erik jude wellness

how I collaborate with you (IE-what I have to offer you)

• Room styling: scale, incorporating new and used items, layering, proportion, color, vignettes, cohesion, story, lighting, impact.

• Experience: how you live in or use the space, what it evokes, how it supports/holds/honors, how it’s maintained, how it makes you/them feel.

• Sourcing: finding and purchasing furniture and furnishing from sofas and light fixtures to textiles and plants.

• Shopping: assisting you with the in-store selection process.

• Events: one-time space styling to create an impactful atmosphere and memorable moments. For example, space layout and flow, lighting, floral arrangements, table settings, personalized and meaningful details that reflect the host(s.

• Budget: keeping a close eye on spending and reporting to you at determined increments.

• New spaces or current space refreshes: whether you need a keen eye to help you setup an empty environment, or a fresh pair of eyes to elevate an existing space.

Process milestones

Collaborating on your space is creative in many ways beyond seeing how shapes, colors and textures play together in an environment. My role includes wearing a few other hats including project management and anxiety management (some folks get fairly overwhelmed just thinking about making changes or decisions). Here’s a few of the typical project milestones in order of flow:

• Initial Site Visit: Our in-person 1-hour meeting at your project site. Prior to the visit, you’ll provide no more than 3 aspirational images for inspiration that give me a sense of style and color.

• Project Overview: After we confirm that we’ll move forward, this overview recaps your goals and includes my suggestions using the photos from the site visit.

• Style Board #1: Once I review your notes from the Project Overview, you’ll receive the first of 3 (maximum) style boards that includes costs and links to online retail sites with purchase options.

• Second Site Visit: You’ll review the style board ideas then we’ll meet again in your space to take additional measurements, review concepts and refine and narrow down our plan.

• Project Update: Recap of our second in-person at your space. I’ll outline next steps and use feedback to begin create an updated style board.

• Style Board #2: At this point, it’s important to be close to final decisions on products that are currently available in the market within your budget. We’ll make adjustments as needed to products.

• Final Style Board: This board contains the final pieces that you’ve decided on with liks to purchase them online.

• Project Checklist: At this stage we’ve made product decisions and are considering dates for the final space styling. I’ll put together a list of the details that need to be accomplished.

• Final Site Visit and Styling: The day has arrived! The day before you’ll have arranged for putting pieces together and any handyperson work needed. Decide on any finishing touches still needed.

My relationship to spaces

I take the same approach with my space styling & consultation clients as I do my coaching and bodywork clients. Part of my role is to facilitate an opportunity for you to deepen your curiosity and present moment awareness (there’s an art to noticing) so that you can create a home or business that is a reflection of you and to which you feel a deep connection and sense of healthy pride. An important aspect of a project is our collaborative relationship. I only work with clients and projects that present an opportunity for soulful connection in the process.

This I know to be true: you don’t have to spend a fortune to transform and love your spaces. For some rooms, it’s as easy as a few modern updates in furniture, textiles and furnishings. But truly, it’s so much more than the objects and the hardware. A holistic thread runs through all of my endeavors: body, mind and spirit are connected. The same principles apply to the spaces we occupy. It's all part of you. Wellness extends into the greater field that we occupy, beyond just our physical and energetic bodies. That’s why Integral Spaces is part of my overall wellness practice that includes Therapeutic Bodywork and Essential Coaching.

Over the decades so many people have spoken to me about their homes or small businesses and I was consistently asked the same question: Can you help me make my space feel like yours? Can you cone to my house? My offering that I lovingly call Integral Spaces is the response to that question. It feels like a lifetime in the making.

I’ve been sensitive to what surrounds me since I was a kid. That’s what led me to fields like bodywork, counseling, coaching, marketing, etc. All of my endeavors have required an intuitive sense of people, what motivates them and how culture and physical and energetic space impacts them (and me!). I identify as an empath and HSP (highly sensitive person) which allow me to not just see a space, but to feel it and imagine how others feel in it. Our homes and gathering spaces are opportunities to create sanctuaries, places of safety. For many of us we get one place to create as our own. How can we not feel a calling to offer it as an expression of ourselves? What is it that makes a house a home?

If I was being interviewed by Oprah and she said, “Erik, when did this love affaire with spaces begin?” here’s what I might say (after I sip some tea):

My first memory of feeling impacted by my surrounding was in my childhood home. It was very small and we never purchased new items for our home. We had basically the same elements the entire 20-ish years that I lived there. My mom is a clean freak and on some weekends after we would do chores (yes, in the Spring she had me washing walls) we would rearrange the furniture. I can’t tell you what it was about it, but I can vividly remember feeling the excitement in my body that we were going to shift the living room. We were giving our home the opportunity to feel new, fresh. We would talk about how we lived in the space and how moving X item here or Y item there would disrupt the flow or be uncomfortable for a guest. There weren’t many options as far as where things could go but I felt it: happy and content with less clutter in my mind. It was so much more than placing a thing here or there. The same went for my bedroom which was the only room I really had any control over. After I rearranged and cleaned it, I would just sit there, fully content, just looking around. Satisfied. And again, we weren’t spending much if anything on new items. My parents taught me to value and appreciate what I have. That when you do that, material things last longer and serve you well. If I was really lucky, we’d head to the Pizza Hut down the road after our cleaning and restyling to celebrate a job well done. Cleaning, pizza, organizing, styling…these are a few of my favorite things! Thanks Mom! Oh, and another concept that became so important to me that a friend once said while we lived together in college: Tidy room, tidy mind. That’s a real gem. If I was feeling off, she would remind me to check in on my living quarters and see if there was an opportunity to tidy up. It always worked, and always does. It continues to illicit that childhood feeling of sitting in a freshly cleaned and organized room— contentment. If I can add a dash of contentment to my client’s lives through intentional style, I’m deeply satisfied.