Welcome to Awakening Heart!

This is a place for you to expand your ability to live life wakefully, with an open and awakened heart, a place to be inspired, a place to harvest life’s teachings, as gifts, coming to support you in your journey.

The photographs, poems, and prose are for you to light your way, for you to still yourself, to go beneath the silence. There, you can find your own inner Voice of Wisdom speaking to you.

My intention, through my writing, is to open up opportunities for you to think new thoughts, to free yourself up, to come to be in a place of greater peace. The writings are openings for Presence, for Possibility, for transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. They are opportunities for you to sense, to connect with, to hear, the deeper meaning in everything.

They are for you, expanding your sense of vitality, awareness, and wholeheartedness.

About Amba

As a devoted adventurer of both inner and outer travels, a pioneer and pilgrim dedicated to personal development and to making a difference in the lives of human beings, I am committed to stepping ever more powerfully beyond what is familiar and safe.

I am, and have been, a dedicated student, an explorer of the deepest kind. I began my journeys into personal and professional development in the early 1970’s, when I enjoyed my first awakenings through the programs at the Esalen Institute. Since then, I have taken deep dives into many ontological and spiritual pathways, all yielding pathways to the infinite and to where the infinite informs the practical.

I am an author, a poet, a spiritual teacher, and a storyteller; I am privileged and blessed to transform people’s lives.

I am, and have been, a transformational leadership coach for both individuals, and for companies for forty years, creating culture shifts in organizations and businesses that are based on trust, collaboration, real communication, and accomplishment. In partnership with my clients, we bring Spirit and Soul into the workplace in the most practical way, freeing up people to have their creative powers available to them.

To find out more about the work I make available, visit my website, galeleadership.com.

Visit Gale Leadership

I have been writing poetry throughout my life, and weave many of the themes of my poetry and the poetry itself through my interactive transformational work with people. I am thrilled that I have recently published my first gold award-winning book, a book of poetry, photography, and teaching/reflective questions, called Crossing Thresholds, Island Reflections. The book was a number one best seller in the category of Nature Poetry. All the photos are from Isle Royale National Park, in Lake Superior, where the poems were also born

 As Brother David Steindl-Rast, Benedictine monk one of the great spiritual teachers of our times, said:

I live on beautiful Bainbridge Island, in the Pacific Northwest, an island across from Seattle. We built our own home on land near the water, as we’ve spent much time at Isle Royale, and I feel like I live in a national park!  As I am passionate about connecting with the natural world, the move here with my husband in 1990 from California has been a fulfillment of a deep longing.  I live with my husband, Don, who plays banjo and pedal steel guitar and is a consummate musician and singer/songwriter. Our daughter, now age 26, is a brilliant and gifted artist and passionate about life. She lives in Kirkland, Washington, and we are delighted that she visits us a few times a month.

When I am not coaching, designing or leading transformational work, writing poetry, stories, and blog posts, reading (Mark Nepo and David Whyte are my two favorite poets/authors) or diving into developmental courses myself, you can find me joyfully watching Mariner’s baseball with my husband, hanging out with my daughter, or traveling around the world.