Gain the inner awareness your heart yearns for and that every child & person you serve deserves.
A better way of living and serving is calling to you from within.
The vibration of adults’ emotions influences every child in their care. If adults are wound up tight and over-react to any disruption, children naturally cower, protect themselves, or act out despite their best intentions.
These children don’t feel a sense of felt-safety or belonging.
It’s difficult for youth to regulate their emotions if the adults caring for them are not taking responsibility for their own emotional field.
Our team invites and inspires child-serving professionals and caregivers as well as leaders, change-makers, and social equity advocates to tap into their full potential by being brave and vulnerable with themselves and with one another.
We offer an integration of education neuroscience and evidence-based mind-body practices to help leaders:
- transform their own energy,
- settle their nervous system,
- address implicit bias, and
- develop a greater capacity for authenticity, equity, and heart-centered connections.
Join our community of child-serving professionals.
Discover by experience how to co-create a rich ecosystem where safe spaces and deep learning are cultivated from the ground up.
The results of our immersive retreats ripple:
- Heart-connected teachers are able to create nourishing classrooms where every student feels safe to take risks and explore their potential.
- Heart-connected educational leaders are able to create flourishing schools that embrace the cultural differences among families, students, and staff.
- Heart-connected therapists and counselors realize their part in providing healthy co-regulation for youth who exhibit behavior challenges.
- Heart-connected caregivers are able to create loving home environments where they model emotional resilience and positive social engagement.
In a heart-centered environment, leaders (and every child in their care) have the foundation they need to rise to their greatest potential.
Real change for youth requires an approach that foregrounds inner transformation over cookie-cutter programs, communal transformation over top-down initiatives, and children’s liberation over children’s marginalization.
Don’t you, the people you work with, and the children you serve deserve this kind of transformational approach?
Heart-Centered Connections™
Our Heart-Centered Connections™ Curriculum & Immersive Retreats empower educators, leaders, caregivers, therapists, and activists to tap into self-awareness, settle their nervous system, and foster heart-centered connections that liberate the potential of every child or youth in their care.
Settle your nervous system.
Co-regulate with youth and peers.
Liberate their potential.
Rise above the culture of exhausting reactivity.
We know deeply compassionate educators and caregivers are exhausted and burnt out.
We’ve heard accomplished therapists and healthcare providers feeling powerless to serve their most challenging children and teens.
And the environment they work in—pervaded by trauma and nervous system survival reactivity—further depletes them and the children in their care.
And yet they all yearn to rise above this culture of exhaustion.
They ache to feel attuned to their own hearts, connected with the students they serve, and in harmony with their environment.
The problem isn’t that adults don’t care enough. The real challenge might reside at a deeper level—the nervous system.
It might sound counter-intuitive, but the people and school systems we serve who are elevating instead of isolating children learn through immersive experience something transformational:
Community is medicine.
Our Approach: Heart-Centered Connections
Our Heart-Centered Connections™ Curriculum & Immersive Retreats empower educators, leaders, caregivers, therapists, and activists to tap into self-awareness, settle their nervous system, and foster heart-centered connections that liberate the potential of every child or youth in their care.
This trauma-informed approach draws from educational neurobiology, polyvagal theory, and Dr. Niki’s unparalleled ability to cultivate a nurturing learning environment that opens up the hearts of teachers, leaders, and other caregivers.
Participants emerge as liberated heart-centered professionals who understand how to settle and activate their nervous system, attune to every person in their care, and create nourishing learning environments where everyone feels a true sense of safety and belonging in their presence.
You can move from regulation to liberation.
We believe transformation happens when people are primed with a growth mindset:
CHALLENGE… COMMIT… PRIORITIZE…
It’s possible. Let’s get started.
Meet Our Founder
Dr. Niki Elliott
Moved by Spirit to advocate for children and to liberate the system
A high-energy, spirited, and inspiring teacher educator, Niki has taught students of all ages for over 30 years. She is a staunch advocate for children whose lived experiences include learning differences, mental health challenges, foster care placement, and/or racialized marginalization. Her mission is to galvanize an education workforce that establishes inclusive and holistic learning communities where all students and educators thrive.
Presently, Niki is a sought-after speaker, mindfulness retreat facilitator, curriculum developer and trainer. Her unique approach to integrating education sciences with mind-body nervous system wellness has supported thousands of administrators, educators, and counselors worldwide. Educators who have adopted her mind-body approach report significant reductions in expulsion rates for students of color, improvements in classroom climate, and increases in professional well-being.
Niki is a native of Southern California, where she presently resides with her family. She earned a doctorate in Education at UCLA and holistic certifications in yoga, mindfulness meditation, and clinical breathwork.
Gain the training your heart yearns for.
If you’re a burned-out educator, child-serving professional, or caregiver
Rise Up