Chad Herst, MS, LAC, PCC

Chad Herst, MS, LAC, PCC

I did not get into this work because I had it all figured out. I got here because life cracked me open early.

When I was eighteen, my brother took his life. I grew up in a house where performance mattered more than sensitivity, so I learned to keep going even when it was empty inside. That strategy worked for a while until it didn’t.


In my search to make sense of it all, I chased wisdom and worth across India and the Ivy League, learning yoga, studying meditation, and earning degrees from Columbia College and in Traditional Chinese Medicine. I spent years trying to heal others with needles and medicine, only to realize that my real gift for healing was in the way I listened.

Eventually my body gave out and the performance failed. What followed was a long unlearning through illness, therapy, betrayal, and stillness that taught me how to stop earning love and start living in my own skin.

That is where the work I do now was born. I help high achievers, performers and perfectionists, the ones who look like they have it together while quietly being run by shame, anxiety, or the fear that if they stop, everything will fall apart. I know that cycle because I’ve lived it.

This isn’t about fixing you. That drive to get it handled once and for all is just another performance strategy. What I’ve learned is that the ache we all carry isn’t a mistake to erase. It may cut us off from ourselves, but it also carries the map home. When we stay with it long enough, it begins to show us the way back.

The tools I offer, including somatic awareness, mindfulness, nervous system work, and parts work, are not about fixing you. They help you stay with what hurts long enough for it to shift. You’ll still spin out sometimes, but you’ll learn how to return, again and again. That’s the slow work of coming home, of reclaiming that one part of you that never stopped wanting to be seen, felt, and loved.

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