him to be late without calling. Lynn is sure it wasn’t okay and Steve argues that it isn’t a big deal and tries to resolve the situation by explaining what happened.

When we look below the surface, Lynn notices a deep sense of unease followed quickly by hurt and then anger with thoughts like “if he truly loved me he would be more considerate.”

When I ask Lynn to pay attention to the unease, she remembers feeling something similar as a teenager when she’d been left alone most of the time by her divorcing parents. She’d felt abandoned.  This is what she feels when Steve is late and not communicating with her. This is why it matters so much to her that he stay in touch when he’s running late. 

When Steve takes the deep dive, he notices that he feels frustrated, confused, guilty and rebellious.  He’s been trying hard to communicate more.  But when Lynn gets upset painful thoughts go through his mind like “It’s never enough” and “I can’t win.” 

Steve feels guilty for not calling because he doesn’t like Lynn to feel upset but he also feels rebellious, as if Lynn is a controlling parent forcing him to do something unreasonable. Finally, her reaction confuses him.  It seems too intense for the situation.

sunset in the amazonTaking the “deep dive” allows for truer understanding and trust to be born.  Not just in our partners but most importantly in ourselves.  Until we stop and look, we don’t know what the deeper feelings and thoughts are that drive us. 

In this example, Lynn and Steve can both see how destabilizing it is for Lynn when she feels alone. Steve now understands that Lynn isn’t acting like a parent when she asks him to keep her updated.  Instead, she hates feeling abandoned and afraid. He now better understands how intense the experience is for her and where it comes from.

Lynn now recognizes that even though she’s asked Steve to be a better communicator, he hasn’t really understood why it was so important to her. It has just felt controlling and unreasonable to him. She can also see that her reaction isn’t just caused by what Steve is doing but has roots in earlier experiences.

Again and again I see understanding and compassion arise out of diving deep. Light bulbs go on as couples realize how differently they are wired and how differently they have understood the situation.

The hardest part seems to be learning how to communicate in a way that doesn’t blame our partner for what we are feeling and learning to listen to our partners with curiosity rather than defensiveness.  Love blossoms again and again when we learn how to do this.

Operating Instructions for Wellbeing

Operating Instructions for Wellbeing

Clarity and Wellbeing are ALWAYS present


If you are feeling anxious or depressed, wellbeing may seem entirely hidden. To hear that it is always present but simply veiled may seem like fairy tale. But it is an experientially accurate description that can be tested.

Myth:  We believe getting what we want makes us happy. Believing this means we put all of our energy into the experience, relationship or object that seems associated with feeling a sense of wellbeing. Have you noticed that you/we do this?

Operating Instructions for WellbeingReality:  When we get what we want we feel happy because for a little while we aren’t wanting anything other than what we have.  For a brief moment we are Buddhas, content with the way things are.

Try noticing this for yourself. You’ll see that when you are happy, you aren’t trying to push something away or believing a thought that you need something in order to be happy.

Why it Matters: You can spend your life having brief moments of happiness after working hard to get what you want. Or you can learn to access the contentment that is always present and use the difficulties that arise as the beautiful compost that grows wellbeing.

How do we do that? We need to find our own “bridges” to wellbeing. We need to discover that there is already something in us which is totally content and totally accepting of our situation. We can access this and look at our lives from this wise and accepting perspective.

Operating Instructions for Wellbeing
Happiness is simply to allow everything to be exactly as it is from moment to moment.  —Rupert Spira

Accessing this clarity is true freedom.  It feels good.  It sees clearly. We know the next thing to do that isn’t driven by fear or by hurt or by automatic habits. Without access to this natural clarity (another word for happiness), we are stuck trying to make the world cooperate with our plans.  Sometimes it does and often it doesn’t.

This is the rollercoaster ride of life. And like all rollercoasters, you can’t get off in the middle of the ride.  This isn’t a problem if you have access to clarity and wellbeing.  We can accept the ups and downs of life and “enjoy the ride” if we have the manual for accessing our everpresent wisdom.

