ALTEA: On Healing and Altitude
ALTEA comes from the Greek ἀλθαίνω, the verb that means to make whole, to heal. The plant named after it has been offered to the wounded since antiquity. Its root, soaked in water, becomes something that soothes from the inside out. It is a beautiful sound, but that is not why I chose it. I chose it because it says the thing I most fundamentally believe: that healing is not repair. It is a return to what was always there.
The altitude is in there too. Not transcendence. I am not interested in leaving the ground. Something closer to the freedom that comes when you lift just high enough to see what is actually true about the terrain below, and to recognise yourself in it. The altitude that makes me feel taller, see things clearly, speak without fear and believe in humanity again. I know this particular altitude because I have had to find it. I come from Greece and I live in the UK, and that sentence carries something that took years to understand. The logo holds both movements: the upward reach and the inward spiral. That is not a coincidence.
For a long time, I believed I was open-minded by profession. I had a PhD about "the Other." I taught intercultural understanding and inclusion. I also lived inside walls I could not see, because they were made of the same material I was made of: my roots, my faith, my language, my certainty about how things simply are. It was moving, living inside another culture, navigating another grammar, meeting myself in translation, that slowly peeled those layers back. Each one that fell left more room.
This is the reason I chose to coach. Not because I solved something, but because I know what it is to carry something you cannot yet trust as knowledge. To sense something in yourself that has no language yet, to be educated and capable and still feel that the most important question has not been asked. The Socratic tradition I carry is a lived belief: the person in front of me already holds what they are looking for. My work is to ask well enough, and listen carefully enough, that they can begin to hear themselves.
ALTEA is where I do this work. I am an iPEC Certified Professional Coach grounded in Core Energy Coaching. Behind the practice is a PhD, years of genuine philosophical inquiry and the particular education of living between two cultures. My coaching philosophy holds one non-negotiable: we are already whole. Beneath the weight of accumulated expectation, the stories others have told about who we are, and the understandable strategies we have developed to manage life rather than live it, there is a person who already knows. Coaching, as I practise it, is an act of remembrance, older and more honest than either fixing or improvement.
This journal exists because I think in writing. Here I will write about energy and consciousness, what happens when people encounter themselves honestly, the surprising places where Socratic inquiry, Core Energy theory, and the healing traditions I work within turn out to be saying the same thing in different voices.
I write in English, which is my working language and in Greek, which is my thinking language. Both belong here. If something brought you to this page, I trust that. Whatever it was, it was already listening.
Much love,
Charis
