I teach people to stop performing for love.
I know the road because I walked it, and I walked it late. I will not teach you a thing I have not lived.
Author · Coach · Podcast Guest · Circle Keeper
For years I lived by other people's rules — collecting gold stars, trying to be the good girl who had it all together. On the outside my life looked polished. On the inside I was silencing myself, abandoning my truth, and dimming my own light.
There were mornings I drove more than an hour to a job I could not walk into. Some days I sat in the parking lot and drove home again. Nine months of that, while I was in therapy, meditating, and quietly negotiating my exit from the family business.
I didn't always know how to ROAR.
At fifty, I finally had the courage to quit. I chose me.
Then I went and got the training. I became a certified health and wellness coach and a Reiki Master, and I started mentoring other people who were ready to stop performing and start living fully alive. Everything I bring to a circle is something I walked first and then went looking for the research on.
The part I skip when I'm being brief
I had signed up for a seminar I didn't want to attend, and I spent the first morning of it deciding the whole thing was beneath me. I'm sure I was radiating that. At lunch I went back to my room and had a hard talk with myself, and I wrote down seven agreements before I went back in:
Calm down and listen
Go to every group lunch and every activity
Meet new people
Stay open to new ideas
Keep a beginner's mind
Expect great things
Be humble and kind
I'm an introvert. Sitting down to lunch in a ballroom where I knew nobody was, on its own, a victory. But I'd promised, so I went. A woman walked in, looked directly at me, crossed the room and sat down at my table.
She turned out to be the guest speaker. Halfway through the conversation she told me I was too comfortable in my life and might need a new perspective. Then she suggested I go to India and live in an ashram for thirty days.
A stranger told me I was too comfortable. So I went to India.
You should know I don't enjoy camping, bugs, dirt, or being uncomfortable.
I knew I was going anyway.
So in January 2020 I spent thirty days at Shantivanam — Saccidananda Ashram — in Thannirpalli, Tamil Nadu. The name means forest of peace. Two French Benedictine monks founded it in 1950, and from 1968 until his death in 1993 it was led by Father Bede Griffiths, who spent the last twenty-five years of his life there braiding the Rule of St Benedict together with Hindu sannyasa.
Both traditions, held at once, with neither one required to win. I have rarely seen anything like it before or since.
There was also time at an orphanage. And there was nothing familiar in reach: no title, no calendar, and nobody who had ever seen me perform the role — which meant there was no point performing it. That turns out to be the whole trick. A persona needs an audience that recognizes it. Take away the audience and you find out what is actually underneath.
Thirty days is long enough to stop being a visitor. I sat in ancient temples and watched ceremonies I didn't understand and wasn't asked to understand. I learned to chant — badly, out loud, in a language I don't speak, with nobody there to be impressed. I had spent thirty years being the competent one in the room. This was the opposite, and it was good for me. And I learned what I could about Hinduism and the gods, as a beginner.
I spent time in a village and saw how people actually lived and worked.
January 2020. You know what happened next. The news was starting to turn while I was still there, and toward the end I was quietly afraid I wouldn't be able to get home. I made it back, and then the world shut down behind me.
I have thought about that timing a great deal since — being sent, by a stranger, to the least comfortable place I could imagine, in the last month before everyone on earth was made to sit still.
It was, as they say, life-changing. Giant spiders and all.
Credentials · and their edges
What I do and what I don’t.
Plenty of people in this field are vague about this on purpose. I'd rather you knew exactly where my lane ends.
Certified Health Coach
Institute for Integrative Nutrition · done for myself
I trained for me, not to open a practice. I don't take health clients and I don't write plans for anyone. What it gave me was a working understanding of a body I had spent thirty years overriding — and it's the reason I start everything, the coaching and the circles and the writing, with the body rather than the mindset. If a friend asks, I'll gladly tell them what I know. That's the whole of it.
Not meal plans, not prescriptions, not diagnosis. Anything clinical belongs to your own doctor or a registered dietitian.
I don't book reiki sessions, and I never have. It isn't a service I sell — it's how I do everything else. I put it into food while I'm cooking. I send it across the country when a friend needs a hug and I can't be there to give one. It's in the writing, and it's in the room when a circle is running.
Reiki Master
Trained to master level · not on the menu
Not medical treatment, and never in place of your doctor.
Executive Leadership
Thirty years · corporate, then family business
I learned business at a global building-products manufacturer and rose to executive there. Then I took all of it into a family business — the one I helped build, and the one I eventually had to walk out of. Three decades in the chair between them. I know the golden handcuffs from the inside: the role that fits so well you forget you're wearing it.
Not legal or financial advice.
Author
Seven Books
ROAR: Your Sacred Rebellion, The Manifester's Playbook and its workbook, and the Little Ones books for children. Writing is where I work things out before I ever teach them.
Circle Keeper
The room
I keep the circle and provide the content. The circle offers community support and spiritual running mates.
Not a therapist, not a licensed clinician, and I say so out loud in the room. Coaching is a strong companion to therapy and a poor replacement for it.
WHY I TRAINED
For thirty years I outsourced it. I took the appointment I was given, accepted the answer I was handed, and overrode whatever my body said in between, because there was a schedule to keep and people counting on me.
That's the same habit as performing for love. You just do it to yourself, in a doctor's office, in a language you never learned.
So I trained. Not to coach anyone else through their health — to be able to ask a better question, read my own results, and know the difference between you're fine meaning fine and you're fine meaning nobody looked.
Nobody was going to advocate for my body except me.
In April 2026, Function Health put my biological age twelve years below my chronological age.
I'm not selling you that. I can't promise anyone a number and I wouldn't try, and if someone tells you they can, walk. What I'm telling you is what the advocating produced for one woman who started late.
Your body is yours to ask questions about. So is your life. That's the whole argument, and it's the same argument in both rooms.
FROM PEOPLE WHO’VE BEEN IN THE ROOM
Clients, colleagues, and the hosts who booked me.
An exceptional individual committed to personal growth, authenticity, and helping others transform their lives.
LOA Today · podcast host
A beautiful embodiment of authentic self-love and soulful wisdom.
Mind Over Matter · podcast host
HAVE THEM SENT
Love Letters
Every week or so, one letter. Something I have lived, told straight, with the part I got wrong left in. You'll get the welcome letter first, and the next one when it's written.
REACH ME
The door swings both ways.
For anything at all — julie@hellojulieheaton.com. I read my own email.
For podcasts — I'm a guest, not a host. I've done something close to fifty of them and written down maybe fifteen — those are here, with what the hosts said afterwards. Interview requests welcome.
For a seat — the circle runs here, and the terms are on the page before you're asked for anything.