Today we’d like to introduce you to Maureen DeLorenzo.
Hi Maureen, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I grew up in a blended family as the middle of five children, though I often functioned more like the firstborn — responsible, dependable, and eager to do things the “right” way. My parents still laugh about how quiet I was at school and always so “easy.” Until fourth grade, I barely spoke in class, even bringing recordings to my teachers to prove I could talk at home. I was praised for being easy, caring, and accommodating — the child who didn’t cause trouble.
On the outside, my parents worked hard to create a beautiful life for us — private schools, family vacations, exciting experiences, and community involvement. And while I’m deeply grateful for their hard work and all that I was given, I realized early on that experiences are only as rich as the feelings inside of them — the honesty, connection, and happiness shared between the people living them. Inside our home, there were good intentions and a longing for closeness, but also an undercurrent of tension, heaviness, and unspoken truths. So I learned to keep my head down and stay focused on the next goal. Dance became my outlet, friends became my family, and food became my comfort.
Goals and lists became my external anchor. In third grade, I started creating detailed checklists for my mornings, afternoons, and evenings — my mom would type and print them for me. Over time, those lists began to run my life. I forgot to include myself on them — how I actually wanted to feel. Achievement became my source of safety, leaving me in a constant cycle of stress, anxiety, and guilt whenever I wasn’t accomplishing enough.
My sense of self came from what I was doing, not what I was feeling, fueled by external validation and solving other people’s problems. Feelings were something to suppress with food, distractions, and staying busy. By nineteen, I was struggling with a full-blown eating disorder, chronic anxiety, shame, and depression. I felt deeply lost and disconnected from myself. I swung between binge eating and restrictive dieting, gaining over thirty pounds in a single year.
I was so disconnected from myself at the time that even moments that should have felt meaningful barely registered emotionally. I remember receiving a prestigious award from the national headquarters of American Israel Public Affairs Committee and walking up to the stage to accept it feeling almost completely numb. From the outside, it looked like success, achievement, validation — but internally, I could barely feel any of it. That moment became a powerful reflection of just how dissociated and disconnected from myself I had become.
That blueprint of over-functioning and under-feeling followed me into adulthood. I went to graduate school to become a therapist — a natural role for someone skilled at caring for others. I became deeply attuned to everyone else’s emotions while remaining disconnected from my own. I had two children, moved to suburbia, and opened a successful clinical practice. Life looked full from the outside, but underneath it all was a persistent ache: “Is this it? I feel like there should be more.”
I realized I had stopped dancing through life. I was either pushing through or collapsing, never really allowing myself to exist in the messy middle. I didn’t even know what that middle space looked or felt like, but I was determined to find it. I knew I wanted to feel more alive and connected — not in a forced, “life of the party” kind of way, but in a grounded, genuine way. I wanted to move through life with more rhythm, music, presence, and purpose instead of constantly bracing for the next goal or pushing myself toward the next thing.
So I committed fiercely to radical honesty — with myself and with others — while intentionally making more space for fun, movement, playfulness, and connection. It hasn’t been a linear process, and I still find myself slipping back into old patterns of pushing or shutting down at times. But over time, that commitment has transformed the way I live and became the foundation of the work I now share with others: helping people reconnect to themselves, their bodies, and the aliveness they may have forgotten was always there.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
For me, the journey back to myself came through the heartbreak of divorce. Deciding whether to leave my marriage was one of the most painful and confronting experiences of my life. For an entire year, every Thursday morning at 4:45 a.m., I would quietly walk downstairs to meet virtually with my spiritual mentor in London. Week after week, we peeled back another layer of truth — truths about how I really felt and the stories I had told myself to avoid feeling it.
The dread in my body was intense. There was a deep, visceral fear of what I might uncover if I truly listened inward. But that became the work: learning how to stay present long enough to hear myself honestly.
My divorce sparked what felt like a second adolescence — disorienting, humbling, lonely, wild, liberating, and deeply necessary. It was the process of becoming more fully myself. Along the way, I’ve had to learn how to live alongside grief: the grief of disappointing people, letting relationships go, and releasing old beliefs about love, marriage, and family. Rebuilding my life through the lens of self-love has been both the greatest challenge and the greatest gift of my life.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Wise Mind Mama?
My work has always been rooted in women’s empowerment, leadership, and community. I began my career in women’s philanthropy and leadership development, supporting initiatives centered around connection, growth, and collective healing. Over time, that work evolved into a more personal and integrative practice supporting women navigating relationships, identity, emotional healing, and midlife transformation.
As an integrative therapist and intuitive facilitator, I’m known for creating spaces that foster deep connection, transformation, and self-awareness. Through talk therapy, somatic dance, retreats, and women’s groups, I help people reconnect with themselves, their bodies, and one another in ways that feel grounding, freeing, and deeply human.
For me, the line between the personal and professional has always been beautifully blurred. Guided by a strong sense of purpose and creativity, I bring my whole self into my work. Like many healers and creators, my professional path has been deeply shaped by my own healing journey. I’ve learned that if I’m not living authentically and doing my own inner work, it becomes difficult to truly inspire others to do the same.
Healing, to me, means allowing myself to feel all of it — not necessarily acting on every feeling, but giving myself permission to fully experience my emotional truth. Ironically, the more I’ve allowed myself to feel, the lighter, freer, and more alive I’ve become. That realization has become both my purpose and my legacy: helping overwhelmed, over-functioning women reconnect with themselves, face their fears, and create lives that feel more vibrant and alive from the inside out.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I see myself as a “cliff jumper” — ironic, considering I’m terrified of heights. For much of my life, my decisions were shaped by fear — fear of disappointing others, making the wrong choice, or stepping outside what felt familiar and safe.
Over time, I’ve learned that real risk-taking begins with stillness: getting quiet enough to hear what’s true beneath the noise, and then having the courage to follow those inner nudges even when they disrupt expectations.
Ironically, the more risks I’ve taken, the more I’ve had to let go of the things that kept me disconnected from myself — the extra food to numb, cocktails to take the edge off, obligatory phone calls rooted in guilt instead of genuine connection, reassurance-seeking, and exercise that felt punishing rather than nourishing. Living more bravely has required becoming more honest, more present, and more protective of my energy so I can actually feel my life as I’m living it.
Many of the biggest risks I’ve taken reflect this shift toward a more intuitive way of living — initiating my divorce, starting my own business, walking away from opportunities and money that didn’t feel aligned, choosing rest over busyness, solitude over distraction, and connection to self over external validation.
Still, living this way often feels messy and terrifying. The conditioning runs deep, and the noise of consensus about what life should look like is always there.
Listening to my inner compass instead of those voices is an ongoing practice — a continual willingness to get quiet, confront what is true, and trust the leap anyway. Each leap brings both expansion and grief, and learning to hold both has been essential to flowing with life rather than resisting it.
In many ways, I’ve learned that the edge never disappears — but neither does the ground that meets you after the jump.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://maureen-delorenzo.clientsecure.me/
- Instagram: Maureen_delorenzo
