ALTEA: On healing and altitude

The meaning of ALTEA

ALTEA comes from the Greek ἀλθαίνω, a verb meaning to make whole, to heal. For centuries, people have offered the plant to those who were wounded. Its root, soaked in water, becomes something that soothes from the inside out. It is a beautiful word, but that is not why I chose it. I chose it because it names what 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 the terrain below more clearly and recognise where you stand in it. The altitude that makes me feel taller. From there, things come into focus. I speak with less fear, and somehow I believe in humanity again. This is an altitude I know 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.

Identity, culture & belonging

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. And yet I lived inside walls I could not see, because they were made of things so familiar to me that I rarely questioned them: my roots, my faith, my language and my sense of how things simply are. It was living inside another culture that began to expose those walls. Another language, another “grammar” and the experience of meeting myself in translation slowly peeled those layers back. Each one that fell left more room.

The turn towards coaching

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, even when you are educated and capable. To know that something matters before you can fully explain why. 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 the right questions and listen closely enough for them to start hearing themselves.

ALTEA is where I do this work. I am an iPEC Certified Professional Coach grounded in Core Energy Coaching. Behind the practice is my academic work and a long engagement with philosophical inquiry. Living between two cultures has shaped it just as deeply. My coaching philosophy holds one non-negotiable: we are already whole. Beneath what we have absorbed from others and the ways we have learned to protect ourselves, there is a person who already knows. Much of life can pull us away from that knowing. Coaching, as I practise it, is an act of remembrance, not fixing and not improvement.

Writing, consciousness and inquiry

This journal exists because I think in writing. Here I will write about energy and consciousness, and about what happens when people meet themselves honestly. I am interested, too, in the places where Socratic inquiry meets Core Energy, and where both begin to touch the healing traditions I work within. Sometimes they seem to be speaking about the same thing, only 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