The You Project: Austin
From Shadows to Sunlight
“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.”
— Og Mandino
F R O M S H A D O W S T O S U N L I G H T
The You Project: Austin
Tuesday | January 13, 2026 | 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Location: 300 Allen St, Austin, TX 78702
The You Project: Austin is a 12-week journey of rediscovery, shedding the shadows of conditioning so you can reconnect with your inherent nature and embody lasting change. Within a supportive community, you’ll move beyond old patterns and open to a deeper, more authentic expression of self.
Rooted in Eastern philosophy and informed by Western psychology, The You Project: Austin bridges ancient wisdom and modern science to guide real, embodied change. Each practice is crafted to touch every layer of your being: physiological, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual…So transformation becomes something lived, not learned.
Through neuro-somatic regulation, integrative processing, ritual, and community care, you’ll explore your system’s innate capacity to heal, grow, and transform, creating a field where release and reconnection unfold naturally, and lasting change takes root from the inside out.
Your guides, Gioconda Parker and Brenda Lee Gauthier, bring decades of experience in yoga, psychology, and trauma-informed practice.
Together, they hold space with skill and compassion, weaving science, soul, and lived wisdom into a grounded, integrative experience that supports both mind and body while honoring the spirit of who you truly are.
The Vibe…
Twelve weeks. In person.
No fluff. No fixing.
Just a chance to finally do something different.
This isn’t a lecture or a class. It’s an unfolding. Part practice, part discovery, part unlearning.
Through carefully cultivated experiences, intentional conversation, and embodied exploration, you’ll begin to see how the patterns that once protected you can become portals for growth, freedom, and deeper connection.
What begins as unlearning becomes remembering. The return to a life that feels more alive, spacious, and authentically your own.
The Experience…
This is a space for real change.
Here, we do more than talk about it.
We create it.
You’ll begin to dissolve outdated stories and shift from autopilot to awareness, from resignation to possibility.
You’ll feel it in your body…
in the way you pause before reacting,
the courage to speak the truth,
and the trust that returns.
You’ll laugh, squirm, move…maybe cry, and probably swear.
You’ll surprise yourself more than once.
You’ll start showing up lighter, clearer, more awake.
This isn’t about focusing on what’s broken.
It’s about rediscovering the person you were before you learned to dim your light…
No guru speak.
No toxic positivity.
No pretending.
Just the real you, without the walls.
The Program Structure
The Three Phases: From Shadows to Sunlight
This journey unfolds in three phases, each one building on the last:
Resilience, where you uncover the patterns of your past and learn to work with your nervous system, body, and mind.
Resonance, where we heal together in relationship and community.
Radiance, where you return transformed; free to choose how you want to live and who you want to become.
Phase One: Resilience (You)
Here is where you meet your roots: the shadows of old stories, patterns, and beliefs that took hold early and still shape how you live today.
In this phase, guided by the first three chakras, you learn to listen to the body…the nervous system that has been both protector and prison. Resilience means learning to work with yourself instead of against yourself, uncovering the programming that keeps old shadows in place, and beginning to disrupt the cycles that have kept you stuck.
As you do, you’ll discover how your challenges have shaped unique strengths, transforming your story from one of survival to one of empowerment. You’ll identify the patterns, practice interrupting them in real time, and discover that you do have a choice.
Each new choice lays down a different pathway, rewiring your brain, reshaping your habits, and reclaiming your power to live differently.
Phase Two: Resonance (We)
Here the heart becomes our teacher. As shadows of disconnection and over-connection come into the light, we begin to notice the ways we’ve learned to protect ourselves, sometimes by pulling away, sometimes by giving too much.
Guided by the heart chakra, this phase is about choosing a new way of relating…one that balances openness with boundaries, compassion with clarity.
In community, we learn to heal the wounds of disconnection and to experience what it feels like to live in resonance rather than isolation. We practice co-regulation, connection, and the brave act of letting ourselves be seen without losing ourselves.
Resonance is where we discover that we get to choose how we show up in relationship. And that real healing happens in the space between hearts.
Phase Three: Radiance (You Transformed)
This is where you step into the light.
Guided by the upper chakras, Radiance is about releasing the shadows of who you were told to be and choosing how you want to live, how you want to show up, and who you want to become. It’s the shift from surviving to living, from silence to authentic voice.
Here, you learn to express truth with courage and discernment, to stand in your wisdom without collapsing into old roles or others’ expectations.
Radiance invites you to live from the courage to shine brightly, sharing your unique gifts and trusting in your inherent worth.
When you embody this choice, your light not only frees you, it inspires others to do the same.
What Makes Us Different…
It’s Not Therapy. It’s Not Coaching. It’s a Repatterning Experience.
Most approaches either process your past (therapy) or push you toward goals (coaching). The You Project bridges both. It guides you to deconstruct the unconscious patterns that keep you looping and then rewire new ones through the body and mind.
