The one who keeps the light on
I'm Amanda. Clinically trained social worker, intuitive, coach. Six years of sitting with people in the middle of a change, and not once telling them who they are.
What I actually do
Most people meet me through a reading. It's the front door, and it's a good one. It's also one room in the house.
The Aligned Way, twelve weeks one to one, is where the real furniture gets moved. Workshops and retreat rooms are where I get to do it with a crowd. And there's a deck in the works, coming in 2027, for the version you can run at your own kitchen table without me in the room at all.
Underneath every one of them is the same five stages. Curiosity, practice, integration, redirection, continuing. A spiral, not a ladder. Getting aligned, the way I mean it, is a well rounded, custom fit approach to life. Yours, not a template.
What I learned alongside my education
I went to community college, and within one semester I had chosen Human Services as my major, which put all of my classes in Paterson, New Jersey. I was the youngest person in the room, freshly eighteen, and I'd grown up in a mountain lake town in northern New Jersey, which is a polite way of saying I grew up in a bubble.
I learned more from the people around me than I did from the program. Mostly what it cost some of them to get to class at all.
And I learned what a social worker actually is, which nobody tells you going in. For a lot of the people I sat with, a social worker was the only kind person they'd met by the time they turned twenty. That's the job. You're often not the expert in the room. You're just the one who showed up and didn't flinch.
I'm most likely not the first social worker my clients have met by the time I enter their lives. That's still the whole job, and it's why I won't hand you a verdict. Nobody was ever helped by being told what they are. They get helped by somebody sitting there long enough that they can hear themselves.
Why I'm not a therapist
My graduate program was a catalyst of change for my life. It followed an incredibly rewarding, and exhausting, year of holding space in group treatment for people carrying a lot of pain and darkness. I learned my capabilities were vast, but my capacity was not. My graduate year offered me plenty of opportunities to explore new directions in my career. And then the world shut down. And it stayed shut down through my graduation. And the state office was closed when I should have been sitting for my licensure exam.
Coaching started out as a compromise and turned out not to be one. I still use all of it. Active listening. Reflection. And the lens that says a person is always sitting inside a system, so a lot of what looks like a personal failing is really the system they're stuck in. I just don't burn myself down to use it anymore.
If you're already in therapy, this works well alongside it. Therapy is where the feelings get held. This is where we do something with them. And whatever comes up in here, you've got somewhere to take it next week. I'm not going to leave you out there.
The part that cannot be ignored
At some point, what was once looking at people like a social worker became seeing people. Take that lens, and add seeing an aura around everybody.
I veil when I read. Sometimes a head scarf, sometimes something else. It isn't costume. It's protection, and I started after a stretch of going to people's houses and driving home with a migraine I couldn't explain.
I do involve tarot and oracle cards in all of my work. And in many ways my clients have surprised me more than I've surprised them on that front. Because when you're being seen fully, the tools used to get there are just a vehicle.
What I won't do
I've held to every one of these when it would have been easier not to . That's how you know I mean them.
I won't tell you who you are. It's disempowering, and honestly it doesn't survive a skeptic anyway.
I won't decide what you need. Talking somebody into a bigger package is the oldest move in this industry and I'm not doing it.
I won't use fear to get you back in the chair. No bad news that conveniently requires a follow-up.
I'll tell you when it's too soon. Sometimes the answer is come back in six months, and you'd be surprised how rarely anyone says that out loud.
I won't discount for friends and family. Full price or free, nothing in between. The Community Cup is what sits in the gap.
I won't do it for you. Your mom can absolutely send you here. She just can't do the work for you.
What happens in a reading
Before we start, every time, I ask what rules you've heard about this, what you're expecting, and what happened last time if there was a last time.
Then: you can touch the cards. You can interrupt me. You can ask me to slow down or say it again. If something doesn't feel right, your intuition trumps anything that comes out of my mouth. The reading is for you. It isn't for me.
And I'm not going to tell you what's going to happen. I'm showing you options. You're allowed to look at every one of them, decide you don't like any of them, and write something else instead. I mean that with certainty.
Laughs happen every session. Cries happen every so often.Amanda
Once the light's on
In social work school we talked about shining a light. Somebody shows you the whole room. You put the flashlight on the one part that needs looking at.
A client once said it better than I do. There's something in the corner of your brain that you know is there. You can feel it. But all the furniture's blocking it. We just have to move the furniture out and let the idea come through.
Once the light's on you can't turn it off. You can decide not to look. It's still there.
What I want is for you to leave in a more self-sustainable place than I found you. You've had this in you the whole time. Maybe you never had to use it, so you never flexed it. So we flex it together, you'll wobble a bit, and that's part of it.
What I'm building
The Aligned Way Oracle Deck, in the works and coming in 2027. The Soul Led Network, a directory of practitioners I actually trust. The Community Cup, which is a tip jar right now and a scholarship eventually.
An ecosystem, basically. In nature nobody has to sit down and discuss whether they'd like to be part of a village. They just are part of an ecosystem.
If it's finally time
Book a reading and we'll look at where you actually are. Or read the method first, if you're the kind of person who needs to understand a thing before agreeing to it. Both are fine. I'm the second kind.