Mentoring

I work with people who are experiencing a lot of fear that leads to self-sabotage. If you find yourself caught in patterns of avoiding, escaping, or undermining your own growth and wellbeing, you're not alone.

My mentoring approach focuses on developing safety and presence as the foundation for transformation. Rather than trying to fix or change ourselves, we learn to be with what is actually happening in our bodies, emotions, and lived experience.

Together, we explore:

How to create safety within yourself so you can feel your fears without being overwhelmed by them

  • How to create safety within yourself so you can feel your fears without being overwhelmed by them
  • Practices for staying present with difficult emotions and sensations
  • Ways to recognize and interrupt self-sabotaging patterns
  • Embodied techniques for metabolizing trauma and conditioning
  • How to develop authentic relationship with yourself and others

This work is not about following a system or method, but about learning to trust your own capacity for healing and presence. We work at your pace, honoring what wants to emerge and what needs to be held with gentleness.

Sessions can be conducted in person in Asheville, NC or virtually. I also incorporate movement, breathwork, and nature-based practices when appropriate.

Rooting Walks

Rooting Walks are guided nature experiences blending somatic movement, breathwork, stillness, and shared presence. Set in the forests and trails around Asheville, these walks offer a gentle space to return to your body, your breath, and the earth — together, in a small group. No experience is necessary — just bring yourself, comfortable shoes, and an openness to presence.

Each walk is slow-paced with frequent pauses, including simple practices like grounding, breathing, and noticing. We move in and out of silence, sometimes sharing reflections, sometimes just walking side by side. It’s a space for realness — to feel, to rest, to reconnect with the ecology of your own body and the living world around you.

These walks are an invitation to stay right here — to meet yourself and the moment as it is. Rooting Walks aren’t about fixing anything — they’re about remembering what’s already whole and finding belonging in the richness of now.

What To Expect

  • A slow-paced, gentle walk through nature (roughly 2-3 miles)
  • Frequent pauses to breathe, notice, reflect, and reconnect
  • Opportunities for quiet, inner listening as well as optional shared reflection
  • An opening and closing circle, to honor the moment and each other
  • A welcoming space for all bodies, all emotions, and all levels of experience

What To Bring

  • A small backpack or bag
  • A water bottle
  • A raincoat or layer in case of shifting weather
  • Good walking shoes (not fancy, just something you’re comfortable in)
  • Optional: a journal, something small and meaningful to carry, or a small mat/sit pad for circle time

Who This Is For

You. Especially if you're feeling raw, scattered, inspired, burnt out, grieving, curious, or just want to be around others in a real and grounded way.

You don’t need to be “into mindfulness.” You don’t need to have a good reason. Just come. Be. See what happens when we walk without needing to go anywhere.

Accessability & Energy

This walk is designed to be accessible and restorative. There will be moments of stillness, gentle movement, and optional expression. It’s ideal for people looking for a soft, grounding re-entry into the natural world and themselves.

Weather Note

Asheville weather can shift quickly. A light rain won’t cancel us, but thunderstorms might. In the event of unsafe weather, you’ll get an update by 9 AM the day of.

About

My life imploded from deeply unresolved trauma, emotional enmeshment in my marriage, career and religious burnout, and divorce. I left the US for several years seeking clarity and answers on why it was so hard to be in relationship with people, why work was so incredibly stressful, and most importantly why I couldn't live just with myself without constant distractions, social anxiety, a sense of failure, and nearly constant fear built around feeling a stranger in my own skin.

I traveled the world: Greece, the Caribbean, Colombia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India and other countries on this journey. I found a form of transformation that came not through intensive therapies, courses, workshops, books or any other system.

What I've learned is that healing comes through presence, bathing the tensions and unloved parts of ourselves, the parts we call negative or problematic that we tend to silence or escape from with entertainment, consumerism, work, or establishing more controlled and hyper specific identities that must be reinforced by symbols and lifestyles and more things.

I learned that stillness, silence, and experiential, embodied rooting, is a process of bringing our awareness into this present now, into reality itself, so that we can metabolize our holding patterns, our traumas, our psychological conditionings, and find true liberation of our deep, cultural, multi-generational wounding.

It's simple. And it starts with safety and presence. Listening to the call instead of silencing it. Slowly diving into the fears and pain that emerge, bringing them to the surface and into love and safety and support, and then diving back in.

I am a facilitator, trained yoga instructor, freediving instructor, writer, and mentor, bringing together embodied practices that support presence, healing, and authentic relationship with ourselves and others.

Get in Touch

I'd love to hear from you. Whether you're curious about mentoring, interested in joining a RootingWalk, or simply want to connect, feel free to reach out.

Email: chrisguardhunt@gmail.com

Location: Asheville, North Carolina