Are you ready to live your truest,
most beautiful life?
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Season 2 - A Soft Place to Land - is coming soon!
In this podcast, Cynthia Garner shares stories from her personal journey as an adoptee and single mother. She offers nervous system support, real-world relationship wisdom, and simple, restorative practices for those navigating emotional exhaustion, systemic stress, and the long road home to themselves.
She creates a soft place to land for anyone ready to reclaim clarity, regulation, and rest.
Share your story on the Ask Dr. Cindy Hotline. Your call helps others know they aren’t alone.
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As a seasoned large-group facilitator, Cynthia’s poise and passion will connect, inspire, and uplift your community and offer actionable practices for creating meaningful, lasting change.
Cynthia offers gripping and relatable stories, poignant wisdom, and a fierce determination to be an agent of generational healing.
You’ll walk away from her events feeling grounded and empowered, with practical tools to lower stress, break cycles of reactivity, and reclaim attentional control, so you can lead with integrity, steadiness, and care. Learn more.
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Fierce Boundaries is a guide for anyone ready to step out of survival mode and into a more intentional way of living. The skills you learn in this book will serve you in every part of your life—from how you show up in relationships to how you navigate work, parenting, or the bigger questions of our time. Buy now.
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Schedule an exploratory session to discover how coaching or mentorship can help you find rest, transform exhaustion into focus, and step into soulful leadership. Together, we’ll create a personalized plan to help you thrive and make a meaningful impact. Explore coaching and inquire.
Fact: If you do not tend to your wellness, you will be forced to tend to your illness.
Ignoring this truth nearly cost me everything. Even after my home finally quieted in the years after the divorce, even though I had removed the screaming and berating and soul sucking energies from my home and cleared the remnants of that disastrous marriage from my closets, I still couldn’t sleep through the night. It was a heavy lift to turn off my whirring, self-critical mind much less sit on a meditation cushion without dissolving into a full-fledged panic attack.
Deep in my bones, I believed that resting was dangerous, and I only ever felt restful when I was completely alone and without anything to tend to or accomplish (an opportunity that does not come frequently when you are a single mom and attempting to coparent with a narcissistic, depressed alcoholic).
As a people pleaser, I had no real boundaries and anxiety was the story of my life. In fact, it was the story of generations of women and alcoholic men who had come before me and imprinted a legacy of trauma and self-betrayal on my DNA. I mean, when you are primed for hyper-vigilance from conception, when your heart’s rhythm and your story of belonging in the world are built upon unpredictable bursts of terror and a chronic sense of fight/flight/flee, what does “rest” even mean? Is it even possible? Is it even safe?
Fact: Humans are not designed to live in a constant state of fear and depletion.
After a lifetime of operating in a scarcity mindset and chronic survival mode, I did not know how to rest, much less how to “tend to my wellbeing.” Taking that kind of time and energy felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. Besides, wasn’t sitting around and doing nothing “lazy” and “wasteful”?
Without rest, and without boundaries, the emotional abuse and harassment kept coming. Then one day while I was chopping vegetables, bitter and seething with rage over text messages I was exchanging with my ex, the volcano erupted. My then 3-year-old daughter sweetly asked me to come play with her on the floor and I exploded with a guttural scream and began hacking violently at the countertop. A lifetime of repressed anger and grief roiled out of me, finally unleashing itself upon my kitchen in a spray of carrot-stained laminate.
And then, I saw my daughter’s wide eyes. The terror and confusion on her face.
In that instant, I made up my mind. The cycle stops with me. It ends right here. Right now.
Healing this rift wasn’t optional for me—it was essential. And in order to do so, I had to acknowledge that my well was dry and my soul was utterly exhausted. I didn’t know how to rest, but I was willing to learn. Writing Fierce Boundaries and recording the Welcome You Podcast helped me integrate these skills in real time. I would not allow my daughter to replay the same abusive dynamics that had suffocated my spirit and kept me locked into a cycle of reactivity, depletion, and shame.
Meditate with me on Insight Timer!
Fact: Your nervous system is the intervention.
I enrolled in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class and soon started working with a mentor who helped me slow down and recognize that I didn’t have to believe my thoughts, focus on my failures, or keep judging myself, and that there was safety and rest available to me, anytime, anywhere.
Through mindfulness, somatic healing, and nervous system regulation, I learned how to step back from my intrusive thoughts and core beliefs. With manageable micro-moments of awareness, I practiced watching the impulses to react come and go and learned how to ground myself in what was real and true, in the present moment. Miraculously, giving myself permission to rest and regulate myself started to ripple outward.
