Dr. Caitlin Elsaesser is a contemplative coach, licensed clinical social worker, professor, and meditation teacher who has spent over fifteen years walking with individuals through healing, emergence, and soulful transformation. She is also the co-creator of the Socially Engaged Mindfulness Training Program—an eight-week, evidence-based offering that integrates mindfulness, critical consciousness and The Work That Reconnects to support frontline changemakers. Her work bridges the clinical and the mystical, rooted in trauma-informed care, somatic awareness, and practices of soul-tending, ancestral connection, and embodied awakening. She brings warmth, clarity, and deep listening to her 1:1 work, as well as to the retreats and group offerings she leads.

Caitlin’s approach weaves mindfulness, animist traditions, and ancestral healing to help people access inner wisdom, aliveness, and meaningful change. She draws from her own anti-racist ancestry work, including the reclamation of her Celtic indigenous roots, and honors the body, the land, and the unseen as teachers. Guided by a commitment to collective liberation, she integrates attention to power, identity, and belonging throughout her offerings—while also affirming pleasure, intuition, and desire as sacred aspects of emergence. Her personal path has included respectful, intentional work with psychedelic medicine in support of expanded awareness.

A lifelong student of connection and collaboration, Caitlin is skilled at cultivating relational healing and equitable partnership. Her training in nonviolent communication and participatory research supports her in holding groups and individuals seeking deeper mutuality, clarity, and shared vision. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work, where her research centers on trauma, mindfulness, youth wellbeing, and transformative practices rooted in community wisdom. She has completed over 50 nights of silent meditation retreat and is a trained mindfulness teacher with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education and the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults. Her work is animated by joy, reverence, and a trust that each person carries deep medicine—waiting to be remembered, embodied, and lived.