Finding Your Way
For Women Seeking to Heal, Grow, and Thrive
Post-Traumatic Growth Coaching For Women
Welcome to Finding Your Way 🍂
Learn everyday ways to soothe your nervous system, increase resilience, and reconnect with yourself.
Healing after trauma is a tender time of renewal— of reconnecting with yourself, and rediscovering the parts of you that may have felt lost or forgotten. It's a chance to reclaim joy, reconnect with a sense of wholeness, and take your next steps with more resilience and clarity.
I’m here to walk alongside you with warmth, empathy, and a non-judgmental presence.
I bring to this work a unique blend of:
Years of experience as a coach, teacher, and mentor
Specialized training in trauma-informed healing and growth
My own experience with trauma recovery and post-traumatic growth
From my experiences, I’ve cultivated an ability to listen with empathy, offer compassionate witnessing and attune to the unique rhythm of your story. I’ll guide you, as you tap into your strengths and values — at your own pace, in your own way.
My own healing journey taught me the profound impact of safe, caring spaces where you can feel seen, heard, and supported. That’s the kind of space I strive to create for you.
That’s why I created the Finding Your Way Community 🍂 — a warm and welcoming space to support your growth, your healing, and your path back home to yourself.
Learn simple, everyday ways to:
Soothe your nervous system
Strengthen your resilience
Reconnect with yourself
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Soothe Your Nervous System
Feeling Distracted, Overwhelmed, or Disconnected?
These sensations may be your body’s way of signaling unresolved experiences still held within. Even after trying various tools and techniques, it might feel that something is still missing. You long to feel calm, joyful, present— with more ease.
Through trauma-informed coaching, you'll learn how to gently regulate your nervous system using practices rooted in mindfulness and neuroscience. You’ll also find connection in a community of likeminded women.
You’re warmly invitated to join this supportive space, guided by Esther Brandon’s compassionate, evidence-based approach to healing and post-traumatic growth.
If you have a history of trauma you might:
Be seeking meaningful connection with others walking a similar path
Be feeling both the anxiety and excitement of discovering your purpose and taking the next steps on your path
Be experiencing moments of overwhelm or feeling unsafe in the world.
Know that healing is possible— maybe you’ve started the journey, or you’re not sure where to start
Be tense or easily triggered by small everyday situations
Find connection challenging
Who I Serve
Understanding Trauma and the Path To Growth
Trauma isn't always about one single, dramatic event. As I learned from Dr. Peter A. Levine — trauma expert and founder of Somatic Experiencing®, a body-based healing method — trauma isn’t defined by what happened to us, but by how , it affected us inside, especially in the absence of an empathic witness to help us process it.
The word trauma originates from the Greek word for wound.
According to Dr. Judith Herman, another leading voice in trauma research, trauma can be understood as “anything that overwhelms our sensory capacity to adapt to our experience.” In other words, it can arise from experiences that felt like too much, too fast, or too soon— moments we couldn’t fully process or integrate at the time.
These unprocessed experiences often stay stored in our bodies and nervous systems, subtly influencing how we feel, respond, and relate to ourselves and others.
When you are ready, healing involves softly reconnecting with these stored experiences. Through movement and body-centered practices, — we can make room for sensations, and for beginniing to notice whatever is there. In this spaciousness, the nervous system can begin to soften, release, and find its natural balance again.
This is the heart of post-traumatic growth: a path of integration that leads us back home to ourselves.
With the right resources, your nervous system has a natural capacity to heal. Together, we’ll create a safe enough space to nourish your healing, strengthen your resilience, and support your growth.
What to Expect in Our Sessions and Groups
Growth and healing take time. They unfold gradually, supported by a sense of safety, small manageable steps, and a soft knowing of when we’re ready to reconnect and begin to repair. Our work together creates space for that process to happen with care.
Blending Mindful Awareness and Science
After a traumatic event or experience, life can feel tender and overwhelming. The nervous system is often more sensitive — easily triggered, and slow to calm.
Through my own trauma recovery, I learned the powerful impact of blending mindful awareness with science-based practices to restore balance, calm, and increase resilience. This blending is like medicine for the nervous system. When your nervous system is soothed, your body relaxes, your mind becomes clearer, and your whole system— your heart, brain, lungs, and gut shift into a state where healing and growth can take place. In both group and individual sessions, we gently weave together the following practices to nurture healing, resilience, and growth.
Mindfulness, Backed by Science
Mindful awareness is the natural capacity we all have to be aware of the present moment we’re in. Like a muscle, this awareness strengthens with gentle, consistent practice. Even short pauses—just a minute or two— can calm the nervous system, increase clarity, and restore balance. These small mindful moments throughout the day help ground you and increase resilience.
Mindfulness can be described as attending on purpose to our moment to moment experience with a non-judgmental, interested, friendly presence. (inspired by Tara Brach)
Self-Compassion Tools
Self-compassion creates a sense of inner safety, making it easier to try new things without being distracted by fear or an inner critic. When we meet ourselves with kindness, we become more resilient and it cultivates our well-being. Self-compassion is not self-indulgence— it’s strength rooted in both gentleness and fierceness— fierce like a mama bear protecting her cubs.
Science-Based Insights and Practices
Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB)
We explore how the mind, body, and relationships can be gently integrated with awareness and care. Integration— the linking of different parts of our inner and outer experience—is a key foundation of health and well-being. It strengthens our capacity to meet both difficult and joyful times with clarity, self-awareness, and resilience. Trauma can create disconnection. Integration helps restore your sense of wholeness.
Polyvagal Theory
You’ll learn about how the nervous system responds to safety and threat— and how physical sensations— like tension, pain, restlessness— relate to those states . At the heart of this system is the vagus nerve, which acts like a communication hub—signaling whether your body engages in calming or protective responses.
What Clients Are Saying
Esther Brandon’s Story
“Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We feel more alive.
We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation and healing.”
– Jon Kabat Zinn
A Window Into My Story
Over 40 years ago, I walked into a mindfulness workshop led by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Mindfulness became the medicine I never knew I needed.
After retiring, I completed the Jewish Mindfulness Teacher Training at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. In that sacred circle, I found connection, healing, and belonging. I reconnected with the wisdom of my ancestors and brought that depth into my work with educators, integrating breath, movement, and mindfulness into classrooms— and now into my work as a Post-Traumatic Growth Coach.
I also began studying the science behind trauma and healing—Interpersonal Neurobiology, Polyvagal Theory, and Peter Levine’s somatic practices. I learned that our nervous system holds the keys to transformation. When we feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure, our bodies can shift from survival to growth.
Incorporating short, consistent mindfulness practices helped me regulate my own nervous system. Research supported my experience—brief moments of mindful awareness can strengthen resilience and support both mental and physical well-being.
Ten years ago, a breast cancer diagnosis brought everything into focus. Held by a loving community, I felt deeply safe and grounded. That support allowed early childhood traumatic memories to surface and, over time, to integrate— grief opened to spaciousness, loss to love.
There were wounds from my early attachment experiences—Yet, within those wounds lay the quiet seeds of resilience—a fierce, compassionate kindness toward both myself and others. From that inner strength, I began to create clear boundaries and reclaim my sense of agency.
Now, as I recover my ability to walk, each step is uncertain — but each one is grounded in strength. This is what post-traumatic growth looks like: not only healing, but returning to wholeness with courage, compassion, and clarity.
I invite you to walk this path with me — a journey of healing, reconnection, and coming home to yourself.
“The gift of healing trauma is that the woundedness becomes a gateway to freedom, healing and love.”
— Tara Brach
