Caroline Courey is a personal life coach, an MS Warrior, a mother of four and, together with Stephen, the essential force behind the Inner Monk.
Caroline has worked with Stephen since 2003 to create and promote mindfulness seminars in the Montreal area and now on Zoom.
Caroline was trained at Integral Coaching Canada in Ottawa and has been practicing since 2009. She specializes in interpersonal communication, and helps women in abusive relationships regain their power.
She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1992 and has managed her illness without pharmaceutical drugs, relying instead on a diet designed to counter autoimmune disease (The Wahls Protocol), combined with exercise using neuroplasticity to regain lost function in muscles and joints (The MS Gym). Caroline has also learned to create new neural pathways in the limbic system using The Dynamic Neural Retraining System™. Caroline freely shares her experience with other MS Warriors and anyone interested in learning different approaches to self-care management.
Caroline uses mindfulness to help her clients create and maintain the changes they want, find purpose and fulfillment and experience real joy.
Mindfulness Live grew out of the ongoing conversation between Caroline and Stephen about the best way forward after fifteen years of in-person, ten-week seminars several times a year. Stephen’s dream was to provide ongoing training and support providing meditators with direct access to an experienced teacher and enabling them to know more about each other and how others practice mindfulness.
Working together, this dynamic husband and wife team created a new empowering way to accomplish what everyone wants— peace, happiness and tools to manage uncertainty and stress.
Who Is Caroline?
Caroline’s my wife. She’s the reason this website is here. It’s also because of her that I finally hung out my shingle again after a twenty-year hiatus. My teachers had declared me ready to teach, but I didn’t think so. The best teachers taught from experience, not books—everyone knew that. I left the monastery, looking for experience of my own.
Lay life was chaotic, stressful and rudderless. I was surrounded by the consumer dream, but it didn’t draw me in. The monk was still in me. I felt odd. I married twice, divorced twice, survived two decades and was ready to return to celibacy when Caroline fell into my life.
It was the conversation that hooked me—same wavelength, same priorities. Also in time, a growing sense that we must always have known each other? I helped her with her book and, although she claimed she didn’t really know how to write, changed the way I wrote my memoir, The Novice. We bonded.
“Who’s that?” she asked one day over my shoulder. I was googling my old friend Stephen Batchelor.
“He’s a Buddhist writer,” I said.
“He teaches meditation?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t you do that?” she asked.
I almost said I wasn't ready, but thought twice instead.
It wasn’t hard. An ad in the local paper got us forty people interested in Buddhism and mindfulness. I’d grown accustomed to putting off my lifetime’s calling. Now abruptly, I was back in my element.
Caroline helped with PR, getting me interviewed and publicized. She became familiar with the material, and helped me adapt it to an audience of stressed-out consumers. All this while she trained and interned as a personal life coach.
And the conversation was great even before that!
When we realized we were falling for each other, as well as for each others' work, Caroline resisted. “Run!” she said. “Get away from me.” You see, she had multiple sclerosis (MS).
“Whatever we go through,” I said, “Let’s go through it together.” It took her a few years, but finally she agreed.
So we’re married. Our current joint venture is Mindfulness Live, while she pursues her coaching and I my writing. Life is no bowl of cherries, but I share a happiness with Caroline that I never expected in my life.
So that’s who she is.