Coach With Allana

From Landmark I went on to attend Reverend Beckwith’s Agape’s programs and take courses from T. Harv Eker’s Peak Potentials (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind) such as Warrior Camp where I carried a paralyzed man on my shoulders up and down a mountain. Welts bled from my shoulders as I held his spindly legs and he walked on his hands through the mud over the finish line after dark. My heart broke open. I was hooked- a personal growth junkie.

My parents had modeled care and compassion for others. My Dad, a pharmacist, would spend some part of Christmas day at his closed drugstore helping the elderly who ran out of medicine. He made it a habit to chat with customers to unveil root causes and shift their focus to wellness. I’d punch holes in the plastic top of vials and stick a lollipop in them, with an Rx label saying, ‘Pratt’s Pharmacy, The Little Drugstore with the Big Heart.’ I loved seeing customers’ faces when they left the store.

Mom taught English as a Second Language and was a nurturing mother figure for children who’d lost their parents and escaped the Killing Fields or Vietnam by swallowing diamonds. Her version of care and compassion was also bolder. When an older boy ran me off the sidewalk with his bicycle walking home from Kindergarten, she marched into the school Principal’s office to ensure I could walk home safe. She banded with other mothers getting a PE teacher fired when he, among other things, touched our asses too many times. She also taught me to savor the beauty of the moment. Driving from the interior of BC to Vancouver, she’d pull over our blue Ford Van and breathtakingly declare, LOOK at these mountains!

After school, I’d sit at our 70’s orange round kitchen table doing my homework while Mom’d make dinner until Dad got home. One evening while she was peeling potatoes, he leaned in to kiss her on the back of her neck. She blocked him out like an Ice Queen. She just. Kept. Peeling. Decades later, I was cutting vegetables telling my first husband how excited I was that I got an audition! He told me to stop getting so excited, that I didn’t even have the job, and that I was cutting the vegetables all ‘wrong’. So I too blocked him out. And just. Kept. Cutting.

I wonder after 30 yrs of addiction, affairs and leading separate lives with my sister and I, what shifted in Mom to finally leave Dad. I told my husband the night before we were to embark on a decadent vacation. I said, I can’t do this anymore. We’ve tried everything. He said, But you can’t even work here. You need me. I said, I’ll figure it out, I always have. My green card arrived in the mail the next morning.

Now I wanted to not just experience transformation, I wanted to inspire it. I began coaching for T. Harv’s Peak Potential and rose to the top 1% of coaches. While coaching for Landmark and Eker, I loved their work but also ached for something more. Coaching revealed that my daddy wounds led me to be rescued by my first husband and give up my performance roots. I secured the role of Ms. Potiphar for a local production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, singing 8 part harmony for the first time in my life. I was hired by Guthy Renker for several beauty product infomercials. I co hosted Secrets of the Red Carpet with costume designer of ABC’s series Castle, Luke Reichle. I was the Relationship Coach for both Emmy nominated Reality TV’s Stable Wars: Del Mar and TLC’s That Ying Yang Thing.

Still coaching for Peak Potentials, at an event I was talking with Harv on the dance floor, Harv why do you only pay us coaches $35/hr when the International Coaching Federation says the going rate is $200/hr? He responded, Because I find the lead and handle the whole backend. I retorted, Well that can’t be that hard. I value myself and want to be paid more. He smiled, Good luck.

Well, I had NO IDEA that I’d have to learn to be a marketer, PR expert, sales woman, copywriter, web designer, speaker, social media expert, video and audio editor, accountant and bookkeeper, content creator, writer and book publisher. Overwhelmed and not yet capable of fully processing my emotions, I did what I knew, study. I applied what I studied in my 1st attempt at becoming incorporated was “Goddess Getaways, Inc”. My mom even traveled to California to attend my first retreat. Yet I began to face the truth that being a coach and running my own business were two different skill sets. OMG, I was so humbled. I’m not sure if was stubbornness or bravery, yet I went to networking events, hired business coaches and on the brink of giving up, a chance meeting landed me a segment on Leeza Gibbon’s Live. We hit it off immediately. I took it as a sign to keep going.

