At Southwest Institute of Healing Arts, you will often hear talk of “callings” and “signs from Spirit”. Amber Peitzmeier, a Mind Body Wellness Practitioner graduate, has quite the story about how persistent these nudges from the Universe are!
“I started getting ads about SWIHA. I kept ignoring them. I kept telling Facebook they were irrelevant to me. I kept scrolling by,” Amber recalls, “No matter what I did, the ads were still there.”
That may sound like a glitch in the algorithm, however Amber was already contemplating a change: she shares.“I was an accountant that felt stuck with no real direction in life. I was successful in business but I wasn't fulfilled or happy. I felt like I was skating through life earning money and merely existing. I was constantly stressed, sick, tired, and stressed out from being sick and tired. I was just completely and utterly miserable,”
She remembers talking to her husband one day and telling him that she just couldn't do it anymore and needed a new career. He brought up health and wellness, a longtime passion of Amber’s. She says: “I brushed the idea off because I had already gone to school, I thought that I had little financial aid left, and didn't want to be in school for ten years paying out of pocket. I just felt completely stuck.”
However, Amber took the first step and finally called to learn more about this mysterious college that kept popping up everywhere: “They helped me pick the most amazing program that fit all of my passions perfectly. I was so excited that I was able to learn more about holistic health, nutrition, hypnotherapy, and get to do it all for a living,” she tells us, “I felt like a little kid on Christmas and just couldn't stop beaming in excitement for the next few months waiting for my program to start. And that's how my journey in the holistic health industry was started.”
Reflecting on her time in her program, where she chose to focus on Holistic Nutrition and Hypnotherapy as well as the core modalities in the Mind Body Wellness Practitioner program, Amber reminisces: “All of my instructors had a huge impact on my life. Even the classes that I didn't think I would enjoy were a great influence on my life and my business. The energy and knowledge of all of the instructors was so magnetic that classes were almost meditative and therapeutic, in a sense, for me. I will never forget any of my instructors and they each impacted me in one way or another.”
Today, Amber is fulfilling her calling with her business, Slow & Serene. “I help women regain control of their health and lives through various ancient healing practices and stress reduction modalities so they can reduce the risk or reverse the impact of stress related or exacerbated conditions,” she explains, “I also help ambitious teenage girls free themselves from perfectionism and self-doubt while managing stress and the general overwhelms of life.”
“If we don't offer ourselves forgiveness and extend grace to ourselves then the stress from living under perfectionist mentalities can really damage our health, on a holistic level,” she continues, “Everything you learn at SWIHA, incorporate into your own life. See the benefits, impact, and changes yourself. It gives you a whole new and different sense of love for the work that you do.”
Amber concludes: “I'm a completely different person now. I adore my life and all of life in general.”