If you want to work with me to figure out how to reliably access wellbeing or to address patterns that get in the way of it, please give me a call.  This is my passion and expertise.

Speaking Your Partner’s Language of Love

Speaking Your Partner’s Language of Love

Couples often come to me feeling depleted. The bank account of love has been drained. So one of the important things we do is figure out how to replenish the love bank.  The funny thing is that couples often end up realizing that their partner WAS trying to love them.  It just wasn’t landing. It turns out that couples usually speak a different love language. We’ve been doing our best but innocently missing the mark!

Over 25 years ago, my father showed me a laminated card in his wallet.  On it he’d written a number of things that meant love to my mother.  He confessed that if he didn’t write it down and refer to it, he would forget so different was her list from his own. They’d come to their lists by having a talk about what meant love to each of them.

In 1995 Gary Chapman published 5 Languages of Love which very skillfully categorized these ways of experiencing love.  Gary explained that people tend to have one or two ways that they experience feeling loved and these are often different than their partner’s ways.  Taking the quiz in his book (or on his website: www.5lovelanguages.com ) allows a person to grasp their own way of experiencing and usually expressing love.

We tend to give the way we want to receive.  But in order for a relationship to flourish, we need to learn how to give in a way that our partners can receive and vice versa.  So I recommend taking Gary Chapman’s quiz.  Make sure your partner does as well. Find out which of the five languages you each use: Quality Time, Touch, Acts of Service, Affirmations, Gifts. Get really familiar with your own and your partners.

I tell my clients that they may very well feel like a toddler using their partner’s language of love.  If it were natural to love your partner the way they need it, you’d have been doing it!  Like any skill, it takes practice.  Like my father, you’ll have to find a way to remind yourself.  With practice and commitment, your love bank balance will soar.

Enjoy the discovery.

Learning to Access Well-Being

Learning to Access Well-Being

What if we get to choose our perspective?

You believe you have problems.  In fact, you may be working with me to solve these problems. There is another point of view that doesn’t see anything as a problem.  This perspective is always available to us.

My tip for today is to guide you through a simple 4-step process that allows you to look at your life situation from the perspective of “no problem and no fear.”

Why bother with that?  The reason is simple: it feels good and gives us much greater clarity about our life situation. What a miracle to discover that we can choose our point of view!

In passing on this understanding I am drawing in part on an approach developed by Warren Berland who wrote a great little book called Out of the Box: Freedom is a Choice.  I recommend taking a look at his website.

Screen Shot 2016-03-08 at 3.14.53 PMBerland helps us orient by first asking us to imagine ourselves trapped in a box unable to get out. How would we feel?  Notice the sensations in your body as you imagine yourself enclosed in a box. Notice your emotions. Notice your thoughts. This is the experience of being “In the Box.” This is also what it generally feels like when we feel stuck in our lives.

Now, picture the top of the box coming off.  You step out into the light.  Nothing binds you any longer.  How does that feel?  Notice your body, your thoughts and your feelings.  This is the experience of being “Out of the Box.” This is also generally how you feel in life when you are unafraid, free, in the flow, alive and present.

Now that you have a feeling for “In the Box” and “Out of the Box” you’re ready to apply it in your life. This four-step process can be applied any time you realize that you feel stuck.

Step 1: Know that you are stuck.  Acknowledging this and taking the time to stop is a big deal.  How do you know you’re stuck?  Any time you feel there is a problem and it’s bothering you is a time when you’re “in the box.” The upset may be mild or major but bottom line, there will be unpleasant sensations somewhere if you look. You don’t like something.  You are afraid of something happening.  In that moment, there is a problem.

Step 2: For a moment put your problem aside.  Reassure the part of yourself that wants to solve this problem that you will come back to it soon.  But for a moment, put the whole complex of emotion and thought on the back burner. It can be helpful to picture yourself putting your problem on a shelf, out of the way.