Part of my stubbornness was to escape my feelings. My mom was dying of cancer. It was near the end and I was in Vancouver, alone with her in the hospital. She had lost consciousness for days when she abruptly sat up and asked, Where do I go to die? I said, I think the Angels come to get you when you’re ready. Then she said in this strange possessed high pitched voice with squinting eyes, Let’s go then! She tried to get out of bed with a catheter and morphine drip. When I tried to stop her, she bit my hand through the skin, muscles, teeth grinding in between my bones. I was screaming, she was screaming, the nurses rushed in screaming. I ended up in the ER. I still covet my scar.

That night she lost consciousness again. I slept in the cot beside her. At dawn, the nurses woke me. She’s Dead. I was in slow motion. Yes, we’ll check out by Noon. Fuck I missed the moment! Did she need me? Did she reach out? I breathed the most excruciating breaths of my life, sobbing and prying my heart wide open… I could see she wasn’t IN her body. Then all of a sudden, stillness melted gravity and I felt her everywhere.

When I first discovered mom had cancer, I felt alone and panicked. My sister was engaged, my Dad was remarried, so I thought a man was a plan. I quickly remarried a new boyfriend in Las Vegas. The week after Mom died, it was my sister’s wedding at the Emerald Lake Lodge in the Rockies. We pretended mom was on vacation, drank a hell of lot and I got pregnant.

After the wedding and the funeral, my new husband and I returned to Los Angeles and I went into overachiever mode numbing the pain of loss. At the time my branding embraced my belly. I was the “Sexy Mom Expert” touting ‘When mama’s happy, everybody’s happy’, yet behind the scenes it was far from jovial. In the hospital the day after our son’s birth, my husband texted me to say he quit his job so we could live off my Mom’s inheritance. Shit, I did it again. My closed heart had attracted another closed heart. Within a year I was a single motherless mom. From his point of view I humiliated him and he sought revenge with a 12yr custody battle. I incurred tremendous legal debt and lost my home, yet the real one I had lost was me.

Personal growth courses lifted me and Leeza helped evolve me booking weekly radio segments for over a year. She got the call from Dancing with the Stars during one of our segments. All the producers rushed in elated, screaming, You have to do it! She was clearly nervous. I suggested that perhaps she didn’t have to, yet she could choose to… what was her Why? She had valid concerns that she was turning 50… did she want 52 million people seeing her thighs? I suggested we could shift her Why into inspiring 52 million people to show up for the adventure of being alive, rather than looking good or winning. She said, As long as you’ll be my coach.

Yet I understood how Leeza felt. I remember being at odds with my body. In between dance contracts in Japan, I traveled as a backpacker through Thailand, committed to learning how to love my body rather than comparing myself to other women. I spent $3 a night for a wobbly shack on the beach. I purposefully walked miles every day along the secluded beach of Koh Pan Gan in nothing more than a floss g-string. There’s a popular misconception that showgirls are confident yet the opposite is often true. My fellow dancers were bulimics, anorexics and heroine addicts. Many were ruthlessly competitive and condescending, attempting to maintain their job by cutting down the new girl, always striving for the unattainable perfect body.

My goal walking the beach nearly naked was to trigger all my insecurities. It was my own Camino de Santiago, a sacred pilgrimage to set down my body shame and learn to embody my inherent beauty from the inside out. I cried most days, unable to just let go and be free. One day turning back toward my shack, defeated, I simply gave up. Instantly gravity disappeared, I felt one with the sand, the waves, the droplets of water in the air, the rays of sunshine, the people around me and my sacred naked body. Thus while my mind didn’t know the logical steps to support Leeza, my instincts knew I could help her return to body’s wisdom and inspire millions. I’ll never forget the warmth in her smile the day she embodied the connection between her sensuality and safety.

