Coffee & Careers: Audrey O'Connor, Energy Practitioner

Let me tell you all about Audrey O’Connor for my latest Coffee and Careers interview. I met Audrey at a Mingle supper club last year - she was a kinetic ball of energy; fast-talking, fast-moving, full of banter, gorgeous vibes. I knew she was in the wellness space; that she taught pilates, that she had a platform called corestatehq. But the more I followed her, the more I realised the full picture was much more interesting than that. Sound healing. Reiki. Astrology. Corporate workshops for Google and Mastercard. An accredited teacher training programme she built from scratch. A retreat in Malta. A solo trip to Stonehenge. And then I heard her on Louise McSharry’s podcast - the full story, from construction sites in Toronto to crystal bowls in California (by way of deconstructing The Real Housewives via starsigns) - and I thought: people need to hear this.

Audrey is not performing the woo-woo. She’s not burning sage and hoping for the best. She’s commercially sharp, she’s intellectually serious, and she will absolutely tell you what your rising sign says about why you keep self-sabotaging in meetings. She deconstructs the mystical into something useful and practical and relatable and she makes it land whether you’re a sceptic or a believer. This is her story.

I would call myself a sound healer, energy practitioner and educator, my work blends intuition, nervous system regulation and practical boundaries. I help people understand their own energy - what drains them, what lights them up, and where it’s leaking without them realising. Everything is energy, and I use sound healing, Reiki, astrology, tarot, breathwork and signs to help people break emotional patterns and reconnect with themselves. I trained with The Sound Healers Academy in California and eventually created my own accredited Sound Healer Teacher training, The Mastery of Sound, which is now shaping a new wave of sound healers.

My approach is grounded in both the evidence and the intuition, the facts and the woo woo. I read energy, patterns and behaviour, and that lens runs through everything I do.

My work has a range. I collaborate with corporates like Google, Payoneer, Aviva Stadium, Mastercard and Levy, and with brands like L’Occitane and hotels such as The Fitzwilliam Hotel and Verdala Wellness in Malta. One day I’m breaking down the Real Housewives’ astrology on a podcast, the next I’m facilitating a nervous system workshop for a leadership team. The thread running through it all is energy the patterns people carry, often unconsciously, and the way those patterns imprint on the people around them and the environments they move through.

Everyone is carrying something, a story, other people’s projections, some form of tension, even if they don’t show it or don’t know it yet. Once you make a shift, everything changes.

I trained in Construction Management & Economics and spent my twenties as a Quantity Surveyor. I liked the structure of it, taking a site from demolition to completion, building budgets from scratch, watching how engineers, architects and subbies all moved differently while working toward the same outcome. I had a pull toward high‑rise work and wrote my thesis on HVAC systems, so moving to Toronto felt like the natural next step as it’s a high rise city.

Over time, the work that once made sense on paper stopped feeling right in my body. There’s a particular guilt that comes with leaving a job you’re good at, the inner knowing that “capable” isn’t the same as “fulfilled.” You can enjoy parts of something and still recognise it’s not where you’re meant to stay. I’ve always had a clear instinct for when something has run its course. When my gut shifts, I really feel it. I used to override that, but now I really trust it. When something is done, I know and I don’t cling out of obligation anymore.

Listening to my body is what led me toward the work I do now. Training with Polestar Comprehensive Pilates opened the door to embodiment work, and from there I moved into sound healing, Reiki and intuitive development. I trained with The Sound Healers Academy, TSHA, in Los Angeles, travelled to Mount Shasta and Sedona for deeper study, and completed my Reiki Master training in California with Susy Markoe Schieffelin. Covid pushed me online, and building corestatehq from scratch became a turning point. A year‑long business membership with TSHA in California deepened my work around the energetics of business. Understanding your own patterns changes how you lead, how you make decisions, and how you’re perceived and that’s the work I go deeply into in sessions, courses and my teacher training.

Creating my accredited sound‑healer teacher training, The Mastery of Sound, has been one of the most meaningful parts of my work. I love bringing together the theory of music, the science of sound and the energetics of business inside my three‑month online containers. I’ve trained students online from Ballina, Co. Mayo to Puerto Rico, and what I love most is giving people the space to actually see their own potential and range.

Working with Google’s leadership teams and contributing to their wellness app, Motus, shaped a lot of how I work today. I was involved in the planning and the conversations around what the app needed to be, and it taught me how to create content that’s genuinely useful. I also filmed content for Motus in Ireland and London, collaborating with teams from New York to London. Seeing ideas move from concept to creation showed me what was possible and helped me build my own business with more clarity and confidence.

