Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Tulumbas.
Hi Laura, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My life has been a story of many beginnings, endings, deaths, and rebirths.
My own story is one of deep transformation, beginning in my early teens when I was overweight and inflamed, and had to navigate how to move and feed my body in order to feel good, to the bustling world of New York’s restaurant scene and evolving into a dedicated pursuit of healing and self-discovery when the world shifted on 9/11/2001, I lived a block away. Through my life journey, marriage, kids, the death of my Dad, divorce, remarriage, moving away from my NYC existence after 44 years of life, starting over in a new city, dealing with my Mom’s dementia, navigating my relationship with my kids as they grow, and another marriage ending, there have been so many new beginnings, deaths and rebirths in this one life. I have had to grow and adapt, I found solace in yoga, wisdom in Ayurveda, energy and transformative shifts in Reiki, depth and real access to myself in therapy. Each step has brought me closer to the intricate balance of body, mind, and heart. I truly respect the healing process and acknowledge how difficult it can be.
If there is one thing I know for certain, it’s that healing is rarely a straight line. It spirals. It loops back on itself. It asks us to revisit places we thought we had already healed. It humbles us, breaks us open, and if we’re willing, it transforms us.
When people find me now through Reiki, intuitive coaching, or Ayurveda, they often assume I’ve always lived this way. The truth is, my healing journey began long before I ever stepped onto a yoga mat or discovered Reiki, therapy or Ayurveda.
I was born in Astoria, Queens, and raised in Whitestone, New York, surrounded by a big Greek, Italian, and Irish family. There was love everywhere. Sunday dinners, family gatherings, cousins, grandparents, food, fun, laughter, and the kind of closeness that made me feel deeply held. Looking back, I can also see that some of that closeness came with blurred boundaries and a tendency to take care of everyone else’s needs before my own. At the time, it was what I knew. It was mine and it was home.
I have always known, sensed, and felt things that seemingly I shouldn’t have had access to. As a child, I didn’t have language for it. I simply experienced moments of knowing that couldn’t be explained logically. Later, I would come to understand that what I was experiencing was intuition.
It wasn’t until high school that one of my teachers recognized this sensitivity and innate knowing. Through thoughtful conversations and an introduction to the Tarot, she gently encouraged me to trust what I was sensing rather than dismiss it. Looking back, I can see how important that validation was. Having someone acknowledge a gift that I didn’t yet fully understand helped me begin to trust myself in a deeper way.
At the time, I didn’t have much support or guidance in the world of energy, intuition, or metaphysics. These were subjects that often remained hidden or were spoken about quietly, if at all. While there was certainly an awareness of intuition within my family, it wasn’t something that was openly explored or cultivated.
In retrospect, I believe many members of my family possess untapped intuitive gifts and a natural sensitivity that could be developed if they chose to bring more attention and curiosity to it. I have come to believe that intuition is far more common than most people realize. While some people may have a stronger natural inclination toward it, I believe we all have access to an inner knowing that can be strengthened through awareness, practice, and trust.
When I was younger, conversations about intuition, energy, and metaphysics often existed on the fringes. Today, these topics are becoming increasingly mainstream and accepted. Perhaps that is because more people are having direct experiences they cannot easily explain, or perhaps science is beginning to catch up with what many wisdom traditions have understood for centuries—that there is far more to our experience than what can be measured, seen, or fully understood through logic alone.
My own journey has taught me that intuition is less about predicting the future and more about cultivating a deeper relationship with ourselves. The more I have learned to listen, trust, and pay attention, the more I have discovered that the wisdom I was searching for was often already present, quietly waiting within me.
As a young woman, I was searching for something, though I couldn’t have told you what it was.
I studied English Literature at Binghamton University but spent most of my time in dance classes, choreography Musical theater productions, and creative spaces. Dance was my first love. Movement has always been one of the ways I make sense of the world. and my emotions. We can speak things through bodies that touch places words miss.
After college, I returned to New York feeling completely lost. Everyone around me seemed to have a plan. I didn’t.
I wandered the streets of Manhattan trying on different versions of myself. Public relations. Textile design. Acting. Showroom Manager. Restaurants. None of them felt quite right.
The restaurant business eventually became my home. It was exciting, chaotic, exhausting, and often fueled by adrenaline. I was in my twenties, working long hours, sleeping too little, drinking too much, eating late at night, and pushing myself beyond my limits.
From the outside, it looked glamorous. Working in the hottest restaurants, dancing on bars, living with abandon.
Inside, I was overwhelmed, stressed, and angry.
Yoga entered my life because I needed somewhere to put my rage.
I didn’t start practicing because I wanted enlightenment. I started because I felt like I was losing my mind.
