With the first day of spring just a couple weeks away, change is on the horizon. Sure the changing of the seasons is nice, but sometimes change — especially changing one’s perspective — can be really difficult.  
Rebecca Freedner has made it her business to help people shift their perspectives and discover their best lives through intuitive transformational coaching. What is intuitive transformational coaching? Glad you asked. 
“Ultimately, I read energy,” said Freedner, who closed her successful henna studio in Vergennes in 2017 to pursue this new career. “I read between the lines.”
In a typical session (not during COVID times) a client would come to Freedner’s studio in Bristol, lay on a massage table and Freedner would begin with some Reiki techniques. She talks them through a meditation and body scan and then they begin to talk. With COVID, a Zoom session is similar just without the in-person touch.
“I always sit down and meditate on a client before our session — often before I have ever met the person,” Freedner said. “I write things down in a notebook… for instance, the person’s left hip might come to me, so I’ll make sure to ask about that… or I can sense the person has suffered a loss… It is important for me that I’m reading them not just taking queues from our conversation.” 
Freedner said that she often brings up her notes first because it gives validation to both her client and herself. 
“It’s amazing and get’s me going,” said Freedner, who’s come to accept the term “psychic.” “Even I still need to hear this is real!”
People who find Freedner, generally “feel stuck and ready for something but they don’t know what it is.” It’s Freedner’s job to help them uncover that in an hour and encourage them. 
“One of my main objectives is to shift perspective,” she explained. “We limit ourselves tremendously because we imagine outcomes with our minds and none of them are that great… they’re fine, but not great. When we accept that there are infinite possibilities of outcomes, that helps us shift to thinking about desirable outcomes, which elevates our frequency — then the likelihood of a desirable outcome is better.”
Short answer: get happy.
“Now here’s where it gets a little bit woo,” Freedner continued. “If we understand that everything is energy, like waves, then when we have a feeling like shame — that is a very low frequency and slow-moving energy — we know that it gets in the way of feeling joy — a high-frequency.”
Freedner said it’s the client’s job to release that slow-moving energy and her job to facilitate that release. 
“I give my clients permission to be happy in their lives, even when other people may not be,” Freedner said. “It’s OK to say, ‘My life is amazing, I have everything I need.’ Doing that is actually contagious. It’s about not having guilt in loving their lives, or finding beauty in abundance and grace. We can’t make change if we don’t allow ourselves to feel unfettered joy.”
Freedner speaks from experience. 
“Part of what makes me good at my job is that I’ve had a really strange life,” said the 44-year-old, who lives up in Lincoln. “I had a lot of challenges starting from when I was a little girl… My parents were separated and it was a tumultuous relationship. Actually all the adults in my life were dealing with their own personal demons, which left me with plenty of time alone and unsupported… I figured, well, if this is my life I’m going to make it cool. So I would do brain experiments, meditate and stuff like that… it was weird as an eight-year-old but it led me to this place in my life where I’m supposed to be.”
Freedner grew up mostly in New York state, but her family moved around a lot. She left home at age 15 when they were living in New York City. “Squatting in abandoned buildings, actually,” she corrected. She went to New Mexico by herself on a Greyhound bus. There she worked as a nanny and lived in a teepee for a Peyote church community in Gila National Wilderness, found her now ex-husband and had her first child at age 20. 
“That really changed everything,” she said. “Having a baby taught me how to love and cracked me open; made me understand that I was important and I need to be here for someone else and even that I was lovable — something I hadn’t ever experienced. Before, I was stoic, always lived by myself; I didn’t need anyone. Becoming tender and loving as a mother completely changed me.”
The family grew in Vermont, first in Burlington, then Hinesburg, Winooski and Vergennes for 12 years. That’s where Freedner set up her henna studio, Heartfire Henna.
“It was a beautiful studio with raw stone walls,” she said. “It was incredibly cozy and beautiful and well lit… Henna is very intimate. You sit for hours with someone, that’s when I’d start to sense something that they weren’t telling me. It was like my henna studio was me doing energy work but incognito.”
As Freedner’s henna business was blossoming she was loosing interest. 
“It was time for me to expand and get an employee or apprentice, but every time I would think about that I would get sick and feel the weight of the world,” she said. “I made the really hard decision from my heart to close the business.”
That was the summer of 2017, the same time she was separating from her husband and selling the house where they raised their two kids, who are now grown and “out on their own adventures.”
Freedner travelled solo for eight months before coming back to Vermont. She walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, visited Portugal, worked as a Reiki master in Thailand and drove a van around the North and South islands of New Zealand. 
“I’ve been in this weird life long enough now that I trust,” she said. “It ultimately gives me a deep calm. Not trusting is stressful.”
Freedner trusts that the right clients will find her and she trusts that she is ready to help them. 
Their relationship together is often short. Freedner suggests a three-session package and then encourages at least six months before they contact her again. 
“I don’t want to be a crutch,” she said. “My job is to facilitate empowerment and get them excited about their life.”