The moments that stay with me are when someone tells me they felt something shift in their system, a pattern releasing, a new level of awareness landing after doing my sound healing meditations consistently, and it becomes part of their daily routine. That’s the part that feels meaningful and of service.

I don’t really have a “worst job.” Every role teaches you something: your boundaries, what you settle for, what drains you, and where you expand. My last Quantity Surveying role in Dublin was simply the point where I realised I was done with that chapter. I couldn’t just leap out of the industry; I had to lay the foundations for my next move. That role showed me what alignment feels like and what it doesn’t feel like in my body. That clarity shaped me far more than the job itself.

My work and my side quests are intertwined now, but in a way that feels grounded and not because my worth is tied to output, but because the things that regulate me are the same things that light me up. Hiking is one of them. I love being in the Alps in Switzerland with zero coverage with my husband Jim, or heading home to Dingle for a hit of West Kerry air. Tarot, astrology, signs and cacao are part of my daily rituals. Travel feeds me too. I have a 5 day solo trip to Stonehenge coming up, and I’m hosting a dreamy retreat in Malta in June that feels like something I’ve been moving toward for years. I love electronic music, gigs, and inhaling documentaries. My cats, Meowsles and Odie and their constant purring are part of my grounding rituals.

My current side quest is Blame the Moon, a YouTube series where astrology meets culture - exploring how signs interact and the patterns underneath. It launches April 29th. I’ve also got a few training sessions on the energetics of business coming up later in the year and my upcoming Sound Healer teacher training, which feel like the next natural evolution of the work.

A collaboration that fell apart in a messy, blindsiding way. I trusted the wrong people who didn’t know what they were doing, I didn’t read the fine print, assumed “sure they must know best,” and I lost a lot of money.

It taught me one of the most important lessons I have learned in business failure is feedback and knowing the value you bring to your own work.

People are tired of living in their heads, especially online. Social media has turned into a world of self‑diagnosis and endless labels, and it leaves people stuck in this kind of analysis paralysis. They are thinking about themselves instead of actually feeling themselves. I think a big part of that is people are reconnecting with cultural practices ( especially the Irish language) and ritual, the things our bodies have always understood. These kinds of practices are part of how humans have made sense of themselves for generations. When people drop into sensation, vibration, breath, they are reconnecting with something that’s both energetic and biological and they can actually feel again.

People are craving community again shared experiences, group regulation, circles, cacao ceremonies, saunas and collective rituals. It’s not just with close friends, it’s with strangers too. There’s a real freedom in doing this work in a room full of people you don’t know, gathering together.

Even my virtual full moon circles have that magic every month, people drop in from all over the world, sit in the same energy for an hour, and half of them float off to sleep afterwards. It shows how deeply we’re wired for connection, even through a screen.

Short‑form content has become so quick and templated lately that you can almost tell when something has been generated automatically. People are craving spaces where someone is actually thinking in real time, places with nuance and a bit of real humanity.

This is why I think long‑form platforms like YouTube, Substack, podcasts, and proper conversations are having a real moment again.

A real challenge on the horizon is that people are overwhelmed. There’s too much information, too many opinions, too many “biohackers,” and a lot of wellness that looks polished online but doesn’t actually help anyone feel better. Where I fit into the solution is by keeping things simple and bringing people back to themselves. In my work whether it’s sound, ritual, or group sessions people get a chance to slow down, regulate, release the numbness and actually hear their own signals again. When people reconnect with themselves and their gut, they make clearer choices and they take their power back.

I wake up to the sound of Odie jumping off the headboard or using the bed as a scratching post every morning just after 6am. He’s like clockwork and then it’s straight downstairs. Morning rituals are everything for me. I used to wake up with a coffee and answer emails in bed for years, and it completely burned me out.

Now it’s simple. If I have work scheduled early, my alarm goes off earlier and I go to bed earlier. It’s a non‑negotiable. I leave my phone upstairs for the first hour and its warm water with lemon and feed Odie and Meowsles. Ten minutes of meditation and channeling Reiki and then movement either weights and rings at seven, or a walk if I’m not in the gym, I have to practice what I preach. If I have an event that day I’ll do a little bowl practice to prepare. I can only be responsible for my own energy, and this is what keeps me grounded enough to hold space for others.

You can find Audrey here and find out about her upcoming events here

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