A little about my path:

I hold a BS in Psychology, am a PCC-certified coach, and have trained with teachers including Gabor Maté, Ann-Marie McKelvey, and Coeleen Kiebert. My approach weaves trauma-informed coaching, expressive arts, and embodied mindfulness to support meaningful personal growth.

When I’m not holding space for others, I’m in the studio—hands in clay, surrounded by creative possibility. Or out exploring the redwoods near my home.

Eight Things I Know For Sure

Self-knowledge is ungovernable.

True belonging begins when we learn to belong to ourselves.

When we are kind to ourselves, we radiate kindness to others.

Meditation can change your brain and your mind.

Human connection is an essential nutrient.

Nature is medicine.

Creativity heals.

The reflective life is an act of quiet revolution.

Hi, I’m Tese Mascari, artist, mindfulness-based coach, and founder of Studio Emaho in Soquel, California.

I work with people who have become very good at attending to everyone else.

Thoughtful, capable, deeply caring people who have gradually lost track of their own experience, through the accumulated habit of turning outward. Toward children. Partners. Work. Toward everyone who needs something.

My work is an invitation to turn back toward yourself, with the same quality of attention and curiosity you've been giving everyone else.

When you develop an honest, compassionate, and embodied relationship with your own inner life, something shifts. Your anxiety. Your relationships. Your capacity to actually be present with the people you love most. This is a profoundly generous act, one that deepens both your self-understanding and your connections.

My Journey Here

My path into this work began with meditation. And with the shift from judgment to curiosity as a way of meeting my own experience. That shift changed everything. It also revealed loss. Connections and experiences I'd avoided my entire life. Living with that loss, rather than around it, became an important lesson.

I have been a meditation practitioner since 2006 and a lifelong student of how people grow, change, and find their way back to themselves. My work weaves together trauma-informed coaching, expressive arts, nervous system awareness, and honest, unhurried conversation that allows something real to surface.

As a parent, I understand the particular vertigo of loving someone whose path looks nothing like you expected. And the quiet work of remembering that you are also a person with an inner life worth attending to.

Somewhere along the way, our culture began teaching us that a good mother measures her own happiness by her child's, that her worth lives in their outcomes, that losing herself in them is the same as loving them well. These are lessons worth unlearning.

And our children feel the weight of it.

Our children are not us. We are not our children. They arrived as their own people, with their own paths, their own nervous systems, their own stories to live. Loving them well, really well, requires that we remain someone. And allow them to discover who they are. Our work of learning to be present, boundaried, curious, and alive in our own right is the way we model mental health. And a child who knows themselves, who has grown comfortable in their own skin and clear on their own values, is far less easily swayed by the noise of the crowd.

A generation of young people and their parents also had their transition into adulthood interrupted by a global event that none of us had language for. The reverberations of that are still moving through families, relationships, and individual nervous systems. I hold that context in my work; with parents, and with the young people navigating what comes next.

My creative practice has been as formative as any training I've completed. Hands in clay, I have learned things about presence, uncertainty, and trust that no curriculum has taught me. Art reaches the parts of inner life that language arrives at last, and that understanding lives in everything I do.

The word emaho, a Tibetan exclamation of wonder, is central to this work. Awe and curiosity are qualities I value and the methodology itself. The orientation underneath all of it.

Read testimonials here.