It’s not about analyzing your story; it’s about changing the wiring underneath it.
This is the foundation of our psychoneurosomatic approach, working across the physiological, somatic, emotional, cognitive, relational, and spiritual layers of experience so that lasting change can happen.
You Don’t Just Learn About Change. You Experience It. Live, in Real Time.
Each practice and exercise is carefully designed to interrupt old patterns and give the body new experiences to take in: experiences of safety, connection, expansion, and choice.
You don’t just learn tools; you practice being different in real time, in your body, with others. Transformation isn’t a concept here; it’s something you feel as your system reorganizes itself from the inside out.
This is experiential neurobiology: the nervous system learns safety, agency and connection by doing, not talking.
Acceptance Is the Entry Point, Not the Reward
Rooted in Eastern philosophy, this program moves away from pathology and judgment. We understand that most patterns weren’t chosen; they were protective responses that once kept us safe.
Eastern wisdom reminds us that even in our darkest moments, the light of awareness is never lost. When we meet our patterns with curiosity instead of criticism, that light returns as something remembered.
From there, healing unfolds naturally…through relationship, awareness, and compassion.
Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?” we ask “What is my system trying to do for me?”
The Group Isn’t the Setting. It’s the Medicine.
This isn’t a lecture series or a room full of strangers doing personal work side by side.The group itself becomes a living nervous system… a collective organism where mirroring, resonance, and regulation happen organically.
Within that field, people rediscover belonging, safety, and connection, often for the first time. Healing here doesn’t happen alone in a group; it happens through the group.
The group isn’t an audience. It’s an ecosystem for rewiring relational patterns and reclaiming belonging.
Transformation follows the Natural Arc.
The program is built around three phases that reflect the nervous system’s organic sequence for healing and growth: Resilience, Resonance, and Radiance.
We don’t rush. We build capacity, connection, and then expansion. This mirrors how change happens in the nervous system, ensuring that transformation is integrated, not just inspired.
Bridging East and West with Integrity.
Many approaches borrow practices from both East and West, but rarely with the depth or discernment each tradition deserves. At The You Project: Austin, we don’t layer Eastern practices onto a Western framework. We let each inform and refine the other.
Eastern philosophy offers the orientation: we are already whole, not broken. It reminds us to move from awareness, presence, and compassion. Western psychology and neuroscience offer the application: insight, tools, and practices that create new neural pathways, new behaviors, and new ways of being.
Rather than merging them into sameness, we let them stay distinct and in dialogue. One offers meaning, the other mechanism.
This bridge is where real transformation happens. Where practice meets wisdom, and action becomes embodied change.
Facilitators Who Walk the Path, Not Just Teach It.
This work is led by facilitators who have walked the terrain, have done and continue to do, the deep work.
We understand trauma, healing, and transformation not as theories but as lived experience. We do our best to model what it means to live awake, embodied, and real. Not perfect.
Our presence is grounded in authenticity rather than performance, and that authenticity sets the tone for the entire space.
A Culture of Presence, Not Performance.
In a world obsessed with self-optimization, The You Project: Austin offers something rare: a space to come home to yourself, not improve yourself.
This is an in-person, heart-to-heart experience where community becomes the container for transformation.
It’s designed as a living experiment in what happens when we come back to ourselves, and to each other...in real time.
Here, being human isn’t a flaw to fix; it’s the way in.
In Essence…
Most programs help you understand yourself.
The You Project helps you become yourself—through embodied practice, collective healing, and deep psychoneurosomatic repatterning.
It’s not about changing who you are.
It’s about remembering who you’ve always been, beneath the patterns that once kept you safe.
Why This Approach Works…
Because it’s built on how lasting change actually happens. In the brain, the body, and human connection.
It activates every level of experience.
Change requires engaging all neural pathways: cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and somatic.
This approach combines education, movement, breath, and relational practice so the entire system learns together.
When every level participates, the change holds.
It uses repetition and practice to rewire the brain.
Neuroplasticity depends on repetition and new experience.
Consistent practice. Both in and between sessions, builds new neural pathways that replace automatic responses.
Over time, what was once effort becomes a new baseline.
It completes old survival patterns instead of suppressing them.
Trauma lives in unfinished responses.
By allowing the body to complete these stored impulses. Through movement, breath, awareness and completion, the nervous system releases trapped energy and restores regulation.
This frees up capacity for choice and connection.
It relies on co-regulation and group resonance.
The human nervous system learns safety through relationship.
Working in community activates social engagement and vagal regulation, allowing participants to internalize safety and belonging through direct experience.
Healing happens through the group, not just in it.
It’s grounded in wholeness, not pathology.
Eastern philosophy teaches that our essence is unbroken. The kleshas (ignorance, fear, attachment) are what obscure it.
This orientation depathologizes human behavior and replaces self-judgment with awareness, creating the internal safety needed for transformation.
It integrates Eastern philosophy with Western neuroscience.
