about claire

Check out my other homes on the web:
Enchanted Home
Enchanted Studio
Sweet Spot Cafe 

And here’s a bit about my darlin’ hubby Kenny:
Ken Plattner
Enchanted Wedding

And here’s the love of my life, Roxy the Wonder Dawg, Queen of the Peaceful Old Soul Labradors.

I have over 25 years of experience as a facilitator of women’s personal growth groups, and as a healer drawn to energies, bodies, creative spaces.

I essentially acted as an in situ life coach — long before anyone had invented the term ‘life coach’. I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘life coach’ — I don’t dislike it in general, just never really resonated with it for myself.

Looking up the root of the term ‘facilitator’, I find the word ‘facile’ — French for ‘easy’. Perfect. So that is who I am — I’m an easifier. Or, more simply, I’m an easer. I bring ease. Not so much bring, but rather, re-remind.

And more than that, I’m an inviter. I invite.

I invite collaboration with our inherent wholeness, our natural — indeed, original — rhythm of yes, our wholesome participation WITH our downstream inclinations, our entire beings nodding yes, yes, yes. 

I learned, finally, happily, with great sighs of aaahhh…. that nothing I wanted for myself was upstream. (And some days, I re-learn.) I learned, deep in my cells and interstitial spaces, that ALL of life is FOR me, all of life is participating with The Great Current.

(I find it quite poetically satisfying that our move to France will take us to live in the Languedoc region — which translates literally as ‘the language of yes’.)

And like all seemingly-innate gifts, I come by my ability for Easing and Inviting by way of its opposite… An environment-of-origin that was anything but easy and inviting.

So here I am, living inside this healing expanse of my whole self, in this characteristic way that we humans have, benefitting from this lovely gift we have for taking our wounds and harvesting the already-there wholeness. A perfect alchemy, this turning-towards.

And then joyfully rippling out to our corner of the world the very thing that we had needed most — because we were finally able to claim it fully for ourselves. We are finally able to let love in. That is my story. I suspect it’s your, too.

This is one of those succinct pieces of wisdom that is so resonant it can inform an entire life, chapter after chapter. And its power comes from how yes it feels. I don’t remember where I found it, or who wrote it, but I framed it in a teeny pewter frame. Because I love teeny things. And it has been my Sacred Space companion for at least 25 years, chapter after chapter, more resonant with each passing year. Now, it dwells in the lavender-and-lime-colored niche in my plum-colored bed alcove…

Heaviness within our feeling life isn’t about issues and concerns from the past. It comes as a result of turning the body against the nourishment which is being given to it all the time, and from a misunderstanding of the possibilities at hand. Everything is given to us. Our purpose is to receive, transform, and give back.

 

The Third-Person Version

Here’s the long-form bio for those of you with an unreasonably-healthy attention span and/or greater-than average curiosity:

Claire O’Connor knows that part of the cure to the ‘pathological individualism’ — and the attendant inner and outer ills — rampant in our culture is to let others in on your most treasured dreams and to surround yourself with the right tribe — and she wants to spread the word.  With the ‘right tribe’, we can help each other live from our innate wholeness and inborn genius.

We evolve at the rate of the tribe we’re plugged into.
Carolyn Myss

Fueled by the joyful side effects of lives lived buoyed by full support, mutual celebration and full engagement with the spirit of possibility, Claire shares her gifts as a natural connector with a way of drawing people together — and as a healing, wide and inclusive presence.

A delightfully down-to-earth, warmly engaging and intuitive facilitator and workshop leader, Claire connects with a bright, open energy which invites people to feel safe and at home no matter the setting. Claire has the ability to light-heartedly yet masterfully focus group energy, while staying tuned in to each person. Participants feel at ease and inspired at the same time.

Her background includes a degree in Holistic Human Development and Transpersonal Counseling Psychology and over two decades of experience as a group facilitator for various groups, teams and guilds whose membership has included women-in-transition, women entrepreneurs, new empty-nesters, career-changers, healing arts practitioners, environmental educators, middle-schoolers and college freshmen.

Claire is a Body-Mind Vibrance and Conscious Relationship Coach, certified by the Hendricks Institute for Conscious Living. The Hendricks Institute founders, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, train bold pioneers in the realms of authentic relating, presence, vitality and easeful manifesting. In addition to the coaching certification, over the past four years Claire has also participated in their advanced Transformational Leaders Program, Couples Catalyst Intensive Program, Conscious Entrepreneurs Program, and dozens of their shorter trainings.

As a practical ‘space magician’, Claire loves working with creatives, artists and healers to co-create enlivening environments — and lives — where exuberant creativity blossoms and flow reigns.

She adores assisting people to shape inviting, intelligent, deeply functional spaces which have the power to make life easier, heal, and to nourish well-being everyday.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where the vitality of the place may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
                                                                                                                                                     John Muir

Claire draws on extensive studies in social and environmental psychology, along with advanced professional training in the very practical western feng shui. As a 1998 graduate of the Western School of Feng Shui in San Diego, Claire studied directly under Terah Kathryn Collins. She also studied with the visionary feng shui architect Tom Bender and interior designer Denny Daikeler, an innovative, internationally renowned teacher whose approach marries spirituality and environmental psychology.

Here are some of the spaces she’s midwifed…

Claire’s renaissance-woman background includes 16+ years in private practice as a Licensed Massage Therapist, and three years as a wilderness-based Outward Bound-style group facilitator, helping people access the transformational and healing powers of nature on the wild rivers and lakes of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.