Looking back, I suspect it was inner knowing that led me, a small-town girl from British Columbia, to hitch a ride with Uncle Phil on his monthly run to the States on his 18 wheeler. Or it was stubborn defiance so I didn’t have to take over Dad’s Pharmacy or be an underpaid teacher like Mom. To my 19-year-old small-town Canadian naive mind, I was going to make it in Hollywood. I’d be a dancer either at DisneyLand, Knotts Berry Farm, or maybe a cruise ship. But I didn’t even have a Green Card.

I ended up auditioning for a job dancing in Japan. I was hired… yet what a wake up call. Opportunities required fishnets, false eyelashes, high heels, a G-string and not much else. Short drunk tattooed men in kimonos would sit cross legged on the floor around our stage with their weenies hanging out red-faced-drunk, yelling, slurring and enamored by our show. I was both horrified and intrigued. My body felt empowered dancing to Madonna’s Vogue, the beginning of awakening my sensual powers. Yet my mind was on high alert that sexuality invited such inebriated degradation. Was I to feel exploited or revered? Mid contract the choreographer sent a ‘care package’ to each dancer. Others got vibrators, chocolate, sex toys, lingerie….yet Allana got a crayola coloring book and crayons, as if to mock my naivete.

My mom didn’t set me up to be savvy in the world of men, sex and societal pressures. She taught me to slow down, be present and savor the moment. I remember one time at the Vancouver Hotel during breakfast, she asked my sister and I to see if we could taste the difference between the minerals of mountain water and the freshness of oceanside water. Yet she didn’t get around to having ‘the talk’ until I was 13yrs. She took me alone to a high end restaurant and proceeded to down a full glass of wine in one gulp. Then she turned her empty wine glass upside down on the white linen tablecloth and declared, This is your vagina. The sterile lecture consisted of learning I would get a period and how babies were made yet nothing about the female body’s capacity for pleasure, power or perception.

In Tokyo I was shocked by the blatant sexuality. Men in business suits on the subway read comic books titled, Rape Man, depicting bent over girls in school uniforms. Yet I persisted knowing there had to be another sexual reality given I’d experienced my body, mind and spirit as Divine Oneness on that beach in Thailand.

My next Japanese dance contract was at the elegant Four Seasons. The hotel was epic with a gorgeous 5 story Pagoda on the exquisitely manicured grounds. The job was more money than I’d ever made in my life. When I arrived for a costume fitting during dress rehearsals, there were no tops. Now it all made sense. A topless review. Shit. I almost didn’t go back. But I was a good little Canadian girl well trained to comply to social pressures. All the other girls from Europe and Australia were totally ok. So I stuffed my shame into numbness yet my fake smile gave it away. They questioned, “What’s the problem?” Mortified, I pretended, “Oh nothing, it’s all good.”

I learned to be numb out in my alcoholic home. When my dad would drink and do drugs, he seemed possessed by demons. Awful things happened. I was told it was my fault, stay still, say nothing. I have very few memories of exhaling. As I grew older, mom numbed out too, and was usually preoccupied. Yet when I was small, almost 3yrs old, I remember her being particularly present. I was putting Fisher Price people on the Fisher Price record player, turning up the speed until they flew all over the living room floor and I’d fall back howling. Mom smiled watching my every move. It was as if she was liquid love, lounging on the couch in her pink velour housecoat, horn rimmed glasses, scarf on her head, sipping her coffee in a blue Lotte China mug. In her safe approving gaze I felt magical.

On opening night, feeling far from magical wearing a huge feathered headdress and a fake smile, all the suited men on my side of the stage from Sony, Toshiba and Honda were ‘skah-bey’… horny. Yet all the suited men on the other side of the stage where the French girls were, were bowing in adoration. WTF? As I paid more attention, they seemed to drink in the men’s lecherous looks and somehow perform alchemy becoming even more elegant.

These women were breathing in the energy of ‘You’re a piece of meat’, affirming that their body was a divine temple and exhaling the energy of ‘Thank you for noticing I’m a work of Art.’ Each show I was scared and disgusted but tried not resisting men’s sexual turn-on. Instead I opened, welcomed it, affirmed my body’s sacredness and exhaled appreciation for them acknowledging my Goddess nature. Astonishingly, they began to bow in reverence. To ME! I learned that while the men were paying to watch me dance, I was actually in charge if I was brave enough to claim it. I had the potential to take control with energy not force, hypnotize them, dominate their attention to ultimately awaken their masculine grandeur.