What I found on the mat wasn’t peace—not at first. What I found was myself. Slowly but surely I made way to my center and then would loose it agin and have to start all over. it was a game of hide and seek. That’s just the reality of healing. We are never done.
I did a brief stint on the left coast when I moved to LA to help open Asia De Cuba in The Mondrian Hotel. I went back to NY after 18 months. I remember calling my Mom crying that it was sunny all of the time and she said “I think it’s time for you to come home”.
Then came September 11, 2001.
I lived one block from the World Trade Center.
Even now, in 2026, twenty-five years later, it is difficult to describe what that experience did to me.
That morning, I woke up to a sound that I initially thought was a truck hitting a metal plate in the street. and then seeing a silver shiny ribbon fly past my window, I remember having the thought, “It can’t be the Twin Towers. That already happened.” Then my phone rang (yes, a house phone) and I jumped out of bed to answer it.
And then everything changed.
The city I loved was forever altered.
The buildings that represented home disappeared.
My sense of safety disappeared with them. I was displaced and disconnected from everything all at once.
Like so many New Yorkers, I was traumatized. Instead of grieving, I bypassed my pain.
I told myself I should be grateful to be alive.
I told myself other people had it worse.
I told myself to move on.
The problem with bypassing grief is that your body remembers what your mind is trying to forget.
For years, I carried that grief everywhere. I still do but in a different way and now with more awareness.
It shaped my relationships, my choices, my sense of safety, and my understanding of myself. At the time, I didn’t realize how much of my life was being lived from a place of unresolved trauma.
I often joke that I woke up from the fog of 9/11 married.
There is more truth in that statement than humor.
Looking back, so many of my decisions during those years came from a nervous system that was trying to find solid ground after everything familiar had been shattered.
The healing journey that followed wasn’t elegant.
There was financial struggle.
A bankruptcy that filled me with shame.
A miscarriage I barely allowed myself to grieve.
Postpartum depression that I tried to push through on my own.
The devastating loss of my father.
The unraveling of a marriage.
The overwhelm of motherhood.
The heartbreak of realizing that some relationships cannot become what we desperately want them to be.
Again and again, life invited me to let go of who I thought I was.
And again and again, I resisted.
Until I couldn’t anymore.
The death of my father marked one of the most profound turning points in my life.
For the first time, I knew I couldn’t carry everything by myself.
I reached out for support and began therapy.
That decision changed everything.
Therapy gave me access to parts of myself I had spent decades avoiding. It helped me understand that healing wasn’t about becoming stronger so I could endure more pain. It was about getting honest enough to feel what was already there, that I had shoved down, stuffed in the dark corners, hiding, concealed, in order to tolerate existing. I had convinced myself for so long that I should be able to handle it all on my own. That may be true to a certain extent, but not without clear reflection and someone skilled, and willing enough to mirror back to feel, grieve and process in a supported container. The more I learn to allow my experience to exist without trying to make it something else, the more actual strength it builds, the more internal infrastructure and resource I have.
Around the same time, Ayurveda entered my life in a much deeper way.
What began as curiosity became a complete shift in how I understood health, healing, and self-care.
Ayurveda taught me that healing happens through relationship—with our bodies, our daily rhythms, our food, our emotions, and the natural world.
Reiki later expanded that understanding even further, introducing me to the energetic dimension of healing and transformation.
Each modality offered me a different piece of the puzzle.
Together, they helped me come home to myself.
And then life continued to ask more of me.
Divorce.
Remarriage.
Leaving New York after forty-four years.
Starting over in Texas.
Another profound heartbreak.
And perhaps most painfully, witnessing my mother’s slow disappearance through dementia.
There is no preparation for watching someone you love slowly leave while their body remains.
It is a grief unlike any other.
Today, when I sit with clients, I don’t sit across from them as someone who has figured life out.
I sit with them as someone who has lived.
Someone who has loved deeply, lost deeply, grieved deeply, and healed deeply.
Someone who understands that healing is layered.
That growth is messy.
That transformation is rarely convenient.
And that sometimes the greatest act of courage is simply staying present with yourself when everything in you wants to run.
My work today is rooted in this understanding.
Through Reiki, Intuitive Coaching, Ayurveda, Yoga and trauma-informed healing practices, I support people as they navigate their own shifting reality, grief, growth, and transformation.
Healing is not about fixing yourself.
It is about remembering yourself.
It is about learning to trust yourself.
And ultimately, it is about coming home to yourself, again and again, for the rest of your life.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It was definitely not a smooth road. One of my biggest struggles has been believing in myself. Real strength isn’t built out of thin air—it comes from moving through difficulties and discovering that you can survive them. The resilience we rely on is often forged through the very experiences we would never choose for ourselves.