Step 3: Access the place of “no problem and no fear.” You know this place already.  You’ve been there before. Remember what it felt like to step out of the box.  Remember a time when you felt free, at peace, in the flow, without fear.  From that place you know that all is well with the world.  That’s the place of “no problem and no fear.”

Ask yourself, “what if all fear were gone—how would the world look to me?  What would I notice right now about where I am?”  Simply look from that point of view—know that it is accessible through a simple shift of perspective. The wonderful thing is that you can choose to look at life from out of the box. It doesn’t have to happen by accident or because all the conditions of your life came together for a magical moment.

If your mind begins to protest you can smile at that as well.  Whether you feel the sense of freedom or not, you can access this always available perspective. You just have to choose to do it.

Step 4: From the place of “no problem and no fear” look at the life situation you put aside a short time ago.  Stay in the clarity and wisdom—in the freedom and relaxation of this perspective and see what comes to you when you look at your life situation from this other point of view. You will be amazed at what you see when you look at your life situation without fear and angst.

It is important to think of these steps as exercising a muscle.  You are literally honing a skill and making the choice to move from one perspective to another.  It gets easier the more you practice doing it. It feels good, you have brilliant insights, you can choose to do it.  What’s not to like about this?

Get in touch with me if you need or want a guide in this process.  Happy choosing, happy looking, happy freedom.

Why Does Couples Therapy Work?

Why Does Couples Therapy Work?

The Path for Couples Made Visible

Very few of us have been taught how to look within to see the beliefs and feelings that are driving our behaviors. Even fewer know how to do that with their partner in a way that supports bonding rather than conflict. Couples therapy works because it does three main things:

1)   Illuminates the Cycle:  When one member of the couple gets triggered rather then staying with the vulnerability of feeling hurt or abandoned or wrong they get angry and criticize or withdraw into silence and disconnection. This tends to trigger the other member of the couple. This dynamic of triggering and re-triggering can be seen as the “dance” or the cycle.

Couples therapy illuminates the dance and makes it conscious.  Aware of their dance, the couple can make an alliance to stop the painful cycle that has led them to feel alienated and alone.

2)   Helps the Couple “Go Deep”: There is much more to the dance then either person knows.  To understand the depths, someone has to do what I call “taking the elevator down,” to speak about the painful thoughts and feelings underneath the anger or withdrawal.

This reveals a world that the couple was often unaware of and generates compassion and understanding in both.  The couples bond is made more secure by the love and connection that this deeper understanding invites.

3)   Allows for Differences: Another common pattern is that couples resist differences.  It’s easy in the beginning of a relationship because it’s usually all about the “WE” but as each person’s individuality begins to reassert itself a power struggle ensues.  Each wants the other to do/say/see life as they do.

In Couples Therapy we begin to notice the fear of differentiation and to understand, instead, what the differences mean and why they are so important for the healthy development of the couple’s relationship. Freeing your partner to be who they are allows love to flourish.

Research shows that Couples Therapy delivers a big bang for the buck.  Studies of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples show that most couples experience relief from relationship distress within a few months and the improvements are retained long-term.

Couples Therapy is now an obvious choice for all couples given how much better we feel when our love relationship is healthy.  There is no need to tolerate months or years of distress. The Paths to Well Being for couples are fully visible to experienced couples therapists and there isn’t much else in this world that delivers more happiness.

Paths to Healing, Wellbeing and Self-Awareness: An 8-week online course for women starting this January, 2022

Paths to Healing, Wellbeing and Self-Awareness: An 8-week online course for women starting this January, 2022

Taught by Teresa McGlashan, LMFT and Christina Giammalva, Somatic Counselor Dear Friends and Colleagues,     We are offering …

Blog

Finding Your Path to Fundamental Wellbeing and Healing: An 8-week course offered this February, 2020

Taught by Teresa McGlashan, LMFT and Christina Giammalva, Somatic Counselor We are offering a life-changing course filled …

Blog

The Healing Power of Unconditional Love

What is Unconditional Love? Unconditional Love is about loving regardless of the other person “deserving” it. …