Eleanor Shannon
Founder of Come To Your Senses
Expert Contributor | She Owns Success
Meet The Expert
Eleanor Shannon
By the time I was in my mid-forties, my life looked perfect—two Ivy League degrees, prestigious work in business and education, a high-achieving husband, three beautiful children, a lovely home and two Volvos in the driveway. But I was living with chronic back pain. Both my parents were seriously ill, requiring almost as much care as my children. My marriage was unraveling. And I couldn’t hold it all.
At that point, I began a journey to connect with the wisdom of my body, shift out of pain, and move into new ways of being. I spent fifteen years in Italy reinventing myself. When I returned to the States and certified in Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry body-centered approach to rewiring the nervous system, I discovered the cutting-edge neuroscience that explained why everything I’d done intuitively had worked. Amazing!
I founded Come To Your Senses to mentor, guide, and support clients 1:1 (online and in person), as well as in group retreats. I use practices including Compassionate Inquiry, parts work, mindfulness, meditation, dance, yoga, writing, experiencing Nature.
Professional Background & Training
Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry (2020-24): Professional Yearlong Course, Mentoring, Certification, Certified 2024.
– Certified Life Coach, Certified Coach Federation (2020)
– Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms®: Practitioner, Spaceholder, Teacher-in-Training (2007-22)
– Divine Sleep Yoga Nidra® Training, Kripalu (2012)
– Yoga 200-hr, certification, Kripalu (2009)
– Yin Yoga Certification, Yoga Renew, (2021).
Dartmouth (BA) 1979
Harvard Business School (MBA) 2004
What I'm Known For
Philosophy
At the core of my work is first, neuroscience that explains how your nervous system creates beliefs and behaviors unconsciously both as a survival strategy and to protect you from the pain of experiencing more than you can handle, especially when you are small.
Because those unconscious beliefs and behaviors are embedded not just in the mind, but also the body, shifting out of them requires tuning in with the body and noticing…What happens in my body when an old belief or impulse is activated?
But it’s too much alone. Being in trusted connection allows you to feel safe while witnessing and experiencing old unconscious patterns in the body. From there, you can develop capacity to make different, conscious choices, even when it feels uncomfortable in your body. It’s like going to the gym and lifting weights. By practicing with the support of trusted connection, you can shift into new beliefs and behaviors.
Also at the core of my work is the understanding that there is nothing bad or wrong about the beliefs and behaviors created in childhood. Patterns of over-functioning, anxiety, people pleasing, etc, are not to be judged or fixed or gotten rid of. Instead, the more you embrace and understand how those patterns helped you in the past, the less they will need to activate in the present. It’s a paradox that changed my life and changes the lives of all clients I work with.