Julie MacAdam

I am Julie MacAdam. I don’t just believe these tools work but know they do on a personal level. They have, and continue to, transform my life. 

To me, healing is about including, widening, and deepening our relationship with what lives within us and around us. I see the world and its inhabitants as fluid, changeable, and becoming. I use any pronouns spoken with care. 
I believe change is nourished when we collaborate with forces larger than ourselves. That’s why I work with dreams, the body, the creative process, and plants. 
My passion is helping people remember how to be in conversation with what is tender, wild, and wise inside them. To hold sensation without shutting down. To stay present with both pleasure and discomfort.
I honor your body as a brilliant, responsive being—one that has survived, one that can adapt, one that can choose. 

Leading Ethics

  • Perspective shifting from either/or to both/and thinking, expanding your capacity to embrace more of your life.
  • Befriending the body, sensations, and feelings, so you trust in your capacity to feel and move through what arises.
  • Engaging life’s challenges in creative and embodied ways, helping you trust your inner resources and experience change.
  • Working in real time, so we don’t only talk about it but anchor insights through experience.
  • Taking a process-oriented approach, because how you get from here to there matters.
  • Honoring complexity and paradox, cultivating resilience in the midst of the grit and mess.
  • Attending to more than the thinking mind alone, and drawing on other ways of knowing and being with yourself.
  • Working slowly and attentively, allowing subtle changes to be felt and integrated.
  • Embracing the power of a transdisciplinary approach where more than one therapeutic modality is used, because we too contain multitudes. 
  • You, over time, seeing and feeling the changes you desire, so that you feel empowered to continue.

Training

Kripalu School of Yoga

  •  200hr YTT
  • Abhyanga Massage Course
  • Ayurvedic Studies

Sivananda Ashram

  • Yoga 1, 2 & 3
  • Pranayam (breathing exercises) Studies

Yasodhara Ashram

  • 3-month Yoga Development Course (YDC) 
  • Hidden Language Hatha Yoga Certification
  • Hatha Yoga Certification
  • Kundalini Certification

Lotus Palm 

  • Thai Yoga Bodywork Level 1 & 2 
  • Hot Stones Massage 

Somatic Experiencing®

  • SEP, Three-year Professional Training Program

Tamalpa Institute

  • RSMT/E, Two-year Movement-based Expressive Arts Therapy Training Program

Goddard College

  • Masters in Embodiment Studies
  • Masters Thesis – Creative Dreamwork: A Body-based Creative Arts approach to Dreams for Healing Trauma

Herb Pharm

  •  Three-month Herbal Apprenticeship

Thyme Herbal

  • One-year Herbal Apprenticeship

Goldthread

  • Nine-month Herbal Apprenticeship

Vermont Center of Integrative Herbalism

  • Three-year Clinical Training Program

Yasodhara Ashram

  • Dream Certification Program 

Vermont

  • On-going 1-1 Studies 

Conscious influences:

  • My dreams, my students’ dreams, the unflinching love and support that comes from dreams, and looking to dreams an animate forces of energy expressed in image.
  • The people I work and my on-going journey; all that continues to teach me about perseverance, vulnerability, grit, transformation, and the power of the arts.
  • Somatic Experiencing and its’ tools, techniques, and principles.
  • The Tamalpa Life/Art Process and teachings of Anna and Daria Halprin – creativity being a process inherent to every being and the importance of creating art that matters, whether it looks “good” or doesn’t.
  • Arnold Mindell, the dreaming body and a process-oriented framework.
  • The yogic lineage of Gurudev Sivananda and the teachings of Swami Radha, founder of Yasodhara Ashram.
  • Dr. Gabor Mate and his teachings on authenticity and belonging and the myth of normal. 
  • Susan Raffo and the lens of healing justice.
  • Bayo Akomolafe and his work and inquiry.
  • The teachings of Sharon Salzberg, Pema Chodron, and the practices that keep us soft, open-hearted, strong, and discerning.
  • Dance as movement through various teachers and forms.
  • Dr. Stan Tatkin and his teachings on attachment theory, neuroscience, and arousal regulation.
  • Plants, the natural living world, and my teachers of herbal medicine.
  • Intuition and trusting it.

“If we are willing to stand fully in our own shoes and never give up on ourselves, then we will be able to put ourselves in the shoes of others and never give up on them.” 

-Pema Chodron 

Change is possible - that isn't false hope.

What comes from this work?

Greater capacity to stay present and embodied through life’s changing variables, challenges, and joys.

Increased ability to “bounce back” after challenges.

Living authentically, with a sense of agency and self-governance.

A deeper and fulfilling connection with others based on reciprocity and mutual respect.

A safer sense of exposure and vulnerability that you choose consciously.

Confidence, self-worth, and attunement to your needs and desires.

Setting and honoring boundaries that support your limits and edges.

Freedom from chronic patterns physical or emotional pain.

More openness and flexibility in thoughts, behaviors, beliefs, and emotions. 

A discerning compassion for yourself, others, and the world.