Hi, I am Caroline!
Writer, Maker & Noticer
I’m interested in the things that make life feel richer: beautiful spaces, good questions and meaningful conversations, nourishing meals, emotional honesty and nervous system calm, creativity, storytelling, humor, nature, and the small rituals that soften us back into ourselves.
The thread running through my work is something I think of as the architecture of meaningful living: the subtle ways our inner lives, physical environments, relationships, stories, rituals, and everyday choices shape how a life feels.
I’m also, at heart, a maker. Sometimes what I make is tangible: an essay, a painting, a cookbook, a meal, a workshop, a room, or a gathering. Other times it is less visible: an emotional space in which people can exhale, tell the truth, feel seen, and connect more meaningfully.
A little about how I got here
I was raised in Germany and moved to the United States at sixteen. Living between cultures shaped my curiosity about how people create identity, belonging, beauty, and meaning, as well as the different ways we understand what it means to live well.
I come from a family of doctors, including a grandmother who was one of the first female physicians of her time. I initially imagined following the same path. After graduating from Boston College, I completed Columbia University’s rigorous postbaccalaureate premedical program and began applying to medical school.
But the part of healing that fascinated me most was not only what was happening biologically. I wanted to understand people’s stories, their emotional lives, the relationship between mind and body, and what allows a person to feel whole and fully alive. Shortly after graduating from Columbia, I experienced a serious back injury that required surgery. During my recovery, my interest in the mind-body connection intensified.
I withdrew my medical school applications and pursued an M.A. in Counseling Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute instead. It was a significant change of direction, but also the beginning of the work that would occupy me for the next fourteen years.
Studying emotion through art and the body
My graduate studies focused on depth psychology, dream and imaginal work, the mind-body connection, shadow work, and the masculine and feminine dimensions of the psyche.
My published production thesis, “Experiencing Emotion Somatically: Fostering the Mind-Body Connection on the Journey Toward Wholeness,” explored how women experience anger, sadness, and joy in their bodies.
Using phenomenological, heuristic, and artistic-creative research methods, I guided seven women through relaxation exercises and body scans. Each participant then created body maps depicting where and how the emotions lived within her body. Alongside the written research, I created a film documenting the process and the deeply individual ways emotion takes physical form.
The project brought together many of the things that continue to animate my work: psychological inquiry, the wisdom of the body, visual expression, storytelling, and the creation of spaces in which people can encounter themselves more honestly.
Twelve years of creating, teaching, and guiding
After receiving my M.A., I founded a private life and health coaching practice that I ran for more than fourteen years. I worked primarily with women, supporting hundreds of clients through questions of health, identity, relationships, motherhood, confidence, purpose, and personal change.
I expanded my training through the Integrative Women’s Health Institute, where I became certified in Women’s Health and Nutrition. My studies included holistic health and nutrition, hormonal health, preconception, fertility, and postpartum wellbeing. I also completed an apprenticeship with women’s health educator Nicole Jardim, focused on menstrual health, fertility, and hormonal balance. I received training in Transcendental Meditation, which has informed much of where I took my work.
Over the years, I developed and taught original courses, workshops, visualizations, and group experiences centered on mindfulness, emotional wellbeing, creativity, self-knowledge, and meaningful change. My work has included journaling groups, creative-expression workshops, retreats, guided visualizations, the 28-day Easy Joy experience, a powerful 7-day visualization called The Reset, my 10-week private coaching container Calm Space, and many more, smaller programs exploring health, identity, confidence, and a more personally aligned way of living.
Running this practice also meant building the business behind it. Over the years, I shaped its brand and messaging, built websites and email communities, developed and launched offers, created digital content, and learned how to bring an idea from its earliest spark into a finished experience people could actually encounter.
Alongside that practical experience, I pursued extensive independent education in business and entrepreneurship, branding, marketing, copywriting, audience building, and digital business. This became another form of creative work: understanding the essence of an idea, finding the clearest way to communicate it, and shaping the many individual pieces into a coherent whole.