For much of my life, I believed that in order to be loved, I had to take care of everyone around me. I felt responsible for managing other people’s feelings, expectations, and disappointments. It was as if I was constantly walking on eggshells, trying not to upset the balance. If everyone else was okay, then I could relax—at least temporarily.
To some extent, I still wrestle with that pattern.
Who am I if I’m not the one taking care of everyone? If I’m not feeding, supporting, helping, healing, or holding things together? It’s a question I’ve sat with many times, and one that continues to reveal new layers of understanding.
Healing, I’ve learned, is an ongoing process. We are never finished. There isn’t a point where we arrive and suddenly have everything figured out. There are simply deeper levels of awareness and opportunities to choose differently.
I also struggled with worthiness, which I believe is part of the human experience. For years, I felt like I needed to be who other people wanted me to be rather than who I truly was. Underneath that adaptation lived a deep, internalized rage—rage at abandoning myself in order to gain approval, acceptance, or love.
It wasn’t until high school, when I attended a different school than my best friend, that I began to discover my own identity. For the first time, I started to explore what I liked, what I wanted, how I wanted things to be, and even something as simple as what I wanted to wear. Slowly, I began finding my voice.
When we’re young, we’re incredibly impressionable. If we don’t develop a connection to ourselves, it’s easy to become shaped by the expectations of family, culture, and society. We can lose sight of who we are and become who we think we’re supposed to be.
I struggled with that for a long time.
The familial and societal imprints we carry are powerful. They create currents that pull us in certain directions, often without us even realizing it. It took years of self-reflection, healing, and conscious attention for me to recognize those patterns and begin separating my authentic self from the conditioning I had inherited.
My best friend’s mother, Momma D, always called me “Bubbles.” I think it was because I was almost always upbeat, optimistic, and determined to find the silver lining in every situation.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that some of that optimism was serving as a protective mechanism.
I was often bypassing my pain by trying to rise above it, override it, or reframe it before I had fully allowed myself to feel it. If I could stay positive, perhaps I wouldn’t have to sit with the discomfort, grief, anger, or fear that lived underneath.
Like many of the patterns I would later uncover in my healing journey, this one disguised itself as something admirable. After all, optimism is generally viewed as a virtue. And in many ways, it is. Hope, resilience, and the ability to see possibility are powerful gifts.
But optimism can also become an interesting crutch.
When positivity is used to avoid feeling what is true, it can keep us disconnected from ourselves. Sometimes healing requires us to stop looking for the silver lining and simply allow ourselves to sit in the darkness for a while. Not because we are giving up hope, but because we are honoring reality.
Over time, I learned that true healing isn’t about choosing optimism over pain. It’s about making room for both. We can be grateful and grieving. Hopeful and heartbroken. Resilient and struggling.
The paradox is that when we stop trying to outrun our pain, we often discover a deeper, more authentic form of optimism waiting on the other side—one that is rooted not in avoidance, but in truth.
Today, I still feel those pulls. The difference is that I can see them now. I can recognize the imprint, feel its influence, and make a conscious choice rather than automatically following it. That awareness has been one of the greatest gifts of my healing journey. It doesn’t mean I always get it right but I am definitely less impressionable than I once was.
Wholeness, for me, isn’t the absence of old patterns. It’s having enough self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-trust to recognize them when they arise and get really curious about where I am making my decisions from, or where I might be reacting from past trauma.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
One of the most meaningful pieces of feedback I have received from clients is that “one session feels like ten years of therapy.” Having spent more than a decade in therapy myself, I know firsthand what deep therapeutic work requires and what meaningful transformation feels like. While I recognize that statement may be a bit of an exaggeration, I receive it as a beautiful acknowledgment of the depth of healing that can occur within a session.
What makes this work unique is that healing is happening on multiple levels simultaneously. My clients are processing verbally, mentally, emotionally, physically, and energetically. It is a multi-layered healing experience that honors the complexity of being human.
Through my own healing journey and years of study, I have come to understand that we can become caught in neurological or limbic trauma loops, where past experiences continue to inform our present reality even when the original trauma is no longer occurring. These patterns can be obvious, but more often they are subtle, quietly influencing how we perceive, respond to, and move through life.
This is one of the reasons I sometimes challenge the common belief that “the only thing we can control is our reaction.” While there is wisdom in that perspective, it isn’t always that simple. When trauma is driving our responses, we may not have immediate access to choice. Often, our reactions are happening beneath conscious awareness. As we heal and process unresolved experiences, we create more space between stimulus and response, allowing greater access to choice, self-awareness, and regulation.
I have found that healing deepens when we move beyond verbal processing alone. While insight is valuable, lasting transformation often requires engaging the body, the nervous system, and the energetic field. By incorporating somatic awareness, energetic healing, and intuitive exploration, we can begin to unravel patterns that may not be accessible through conversation alone.
