What We Do

Healing Through Heart-Mind Coherence

At The Center for Heart-Mind Coherence, we teach heart-centered and inter-relational practices to help recognize, accept, soften and transform distressing emotional energies that keep us reliving traumas of the past and reenacting self-defeating habits.

Integrating Science & Spiritual Wisdom

We integrate spiritual wisdom across the ages with the latest research on heart-intelligence, interpersonal neurobiology and trauma, to develop the emotional resilience and competency for relating with self and others meaningfully and authentically, with dignity and compassion. We are dedicated to participating in the quickening of love-centered intuitive intelligence to heal intergenerational and transgenerational trauma.

Understanding Trauma & Emotional Patterns

We define trauma in terms of an event’s impact on a person’s nervous system. Trauma then is understood in light of the nervous system’s best available original response to an overwhelming event, the smartest course of action possible at the time (fight, flight, freeze, fix). These initial emotional-behavioral reactions to overwhelm and distress, unless processed and integrated, keep looping in the nervous system as “a residue of energy from the past that interferes with the present” (Thomas Hübl, Ancestral Code Course), keeping us stagnant in repetitive self-defeating patterns.

The wounds of trauma and our self-protective strategies imprint the nervous system with core beliefs about the world and our place in it that skew our perceptions and behaviors towards compulsive reactivity. These imprints are strengthened and activated by core emotional addictions to security, power-control, sensation, and struggle, as the body becomes dependent on the chemical effects of intense, repeated emotions. These emotional habits keep us in reactive states until we notice and meet them, and through the practice of heart-focused attention, transform their energy into wisdom, clear thinking, and responsible (response-able) action.

Our Transformational Approach

Our guided process leads clients through self-reflective work and writing, practices in body-attention and heart-centered breathing exercises applied to distressing emotions, as well as creative and contemplative practices that re-imagine old stagnant stories of distress into new thriving stories. Each component builds on the other to guide individuals through layers of emotional work that uncovers self-defeating imprints and transforms the core emotional addictions developed around old wounds.

Self-reflective writing & awareness exercises
Heart-centered breathing techniques for emotional regulation
Body-attention practices to process distressing emotions
Creative & contemplative techniques to rewrite old narratives

Meet Our Founders

Caroline Eick and Liliane Desjardins, co-founders of the Center for Heart-Mind Coherence, have more than 80 years of clinical and educational experience combined. Their professional backgrounds include the fields of addiction treatment, family dynamics, educational policies, broader social/historical perspectives of community relations and the role of personal and social narratives in the development of individual and cultural beliefs.