Eastern maps like the chakras and koshas describe energy, awareness, and embodiment in ways that parallel modern understandings of the nervous system and layered consciousness.
Together, they form a comprehensive model that addresses both the physiology and psychology of change.
It’s designed for real-world integration.
Each practice is experiential, repeatable, and applicable to daily life.
Change doesn’t end when the session does. It continues through embodied exercises, reflection tools, and community support that make new patterns sustainable.
This approach works because it follows the actual science of transformation:
connection regulates, experience rewires, repetition reinforces, and compassion integrates.
It’s not theory. It’s how the system changes.
Is This for You?
This isn’t about quick fixes.
It is about real change that lasts.
See if any of these questions speak to you…
Do you struggle to see the light within, even when others say they see it in you?
Does life look fine on the outside, yet inside you’re quietly longing for more?
Do you give great advice to others but stumble to follow it yourself?
Do old patterns keep pulling you back, no matter how much you want to move forward?
Do you long for connection, yet often pull away or give too much of yourself?
Are you seeking a shift, but don’t really know where to start?
If even one of these stirs something in you, The You Project was created with you in mind. A space to explore, practice, and rediscover who you’ve always been
Healing doesn’t happen alone.
This is where you’ll find the tools, the community, and the support to truly shift.
What You Get…
Each element of The You Project: Austin is intentionally designed to move you from insight to embodiment. From knowing to being.
Weekly in-person sessions (90 minutes)
Immersive gatherings that blend learning, practice, and integration.
Two holotropic-style breathwork sessions
Deep, inner healer guided experiences that support release, expansion, and shifts within your system.
Between-session practices and reflection tools
Simple, embodied exercises to help you reinforce insights and weave change into daily life.
Community connection and shared accountability
A supportive, resonant group that helps you stay engaged and seen in your process.
Embodied practices that rewire your system for lasting change
Experiential methods that work directly with the body, brain, and nervous system.
A space for your full humanity
Honest, real, and compassionate.
No performance. No perfection.
Your Commitment…
$50 per session (billed weekly)
12-week commitment
20 participant cap
In-person at 300 Allen St. 78702
Recordings available for missed sessions
Tuesday evenings 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
If something in this speaks to you, trust that.
This work isn’t about becoming someone new; it’s about remembering who you already are beneath the noise and the patterns.
The You Project: Austin is a space to do that remembering together. In community, through the body, with honesty and care.
The work we do here is personal, deep, and alive. To hold that kind of space, you need guides who have walked it themselves.
Not in Austin, TX? Let’s Stay Connected.
If you feel connected to this work but aren’t in Austin, we’d still love to know you’re out there.
Click the button below to share a few details—your name, contact information, and where you’re located—and we’ll add you to our interest list. You’ll be the first to know when new virtual sessions open.
Meet Your Guides
Brenda Lee Gauthier
(she/her) LCSW, LCDC, SEP, RYT-500
Brenda isn’t your typical therapist. And that’s exactly the point. With a background that spans fifth-grade teaching, bartending, producing reality TV, and strategy consulting, her path to mental health wasn’t linear. It was earned.
Now, with 15 years in the field and a fire for trauma healing, she brings a no-nonsense, deeply compassionate approach to guiding people home to themselves. Whether she’s leading breathwork, working with complex trauma, or helping someone gently challenge the patterns that no longer serve them, Brenda does it with one core belief: you already have everything you need to heal. She’s just here to help you uncover it.
Her approach blends neuroscience, somatic therapies, Internal Family Systems, Brainspotting, yoga, CBT, Toltec wisdom, and a whole lot of intuitive listening. But more than tools, it’s about the trust and truth she brings into the room.
She doesn’t do savior complexes. She does sacred partnership. She believes in therapy that eventually makes her obsolete. And you fully rooted in your own wholeness.
Gioconda Parker
(she/her) ERYT-500, MTP
Gia has been practicing and teaching yoga for over 25 years, but don’t let the timeline fool you. She’s not here to impress you with a résumé. She’s here because she’s lived this work. After just five classes, she knew teaching yoga was her path, and dove headfirst into a five-year mentorship that shaped her approach to practice, presence, and people.
Her story includes deep study, travel across India and Thailand, founding yoga trainings, and leading global retreats. But her most powerful transformation came not in a classroom or training. It came from walking away from a spiritual community that no longer aligned. That choice lit the fire for the work she brings now: grounded, embodied, wise, and deeply human.
Gia is certified in Somatic Experiencing, has a master’s in Spiritual Psychology, and teaches everything from breathwork and ayurveda to Thai massage and trauma-informed yoga. But her real gift? Making space where people can fall apart and fall in love with themselves.
She’s also a dog mom (shoutout to Ash), a paddleboarder, a national and international yoga teacher trainer and retreat leader. Gia doesn’t teach from a pedestal. She teaches from the mat, the mess, and the miracle of lived experience.