The next dance review was in Roppongi, the party district of Tokyo where I auditioned for the newest club in town. I was tall, model thin with super short French hair. I got the job! We were paid to choreograph our upcoming show by day while dancing 4 sets a night, 6 nights a week. Duran Duran, Matt Dylan, the Rat Pack, and the top sumo wrestlers like Takahanada were club guests. My fellow dancers were outwardly drop dead gorgeous. They’d danced at the Moulin Rouge, Crazy Horse or the Lido Cabaret in Paris yet inwardly they often had horrific backstories.

They were kind yet impatient with my sexual naiveté, explaining how ‘za man like to zee how za woman touch za woman’. Whah? We debuted a new dance to 9 1/2 Week’s Underground Train, wearing very ripped jeans. We sprayed our torso’s and hair with water and wore only a huge blue sequined cross necklace. The stage was dark, blue ice ready to waft around our bodies. From the second floor at the top of the spiral staircase, Frederique appeared in the spotlight first, erotically laying back over the railing, her long hair cascading as I appeared, slowly tracing my hand between her breasts to her neck meeting eyes. 350 raucous guests and hostesses fell completely silent. OMG they were right. The intoxicating art of seduction. From my eyelashes and fingertips to my swirling hips, I tasted the dominant power of, I am the Goddess of this space. I’m in control of your sensitivities. Surrender as I weave them together for your greater good.

Yet my sacred schooling in the power of seduction was short lived. On the Business Class flight from Tokyo to NYC, the Wall Street Broker boyfriend who seemed keen to date a sexy dancer from the hottest club in Roppongi, asked me, Are you going to wear that? I said, I always wear this. He said, Yes but now you’re my girlfriend and we’re going to meet my parents. Balinese sarongs and sexy hoops were soon replaced by Burberry and a conservative bob. A surprise strip tease during his lunch break was abruptly rejected. I remember sobbing watching Kama Sutra with him, aching for deep erotic sacred intimacy, none of the therapy or workshops could save us.

I’m grateful life supported me coaching Leeza through Dancing with the Stars because it inspired my resilience. I kept going, created a website, provided sassy yet soulful content for her radio show, yet I hadn’t even written my first book or learned about opt-in’s. I began speaking and was invited to discuss The Vagina Monologues for a Women’s Studies University program. At the end I made an offer for interns to work with me for extra credit- my first 4 assistants! They were instrumental in helping me ‘get out there’. I began closing clients and hired my first administrative assistant.

While Landmark had taught me to stop projecting blame or being a victim of my circumstances and instead take ownership of my communication and experience, the curriculum didn’t address the power of emotions, our body’s wisdom or the embodiment of Spirit. While T Harv’s Peak Potential satiated me with ritual, community and a phenomenal sense of structure and accomplishment, I missed learning more about relationships and the balance of feminine soft strength and masculine drive and accomplishment.

So for the next decade I continued my studies about spirituality, sacred sexuality and feminine erotic dance. The Universe rewarded my tenacity with two quantum leaps of support with a speaking position with dating expert Christian Carter and my first interview for the men’s dating market with David De Angelo of Double Your Dating.

Now I was coaching women AND men. On interviews I found myself apologizing to male listeners on behalf of their mothers or lovers for emasculating them, revealing how our fearful feminine hearts close when we feel unsafe. The interviews became MY therapy, apologizing secretly to my ex lovers. All along my wounded heart craved the safety to surrender into their masculine nobility and unwavering presence. I exposed my deepest fears that men would hurt me, use me or leave me, like my best friend James who died suddenly when I was 16 yrs old.

