About Me

Hi, my name is Leah McQuade. I’m a trauma-informed master life coach and sacred somatic and intuitive healer. My passion is helping you find freedom from the inside out so you feel empowered to live an embodied life. I blend depth nervous system work, inner child healing, energy work, sacred somatics, yoga, and shamanic breathwork to help you get out of your mind and into the body, where deeper healing and personal mastery can happen. I’m known nationwide for my gentle yet honest approach to coaching and healing. With compassion, we explore the shadow and shine some light on the dark so you can heal at the root level, create sustainable changes in your life, and grow in ways you never thought possible.

 

This is precisely where my story begins. When I started my healing journey 20 years ago, I never in a million years thought I would ever be where I am today. I’ve grown in ways I never thought possible. For most of my childhood and into my 20s and 30s, I thought something was wrong with me. I felt this underlying feeling that I was broken and needed to be fixed. Everything appeared to be normal on the outside, yet I was suffering A LOT on the inside. Like many women, I was conditioned to always be happy, pretend everything was okay, stay small and invisible, and always put everyone else’s needs before mine own. Being highly sensitive, I can feel what is really happening underneath all the smiles, yet as a child I had no role models of what feminine authenticity, truth, and empowerment looked like, so I made my internal world wrong. I learned to dissociate from my body as a way to cope with my sensitivity and influx of emotions and feelings.

 

Much of my healing journey has involved returning to my body again and again so I can listen deeper to the wisdom that lies within.

 

As a child, I had no context for my emotions or a way to release them, so I stored them inside my body as depression and anxiety. I learned to soothe, sedate, and numb the heaviness with drugs and alcohol. I was ten years old the first time I got drunk. The vodka orange juice was the sweet taste of freedom and momentary relief from the heaviness I carried inside.

 

Seeking freedom and release from my own internal prison led me to recognize other protections and coping strategies: An unhealthy obsession with exercise and food, perfectionism, addiction to shame and self-sabotage, overachievement, and overthinking, to name a few, kept me spinning my wheels, repeating the same patterns over and over. My body was a living library of all of my past experiences and it was doing a beautiful job protecting me from the flooding emotions and deeper wounds of a childhood full of neglect, sexual abuse, unpredictability and later college rape.

 

My body, frozen in time, still remembered what was necessary for my mind to forget in order to survive these traumas. It’s taken me years to thaw and find the safety to go within and let go of the past protections so I could embody the truth of my being. The truth that’s been inside of me all along but was hidden by very human and hard life experiences.

 

Rumi so beautifully reflects, “What you seek is seeing you.”

 

I didn’t get to this place of self-love, freedom, joy, and internal peace overnight. It took dedication to the self-development path and lots of courage. It took looking honestly at the shadow—the things that sit within the subconscious that are scary to admit. It took excavating the fears, protections, and coping strategies slowly and at a pace that aligned with my nervous system.

 

It wasn’t until recently, after almost 20 years of trauma healing and self-development work, that I discovered there is nothing wrong with me; nothing needs to be fundamentally changed about who I am. Accepting ALL of me, the messiness, the heavy emotions, my gut issues, my sensitivities, the shadows, my fears, and the light has been a lifelong journey. One that I wouldn’t change for anything. It’s gotten me to precisely where I am today.

 

And I didn’t get to where I am without the guidance of my mentors, coaches, teachers, therapists, and healers. 

 

If you feel called and are looking for some guidance on your path, I’m here to help you walk the shadow with more ease and grace. With gentleness and honesty, we’ll transverse your inner landscape and slowly peel away what’s in the way of you embodying your truth so you can live a life full of self-love, inner peace, joy, and freedom!

 

Curious? I would love to chat!