Julie Zeff

Where It All Began…Julie’s Story

My Vivid Living journey began in 1995 when I discovered the transformative power of combining the wisdom of the mind and the body. My path unfolded (and is still unfolding) step by teeny, tiny step. When I wasn’t sure which way to turn, I kept following my heart and passion. So far I have gloriously found my way here – to today – to Vivid Living for Busy Moms!

Let me take you back a couple of years. My mother was a psychotherapist in private practice and I grew up with psychotherapists all around me. In 1995 I had a life-changing experience when I started working with a mind/body psychotherapist. This time I was the client.

This psychotherapist combined touch with psychotherapy – a new concept for me at the time that I was open to trying. She laid her hand on my back in places where she identified tightness or holding. I then breathed into those places and noticed what memories, images, colors, or sensations appeared. By sharing these experiences with her I gained access to breakthroughs unlike any I had previously experienced.

The work was absolutely transformational for me. I began to let go of old patterns and beliefs that no longer served me and started to access my strength and truth in new ways. From this point I was hooked. I absolutely believed in the profound transformative power of combining the wisdom of the mind and the body.

Around this same time, I graduated from college with a degree in English/Creative Writing and a teaching certificate. So, with noble intentions I gave inner-city English teaching a try. Although I love literature, I found that I had very little interest in teaching The Scarlet Letter to high school students and I was much more interested in understanding their family dynamics.

This curiosity let me to enroll in a graduate program for social work. And, following in the footsteps of my amazing mind/body therapist, I decided that I, too, was going to figure out how to combine bodywork and psychotherapy. So, I enrolled in massage therapy school while in graduate school.

In 1997, I graduated from the Chicago School of Massage Therapy and in 1998 I graduated with my master’s degree in social work from the University of Chicago. I began working at a social service agency in a Chicago suburb doing individual, couple, family, and group psychotherapy. Over the next three years, I persistently tried to figure out how to combine bodywork and psychotherapy.

Over time I felt discouraged, uncertain, and lost. I left my job as a social worker and took time to explore what I wanted to be when I grew up. I traveled solo in Europe for 6 weeks (which had been a lifelong dream of mine) and took myself through the book What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Bolles.

I held informational interviews with people in different fields – people in business, health care, and psychology. I met some amazing people, learned about life coaching for the first time, and then interviewed a few life coaches myself. They were some of the happiest, warmest, dynamic, exciting people I had ever met. Their energy was contagious and I remember thinking that I wanted whatever drug they were on. The drug, as it turns out, was life coaching.

At that time I wasn’t quite ready to take the life coaching plunge and felt drawn to having an experience with a large organization. With persistence and some luck in 2002, I found a job in Human Resources and Organizational Development with a large global bank in Chicago. I quickly realized that though I enjoyed the fast-paced, dynamic life of working for a large organization, ultimately it wasn’t for me.

Around this time I got engaged to my best friend and now my husband, Ken Zeff. The momentous life change in front of me brought me to hire my own life coach. After working with my own coach for three weeks, I realized that I absolutely wanted to be a life coach, too. I loved the empowering, strengths-based approach to the work.

From the beginning, coaching focused on everything I was doing right. Coaching built on my strengths and passions and encouraged me to keep tapping into my truth that was present in my mind and body. Here it was again, that glorious mind/body connection. It was just what I needed to gain a new level of trust in myself and my decision-making abilities. I got to know and trust myself like never before. And, around this same time, I introduced myself to yoga, and loved it.

In 2002-2003, I completed the Basic and Advanced Coaching Training with CTI, married my husband, and began searching for a yoga teacher training program that I felt would blend well with my newly budding coaching practice.

I eventually found it – Forrest Yoga – developed by a powerful, intuitive woman named Ana Forrest. Her work used many of the same concepts and ideas found in life coaching (or at least the way I was trained and worked as a life coach). It emphasized breath awareness and the notion that we are all powerful beings who are at choice in our mind, body and life in every moment.

Over the next five years, our growing family moved around a lot. My husband’s passionate career in inner city school reform took us from Chicago to San Diego, to Washington, D.C., and back to the West Coast where we now live in Los Angeles. We had a child born in each city, and my coaching practice kept growing and growing amidst moves and maternity leave.