Hey, I’m shelley.
You didn't lose yourself when you became a parent. You just forgot where you put yourself down.
This is the path back.
Mindfulness teacher and mentor, Enneagram coach, and contributing author, podcaster, and facilitator — welcome to Spicy Soul Mama.
Self-awareness, built through practice and honest self-examination, is one of the greatest gifts you can offer the people you love.
Who I am
I spent over twenty years in Silicon Valley recruiting rooms, reading people for a living, helping them find where they belonged — long before I understood I was doing that work for myself too.
Then parenthood cracked me open. Not gently. The kind of crack that doesn't close back up, and shouldn't.
I'm an essayist, contributing author (Six Feet Apart in the Time of Corona, 2022), mindfulness teacher, and Enneagram coach. I trained in the lineage of Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach for mindfulness and mindfulness mentoring. I’ve also spent over a decade in the Ram Dass Sangha, where I embraced bhakti yoga.
My writing has appeared in The Sun, Elephant Journal, LA Yoga, Mad in America, and Business Insider. I was awarded the 2025 Dairy Hollow Writer-in-Residence Fellow. I serve on the board of Family Sanity and previously on the Family Alliance for Mental Health Recovery. Today, I work for The Shift Network as a Course Host, exposing me to a range of healing and spiritual modalities.
Parenting is the path, not the destination. The fear-based beliefs you inherited, the voice you quieted to keep the peace, the power you handed over without noticing — this is where we go to work.
The wisdom here is braided, not borrowed from one place.
But none of that is really the point. The point is: I know what it's like to build a whole life on top of a self you never got to fully discover — and I know what it takes to meet her anyway, in the middle of the laundry and the school pickup and the 2 am worry. That's the work I do here - with you.
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
- Kahlil Gibran
Read and listen
Sign up for Spicy Soul Mama Substack essays and podcasts, where I interview interesting spiritual parents who have discovered ways to heal and remember the sacredness of everyday life.
The sacred unraveling
Ground your nervous system
Variations on Introduction to Mindfulness, Practices of Metta (loving-kindness), Create rituals you can keep. Meet with me for a 1:1 session to find modalities that work for you. I have a trunk of treasures to help you find your inner diamond again.
Change the station
Upcoming 12-week container rooted in Ram Dass's teachings on tuning your own frequency and grounded in Vipassana practice. A deeper path for parents ready to stop trying to change the song and start changing the station.
What Clients are Saying
"shelley is made to be a meditation teacher. I never grasped the concepts of mindfulness until I practiced with her."
—Nancy A, Mindfulness Practitioner.
“I’ve been feeling especially grateful lately for the inspiration from Shelley’s podcasts. Each one arrived at the right moment for me."
—Devon, Parent
"I appreciate Shelley’s guidance in our spiritual parenting group. She creates a safe space and camaraderie in a thoughtful and organic way."
- Luisa, Parent/Mindfulness Practitioner
“I am so impressed by your writing. Much of it resonates with my own view of the world. I am looking forward to hearing new ideas and new ways of seeing things.”
—Adam, Spicy Soul Mama Subscriber
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FAQ
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No — the work draws from many spiritual traditions (Buddhist, Jewish mystical, Bhakti, earth-based, archetypal), but it's not tied to any one faith or belief system. You don't need to believe anything specific to do this work.
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No. If you're skeptical of anything that sounds mystical, the practical, nervous-system-level work here will still land — the framing is optional, the tools aren't.
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No. Shelley is a mindfulness teacher and Enneagram coach, not a licensed therapist. This is spiritual and personal-growth work, not clinical treatment — and it can absolutely sit alongside therapy.
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No — the work is for any parent doing the job of raising a life while trying to still have one. Fathers and non-birthing parents are welcome.
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The work is less about a parenting stage and more about your own inner life — it applies whether you have a newborn or an adult child.