Today we’d like to introduce you to Leah Kalish, MA.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Leah. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My personal evolution from modern dancer to actress to yoga educator & curriculum creator to facilitator of systemic and somatic trauma resolution has unfolded over 40 years, Looking back, it’s clear that my desire for personal growth and inner peace was the driving force behind my professional choices and activities. When I discovered a resource that worked for me, I wanted to share it and teach it to others.
It was the Family Constellation and the Embodiment Process experiences that enabled me to take a quantum leap out of a core negative pattern recurring in my relationships and into authentic responsibility and empowerment.
Family Constellation work showed me that I was part of a system and that my chronic issues were expressing the unresolved trauma imprints of my grandmother and mother. All that I had been through – the accidents, the infertility, the rejection of my mother, the divorces, the fears and failures – finally made sense.
With the widening of my perspective came the opening of my heart. Blame turned to compassion as I realized what was mine and what was not. What a relief! I could love my family without taking on its emotional baggage.
This led organically to the deeper somatic work of resolving my own developmental and accident trauma imprints. The Embodiment Process taught me how to slow down, feel the ground, and orient to health rather than pathology. It enabled me to cultivate the neutrality, presence, curiosity, and compassion needed to not only differentiate from inherited feelings and beliefs but to also move out of painful and isolating physical and emotional ways of being.
Together, these two therapeutic modalities have transformed my relationship to life. I feel safe. I trust myself. I am both empowered and at ease. I enjoy fulfilling, intimate relationships. I love my life and my work.
That is what I want for everyone.
Has it been a smooth road?
For the last 25 years, I have been teaching yoga to children along with creating resources and curriculum for their parents and teachers. As Program Creator-Director for Yoga Ed. and Founder-Owner of Move with Me Yoga Adventures, I spent years training educators to use yoga & mindfulness with themselves and their students to enhance social-emotional intelligence and physical and mental wellness through movement, play, self-care and regulation, awareness, and empathy.
While traveling, teaching, producing products, and running a business, I was, simultaneously, in certification training for Family Constellation (completed 2009) and Embodiment Process (completed 2016) facilitation. Managing both was sometimes challenging but I had no doubts about what I was doing so I kept one foot in each camp until just recently. This spring, I finally sold Move with Me Yoga Adventures. It was a relief not be to straddling two worlds and freed me up to devote full-time to my therapeutic practice.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into your story. Tell us more about the business.
My unique specialty is integrating Family Constellation and Embodiment Process modalities, which work together to address both systemic (family) and somatic (body) imprints. Imprints are thought, behavior and relational patterns rooted in the undigested, incomplete feelings and fears from tragic events and traumatic experiences.
The Family Constellation work uncovers and differentiates you from what is not you, freeing you from unconscious entanglement with inherited dynamics and suffering. The Embodiment Process work resolves limiting imprints and defense strategies held in the body that show up as unhealthy and dis-empowering patterns in your life.
Another unique and special element is that I facilitate Family Constellations with my husband, Bruce Kalish. After we were both so positively impacted by the work personally, we were inspired to get certified by Mark Wolynn and make it our shared mission to bring the consciousness and benefits of systemic health to others.
Our partnership is as rewarding for us as it is for our clients. We can see and are often told, how having us, man and woman, facilitating together, enhances the fullness and safety of the space we hold.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I see these kinds of effective, alternative therapies for health expanding exponentially. The movement to grow what talk therapy started will definitely continue as people experience the limitations of conversation and the need to support the body and energy systems.
Contact Info:
- Address: Encino, CA
- Website: https://leahkalish.com/
- Phone: 818-667-3689
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: leah_kalish
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leahkalishma/
Image Credit:
leah & Bruce Kalish
Photographer: Amanda Reta
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