Hi, I'm Stephen Tracy.

I'm a curious, big-hearted, dachshund-loving coach based in New York City. I support people who want to express themselves more fully and live more deeply integrated lives.

What brought me here

Much of my life has been shaped by learning how best to pay attention to my own desire for self-expression.

As a young teenager I discovered something that I was to keep secret for a decade: I was gay, and what I knew about myself had no way to be safely expressed in the world I was living in.

In those early years I went through challenging phases of shame, loneliness, and ultimately, a slowly formed sense of self-acceptance.

For all its difficulty, it also gave me an early initiation into something I've kept returning to: the process of honest self-expression and the resistance that often accompanies it.

Progressing through university, corporate and startup environments, I strove to achieve the best I could. Yet beneath each new accomplishment, I was continuing to sense that any external validation only mattered as long as it aligned with my inner sense of purpose and satisfaction.

I kept arriving at new crossroads where life was confounding my expectations.

I became fascinated by the question of how best to honor my inner sense of purpose and satisfaction with more consistency. How could I live a wholehearted life that felt true to me while I continued to grow and evolve?

Through study, practice, and the support of mentors and coaches, I've developed a living framework for navigating these questions for myself. It's a way of being present to my own life that continues to help me live more fully and authentically.

I now practice as an embodied coach, and I help other people navigate similar questions in their own lives.

Stephen as a child playing in the kitchen

How I work

At the heart of my work is the practice of learning to listen to what's already here for you.

While our work together has a focus, I don't follow a formula or a prescriptive method of getting people from A to B. I think of it more as a collaborative expedition than a guided tour. We explore your issue and understand it as fully as possible. We look at all the reasons you might want to move forward, and all the reasons you might want to stay where you are.

I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to help you figure it out for yourself.

As we give your life attention, things begin to shift. Self-understanding develops, and you start to sense your own agency and capacity to make the changes you want. At some point we part ways, and you return to your life with a renewed sense of trust, purpose, and satisfaction.

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

My experience and training

My work is informed by a blend of personal experience, professional practice, and ongoing study, including:

01Advanced coaching training with Aletheia Coaching (Levels I & II, and Unfolding Deeply Expanded States), with over 550 hours of paid coaching experience since 2023. Aletheia’s “Unfolding” approach to change and transformation is at the core of my work — an integrative, depth-oriented approach that honors the complexity of the whole person and the whole situation.
02Somatic and nervous-system-informed study. Somatic IRF certification with Maureen Gallagher PhD and a 6-week course with Holistic Life Navigation.
03Ongoing training in sexuality and embodiment, including CBE and Somatic Facilitation with Body Electric and Sacred Sexuality (SSIT) with ISEE.
04A professional background in entrepreneurship (co-founder of Keap Candles, 2015–2023), strategy and operations at Google, Procter & Gamble, and as Chief of Staff for the WE♥NYC civic campaign.
05Academic training in Cognitive Neuroscience (University of Cambridge) and Data Science (UC Berkeley).

Two of those lineages deserve a brief note as the erotic is so poorly understood in our culture. Body Electric is a longstanding erotic education school, rooted in conscious exploration of breath, touch, and Eros as paths to presence and aliveness. It took shape in the early years of the AIDS crisis as a place where gay men could reclaim erotic life under shame, fear, and real risk; it remains one of the few embodied learning environments where desire and sexuality are welcomed as central to the work.

ISEE (the Institute for Sexuality Education and Enlightenment) trains practitioners in sexuality and the sacred — domains that are often compartmentalized and yet deeply interconnected. Both shape how I listen if and when our work turns toward intimacy, desire, or sexual embodiment. These are integral aspects of what it means to be human, and they are welcome in my practice.

While my life experiences, jobs and relationships shape my perspective, the heart of my work is about being present in our full humanity together.

Underneath everything I've experienced, I was graced with a nervous system that can hold a lot of intensity, a heart that loves depth, and an unceasing fascination with the mystery of being human.

Sunset over the bay with pine silhouettes — Fire Island Pines

Themes I often work with

Over the years I've worked with clients across a wide range of issues and life circumstances. Below are some of the territories that have come up repeatedly. Expand any that resonate for some more info.

Some clients arrive after a relationship ends, a role changes, a location shifts, or something inside surfaces that asks for something different. These moments often carry a quality of disorientation — the familiar structures have shifted before the new ones have formed. We give attention to what wants to emerge next in your life, and let clarity arrive in its own time.

For many people, what draws them to this work isn't a clear problem — it's a sense that something in how they're living isn't quite the full version of themselves. In their creative work, their relationships, how they speak or what they choose to pursue: something feels compressed, held back, or not yet found. We give that gap honest attention. What's often discovered is not a new self, but a truer one.

Drawing on my years co-founding Keap Candles and working in corporate strategy and analysis roles, I've worked extensively with founders and creatives who are clear about what they want to build but sense unconscious patterns that get in their own way — self-doubt, distraction, losing trust in their own instincts. We explore the deeper layers beneath those patterns. We also might work on continuing to clarify the evolving vision for their business or creative project, if that's where they want support.

Some of the richest conversations I have with clients live in this territory: the longing for genuine contact, the gap between sexual experience and felt intimacy, shame that's gone underground and stayed there. It's in our relationship to these things that we have often learned to hide, to perform, to shrink. We'll share honest, grounded conversation about what's actually alive for you, without rush or agenda. Giving this aspect of your life time and attention is a life-affirming experience, and it's often where powerful and surprising shifts emerge that ripple out into the rest of your life.

If you're a gay man and this territory is where you're feeling the pull, I wrote more about how I work with gay men specifically here:

→ Coaching for gay men

Sometimes the territory people want to give attention to is a partnership itself — romantic, creative, or business. The patterns each person carries into their relationships surface in our work: what gets defended, what stays unsaid, the places where listening breaks down. We work with those patterns one-on-one, or with partners in the room, and find what's wanting to be expressed underneath. People often come to relational work wanting to give intentional focus and shape to what's already alive and unfolding between them. Co-founders and business partners arrive with the same impulse: to build a partnership that fosters more of what's possible between committed people.

Start with a conversation

The best way to get a sense of me and how I work is to spend time together. Book a free introductory conversation, and we'll use the time to explore what's drawing you to this, what you're sitting with, and where it might go.

Book an intro conversationBook a free introductory conversation