This depth of vulnerability manifested new opportunities, a lunch in Brentwood with Author and Celebrity Speech Coach to clients including the late Princess Diana of Wales Richard Greene, and Film Producer and Director Marshall Herskovitz of Dangerous Beauty, one of my all time favorite films about the courtesan and poet Veronica Franco. Marshall suggested the French girls had been my modern day courtesan way-showers. He was right, yet I was still reluctant to own the power, pleasure and somehow peace that witnessing my beautiful body and naked soul bestowed upon men. I felt if I owned my energetic capacity, I would literally explode.

I discovered that sacred sexual energy spanned the range of tender and healing, to creative and generative, to bold and fierce, to erotic and rapturous. It became clear that the show girls had practiced the ancient ritual of Tonglen from Tibetan Monks. Breathe in the pain and suffering of the world, transmute it within and exhale love and compassion. They were sacred divine dominatrixes, leading the audience to submit to their sensual siren nature, alluring them for the greatest good of all.

Deepening my self awareness, I explored Illumination Intensives where I had a profound direct experience where a woman I had judged as obese, transformed into a breathtaking Bodhisattva. During intense plant medicine journeys, Panchamama helped me forgive my self-hating perfectionist. In an SFactor dance class the day I lost in child custody court, I laid on the cold wooden floor in the dark, music blaring, helpless in the fetal position. With eyes closed I felt 2, then 4, 6, 8 gentle hands on my body as I let go and sobbed to the core of my being in my dance sister’s embrace.

The soul of my coaching brand began to emerge- it was more than relationships or sexuality… it was Intimacy. In-To-Me-I-See. Soul embodiment. Slowing down, sensing inside, dropping out of my head and into my heart. Somehow breathing through hellish discomfort led to being washed with inner safety, stillness and even rapture. Feeling offered wisdom not as a thought but as a gut knowing. This discernment of truth invited authentic expression and softened attachments. Intimacy felt like vulnerability, transparency and honesty with barriers down, heart open, receptive to all of life.

When my best friend James died I learned nothing lasts forever, good or bad. Life is equal pain and pleasure and my Dad also taught me about embodied aliveness and celebrating life. On drives out to the cabin at the lake, he’d pull over his black 67 Chrysler exclaiming, Hot Damn! His color blindness easily pointed out bears, deer or a family of adorable skunks. One Christmas morning when I was 16 yrs and my sister 14 yrs, we reached into our stockings. What to our wondering eyes should appear? Condoms. Dad announced, If you’re a Pratt, you like sex. If you have sex, you could die. Use condoms. Awkward silence.

During week day dinners, we were never allowed to watch TV. However when there was a Muhammad Ali fight, this little black TV little would be placed on the 70’s orange kitchen counter. Dad would cuss as he finagled the antennas with aluminum foil to get reception. Then he’d lose his shit in blissful enthusiasm cheering. There was something sacred about the way he’d say, ‘Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee, there’s nobody better than Muhammad Ali.’ It was bigger than the fight. It was something deeper inside him that would come alive. My mom stayed quiet, lips pursed, shallow breathing, looking down. Dad was blazing drunk again. True, yet I still thought his joy was fucking phenomenal.

Dad was also scary, medicating his emotional pain. He’d call me crazy, deny transgressions, very possibly having blacked out. Dressed in my ballet leotard at age 5, I was spinning around the ottoman like a Sufi dancer blaring Jesus Christ Superstar on the huge living room record player. I guess I didn’t hear him say quiet down. He curbed the impulse to hit me, and expressed himself with a fist through the drywall. I developed hyper vigilant behaviors becoming acutely aware of the slightest nuance in others’ communications, body language and energy. The very worst can bring out the very best in us. His behavior was the catalyst for my spiritual gifts, resilience and heart open bravery.

I remember the day I said, ‘Fuck the rules. I’m just going to love the shit out of my clients.’ It’s as if I quantum leaped out of my head and into my heart, into the vastness of timeless presence, profound knowing and non local intelligence. My people pleaser transformed into spacious compassion, ferocious kindness, radical honesty and potent connection. I could hear behind my client’s words to what their soul was saying, hear messages from their friends or family who had passed. I was flooded with exquisite love and compassion for exactly who they were. I didn’t need to figure shit out anymore, my heart’s tender care revealed their intimacy blindspots, emotional bandaids or unhealed wounds. I became a non judgmental safe witness of understanding as they bravely returned to their bodies. They shared that they felt safe in revealing what until now, had been their unspeakable secrets.

