About Me: Ames Carpenter
What you need to know: My coaching certification focuses on “resilience coaching”: not as in “strong enough to take a punch,” but as in neuro-plasticity that allows you to access your ancestral and community wisdom. I combine neuroscience, emotional intelligence, archetypal wisdom, and community justice experience to help under-resourced and marginalized leaders like you heal burnout … without losing your fire.
As Shereka Dunston my life coaching instructor would say, “Black and marginalized folks have generational trauma … but we also have generational resilience.” With support and practice the nervous system can build neural pathways outside of trauma reactions and into new ways to problem-solve and build community care.
My experience includes:
Unschooling: In 2003, after a lifetime of trying to fit in and follow the rules, my family and I jumped into unschooling full force, meaning that our children left public school and the family lived as though that particular institution didn’t exist. It was freeing, exhilarating, and it meant that I had to dig into relationship-based learning, community building, and consensual practices with our children. This opened up a new way of living.
Intuitive& Spiritual Facilitation: In 2007, I turned 40 years old and my midlife crisis arose, right on cue. This led me into dream work and parts work in the Jungian tradition, and then into working with dreams within Irish and other European pagan traditions. I also strengthened my practices with symbolic and intuitive systems such as astrology and altar work. Shadow work, accessing the wise sage within, drawing on ancestral traditions, and using ritual: all are areas I’m honored to explore with clients in the way that’s right for them.
Poetry, Writing, and Publishing: I have been writing since my teen years, and I was a writing teacher before having children. As well as writing my published book of poems, The One Inside An Onion, I am fascinated with creativity and the how it arises in different people as well as in land, animals, and plants. I have a long history of organizing writing groups and creativity workshops, because I believe that community deepens when we create together.
Queer Community Organizing: By 2014, the world was wrestling with the murder of Trayvon Martin, then Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and far too many names: deaths of Black folks at the hands of police departments across the U.S. and beyond. Being of Irish/Celtic descent, with Polish and French also in the mix, I had to reckon with my own participation in white supremacy, its culture, and its systems.
In 2017, I started working as a volunteer organizer with grassroots groups such as Movimiento Cosecha GR, GR Rapid Response to ICE, Restore National with Boston organizer DiDi Delgado, and more. I was happy to do the scut work, and was grateful as I was brought into planning, comms, and facilitating work where that was appropriate.
In 2018, I came out to close activism circles as trans non-binary.
In 2020, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdowns, I worked with other activists and organizers to co-found the Grand Rapids Area Mutual Aid Network (GRAMAN) which responded to the crisis with direct giving and neighbor-to-neighbor support. From GRAMAN sprouted other grassroots efforts such as the Grand Rapids Area Tenant Union and, after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Defund the GRPD. GRAMAN is still alive today, still supporting neighbors and building community through mutual aid.
In 2020 and 2021, at over 50 years old, I came out publicly as queer and trans non-binary. I practice a radical queer politic that is more than an identity - I am focused on coaching as a contribution to liberation, abolition, and solidarity.
Neurodivergence: In 2023, I was diagnosed as ADHD, and I recognized my own traits that are consistent with the autism neurotype as it can present in people assigned female at birth (AFAB). As an unschooler, I had always supported difference in neurotype without needing a label. But with the new research being done by actual neurodivergent folks that aims for meaningful support rather than pathologizing difference, I am able to better support neurodivergent clients with specific research and dopamine-based check-ins.
