Kathy Harlow
Reclaiming the Feminine, Restoring Connection

For over two decades, I’ve worked with people who thought they were just stressed, just tense, just overwhelmed. But through thousands of hours of massage therapy, I started to see a pattern—our bodies don’t just carry physical strain. They hold the weight of our stories, our pasts, our wounds, even the ones we don’t want to admit are there.

I started my journey in 2000 as a certified personal trainer and life coach, and by 2003, I was a full-time massage therapist. My hands-on work taught me that emotional dysregulation shows up in the body long before we even realize it’s there. That realization led me to pursue deeper training in Emotional Polarity Technique in 2013, which evolved into what I now call Emotional Release and Balancing Technique, incorporating multiple healing modalities to help clients process and release the emotional burdens they didn’t even know they were carrying.

Over time, I came to understand that trauma isn’t just a lived experience—it’s generational. The patterns we struggle with today are often the same ones our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers carried before us. Children are born into cycles they don’t even know exist, inheriting emotional wounds, beliefs, and behaviors that were passed down through generations. And until we bring awareness to these patterns, we unknowingly continue them. My work focuses on identifying and breaking these cycles, so that we don’t pass them down to the next generation.

My passion for understanding trauma led me to become a trauma-competent caregiver through Back-to-Back Ministries and, most recently, a certified trauma practitioner through the Arizona Trauma Institute. But it wasn’t just about understanding individual trauma—I started to recognize a much larger issue: we are isolated, disconnected, and missing the deep community our nervous systems are built for.

And here’s the thing: the feminine is the source of community. When we as women are disconnected from our own nature—when we’re stuck in cycles of overgiving, perfectionism, competition, or burnout—the very thing that holds communities together starts to dissolve. That realization is what led me to The Peaceful Goddess Project, a vision I share with Leslie Brooks.

Together, we created this movement not just to heal individuals, but to bring women back to each other—back to deep, supportive, meaningful connections. We realized that working with women one-on-one was powerful, but bringing them together in shared healing? That was transformational.

You don’t have to believe you have trauma to know something feels off. You don’t have to be completely burned out to know you need rest. If you’ve ever felt the ache of loneliness, the exhaustion of always being the strong one, or the pull of something more—you’re not alone. And you don’t have to do it alone.

It’s time to return to what we’ve lost. It’s time to break the cycles that no longer serve us. It’s time to reclaim the feminine.

It’s time to come back to yourself.

Leslie Brooks CLC,LMBT, LMT, CTS

Leslie Brooks is a licensed massage therapist, certified life coach, and community trauma specialist, with a career that spans over two decades. She began her journey in 1999 as a massage therapist, specializing in stress reduction, deep tissue work, and helping clients with complex trauma and fibromyalgia. Leslie has always believed that healing requires addressing the body, mind, and spirit together, especially since trauma is biological and manifests in the body.

In addition to her massage therapy practice, Leslie has a rich background in coaching. From 1999 to 2010, she coached soccer at a professional level, earning a National Youth License (the highest youth coaching certification in the U.S.), a USSF National D License, and Level 1 Child Psychology certification from the English Football Association. Her work in coaching gave her a deep understanding of boundaries, empowerment, and communication.

Leslie opened her own massage therapy practice in 2010, focusing on high-pain and complex trauma symptoms. In 2021, she became a certified life coach and later, in 2025, completed her community trauma certification. Her work centers on somatic experiencing, boundary setting, conflict resolution, and embodying both feminine and masculine energies, helping people reconnect with their bodies and empower themselves in all aspects of their lives.

Through the Peaceful Goddess Project, Leslie combines her expertise in healing and coaching to guide women (and eventually men) on their journey of self-healing, emotional growth, and community connection. She believes in the power of the body as the foundation for healing, and that true growth occurs when we nurture both our emotional and physical selves.