a c o h e r e n t t h r e a d
i did not arrive here easily
I spent decades building a life that looked right from the outside - a nursing academic career, clinical expertise, leadership and consultant roles, and a private practice. I earned credentials and sought to make a difference in the world. These were places where I was valued, respected, and known.
And then I walked away from it all.
Not because it was wrong, it wasn’t. Because something truer was waiting and I could not get to it without letting go of everything I had been using to prove my worth. The threshold I walked through was not to a new career or a better version of the old one.
I walked toward my own stillness and coherence. Toward self-trust that needed no outside confirmation. Toward a peace so inherent, so quietly present, that I finally understood…it was always there, it had never left. It was only buried beneath the static of trying to be enough.
t h e p a t h
what the spiral required
The path was not linear. It did not come with a map. It was not graceful. It asked me to look honestly at the foundational experiences that quietly shaped how I learned to move through the world: how to protect myself, how to earn my place, how to be enough. These survival strategies were necessary, intelligent, sacred, and had quietly become walls.
I dismantled them slowly. Breath by breath, choosing again and again not to rebuild from the old blueprint. I released what no longer carried truth.
What emerged was not a healed version of a wounded person. It was something that had been there all along - a frequency of stillness, stability, truth, and compassion that the noise had simply covered over. They longed to be heard, understood, and felt again.
I am still in the process and will always be “on the way”. That is not a disclaimer, it is the most honest thing I can tell you about why this work is real - and worth the effort. I am, quite simply, free.
I am a double board-certified psychiatric-mental health clinical nurse specialist and advanced holistic nurse. I earned a doctorate in nursing and have worked at the intersection of mind, emotions, body and spirit for over four decades.
I am an expert in circle practice and have specialized in relationship-centered care in all my roles as a nurse leader. I have sat with people in their hardest moments and learned - slowly and imperfectly - how to hold space without flinching, without fixing, without performing, and without needing anything to be different than it actually is.
My clinical practice taught me precision. My spiritual path taught me presence. The coherence work I have done on myself - the hardest work of all - gives me the ability to hold space for yours.
I teach what I have lived. I do not teach what I have merely studied.
kristen lombard
phd. rn. pmhcns-bc. ahn-bc.
t h e g R o u n d i s t a n d o n
If you are at a threshold…
If something in you is ready to be released and something truer is waiting to breathe…
I know that place. I have stood there. I am standing there.
And I can stand with you.