I am a Reiki Master Healer, Intuitive Life Coach, Certified E-RYT 500/YACEP Yoga Teacher, and Ayurvedic Holistic Health Counselor (AADP). My work is informed not only by my professional training but also by decades of personal healing, self-inquiry, and lived experience.
I offer my clients a safe, compassionate space to explore their healing process and reconnect with themselves. My approach is holistic, weaving together the gentle power of Reiki, the insight of intuitive coaching, and the wisdom of yoga, yoga philosophy, Ayurveda, meditation, and holistic nutrition.
At the heart of my work is the belief that our physical, emotional, mental, and energetic wellbeing are deeply interconnected. Healing rarely happens on just one level. By honoring the whole person and the many layers of their experience, I help clients navigate life transitions, process grief and trauma, reconnect with their inner wisdom, and cultivate a deeper sense of wholeness.
My intention is not to fix anyone, but to create a space where healing can unfold naturally, where people feel seen, supported, and empowered to reconnect with their own capacity.
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
There are so many teachers who have shaped my life—more than I can name in this moment, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some.
My greatest teacher has been life itself. My experiences, relationships, family, friendships, heartbreaks, losses, and triumphs have all contributed to who I am today. Equally transformative has been the loving reflection, excavation, and deep healing work I have done with my brilliant therapist, Jorja Rivero. So much of my growth and understanding of myself has emerged through that relationship and the sacred space she has held for me over the years.
My brother, Gregory, and my best friend, Toni—whom I met before my brother was even born—have both taught me so much about what it means to be in relationship. Their love, friendship, honesty, and presence have been gifts throughout my life.
My children have been among my greatest teachers. They have served as a constant catalyst for my continued healing, growth, and self-reflection. In many ways, they have invited me to become a better version of myself. My marriages have done the same. They have cracked me open, challenged me, humbled me, and ultimately brought me back to myself, again and again. I often find myself wishing I knew at sixteen what I know now at fifty-two, and it seems wisdom truly comes through living.
I am deeply grateful to my Ayurveda teachers and guides, Cate Stillman and Dr. (Vaidya) Naina Marballi, whose teachings transformed the way I understand health, healing, and the rhythms of life.
I am equally grateful to my Reiki Master Teacher, Brenda Rose, who introduced me not only to Reiki but also to the worlds of energy healing, tarot, crystals, and energetic clearing. Her guidance has been instrumental in shaping my work and understanding of healing on an energetic level.
Regena Thomashauer, lovingly known as Mama Gena, taught me the importance of pleasure, desire, and self-devotion. She reminded me that pleasure is not frivolous—it is our birthright. Her teachings helped me reclaim parts of myself that had long been neglected and continue to influence how I approach self-care and personal growth.
My yoga teachers are too numerous to count, and each has left an imprint on my journey. Amy Ippoliti led my first teacher training and created a container where we could study the elegant alignment principles and heart-centered philosophy of Anusara Yoga while healing together in post-9/11 New York City. Elena Brower and Lynn Hazan created a space at Virayoga that allowed us to create community, and connection.
Even with all the complexity and trauma that existed within parts of my yoga experience—stories far too deep and nuanced to unpack here—I can honestly say that some of the most extraordinary people in my life came through that community. The lessons I learned continue to shape me to this day.
I am also profoundly grateful to Dr. Douglas Brooks, who introduced me to the teachings of Rajanaka Tantra, the Path of Auspicious Wisdom. Through his generosity, storytelling, and devotion, he invited us into a rich philosophical tradition that traces back to his beloved teacher, Dr. Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy, affectionately known as Appa, meaning “father.” These teachings continue to inform how I understand embodiment, consciousness, and the sacredness of everyday life.
And finally, my grandparents.
My Poppy taught me to embrace life as a gift. Despite enduring multiple heart attacks at a time when medicine knew far less than it does today, he continued to meet life with gratitude, humor, and resilience. My Yiayia often said, “If you have your health, you have everything.” As a teenager, I didn’t fully appreciate the depth of that wisdom. As I grow older, those words feel truer with each passing year.
When I look back on my life, I see that every person, every teacher, every relationship, and every challenge has contributed to my healing journey. Each one offered a lesson, a mirror, or a doorway back to myself. For all of it—the joy, the pain, the growth, and the grace—I am deeply grateful.
Pricing:
- $250 – Reiki & Coaching – 120 minutes
- $150 – Reiki – 60 minutes
- $150 – Coaching – 60 minutes
- All sessions are available in person and virtually
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.reikiwithlauratulumbas.com
- Instagram: @reikiwithlauratulumbas
- Facebook: @reikiwithlauratulumbas @lauratulumbas
- LinkedIn: Laura (Reiki With Laura Tulumbas) Tulumbas
- Youtube: @ReikiwithLauraTulumbas
