You deserve to live your truest, most beautiful life.
Reclaim your story.
Be fierce about it.
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Season 2 - A Soft Place to Land - is coming soon!
In The Welcome You Podcast, is a resting place for wounded hearts. Dr. Cynthia Garner shares real-world stories and personal struggles, and the mindfulness practices that help us to meet the moment with kindness and care.
Nervous System Support
Real-World Relationship Wisdom
Simple, Restorative Practices
Share your story on the Ask Dr. Cindy Hotline. Your call helps others know they aren’t alone.
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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 reclaim your story find rest, transform exhaustion into focus, set boundaries, and step into soulful leadership. Together, we’ll create a personalized plan to help you thrive and make a meaningful impact. Learn more about coaching offerings here.
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Be the leader everybody wants. The way you show up—your steadiness, clarity, and emotional intelligence—directly shapes the culture of your team.
Through 1-on-1 coaching, small group mentorship, and staff well-being workshops, we help leaders cultivate the self-awareness, boundaries, and nervous system capacity needed to foster resilient, engaged, and high-performing workplaces.
Life Lesson #1: 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 quiet my whirring, self-critical mind—much less sit on a meditation cushion without dissolving into a full-fledged panic attack.
I didn’t know how to rest. Not even a little bit.
Deep in my bones, I believed that resting was dangerous. I only ever felt restful when I was completely alone and without anything (or anyone) to tend to.
As a people pleaser, all I wanted to do was make everyone else happy and keep the peace. 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.
Life Lesson #2: You 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 learn how to interrupt a generational pattern of trauma and a lifetime of societal conditioning.
I had to do it differently. Remarkably, it wasn’t about running away, blocking, hiding, or changing the conditions in the world around me, but about coming home to my heart, honoring my wisdom, and being fully present to life unfolding.
Turns out it is possible to be the change. Once you become the owner of your story then you can do anything.
Life Lesson #3: You are enough. Your nervous system is the intervention.
In grounding yourself and prioritizing your own wellbeing, you become a refuge and source of strength for others. You are the work.
It is our birthright to belong. But in our modern world, we get hooked into the endless cycle of taking in too much and not being enough and we start to wander through the world flighty and dissociated, exhausted from being in survival mode, and isolated—unable to summon the emotional energy to risk connection or rejection again.
This fracturing of our safety and sense of belonging in the world is called relational trauma. It is real and it is complex.
While developing a formal sitting meditation practice 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.
I get to live in deep alignment with my story and channel the lessons from my past into wisdom for the future.
Now, I want to help you reclaim your story too.
Life Lesson #4: Happiness is only real when shared.
What the world needs now is for courageous leaders like you to come together into circles where we can connect around our shared human experiences, express ourselves fiercely and authentically, and hold ourselves and each other with care.
Writing, music, and art have helped me embody my authenticity, deepen my healing, and acknowledge the depth of my grief, longing, and rage. Creative expression helps me remain steady amid ongoing upheaval and now I work to channel this energy into interrupting these cycles on a larger scale.
My intention in sharing my creative healing and my story so publicly with the world is to let it be a light in the darkness. More than anything, I want to help other survivors know they aren’t alone and to inspire them to take agency, speak their truth, and reclaim their lives.
We all need regular reminders that we don’t have to hold it all, that we don’t have to heal all the world’s trauma in one generation, and that sometimes it’s okay to lay down on the forest floor, and just let yourself be held. You belong.
You are enough.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be safe and protected.
May all beings know that they are loved.