Throughout those years I always loved gathering people in-person through facilitating workshops in New York and San Francisco, joining the faculty of Omega Institute, and co-leading retreats combining personal exploration, mindfulness, art, and creative expression.
In September 2026, I concluded my private coaching practice. That chapter gave me a profound insight and education in what people actually long for, what drives them, what prevents them from living fully, and what helps us return to ourselves. Its insights continue to inform everything I write and make, even as the form of my work evolves. I am forever grateful for this season.
Examples of things I’ve made
The Well Mama course + cookbook
After becoming a mother, I created Well Mama in 2018, a pregnancy and postpartum program designed to support women’s physical health, hormonal wellbeing, emotional lives, relationships, and evolving identities.
I also wrote the accompanying Well Mama cookbook, translating women’s health and nutrition research into nourishing, blood-sugar-supportive meals that worked within the reality of family life. The project brought together several enduring interests of mine: food, women’s wellbeing, motherhood, beauty, practicality, and the emotional significance of feeding ourselves and the people we love.
Joy Class
I created and hosted the Joy Class podcast, where I explored joy not as an occasional reward, but as a meaningful part of a healthy and fully lived life. Across conversations with writers, psychologists, physicians, artists, relationship experts, and other thoughtful voices, the show examined the practices, relationships, environments, and ways of thinking that help us feel more alive.
Workshops, courses, and guided experiences
Throughout my professional life, I have been drawn to creating experiences that help people slow down, hear themselves, and see their lives from a wider perspective. I have designed and facilitated workshops, retreats, courses, journaling experiences, creative practices, and guided visualizations for individuals, groups, and professional communities.
Caro’s Notes
Today, I write Caro’s Notes, where I share stories, thoughts, and ideas for a life well lived: the beautiful, the funny, and the quietly profound moments that make me pause.
Education & training
Pacifica Graduate Institute
M.A. in Counseling Psychology
Areas of study included depth psychology, dream and imaginal work, somatic and mind-body psychology, shadow work, and the masculine and feminine dimensions of the psyche.
Columbia University
Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program
Completed intensive undergraduate coursework in the sciences in preparation for medical school.
Boston College
B.A. with a double major in International Studies and German Studies, with a minor in Health Sciences.
Integrative Women’s Health Institute
Certification in Women’s Health and Nutrition, with studies in holistic health, nutrition, hormonal health, preconception, fertility, and postpartum wellbeing.
Nicole Jardim’s Women’s Health Apprenticeship
Advanced study in menstrual health, fertility, and hormonal balance.
My unofficial education
I’m a variety-loving person by nature, most alive when I can move between different interests, disciplines, and ways of seeing. Beyond the formal bio, I’m a mother of three, an enthusiastic home cook and food lover, a seeker of joy, a gatherer and connector of people, and a great believer in the occasional spontaneous adventure.
My curiosity has led me to study feng shui, practice Transcendental Meditation, and take more painting, drawing, and pottery classes than I can reasonably count. I’m almost always learning, making, rearranging, experimenting, or following a question to see where it leads.
None of these pursuits has become a neat professional title, but each has shaped the way I see. They have taught me about atmosphere, attention, proportion, beauty, intuition, patience, pleasure, and the relationship between how something is arranged and how it makes us feel.
I don’t experience these interests as unrelated. Each becomes part of the lens through which I notice, connect ideas, and understand what something might need.
These days
I’m in a season of exploration, following my curiosity, making things, seeking out people and ideas that expand my thinking, and paying close attention to what feels alive.
As I look toward what comes next, I keep returning to one of my most enduring instincts: noticing what something needs. It might be a space, a recipe, a painting, a gathering, a retreat, a piece of writing, or a question in a conversation. I’m drawn to the small adjustment that makes the whole thing experience of something more coherent, beautiful, generous, and alive.
That combination of discernment, imagination, and care is a thread I want to follow. I don’t yet know exactly what form it will take, but I’m particularly interested in thoughtful collaborations that bring together ideas, storytelling, beauty, nourishment, creativity, and meaningful living.
For now, I’m writing, painting, experimenting, connecting ideas, and trusting that my curiosities will guide me where I need to go.