We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Meagan Connley. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Meagan below.

Alright, Meagan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I feel like the idea of this business was planted in my soul before I ever had the conscious thought to actually start a business. Most of my life I lived in survival mode. I followed the rules, kept my head down, got good grades, went to college, got a business degree, took a job with a company ranking high on the Fortune 500 list – on the surface I was checking boxes and doing “well.” Underneath the achieving, I felt lost. I couldn’t remember who I really was and what I really enjoyed. I had lost connection with a sense of purpose in life, and my body was letting me know. I was at a low point in every aspect of my health and it came to a breaking point. At the age of 30, I started a mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual healing journey of coming home to myself. Throughout working with coaches and therapists, taking workshops and gaining certifications, I was following breadcrumbs from the universe, leading me back to my soul. At a certain point, I knew I had to leave Corporate America and provide a more sacred kind of work in the world, but I didn’t know what I would do or how I would do it. I experimented, I listened to my heart and my body, and eventually it felt like time to go part-time within the corporate world and officially start my own business. My business offerings have shifted and grown over the past few years as I continued exploring my own healing, and eventually I was led to pursue this work full-time. I continue to be guided by forces greater than myself, allowing my business to unfold and teach me, as I steward the creation of this work. I am grateful the universe dropped the idea in me and showed me the way, because it has been more fulfilling than any idea I could have created in my mind.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My business is called Presence With Love, and I offer trauma-informed Integrative Somatic Coaching.

For me, the name Presence With Love represents the what, the how, and the why of being. Our bodies are only ever in the present moment. When we are in the here and now, we have choice and power. We experience more of reality and accept what is here for us. We can be the Love that we are, and we can receive the Love that is all around us. Love, as in the deeply peaceful and compassionate acceptance, seeing, and feeling of ourselves and others exactly as we are. Love, as in the commitment to the most true, authentic nature of ourselves and others. Love, as in the felt sense of knowing that we are all connected and one.

We experience Presence With Love in the body, through the body. The ego, our sense of self that identifies with image or the past or something we think will protect us, has us take on patterns that keep us out of the present moment. Our ego can have us disconnect from our intuition, from our own inner knowing, from our bodies. And so can a dysregulated nervous system caused by chronic stress and/or trauma that is left unprocessed.

With trauma-informed Integrative Somatic Coaching, we explore the ego and the nervous system, with a focus on coming into the body. Our body is incredibly wise and we tune into the wisdom within you, knowing your body holds the answers you seek. Your body will reveal messages for what it needs to feel, how it needs to move, what it would like to receive, and how you can heal. For anyone who feels stuck in traditional talk therapy; who feels numb, disconnected, or overwhelmed and is ready to come back into their body; who wants to live a more expansive and full life; who wants to experience deeply transformative personal and spiritual growth, Presence With Love is here for you. In our time together, I leverage my own embodied experience from healing, along with years of training in tools including Enneagram, Somatic Trauma Therapy, Yin Yoga, Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead, PSYCH-K, and more. Through one-on-one single sessions or program offerings, I meet you where you are on your journey and am grateful to walk alongside you.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

After 12 years in corporate work, transitioning to the entrepreneurial journey, the biggest thing I have been faced with unlearning is about control and force. I had been taught that if you want something to happen, you make it happen. Try harder. Do more. Whatever it takes. There has been a message of constant work, pushing things forward, focusing on end goals and numbers, and forcing the way there.

This path has been teaching me about a softer, more co-creative energy. Everything I want is already here, so I ask myself now, ‘How can I open to receive this? What in me is blocking the flow?’. When I can address my wounds and ego, tend to my body’s needs, and get out of my own way, what my soul desires naturally flows toward me. In this way, my business is teaching me to love myself, so that I may receive more love, and share it back with others. A cycle, a balance of giving and receiving. A way of being with what is, evolving, and participating in life. A way of experiencing Presence With Love.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I certainly would not be where I am today without so many resources, and the main one being mentors and guides. Along my healing journey, I heard a saying – “We are wounded in relationship, and we heal in relationship”. It truly is not possible to experience presence and love in isolation. I am grateful to Kristen Deangelis, Tori Hawkey, April Kline, Aurianna Joy, the teachers at Enneagram Prison Project, and many others who have held space for me.

Music has been a powerful component of my healing journey and I have fallen in love with ‘Let it Be’ by Carol Woods (from Across the Universe).

The book ‘A Return to Love’ by Marianne Williamson has been the most influential for me on this path.

Contact Info:

• Website: presencewithlove.com
• Instagram: @meaganconnley
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meaganconnley/

Image Credits
The ones in the red dress / black and white photos are Rachel Puckett of Honey & Smoke Photo Co. The ones in the teal dress in fall are Allie Logsdon of Allie Logsdon Photo. The initial headshot with me seated on a couch is Tasha Pinelo of Tasha Pinelo Photography.