Beyond Talk Therapy: How Meditation Coaching Expanded One Therapist's Approach to Healing
Meditation Coaching in Clinical Practice
The story of Tiffany Borst, LCSW – Psychotherapist, Yoga Teacher, and LIBERATE Graduate
Tiffany Borst has been a psychotherapist for over 30 years.
She knew from middle school that psychology was her path. She built a long, meaningful career helping people navigate trauma, anxiety, OCD, and family dynamics. Tiffany became a licensed clinical social worker, practiced in multiple states, and offered the kind of compassionate, grounded care her clients needed.
But after decades of work, something inside her began to stir.
“There was something missing in the healing work I was doing.”
Even with all her training and experience, she noticed her clients were often stuck in their heads. They understood their patterns, but the insight didn’t always translate into transformation. And as the world slowed down during COVID, Tiffany finally had the time and space to reflect.
She began her yoga teacher training and started weaving more embodied practices into her sessions. That’s when she found our LIBERATE Meditation Coach Training—and something clicked.
“I loved that it included meditation, energy work, and a coaching certificate. That was what I needed.”
(She also mentioned a blue butterfly on our website was her personal spiritual sign at the time, one of those intuitive moments that told her she was in the right place.)
What She Discovered
As Tiffany moved through the program, something unexpected happened.
“I realized I had been carrying 30 years of other people’s emotions in my body. I thought I was doing self-care, but this was a different level.”
The meditation and energy tools helped her begin to release what had been accumulating for decades. She started each day with meditation in her office and ended each one with energy clearing. Her system changed. Her energy changed.
“I would drive home and think, Who turned the brightness up on the world? I felt lighter.”
And her clients began to shift too—not just intellectually, but emotionally and energetically.
How It Changed Her Work
Before meditation coaching, Tiffany relied heavily on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), particularly with clients who had anxiety or OCD.
“That work is powerful. But it lives mostly in the mind. Meditation coaching brought it from here [head] to here [heart].”
She started introducing pauses in her sessions—moments to breathe, to ground, to tune in.
“Sometimes I’d stop and say, ‘Let’s bring it down for a moment.’ And suddenly, clients would connect to their intuition. The answers came from within—not from me.”
One client said:
“Usually after a session, I have to text you to remember what I was supposed to do. But today I know exactly what to do.”
So What’s the Difference Between Therapy and Meditation Coaching?
As someone trained in both therapy and meditation coaching, Tiffany sees both the overlap and the key distinctions between these two modalities.
Here’s some key differences:
Therapy
Licensed, clinical, state-regulated
Limited by geography and state laws
Often past-oriented
Focused on diagnosing and treating mental health disorders
Bound by clinical boundaries
Talk-based and analytical
Meditation Coaching
Unlicensed, present-moment, holistic
Intuitive, somatic, energy-aware
Focused on self-growth, awareness, stress relief
Rooted in presence, and future-forward
Can work globally with clients virtually
Allows for a more connected, flexible (yet ethical) relationship
Meditation Coaching Also Helped Her Heal
Tiffany shares that many emotions we carry are simply energy, and that retelling the same stories over and over can actually reinforce the emotional loop.
Through meditation and visualization, she began guiding clients into deeper parts of themselves: their younger selves, their future selves, their higher selves.
“We don’t always need to keep telling the story. When we feel the emotional energy and release it, that’s where healing happens.”
And that’s also where her healing happened.
“This work breathed new life into my practice. And into me.”
Letting Go of Old Stories, Emotions, & Energy
One of the most powerful differences Tiffany noticed was how clients were finally able to resolve long-held emotional patterns.
“We can talk about emotions all day long,” she shared. “But the more we keep telling the same story, the more we stay stuck in the same energy.”
Through meditation coaching, Tiffany learned to guide her clients out of the narrative and into the present-moment experience of the emotion itself. She began to pause traditional talk therapy and instead ask, “What’s happening in your body right now?”
That moment of embodied attention—feeling, breathing, and allowing—often led to breakthroughs her clients hadn’t accessed through years of analysis.
“When we sit with the emotional energy—not the story, but the actual feeling—it can dissipate. We release it. And often, the story just doesn’t need to be told again.”
Finding Resolution
This process brought true resolution, not just reflection. Clients stopped looping. Long-standing triggers softened. Emotional patterns dissolved, not because they were understood intellectually, but because they were fully felt, witnessed, and let go.
“Things resolve so much more quickly now,” she explained. “We’re not stuck in the mental process. We’re accessing something deeper and more complete.”
This shift helped her clients stop looping. They didn’t need to relive the trauma to heal it. They could feel it, witness it, and move forward.
“It’s integration. It’s bringing all the parts of ourselves—our younger self, our future self, our highest self—into wholeness. That’s when people start to rebuild self-worth from the inside.”
The integration, between heart and head, is what Tiffany sees as the true gift of meditation coaching.
Final Reflection
Tiffany continues to practice therapy because it’s her calling and remains a positive, necessary modality. But meditation coaching gave her tools she never learned in graduate school.
It helped her feel more inspired, creative, and connected to her purpose. It helped her clients find clarity faster. And it gave her the ability to serve people in a more holistic, embodied, and spiritually aligned way.
“I’ll always be a therapist. But this just made everything richer. You don’t have to give up your credentials or your clinical work, this simply adds a whole new layer of healing.”
To learn more about Tiffany’s integrative work in therapy, meditation coaching, yoga, breathwork: tifborstyoga.com.
first published on: https://suraflow.org/why-one-licensed-therapist-added-meditation-coaching-to-her-work/