We recently connected with Leigh Aschoff and have shared our conversation below.
Leigh, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you share an anecdote or story from your schooling/training that you feel illustrates what the overall experience was like?
My experience in the Compassionate Inquiry Professional Training, co-founded by Gabor Maté and Sat Dharam, showed me the importance of my own healing process. The depth of my own healing is paramount to how I share the healing approach with others.
The training was both a healing process and an educational journey. The experience invited me to be present and curious about discovering my own outdated belief system. This discovery process unfolds with a present moment connection to body sensations and emotions. Through this healing process, I experience an embodied awakening of my healing work which becomes a daily, moment to moment practice.
The commitment to my own healing journey and practice is foundational to how I show up with the courageous hearts I work with in sessions. This has been an invaluable experiential learning for me that continues to awaken humility, gratitude and compassion from deep in my heart center.
Leigh, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am an artist and a wisdom inviter. I support wounded hearts returning to embodied wholeness. I work with human beings who have experienced separation, loss, othering and wounding to their heart and are answering the call to show up in the world centered in a healing heart.
I am a trauma informed somatic healing practitioner. My background includes certifications in Transpersonal Energy Healing, Intuitive Energy Healing, Hatha Yoga, Therapeutic Yoga and Advanced Akashic Records (as a practitioner and teacher). Additionally, I hold a Masters in Science in Neuroscience and Education and a Bachelor of Arts, with honors, in photography.
What sets me apart from many other therapists and practitioners is my lived experience of being half-adopted from a very young age and the ongoing death of loved ones throughout my young adulthood. The experiences I have lived through have invited me to deep healing, often exploring times and realms where explicit memory is not accessible. My connection to and relationship with non-physical energy began at a very young age. This experience informs the deep faith and knowing I have that healing is possible, for myself and for others. Along with this, I experience a deep heart resonance and connection that when shared with others, in presence, can evoke and invite powerful alchemy and transformation.
I offer healing sessions with full heart sincerity as well as full body reverence to my teachers. As they share their wisdom with me, it lands in my heart body and nourishes my gifts to bloom further. This is all in service to collective healing. My legacy is to be an encouraging human being.
I offer one on one sessions with an intentional awareness that our personal heart body healing is essential to collective harmony. It is my calling to be with others in one on one sessions where deep exploration, custom to each person’s unique ancestral and historic experience, is possible.
May all beings experience heart peace, love, embodied belonging and liberation.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Untrue core beliefs are lessons I am in an ongoing unlearning process with.
We name these deeper beliefs “core” because they are so deep within us, so close to us, that often times, without an intentional healing process like Compassionate Inquiry, we are not aware of them.
The backstory of this, for me, as it is for all of us, is that the core beliefs I am unlearning now at one point in time were a part of a brilliant strategy to maintain connection with my family and caregivers. When witnessed and felt with present moment awareness, these core beliefs loose their potency. It becomes clear they are no longer the best choice.
A core belief can effect the way we make decisions. A core belief can effect the way we experience every day of our life. A core belief can direct the course of our life.
A powerful way to be in touch with authentic choosing for our precious life is to know our core beliefs and engage in a compassionate relationship with them.
We need connection with our bodies to work with core beliefs. This is one of the many reasons somatic healing, like Compassionate Inquiry, is a powerful healing approach that leads to ongoing shifts in how we relate with ourselves, one another and the world.
Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?
Presence, curiosity and non-judgment are mega major important qualities in a healing process.
Presence invites a witnessing and a being with of what is arising. This alone can be a powerful healing. Sometimes being present means slowing down. In order to be present, there is a witnessing, a noticing, an allowing and a receiving. Too often in our busy world, we move fast and fill our days with actions. Giving ourselves time every day to be present invites a spaciousness that moving fast does not allow for. Something happens when we share our presence with one another. Do you notice what that is, for you?
Curiosity is both inviting and open. Curiosity shared allows for experience to unfold without being guided, forced or conditioned. One of my favorite in session questions is, “what is that like for you?”. This question resonates with curiosity and the open nature of it invites a person to tune into their experience and share, often for the first time, what something is like for them. Flowers grow in curious environments.
Non-judgment is essential for healing. Many of us grow up in environments that are laden with pressure, expectations of perfection, blaming and shaming. Non-judgment allows emotions, sensations, perceptions, interpretations and beliefs to show up, as they are, to be seen, heard, held and cherished. Accepting the process of healing as it unfolds is a way of saying, “yes, you!” to what unfolds within us when we step forward into an intentional healing process. When we accept ourselves as we are without judgment, it allows a changing process to unfold.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.heartpeacehealing.com
- Instagram: @heartpeacehealing
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heartpeacehealing
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferleighaschoff/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@heartbodywisdom
Image Credits
All mine – photography and design © Leigh Aschoff