Julie Stuart
Somatic & Transformative
I spent decades learning to perform resilience. Then I discovered something wilder and truer — what it feels like to actually live it.
For over twenty years I've worked with leaders, seekers, and high achievers — helping them find their way beneath the performance, back to themselves.
I work with people who have built impressive lives — and still sense something essential is missing. Leaders carrying the weight of complexity. Individuals navigating transition. People who have outgrown the identity they built and aren't sure who they are without it.
My work is somatic and transformative — which means we don't just talk about change. We work at the level where change actually happens: in the body, beneath the conditioning, in the deeper knowing that lives below thought.
I bring this same depth to individuals, to leaders, and to teams and organizations — because the work is the same regardless of context. Presence is presence. Freedom is freedom. And the body doesn't lie whether you're in a boardroom or a therapy room.
What I Do —
And Who I Do It With
Where This Work Began
My life path has never followed a straight line.
I built my career from scratch — more than once. Different states, different versions of what I thought I was supposed to be doing, different identities tried on and eventually outgrown. Each time something stopped working — a relationship, a livelihood, a version of myself — I had to find a way to let it go and begin again.
I know what it feels like to lie awake at 3am wondering if I made the right choices. I poured myself into building something — a career, a life, a self I believed in, only to feel something essential beneath it begin to erode. I held it together for everyone else while something inside me was asking a question I was not ready to answer.
I fell apart. I found ground. I fell apart again. I found deeper ground.
That became the pattern — and eventually, the practice.
But the moment that shaped everything happened when I was sixteen.
My father sat me down and told me he was gay — that he had known since he was very young, and had spent his entire life hiding it. My parents had separated six months before. The structures I believed kept us safe — kept me safe — were collapsing all at once.
I wanted to cry. Not from disappointment — from recognition.
Even at sixteen something in me understood: his truth was the most alive thing in the room.
It had been waiting decades to be real. And it deserved to be witnessed, not shamed.
So I held myself together — and I held space for him instead.
What happened next reshaped my life.
He became lighter. More expansive. More present. More himself.
A part of him that had been locked away — performing safety, performing normalcy, performing a life — was finally free. And because he was freer, he could actually hear me. See me. Be with me.
I watched what happens when someone finally steps out of the constructed life they built to survive — and into the truth of who they actually are.
I have spent the rest of my life helping people find their way there.
What I’ve Come To Know
What my father taught me — and what thirty-five years of practice has confirmed — is this:
We burn ourselves out living inside stories about who we're supposed to be. We work harder, achieve more, chase the next level — believing that someday, when we have enough, we'll finally allow ourselves the freedom we're longing for.
That day rarely comes.
Because we've chained ourselves to a belief that freedom is something to be earned — when it was never outside us to begin with.
This isn't just a personal problem. It's an organizational one.
When people are running on survival — performing, striving, hiding — their nervous systems are organized around threat. And a nervous system in threat mode cannot access the very things organizations need most:
Big picture thinking. Strategic clarity. Creative innovation. The ability to collaborate, trust, and take intelligent risks. The presence to lead — rather than just react.
Chronic stress doesn't just exhaust people. It literally narrows perception.
People stop seeing options. They play it safe. They protect themselves rather than contribute fully. And because high performance becomes the price of belonging — they hide their uncertainty, their struggles, and their most original thinking.
The result isn't just burnout. It's an organization operating at a fraction of its actual capacity.
The body is the doorway out of this. Not another framework. Not another initiative. Embodied work that actually changes how people feel — from the inside out. When the nervous system finds ground, everything opens: clarity, creativity, connection, and the courage to lead from something real.
That's what this work is for. In individuals. In leaders. In teams.
And here is what thirty-five years has taught me about how that happens:
Resilience is not something you build. It's something you return to. It was always there — beneath the performing, the striving, the surviving. This work clears the way back.
The body knows what the mind has edited out. Grief, longing, truth, wisdom — stored in the tissue, in the breath, in the places you've learned not to feel. When we work there, something real shifts.
Change happens when you feel it — not just when you understand it. The body responds to threat before the mind even knows what's happening. That's where real transformation begins — and where it lasts.
Freedom isn't a destination. It's a practice. The growing capacity to notice when you've slipped back into old constructs — and find your way out. Again and again. With more ease each time.
My work draws on thirty-five years of practice — twenty in coaching, fifteen plus in hands-on bodywork — across somatic and embodied leadership, transformative coaching, energy work, and the Three Principles.
Not a fixed method. Not a formula. Just deep attention to what's true — shaped by decades of working at the intersection of body, mind, and the deeper intelligence that connects them — and to what each person actually needs.
The full list of training and certifications is below — for those who want to know.
An Integrative Foundation
Outside The Work
I live in Boulder, Colorado — which suits me perfectly. Sunrise hikes, mountains that don't lie, dirt and trails underfoot.
When I'm not working I'm hiking, learning pottery, reading, and volunteering with the Warrior StoryField — a Boulder-based organization supporting veterans through storytelling and community. I serve on their fundraising council and am learning to weld and braze alongside them.
In my closest relationships — where the true work always lives — I'm learning, still, how to stay when it gets hard instead of managing my way through it. What it feels like to be truly met. How to stop disappearing in the places that matter most. And how to be loved without feeling I have to earn it first.
I'm discovering, again and again, what it means to be fully, unapologetically myself.
I don't have this all figured out. That's never the point.
The point is to keep learning, keep choosing aliveness over safety — allowing myself to be uncomfortable and sometimes even awkward — and to trust that the ground is always there when I do.
That's what I'll bring to your work together too.
Embodied Leadership Coach and Teacher Certification Leadership Embodiment
Somatic Leadership Trainings Strozzi Institute
Integral Coach, Professional Coach Certification New Ventures West
Somatic-Polarity Coach Certification Colorado School of Energy Studies
Craniosacral & Polarity Therapy Dual Certification Colorado School of Energy Studies — in progress
Transparent Communication Program Leader Certification Thomas Hübl
Equine Guided Coach & Facilitator Certification Skyhorse Academy
Transformative Coach Certification Michael Neill's Supercoach Academy
Reiki Level 1 Certification
Massage Therapy Certification Swedish Institute for Massage Therapy, New York
B.S. Exercise Physiology & Health ScienceState University of New York at Buffalo
Enneagram Ongoing study and trainings
Education, Certifications, & Trainings
Start with a real conversation — it's the best way to sense whether we're a good fit.
Ready to find out if this work is right for you?
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