Journey of the Heart
Women’s Faith-Based Coaching

“He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”

PSALM 147:3

Journey of the Heart coaching grew from a genuine place of empathy and knowing how important it is for a woman to have someone she can trust with the deeply personal parts of her story—with the reassurance of confidentiality, understanding, compassion, and hope as she seeks healing.

Group support can offer meaningful connection around a shared experience. But when a woman has survived more than one kind of trauma, her story may not fit neatly into one experience or one support group. Telling the whole story can bring a deeper fear: If you truly knew everything that happened to me, would you still see me with compassion and believe there is hope for my healing?

I understand that fear personally. I survived stalking and sexual assault, and in 2010, I was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and given only months to live. But those words name only the events. They do not tell the deeply personal details carried afterward—the memories, fears, questions, choices, and losses that can affect hope, self-worth, and trust. Sometimes the hardest part of a woman's story is not what happened, but learning to see beyond what happened and finding purpose again after all she has been through.

There were times when several life-changing experiences were happening at once.

Cancer affected how I thought about my body, my future, and survival. Abuse affected trust, confidence, safety, relationships, and the way I saw myself.

They were all part of the same life—mine.

That experience taught me how closely the different parts of a woman's life can be connected. What happens in one part of her life can touch her heart, her faith, her relationships, her confidence, and the way she sees herself.

Counseling was an important part of my own healing and gave me valuable professional guidance during difficult times in my life. Those experiences also taught me something meaningful about trust, connection, and the time it can take before a woman feels safe enough to say what is really in her heart.

I remember sitting in counseling sessions where I was constantly filtering my own words, trying to protect the person across from me. I worried that my story would be too shocking or too much of a burden for them to handle. I didn't know what was safe to talk about without overwhelming them.

When you spend forty minutes testing the waters, you have very little time left once you finally feel safe enough to speak. So you finally talk. The professional listens and says, “This will be a great place to start next week.” It is a perfectly reasonable response—but inside, you just need a little reassurance, a thoughtful response, or simply a safe place for what you have shared to land.

Instead, you schedule the next appointment with a forced smile, go to your car, and cry in the parking lot. You leave wishing you had never opened up.

I remember that feeling. Sometimes trust needs time before a woman reaches what is really in her heart.

That experience became one of the most important reasons I created Journey of the Heart the way I did.

Through her weekly reflective activities and journaling, I can begin to understand what has been on her heart before we meet. Our time together can then be spent responding to what she has shared rather than using most of the session testing the waters.

And if she reaches something near the end of our time that she is finally ready to share, when possible, I extend our time. I want her to finish her story and have time for me to thoughtfully respond. I want her to leave feeling heard and understood, with a safe place for what she shared to land—and with greater peace, hope, or understanding than when our conversation began.

Counseling and coaching each have their own professional role. Journey of the Heart was created to stand alongside counseling, bringing professional coaching together with the understanding of a woman who has lived through life-changing experiences herself, remembers what those experiences felt like, and cares deeply about the woman sitting across from her.

There were times when fear filled nearly every thought.

Some prayers were only a few words, and I wondered what that said about my faith. I wondered whether a woman with stronger faith would feel less afraid or pray longer.

Looking back years later, something became very clear.

I was still turning to God.

The fear was real, and so was my faith.

Those few words were prayers. Reaching for God was faith.

Jesus' words about faith the size of a mustard seed changed the way I understood those frightened moments.

Fear and faith had existed in the same heart. Seeing that gave me greater grace and compassion for the frightened woman I had been.

As years passed, important landmarks in my life began to look different from where I stood today.

I could see courage in places where I remembered only fear.

I could see faith in moments when fear had made me question whether my faith was strong enough.

Choices made more sense when I remembered what I knew at the time, what I was afraid of, and what I was trying to survive.

The woman I had once judged so harshly began to look very different to me.

For the first time, I could give that woman some of the same understanding, grace, and compassion I would have offered someone else.

That changed the way I understood my past, the way I saw myself in the present, and eventually the way I understood what another woman might discover when she looked back at her own life.

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”

1 CORINTHIANS 13:12

A new perspective also changed the way I understood God's purpose in my own life.

Experiences I once viewed through pain began to reveal growth, courage, faith, compassion, and lessons that became part of the woman I am today.

Gratitude began to grow for what God had taught me and for the ways He had worked through even the hardest parts of my life.

My calling began to make sense.

Professional training gave me knowledge, structure, resources, and responsibility. Lived experience gave me the perspective of having once been the woman searching for understanding myself.

I came to see how much both mattered. Together with advocacy, faith, and years of listening to women, they shaped the coaching I wanted to create.

Journey of the Heart grew from those discoveries.

A woman can return to meaningful landmarks in her life from the perspective she has today and begin seeing things that were hidden by fear, pain, uncertainty, or simply being too close to what was happening at the time.

She may recognize courage where she once remembered fear. Faith that remained present through uncertainty. Strength she once overlooked. Choices she understands differently with everything she has learned since.

That new view can bring greater grace for the woman she was, greater self-compassion for the woman she is today, and greater understanding as she moves forward.

Healing taught me something about living too.

Understanding my past with greater compassion made more room in my heart to enjoy the life I had today.

I could laugh. Create something beautiful. Wear the lipstick. Enjoy dessert. Pray. Rest. Celebrate. Love people. Love God. And feel grateful to be alive.

“Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

GALATIANS 6:2