Today we’d like to introduce you to Lesley Glenner.
Lesley, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
My life’s work has been to “hold space” for other people. Ever the empath, I’m grateful to have found that a livelihood as a space holder suits me well; its dynamic, multi-faceted and endlessly interesting. Founding HoloBeing Healing Arts in Longmont, practicing as a psychotherapist and coach and building a mountain retreat, Riverhaus, near Rocky Mountain National Park are all manifestations of this honed capacity and gift.
After nearly ten years of listening intimately to individuals, couples and small groups, I’ve come to believe that the meaning of life is to be as fully and skillfully human as possible. How we do that is by healing our relational core wounds in a relationship and excavating our innate wholeness buried underneath our emotional injuries. As an aspirational being, I embrace incipience, the ever becoming ever falling-away nature of life itself. I must and I hold it as a guiding truth in my business. Each iteration of my offerings has given me ample opportunities to employ an increasingly skillful approach to my work as a therapist, guide, and holistic coach. Using that truth, I guide clients to and through their core woundings to the gold that can be mined from those healed fractures.
While I grew up in the North suburbs of Chicago, I’ve been in Colorado my entire adult life. After graduating from both CU Boulder and Naropa University, I built my practice and opened HoloBeing to help healer-types like me hone their craft. All the while, helping my clients become the most healed and whole versions of themselves.
Early on in my practice as a counselor and coach, I noticed that I was seeking a community where I could continually merge and integrate my personal and professional identities. Can anyone relate? I was yearning to be met, known, challenged and supported. It’s from this desire. I began the HoloBeing practitioner’s circle (The Professional Growth Fellowship Circle) as a pilot program in Boulder. This experience provided me with that which I was seeking; conscious professional colleagueship, integration of my personal and business selves, real-time feedback on the places where I’d get stuck most importantly healed many wounds I have acquired over the years about groups and communities. I was blessed with many lessons on community, co-creating intentional colleagueship and how a conscious examination of our professional shadows is essential to crafting success. I discovered my true professional home and built lasting soul friendships along the way. I feel so satisfied to be able to pass these same invaluable treasures on to my fellow travelers.
Now, I’m ‘turning the cube’ again by continuing to learn from and harness the benefits of those early lessons through HoloBeing v2. I’ve included the best learnings of Holobeing v1 including the Professional Growth Fellowship Circle, private coaching to individuals, couples and parents), providing furnished space for healers through our new, downtown Longmont location and Riverhaus, a mountain retreat space above Lyons, CO. (check us out @Riverhaus_Colorado on Instagram) RiverHaus goes above and beyond what your typical AirBNB provides such as organic meals and chef services, expert-led team-building exercises and event support.
My attachment therapy practice caters to most, but especially well to parents and individuals who are seeking to parent their children from a more conscious and evolved place. I help them find their awareness, compassion and relational intelligence in their interactions with their child(ren). I welcome anyone courageous enough to look at themselves in the light of truth and compassion. [Read my manifesto: On Love]
As a life-long student of self-actualization, I am always evolving and crafting a life that brings me closer to my own truth, values, home and loved ones. I’m a mom to a four-year-old boy, Jude, and wife to my partner, Dan.
More about Me: Introverted, INFJ (Meyer-Briggs), a triple Fire sign (Aries, Sag, Sag), a counter-phobic Enneagram 6. In reality, I’m a highly-relational, curious, optimistic, empathic, agnostic existentialist.
I fill my cup by taking long walks on the beach or slow hikes in the mountains and taking ample alone time so that I can do mundane tasks… literally. I like to tidy my space, watch water boil, and fantasize about things that may never happen. Turning on my essential oil diffuser, opening a window, listening to a podcast, vacating said podcast and moving around my space organically are all things that help me ground.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Of course not. Is it ever?! My road to here and now has been neither smooth nor linear. I am an experiential learner — I always need to make my own mistakes. The good news is that those lessons tend to really stick because they are embodied lessons 😉
I’m also a magnet for projection. For some reason, people tend to overlay their ‘stuff’ onto me and often put me on a pedestal or attribute some courage or fierceness or confidence or gravity to me that may not be my own. Knowing just how much to hold for others and to help them grow has taken a lot of work in progressive stages. I’m slowly finding that balance in my latest endeavors – creating resources for parents and healing practitioners without excessive hand-holding. This balance had to be hard-won through healing my own deep core wounding. In this case, it was the belief that I need to give my everything to simply break even. That I don’t deserve to be fully met and that I need to carry the lion’s share of the relational load. THANKFULLY, I am on the other side of this false core belief and tweaking my offers to reflect this found wholeness.
