Well-Life Services

Kelley Downie

Home Base: Eau Claire, WI

Willing to travel up to 60 Minutes 

Service Arrays: Individual Skills Development, Wellness Management and Recovery

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Kelley’s desired approach to life is kindness.  She holds a bachelor’s degree in Rehabilitation Health Services with a minor in Women’s Studies from the University of Maine in Farmington.

 

Kelley enjoys working with people who want to connect with their emotions through art.  She helps older teens and adults achieve this by using the book Draw Your Feelings by Rukmini Poddar.  Together they create a personal art journal through Poddar’s guided activities.  The first part of Poddar’s book explores emotions as visual art, forms, metaphors, and data.  The second half of the book explores our relationships to our parts, others, and our values. The last part of the book addresses accepting all our emotions.  With children and younger teens, Kelley guides the client through making their own book of emotions, a project Kelley created.  This project includes working with acrylics and watercolor paints, uses the Little Miss and Mr. Men books, and emotion wheels to explore and express more detailed emotions beyond the 5 basic emotions of happy, sad, angry, scared, and disgust.  In this project Kelley helps clients identify when they feel certain emotions, how that feels in their body, and what can be helpful to them when feeling emotions.  Kelley has taken several online classes with Rukmini Poddar and finds her work of connecting art and emotions deeply meaningful.  Kelley believes these activities, alongside an empathetic witness, can be very helpful and healing for people.  In this way, art can bring self-awareness to see and process emotions in new ways.  

 

Kelley has also combined art projects with the book Now Maps: A Tween’s Guide to Learning About Your Thoughts, Navigating Big Emotions, and Being a Confident Kid, by Daniel Siegel, MD and Deena Margolin, LMFT.  She uses this book to help kids understand themselves and find ways of regulating themselves. In this way Kelley combines art and the neuroscience of social-emotional well-being.  

 

Kelley completed a 7 week therapeutic forest walking guide course through The Forest Therapy School with Regan Stacey. Through this certification Kelley learned the history and holistic benefits of forest bathing, developed her own mindfulness and embodiment practice in nature, and learned how to offer guided nature meditations as well as a walk sequence for clients.  For adults and older teens therapeutic forest walking would begin with a sensory awareness meditation followed by a mindful walk through nature while engaging in specific invitations to connect with nature.  With kids and younger teens Kelley incorporates nature based games, hiking, exploring nature, as well as combining art and nature.  

 

In her own life Kelley uses somatic regulating resources such as controlled breathing, tapping, and other vagal toning exercises, as well as art, yoga, and nature to feel more grounded in herself.  All these modalities are ways she can help others to also feel more present in their body, connected to the world, build internal safety, and live into their own health. Kelley first learned somatic regulation through taking an 8 week and then a 6 week course with Sarah Baldwin.  Kelley completed a 30 hour certificate in Polyvagal Theory Applied Yoga through Arielle Schwartz, PhD and Embody Labs.  She attends a monthly vagal toning practice and vagal toning yoga with Dr. Arielle Schwartz.  She credits Dr. Arielle Schwartz with teaching her the most effective somatic regulating resources that have brought Kelley a sense of safety and wholeness.  Kelley also practices yoga regularly at the YMCA and has completed a 15 hour Kid's Yoga certificate.  

 

Kelley sees the strength in a person's heart, character, and personality and will take time to speak affirming truth to those qualities.  She believes words can be healing when they are true, spoken genuinely, and felt meaningfully.  Kelley has an ability to see a bigger picture and offer options for creative problem solving.  She is patient, thoughtful, understanding, kind, consistent, and dependable; which she believes are foundational for building trust.  Kelley is committed to her own healing and draws from the personal experience of her own healing journey. She sees herself as walking alongside others and is motivated by having found a more full and whole life through overcoming her own personal challenges including dyslexia, complex trauma, emotional neglect, and abuse.

 

Kelley enjoys the quiet early morning.  Mr. Rogers, Eric Carle (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), and Reading Rainbow are her role models from which she derives her most meaningful work.  Her hobbies include cooking, hiking, biking, swimming, paddling, cross-country skiing, and playing games with her family.  She also enjoys birding with her husband, watching the seasons change, listening to the sounds of rain, and feeling the sun on her face.