Monique Shefer
Self-awareness and nervous-system regulation — taught from a chateau in SW France, shaped by a lifetime of practice and the daily curriculum of homeschooling a neurodiverse child.
I'm Monique Shefer. I teach self-awareness and nervous-system regulation, and I've written a book about both — Prismatic Soul: The ancient technologies of sacred connection — an empirical guide for the modern seeker.
I work from a chateau in SW France, where my family and I landed in 2022. The arrival was the end of a slow migration: Johannesburg to London (I was only along for the ride on that one), London to California in 1996, California to France in 2021. I learned somewhere along the way that life is meant to be a grand adventure, and that a great deal of that adventure happens within.
I'm a certified yoga teacher, meditation instructor, chi gung instructor, chi nei tsang practitioner, trigger point therapist, and life and business coach. My contemplative home is in Vedanta and Tao, with dance as a meditation of its own. I'm also an artist, poet, cook, writer, permaculturist, and herbalist — which is to say I take the somatic and creative aspects of practice as seriously as the seated and silent ones.
I homeschool a neurodiverse child, which is its own daily curriculum in nervous-system regulation, sensory accommodation, and the limits of one-size-fits-all approaches to anything. Much of what I teach has been shaped by that lived experience, alongside three decades of practice, three businesses (two sold), and four continents of figuring out what actually works for who I actually am.
I run spiritual mentoring on Zoom and in person, online courses on Insight Timer and (soon) Udemy, and week-long immersions at the chateau in the shoulder seasons. My coaching practice is focused on personal growth and living your values; it has its own separate home at Life's Daring Adventure.
I teach in this style because when religion wrapped real tools in story and dogma, and many spiritual traditions wrapped them further in hierarchy and intrigue, it made deeply useful practices inaccessible. In doing so personal sovereignty became harder than it needs to be. The democratisation of spiritual practice matters. It matters more now than ever. And the people most likely to lead the change are the ones whose nervous systems and minds have been quietly refusing the old packaging all along.