As an interviewer, intimacy allows me to surrender to the mystery of who my guests are. I’ve savored over 900 Intimate Conversations on my radio show now Podcast including Whoopi Goldberg and Alanis Morissette. Snuggled side by side at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, best selling Author of 17 books SARK, said I was one of her top 5 interviews because I actually listened. UN Ambassador Linda Gray, Sue Ellen of Dallas, said being interviewed by me was like sitting under a tree together as if we’d known each other for years. Erin Gray, actress from Kate & Allie, the original L’oreal ‘I’m worth it’ model, said I weave questions into an intimate tapestry. Even my Columbia University Art teacher, after seeing my final project charcoal drawing of my face, suggested I draw 5 different sets of eyes and sew them onto the paper because, You see into people’s souls. People often tell me things they’ve never told anyone else, sometimes, things they’ve never even told themselves.

I’ve continued my evolution becoming certified as a Master Coach with Accelerated Evolution, Psylogia Processes as well as Equilibration with John Castagnini. I studied Appreciative Inquiry with Jon Bergoff of the Xchange Approach and was honored to lead a guided meditation at Heartmath’s Annual Conference in Cancun. I consider myself a Ph.D graduate in Consciousness from the best University in the Galaxy, aka my former boyfriends, former husbands and various court cases.

I’m a mess yet my mess is my gift. I don’t have to be perfect to help others. I’m mostly at peace with my failures. My first boyfriend cheated on me. My first marriage failed. My second marriage failed. My 15 yr old son chose to live with his dad. My last charismatic boyfriend hit and verbally abused me, destroyed my phone, got arrested for criminal assault and went to jail. The very worst is a catalyst to birth the very best in me. Less doubt and more courage to expose my raw truth even if others tell me not to or if I make them uncomfortable.

I refuse to be ashamed that I, a well meaning, educated, successful and kind woman suffered from childhood trauma that repeatedly manifested abusive patterns with men. My deep unconscious hyper vigilance attracted worse and worse abusers to master surviving. I’ve done and keep doing the work. I feel my body’s wisdom and partnership with Life when I speak my truth and bare my naked soul on stage or on camera. I can literally feel people through the lens. An energy pours through me to support them in reclaiming their gentle innocence and don’t-fuck-with-me power. I love inviting my clients to slap their ass n’ smile.

I remember sitting in the dark at the kitchen island, candles and Prosecco, pressing pause on the movie Eat Pray Love on my 52nd bday, searching for a tissue thinking, I am so loved, so supported. I can literally FEEL energetic connection to my friends. I am all alone but I don’t feel lonely. I have created a community I love. Yes, another relationship failed in a big way, yet I succeeded in learning to finally STOP trying to heal angry men. I’m done. I am worthy of a kind man. My beloved cat Muffin jumped on the granite counter as if to agree. I’m enough. I’m the One I’ve been searching for all along. In the face of all this court shit and protective orders, I’m happy.

I’m calling in a conscious, kind, noble and sexy AF man whom I dance for at the end of the day. I’ll show him what’s transpired through my body’s movement. He’ll listens to the vulnerable messages of my hips, to sacredly demand my ferocious unscripted truth. My body will awaken dormant capacities in him, and his presence will awaken dormant capacities in me. I’ll experience my open-heart dancing with his open heart, dreaming a new world together. I feel it as already done.

It’s no longer relevant if I’m a wobbly hot mess or a masterful catalyst of intimacy. What matters is you and I, our sense of belonging, our shared evolution as we embrace our perfectly imperfect nature together. What matters is bravely integrating our wounds to embody wholeness as our very breath, the swing of our hips, the beat of our hearts. What matters is baring my naked soul to the world and splaying my heart wide open in the face of anything. I’m doing my part to love the shit of humanity.

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