The Living Map Method
Recognize. Relate. Rechoose.
You’ve spent your life developing an extraordinary capacity to care.
Now it’s time to include yourself within the circle of that care.
An eight-week, live online learning experience for caring, capable people
who are ready to understand the invisible patterns shaping how they care, relate, respond and choose.
Founding Cohort Begins September 22, 2026
You have learned how to be the reliable one.
You anticipate what others need.
You step in when something needs to be handled. You keep things moving, absorb what others cannot carry and often notice a problem before anyone else does.
Your ability to care is real. It may also have become so closely tied to who you are that it is difficult to recognize when caring has shifted into overfunctioning.
You may notice:
Rest feels uncomfortable, unproductive or undeserved.
You say yes before checking what you actually have to give.
You feel responsible for other people’s feelings, choices or stability.
You long for support but have trouble trusting or receiving it.
Resentment builds beneath your reliability.
You understand your patterns intellectually, but they continue to repeat.
Caring for yourself can feel like abandoning or betraying the people you love.
These patterns are not evidence that you are uncaring, broken or failing.
They are part of a living map formed through relationships, expectations, adaptations, losses and the invisible rules you learned to follow.
When you learn how to read that map, you gain more room to choose how you want to move forward.
What if you could care without disappearing inside the care you give?
The Living Map Method is an eight-week educational experience that helps you recognize the patterns operating across your body, emotions, thoughts, roles and relationships.
Rather than focusing on one behavior in isolation, we will explore how the pieces of your experience connect.
You will learn to:
Notice your body’s signals before reaching depletion.
Recognize the invisible rules influencing your decisions.
Understand the roles you learned to occupy in relationships.
Separate what is yours to carry from what belongs to someone else.
Relate to your emotions with greater curiosity and less judgment.
Pause before automatically stepping in, fixing or agreeing.
Identify the difference between caring from choice and caring from compulsion.
Practice boundaries that make room for both connection and self-respect.
Re-choose how you want to respond when familiar patterns return.
The goal is not to make you less caring.
The goal is to help you remain connected to yourself while you care.
The Living Map Method
Recognize.
Learn to perceive what has been operating beneath the surface.
We will notice the body signals, emotional patterns, thought loops, relational roles and invisible rules that shape your responses.
Relate.
Develop a different relationship with what you discover.
Instead of immediately judging, overriding or correcting yourself, you will practice meeting your experience with curiosity, pacing and compassion.
Rechoose.
Create enough space to respond with greater intention.
Re-choosing does not mean you will never encounter an old pattern again. It means the pattern no longer gets to make every decision automatically.
What We Will Explore
Start Here: Preparing for the Experience
Before our first live gathering, you will receive introductory materials to help you understand how the course works.
This section includes:
Welcome and course orientation
Education versus therapy
Choice, pacing and permission to opt out
Course agreement
Beginning intentions questionnaire
Five-minute orienting and grounding practice
Live-call schedule and access information
Week 1: Reading the Map
Begin identifying the pieces of your Living Map and noticing what has already been present in your experience.
Week 2: Thresholds of the Body
Learn to recognize body signals related to capacity, activation, settling, contraction and openness—without forcing or overinterpreting what you notice.
Week 3: Emotional Weather
Explore emotions as meaningful information. Practice relating to feelings without dismissing them or becoming engulfed by them.
Week 4: Invisible Rules and Thought Loops
Identify recurring thoughts, inherited expectations and unspoken rules that continue to influence your choices.
Week 5: Roles, Relationships and What You Carry
Examine the roles you learned to occupy in relationships and begin distinguishing what is yours, what belongs to someone else and what is genuinely shared.
Week 6: Grief, Release and Reorientation
Make compassionate room for grief, transition and the feelings that can emerge when familiar roles begin to change.
Week 7: Boundaries, Capacity and Choice
Practice pausing, checking your capacity, naming what you need and making choices that are not driven solely by guilt, urgency or obligation.
Week 8: Integration and the Living Map Ahead
Bring the pieces together through the full process of Recognize, Relate and Re-choose. Create a personal map for continuing the work beyond the course.
What Is Included
Your founding-cohort enrollment includes:
Eight live online group gatherings through Zoom
Pre-recorded educational lessons
Guided embodied practices
The Living Map participant workbook
Weekly reflection prompts and experiments
Downloadable maps, worksheets and integration practices
Access to the course materials through Squarespace
Private Facebook community
Opportunities to offer feedback and help shape future versions of the course
This first cohort will be intentionally small so that the experience can remain thoughtful, paced and relational.
