About Amanda Grace

Motherhood & Identity

Becoming a mother shattered me open in ways I didn't anticipate. Before my children, I had a sense of who I was—a woman with agency, creative fire, and clear boundaries. Then I became responsible for small humans, and suddenly every cell of my body was oriented toward care, presence, and responsiveness.

Motherhood asked me to find a new kind of embodiment—one that wasn't about control or optimization, but about showing up, over and over, even when I didn't know if I had anything left to give. I learned to negotiate my needs with theirs. I learned that being present doesn't mean being perfect. And I learned that my nervous system, my body, my capacity—these are not infinite resources I can just push harder to access.

This experience became the foundation for all my later work around embodiment, nervous system awareness, and the integration of care with self-trust.

Living with Invisible Challenges

For much of my life, I carried challenges that weren't visible to others—and often weren't visible to myself. Disability. Neurodivergence. Chronic illness. These weren't failings on my part; they were part of my nervous system, part of how my body was wired.

I spent years trying to fix these parts of myself, to push through, to be "normal." But embodiment taught me something different: what if I could befriend these aspects? What if my neurodivergence, my sensitivity, my need for rest—what if these were invitations to a deeper, more authentic relationship with myself?

Now I understand disability not as a deficit, but as a different way of being in the world. And from that understanding, I can help others discover their own unique intelligence and gifts, regardless of the challenges they carry.

Learning to Trust the Body

I grew up in a world that taught me to distrust my body. My body was something to be managed, controlled, improved. My feelings were something to override. My intuition was something to second-guess.

It wasn't until I began studying somatic work—until I started listening to what my body was actually telling me—that I realized: my body isn't my enemy. My body is my home, my guide, my most honest feedback system.

Learning to trust my body meant learning to feel again. To notice the subtle signals of contraction and expansion. To honor the wisdom of my nervous system, even when my thinking mind wanted something different. This trust became the foundation of my healing and the heart of what I now teach.

Betrayal, Fear & the Nervous System

Trauma leaves imprints on the nervous system. It teaches your body that the world isn't safe, that people can't be trusted, that your own senses might be lying to you.

I've known betrayal. I've known the freeze response, the fight response, the way my body would shut down when triggered by something that consciously I could rationalize away. For years, I thought this meant I was broken or weak. Now I understand it was my nervous system trying to protect me in the only way it knew how.

My work in trauma recovery and nervous system regulation comes from this direct, embodied understanding. I know what it takes to help the nervous system learn safety again. I know the patience, the gentleness, the micro-steps that allow healing to occur.

Neurodivergence, Disability & Difference

For a long time, I experienced my neurodivergence and disability as problems to solve. If I could just think differently, if I could just push harder, if I could just do more—then I'd finally be "enough."

What I've learned is that neurodivergence and disability aren't defects. They're variations in how the nervous system processes information, how bodies move through the world, how minds make meaning. And these variations come with specific gifts—heightened sensory awareness, creative problem-solving, profound empathy, the ability to think differently and see what others miss.

My work now is to help others—especially women and mothers—move from shame about their difference to celebrating it. To build lives that honor their actual nervous system, their actual body, rather than trying to squeeze themselves into neurotypical or ableist molds.

Ancestral Connection & Spiritual Exploration

My spiritual path isn't linear. I've moved through different traditions and practices—some that fed my soul, some that ultimately didn't serve me. What I know now is that genuine spirituality is embodied. It's not about transcendence away from the body; it's about sacred presence within it.

I'm drawn to ancestral wisdom, to the ways indigenous peoples understood the body and the earth, to the honoring of feminine cycles and seasonal rhythms. But I do this with humility and respect—not appropriating, but learning, honoring, and weaving what resonates into my own embodied practice.

Spirituality, for me, is about connection—to my body, to other people, to the more-than-human world, to the ancestors who came before me. It's about remembering that I'm not separate. I'm part of something larger, and that belonging is where the real healing happens.

Grief, Resilience & the Ongoing Process of Becoming

If there's one thing my life has taught me, it's that transformation always includes loss. Every time I've stepped into a new version of myself, I've had to let something go.

I've grieved the version of myself who thought she could "do it all." I've grieved naivete, lost innocence, friendships that couldn't survive my growth. I've grieved the body I used to have, the capacity I used to take for granted, the life I thought I was going to live.

What I've discovered through this grief is resilience—not as a hard strength, but as a tender capacity to feel deeply and keep going anyway. To notice what's been broken and honor both the breaking and the slow process of healing. To trust that even in the loss, something new is trying to be born.

This is the journey I hold for myself and for everyone I work with. We are always becoming. We don't arrive and stay fixed. We move through seasons, through deaths and rebirths, through shattering and reassembling. And in that ongoing process is where the deepest aliveness lives.