In calming my own nervous system, and prioritizing my own wellbeing, I got to be a source of rest and strength for others.
While developing a formal sitting meditation practice also helped, it was the small moments of informal mindfulness, attention, and rest that gave me practical and in-the-moment skills for pausing during tense moments and choose a response, rather than reacting on automatic pilot.
I now had concrete ways to stop perpetuating the abuse/depletion cycle and move forward, and soon started sharing these tools with others. In the decade since I began formally teaching nervous system repair and regulation skills, I have seen these simple but powerful practices help people from all walks of life reclaim their hearts, regain their sense of agency, set boundaries, and step fiercely into their lives fully rested, ready to embrace rest.
Eyecare Associates, Loveland, CO.
Why These Skills Matter
I believe deeply that the skills that helped me survive and thrive are the exact ones we need to navigate these divisive, exhausting times. Anger, grief, and anxiety aren’t things to fix or avoid—they are doorways to rest and success, and your greatest teachers. They show you where you’ve been hurt, where you’ve compromised too much, and where change is calling you.
By turning toward these emotions with mindfulness, somatic awareness, and creative exploration, you can transform yourself and inspire the people and systems around you. You can also turn burnout into engaged, purpose-driven action, channeling your energy toward meaningful change and impactful leadership.
How We Can Work Together:
BoundaryWISE Leadership and Workplace Wellbeing - Customized Programs for Organizations and Trauma-Impacted Systems. These sessions, courses, keynotes, and workshops are designed to help leaders, educators, and high-impact professionals integrate mindfulness into their day-to-day leadership, activism, and workplace culture.
Private 1:1 coaching tailored to your unique needs as a leader, creative healer, disruptor, educator, or healer of generational trauma.
When You Work with Me, You’ll Get:
✔ Expert Guidance in Mindful Leadership & Trauma-Sensitive Practices – Personalized coaching to help you break reactive cycles, regulate stress, and lead with clarity, steadiness, and impact.
✔ Somatic & Creative Practices for Deep Healing & Sustainable Action – Learn how to release trauma, reclaim your nervous system’s wisdom, and access your full capacity for leadership and change.
✔ Field-Tested Strategies for Boundary-Setting & Resilience – Practical, real-world tools to navigate burnout, hold firm yet compassionate boundaries, and cultivate a workplace where well-being and effectiveness thrive.
✔ A Transformational Framework Rooted in Science & Lived Experience – My approach blends neuroscience, mindfulness, and leadership research with decades of experience working with educators, activists, and mission-driven professionals.
✔ A Partner in Your Growth & Impact – This is more than coaching—it’s a collaborative journey to help you step into your full power, disrupt toxic patterns, and create the change you’re here to make.
🔹 Ready to lead with clarity, presence, and impact? Let’s work together to create a sustainable, thriving future for you and your community. Book a free consultation today.
Parents and Teens Mindfulness Workshop, Longmont, CO.
Professional Development Session for Educators, Skyline High School, Longmont, CO.
District Leadership Mindfulness-Based Mentorship Group, South Bend, IN.
Art as Resistance. The Practice of Reclaiming Myself with Painter’s Tape
From the Prologue of Fierce Boundaries:
“At home, later that afternoon, the printed stack of “evidence” yelled at me from the pile on my desk. So, I whimsically threw the papers into a metal bucket and lit it on fire. I took it outside and placed it in the yard where the smoke billowed around the house, symbolically cleansing us all from the memory of this toxicity. I got out a giant canvas and a lot of paint and I sliced the surface in half with painter’s tape, and I let myself have my feelings all over the damn place. The top part of the canvas was where I let my light shine, painting my brilliance with handprints and iridescent, glowing colors. On the bottom of the canvas, I splashed and splattered hues of darkness and fire and smeared them around angrily with a gigantic brush and dramatic, pounding strokes.
Once the pages in the bucket outside burned down to dust, I mixed the ashes with acrylic gesso so that they turned goopy and gray, and added them to the painting, right along the “boundary” between the two sides. Then I pulled up the tape, and laid the canvas down on its back, and ran drippy blood red along the seam between the two very different parts. Then I tipped the painting back up and let the blood run down into the murky, ugly, bottom half, away from the flower garden of my soul and the bright explosion of color that represented my heart.
That night, I blocked his number for good and shot him one last email… (keep reading).
The original “Resolution” painting that became the cover of Fierce Boundaries