Riverhaus is my newest project. It’s an evolved expression of how I can support my “fellow travelers” in our life’s journey in an equanimous and supported way. A way that is whole and sovereign. I learned that I don’t have to re-parent people who are not my therapy clients. I can provide a beautiful container for growth and self-expression without doing the work of the other.
On advice: I’m absolutely allergic to advise. But, I’d encourage any women who are starting their journey to learn the relationally essential skills of witnessing and attunement. These are the building blocks of interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. We need to be proficient in meeting ourselves and those we interact with from a place of self-knowing, compassion and humanity- we practice these skills in the latest iteration of the Fellowship Circle and I invite you to participate as fellow travelers through this journey of life. We truly need each other. Friends, colleagues, mentors and partners so that we can lovingly show one another our blind spots. This will allow us all to grow and evolve in the right relationship with who we really are.
Please tell us about HoloBeing Wholeness Center + Healers’ Space.
As a therapist, guide and coach, I work with clients by deeply listening for the truths and wounds they express underneath their words. I help clients to listen to *themselves* better. I work side-by-side with them to make their implicit stories and beliefs explicit. When we can see ourselves more clearly, we are gifted something truly precious—AWARENESS. And this awareness is the fertile soil where deep, profound, lasting transformation can grow.
Often, I am the first person that my clients can enact emotional honesty with. In the true safety of the therapeutic container, they are able to be vulnerable, messy, unedited, raw and as a result very honest and undefended. This lack of egoic armor allows the therapeutic relationship to become a healing balm seeping into every nook and cranny of past injury, brokenness, tenderness and need. This is the good work of Attachment Therapy.
At Riverhaus, I created a mountain retreat that is the evolved expression of how I “hold the container” for others. It’s an even more supportive, whole, and sovereign place where fellow travelers- adult practitioners- can come and simply be. We offer a menu of a la carte services beyond the traditional AirBnB, such as organic meals and private chef services, expert-led retreat exercises, stocked amenities, and can handle almost any custom requests.
At HoloBeing, I founded and currently ran an incubator for holistic practitioners. HoloBeing is the container in which I get to implement every facet of my life’s work. In addition to client work, I assist healer-types to create thriving private practices through professional development and community practices. HoloBeing is also where I work 1:1 with individuals and couples as a psychotherapist and holistic business coach.
Are there any apps, books, podcasts or other resources that you’ve benefited from using?
Here are some of my favorite books for growth and enjoyment:
‘Parenting From the Inside Out’ and ‘The Neurobiology of “We”: How Relationships, the Mind, and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are’ by Dr. Daniel Siegel, MD.
‘Love’s Executioner’ and ‘When Nietzsche Wept’ by Irvin Yalom (Yalom is my *favorite* Existential psychotherapist, I have loved many of his books.)
‘Anam Cara: A Book Of Celtic Wisdom’ by John O’Donohue.
‘Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar’ by Cheryl Strayed.
‘Belonging’ by Toko-Pa Turner.
‘The History of Love’ by Nicole Krauss (Just a sweet little book that I loved).
Pricing:
- Couples & individuals – avg. $155/hour
- Conscious Parenting group – $ 50/month, per person $75 per couple
- Holistic Business Coaching/Money Coaching $650/month program
- HoloBeing Longmont Fellowship Circle – $150/month
- @Riverhaus_Colorado retreat space and nightly rental $925/night
Contact Info:
- Address: 703 3rd Ave
Suite 101
Longmont, CO. 80501 - Website: www.holobeing.com
- Phone: (720) 244-9665
- Email: holobeing@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hololifeholobeing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HoloBeing/
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/riverhaus_colorado/
Image Credit:
Molly Castle
Joseph Thompson
Kendra Seoane
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