Community Highlights: Meet Elizabeth Watkins Price of EWP Consulting

Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Watkins Price.

Hi Elizabeth, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My career path has been winding, but with each new turn, I have found a new version of myself as an educator.

I started out teaching English to speakers of other languages in Costa Rica and then in inner-city schools. After going to law school, I worked as a civil rights attorney for years. From there, I shifted into higher education, first as a career counselor and then as a judicial educator.

Throughout my professional life, I have been an advocate and ally working to improve access to inhospitable systems and challenge injustice. In all of these varied contexts, I’ve offered my students and clients tangible skills and tools to meet their needs with compassionate understanding.

I’m excited to be turning my full attention to my career transition coaching and mindfulness work in 2022.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I don’t think anyone’s path is smooth as it’s getting cut, but looking back the challenges often inspire growth or change in directions we might not otherwise explore.

For me, a long-term struggle with anxiety is what led me to get serious about mindfulness meditation, and that has been one of the most important choices I’ve made along the way, both because of how it has allowed me to move through my life with greater ease and the way my interest in sharing that practice is now central to my work.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
EWP Consulting is about building lives that are rich in meaning and developing habits that let people experience their lives more fully and with greater compassion and ease. This is to say, it’s a business that is deeply rooted in mindfulness. The services I offer include coaching around professional change, frequently with people who are planning or living into their retirement, and also mindfulness meditation instruction, often with a particular emphasis on how this tool can help to build resilience and peace in our relationships with our bodies and with food.

My professional life started when I was a classroom teacher and even when I went to law school and then worked as a civil rights attorney, I have always been an educator. Something that makes EWP different from other coaching or mindfulness spaces is the context where I developed these skills. I was first a career counselor with law students, lawyers, and judges. When I started teaching mindfulness, it was to the judicial officials of North Carolina. Honing these skills in the legal community meant clearly communicating the tangible impacts coaching and mindfulness can have on decision making as well as satisfaction.

Retirement is something many people loosely imagine, often for the majority of their working lives. For many, it’s the carrot dangling at the end of professional life. We spend years training for careers and building professional identities, but people often step out of their careers and into retirement without the same care and intention. Retirement coaching helps people pause, reflect, and imagine what retirement could hold, and it offers support for people new in retirement as they experiment with what makes that new chapter meaningful.

I think the work I do around mindfulness and the body makes me proudest. The anti-diet movement is picking up steam in so many places, as people realize how much of their lives they’ve spent battling with their bodies and the ever-changing diet landscape. The inner work of noticing thought patterns and improving our relationships with our bodies can help individuals access greater resilience and body compassion in the face of pervasive anti-fat bias.

Whether it is the six-week introduction to mindfulness for body liberation course for people in larger bodies or the eight-week body compassion space for all bodies, the community and healing that’s possible in these programs are what I’m most excited about.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: www.ebethwatkinsprice.com

Image Credits
Rosie Valentine.