About Kellie

Check out this photo–am I lucky or what?  Not only do I have a great husband who is also an awesome dance partner, but as my life’s work, I get to teach other women how to connect with all the passion and greatness inside them and bring it to the world in a way that serves them and everyone around them!

How amazing is that?

I am such a firm believer in the loving strength and generosity of women, I can’t think of a more gratifying calling than to help amplify those forces in the world.

And believe me, I truly appreciate being able to feel those very qualities inside myself, because for a long time, I did not know that they were there at all.

As a young woman (yes, I still look young, but I’m 40), I was completely disconnected from what was good about me.  Like so many of us, I had a childhood that didn’t teach me much about my own value.  In fact, there were some pretty strong experiences to the contrary.  I adapted by living my life in a constant, low-grade fear: fear of screwing up, fear of failure, fear of other people’s emotions, and worst of all, fear of my own emotions. It just left me a sort of restless state of dissatisfaction and a search for meaning.

That dissatisfaction took me on many adventures and misadventures, and honestly, it was making most of my choices for me for a long time.  I changed plans regularly and committed to nothing. Eventually, after college, graduate school, training in various healing modalities, and many years of teaching and training jobs–despite all the education and skills I had amassed–I had practically given up on myself to find the feeling of competence and meaning in life that I was searching for.  I wound up unemployed in a city where I didn’t have any friends, and for three long years, I continued to fall deeping and  deeper into an anxious, depressed and desperate hole.  Needless to say, my marriage wasn’t doing too well, either.

Tragedy tends to distill life into what matter and what doesn’t.  My life was changed overnight by the sudden death of my younger brother at the age of 36.  Upon that event, part of me showed up that cut through all the BS, all the depression, all the lame, self-pitying stories that I had been wallowing in for the past three years. I literally felt like I had been stripped of all the illusion of inadequacy and confusion that was weighing me down. All that mattered was showing up to support the people who mattered most to me.

I took on an entirely new role in my family that embraced all the teaching and leadership training I had, all my connection to spirit, and of course, my love for my family.  I became the Emotional Master of Ceremonies.  I wrote everything that needed writing, I performed ceremonies for my family, and then for 200 more friends.  I prepared the way for over 200 people to find communion with each other–everyone from the mayor to the crazy alcoholics from my brother’s younger years–and closure as a group. It felt like the most important thing I had ever done in my life.

After stepping into that role, it became apparent to me that there was no way I could ever go back under the veil of illusion that I was inadequate and meaningless.  It was up to me to create a path for myself so I could be a leader in the light and bring other people with me.  And that’s how Magnetic Presence started.  As the seed of knowing that what we have and what we are is deep, valuable, and meaningful, and as soon as we choose to experience ourselves that way, we begin to light up the world.

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Kellie Townsend brings together over 30 years of performance experience, 10 years of teaching & training, and 20 years of somatic work and personal development to train dancers, performers & speakers in unleashing their truly magnetic essence on stage. In addition to all her years as a dancer, Kellie has had a long and varied speaking career. She spent her “tech boom” years as a national software trainer for a large software company and then went on be a psychology discussion group leader, a college geology instructor and a dance teacher. She works with women entrepreneurs to help them harness their passion and bring their message to the world in a much bigger way.