Hi - I'm Colette
Mindfulness isn't just something we teach. It's something we practice, embody, and bring to
the people we serve.
My Story
I came to mindfulness at a time when I needed it most.
After a near-fatal pulmonary embolism, I recovered physically, but following that near death experience, I found myself living with a level of stress and anxiety I hadn't experienced before. I was single-parenting a teenager, running a business, and trying to keep all the pieces of life moving. From the outside, I was managing. Inside, I was struggling.
After a near-fatal pulmonary embolism, I recovered physically, but I found myself living with a level of stress and anxiety I hadn't experienced before. I was single-parenting a teenager, running a business, and trying to keep all the pieces of life moving. From the outside, I was managing. Inside, I was struggling.
When I took my first Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, something clicked. Not because mindfulness made difficult things disappear, but because it offered a different way to meet them. I began to understand, through direct experience, how the way we relate to our thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations can shape our experience of stress and our capacity to respond.
That experience changed the direction of my life. More than 25 years into my own mindfulness practice, I'm still learning, still practicing, and still discovering what becomes possible when we meet our experience with greater awareness and compassion.
Today, I help mental health professionals and health coaches bring that same depth of practice into their own lives and their work with clients.
My background spans public health, organizational leadership, health and wellness coaching, and mindfulness education. I'm a National Board-Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC), and a Certified MBSR instructor trained through the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness.
Since 2020, I've taught the eight-week MBSR program in a variety of settings, including healthcare research and a residential treatment setting serving incarcerated men. I've also served as an MBSR interventionist and trainer in research involving stroke survivors.
Alongside my mindfulness teaching, I work one-to-one with people living with chronic pain.
This work brings mindfulness into the immediacy of people's lives, where pain, fear, frustration, and uncertainty can shape how they move through the world. Together, we explore how to relate differently to physical sensations and the thoughts and emotions that accompany them, building the awareness, self-compassion, and sense of safety that can support meaningful change.
Working with people in this way has deepened my appreciation for the difference between understanding mindfulness intellectually and learning to draw on it in the moments that matter. It requires meeting each person where they are, recognizing what makes practice difficult, and helping them discover through experience what becomes possible when they respond to themselves differently.
Whether I'm guiding a group through MBSR or coaching someone individually through the challenges of chronic pain, the foundation is the same: mindfulness is learned through practice, and its value emerges in how we meet our lives.
Why I work with mental health professionals and health coaches
You already have skills, knowledge, and approaches that help your clients. My work isn't about giving you one more technique to add to the list. It's about cultivating the awareness and presence that influence how you use the skills you already have.
When we practice mindfulness, we learn to recognize our own internal responses: the urge to fix, the impulse to reassure, the discomfort of not knowing what to say, or the subtle ways our attention gets pulled away from the person in front of us. We develop the capacity to notice these responses without automatically acting on them.
That awareness can change the quality of our listening, our relationships with clients, and our ability to remain present when things get difficult. For Health Coaches, it can support a more mindful, client-centered approach to behavior change, one that honors autonomy rather than rushing toward solutions. For Mental Health Professionals, it can deepen therapeutic presence and awareness of what is happening within the clinician and between clinician and client.
These aren't skills we develop through information alone. They grow through our own practice, reflection, and experience, and through learning to recognize how mindfulness informs the way we relate to others.
That's why my teaching is experiential, grounded in evidence, and centered on your own practice. We explore mindfulness not simply as something to understand or explain, but as something to experience, embody, and gradually integrate into everyday life and professional relationships.
A practice, not a performance
I don't approach mindfulness as a quick fix, a productivity tool, or a way to eliminate uncomfortable experiences. Nor do I believe we need to become perfectly calm or endlessly patient to be effective practitioners.
We're human. Our minds wander. We get caught in familiar patterns. We have difficult days.
The practice is learning to notice, return, and begin again, with a little more awareness and a little less judgment.
I bring that same spirit to my teaching: curiosity rather than perfectionism, compassion without pretense, and a healthy appreciation for the fact that we're all figuring this out as we go.
My goal is to help you develop a mindfulness practice that supports you personally, deepens your professional presence, and informs how you work with the people who trust you with their care.
Because mindfulness is more than something we offer others. It is something we cultivate in ourselves, one moment at a time.
I'm glad you're here.