From the personal to holistic healing

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From corporate executives to emergency-room physicians, from those struggling with tragic grief and loss.  to those going through depression, women have found their way to Misha Vayner of New York, a mother of 3, and a “Certified Trauma-Informed, Holistic Health & Life Coach” for her company, Your Well Guide.

The Covid pandemic was a period during which Vayner in fact, grew her company. It was also a time when women faced, are facing, additional stress as working from home has meant, coping full time not only with jobs, but also with children at home, schooling, cooking, etc., chores that could be left behind pre-covid when one left for office.

To these issues Vayner adds –

1) a realization of marital issues that had gone unnoticed were surfacing and couples were being forced to deal with them;

2) The impact of isolation + lack of community + socialization and how that impacted children still developing their social skills and mothers who really depend on community for emotional wellbeing;

3) The isolation highlighted deeper unattended wounds that hadn’t been faced from lack of fulfillment in jobs, to marriages, with one’s self and beyond.

“I have treated dozens and dozens of women over the last three years. I look at the most burnt-out women,” Vayner told Desi Talk during a recent interview. “I’ve had a 100 percent success rate,” she adds.

But it took years of learning about herself that has brought Vayner where she is today.

Ten years ago, while building a retail concept store, her childhood dream, her business partner betrayed her, and she was left facing multimillion dollar lawsuits. Loss of a dear family member, marital problems of another, combined with trying to navigate a morass of legal troubles, all combined to shut down her body.

“Life was so intense,” and it became more so when she had her baby and felt the need to return to work to get a paycheck. That was the breaking point.

“My body just crumbled – anxiety, depression, migrains, insomnia, even nail fungus! I was on crutches for a year,” Vayner said. She kept getting diagnosed with stress related problems, but nothing helped.

She decided to take her health into her own hands and sought treatment from an integrative medicine doctor. She also began observing herself and noticed that she kept putting pressure on herself by doing things that were not part of who she was inside.

“How to unpack all that,” became her mission. And she also began to look at trauma healing.

That’s when, “All of a sudden – everything shifted and became better,” and seemingly everything fell into place, “Everything started to flow.”

Vayner has realized that this is an evolving journey, “But when you understand your true self, you can bring yourself back, nourish yourself and navigate your way,” forward.

And that is what she imparts to her clients – women who are undergoing what she went through – showing them how to manage their expectations of themselves.

“We are taught in our society that we should look outside of ourselves for treatments. However, if you turn inward and engage in a deeper healing, to understand how your body is conditioned and from that understanding how to move forward, how to live in alignment with your body.

Vayner’s classes are mostly online but she also holds in-person group or individual sessions. She guides women in trauma healing and stress reduction, learning about each client’s whole lifestyle and where the imbalance is. “At the same time, I am looking at deeper things – at who you are inherently before your trauma.”

That leads to a process of ‘deconditioning’ – in effect, unlearning all the bad habits acquired over a lifetime of living by someone else’s or society’s expectations.

“You find yourself step into the version of yourself that was inside,” Vayner emphasizes. For instance, she says, she was brought up to be very social, but through re-examination, learnt that being social was antithetical to who she really was. “As I came to understand that, I was able to reduce a lot of stress and burnout.”

Vayner’s jobs till now, were all in upscale businesses, from Saks Fifth Avenue to Salvatore Ferragamo, and dealing with upscale fashion.

A graduate of Hofstra University in Speech Communications, also having studied abroad in summer programs with New York University, Vayner is also a product of   New York Fashion Institute of Technology, apart from studying at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and Trauma healing with the Institute of Trauma and Psychological Safety.