Live Gathering Schedule
The founding cohort begins Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
Live gatherings are planned for:
Tuesday, September 22
Tuesday, September 29
Tuesday, October 6
Tuesday, October 13
Tuesday, October 20
Tuesday, October 27
Wednesday, November 4
Tuesday, November 10
Time: 7:00pm-8:30pm Central Time
Location: Live online through Zoom
Recordings: LIVE CALLS WILL BE RECORDED AND WILL REMAIN AVAILABLE FOR ONE YEAR
Meet Your Guide
Hi, I’m Shannon Leigh, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, educator, and founder of Thresholds of Self.
For more than twenty years, I have worked alongside people navigating crisis, caregiving, grief, family complexity, illness, transition and the difficult spaces between who they have needed to be and who they are becoming.
My professional experience has included community social services, juvenile justice, crisis intervention, higher education, hospice, palliative care and psychotherapy.
Across these settings, I repeatedly witnessed the same truth: patterns rarely exist in only one part of a person’s life.
They move through the body, emotions, thoughts, relationships, environments, roles and choices. Meaningful change often begins when we can see how those pieces belong to the same map.
This work is also personal to me. I know what it means to become the reliable one, the caretaker, the mediator and the person others expect to hold everything together.
The Living Map Method grew from both professional experience and lived understanding. It offers a compassionate way to perceive what as always been there—and to meet it with greater relationship and choice.
This Experience May Be For You If…
You are often the capable, dependable or responsible person in your relationships.
You learned to anticipate other people’s needs before identifying your own.
You want to care for yourself without feeling as though you are abandoning others.
You are tired of understanding your patterns intellectually without experiencing meaningful change.
You want to explore the connection between your body, emotions, thoughts and relationships.
You are willing to approach change gradually rather than forcing yourself into another self-improvement project.
You value choice, reflection, personal responsibility and compassionate curiosity.
You are ready to include yourself in the care you give everyone else.
You do not need to arrive with perfect
self-awareness, a clear goal or a polished version of your story.
You only need a willingness
to notice what is here.
This Course Is Educational, Not Therapy
The Living Map Method is a psycho-educational and experiential group course. It is not psychotherapy, group therapy, crisis support or a substitute for individualized mental-health care.
Although I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I will be participating in this course as an educator, facilitator and guide, not as your therapist.
You will never be required to disclose a diagnosis, treatment history or detailed trauma narrative. You may choose not to answer a question, participate in an exercise or share with the group.
This course is not appropriate for someone seeking crisis intervention, acute psychiatric support or individualized treatment.
If you are uncertain whether the course is an appropriate fit, please contact me before enrolling.
Founding Cohort Enrollment
Because this is the first cohort, you will receive the complete eight-week experience at a founding-participant rate.
Founding Cohort Investment: $297
Your participation and feedback will help me refine the pacing, materials and delivery of future cohorts.
You are receiving the first live version of a thoughtfully developed method, along with the opportunity to help shape how it grows.
Enrollment closes September 20, 2026, or when the available spaces are filled
Your Questions, Answered
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No. This is an educational course, not therapy. You may participate whether or not you currently work with a therapist, provided the course is an appropriate fit for your needs.
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No. You will be invited to reflect and participate, but you will not be required to share personal details. Choice, pacing and permission to opt out are built into the course.
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[INSERT YOUR ATTENDANCE AND RECORDING POLICY.]
You will still have access to the pre-recorded lessons, workbook pages and weekly practices.
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Plan for approximately 90 minutes for the live gathering, plus approximately [60-90?] minutes for the pre-recorded lesson, reflection and optional weekly practice.
The course is designed to support reflection without becoming another overwhelming obligation.
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Item descriptionBecause this is a live, small-group experience and preparation begins before the first gathering, all sales are final.
Please review the course description, schedule and educational scope carefully before enrolling. If you have questions about whether the course is an appropriate fit, contact me before completing your purchase.
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You will need a reliable internet connection, an email address, a device that can access Squarespace course materials and Zoom, and a private or comfortable place to participate in the live gatherings.
You Do Not Have to Stop Caring to Begin Caring for Yourself
Your reliability, sensitivity and capacity to care are not qualities that need to be removed.
The invitation is to create a wider circle: one that includes your body, your needs,
your limits, your grief, your choices and your life.
You have spent years learning how to read the needs of the people around you.
Now you can learn to read your own Living Map.
The Living Map Method: Recognize. Relate. Re-choose.
Begins September 22, 2026
Eight live online gatherings
Founding cohort investment: $297
Eight-week live online founding cohort experience beginning September 22, 2026.