About Ruellia Coaching
Ellee Achten is the highly-sensitive heart behind Ruellia Coaching. As a disabled, queer, AuDHD, and multi-disciplinary creative, her work with clients uses creative power to weave intuition, embodiment, and expression into personal transformation.
She is trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and draws on her own ongoing healing journey informed by Somatic Experiencing to support others in reconnecting with their inner wisdom and creative aliveness. Her coaching approach is deeply trauma-informed, client-centered, and body-wise.
With two graduate degrees in creative writing, Ellee brings a deep understanding of story, identity, and evolution to her work with clients.
Ellee is also a formally trained vocalist and the founder of The Rooted Voice (www.therootedvoice.com), where she has been teaching a somatic approach to vocal theory for 20+ years. Her method has supported singers, speakers, and teachers alike, and she has trained multiple voice coaches in this grounded, intuitive framework.
A lifelong visual artist, Ellee has worked as a professional photographer for decades (www.elleeachtenphoto.com). She also paints, draws, works in ceramics and linocutting, and creates short narrative art films. Her multi-modal creative practice is a vital part of the way she listens, witnesses, and supports others.
Ellee’s work is rooted in the belief that each individual’s intuitive creativity is a sacred pathway to belonging, sovereignty, and becoming.
What does the name mean?
Ruellia is the botanical name for the wild petunia—an untamed bloom that thrives in overlooked places. It doesn’t grow in perfectly tended gardens but in cracks, edges, and wild ground. Like this flower, Ruellia Coaching honors the strength and creativity that spontaneously arises when individuals are nurtured in the right environment.
The name holds deep personal significance for Ellee Achten, so much so that she wears the uncultivated flower tattooed on her skin as a reminder. Ruellia was her mother’s favorite flower. Ellee still nurtures the same plant that she cut down and tucked into her mother's grave. For almost a decade the delicate flowers seem to bloom only during the most meaningful, transformative times of Ellee's life.
The Ruellia is very much a deviant symbol representing the truth that it's okay to thrive on the edges of society, and that there's a place in the world for everything with the desire to grow. Its quiet magic—with flowers that bloom brand new each morning and drop to the earth by night—mirrors the rhythm of growth, presence, and release that this coaching work seeks to honor.
Who is this work for?
This work is for those standing at the edge of something—grief, reinvention, desire, truth—and sensing not just the ache of change, but the invitation to come home to themselves.
It’s for the quietly brave. The ones who’ve spent years translating their truth just to be heard. The ones who’ve shape-shifted to belong, only to find themselves more lost. It’s for the outsiders and deep feelers. The ones who’ve been told they’re too much, too tender, too strange—and are beginning to wonder if those are actually their gifts.
If you're tired of measuring yourself by what you produce or prove—if you long for a life that feels honest and real, even if you don’t know where to begin—this space is for you.
Every single human has innate creative energy. Creativity is the living expression of your inner world — the way your thoughts, feelings, questions, and rhythms take form outside of you. It’s not about producing or performing or even about responding — it's about connecting securely to yourself, to your body, to your environment, to your own desires. Creativity can look like writing, singing, painting, dancing. But it can also be the way you make a decision, shape your day, build community, invest in your work, care for your dog, or speak your truth.
Louder for those of us stuck at the back: At its root, creativity is how you belong to yourself — how you remember that you’re real, present, and allowed to take up space.
There is space here for the wild-hearted and the weary, the neurocomplex and nuanced, the ones waking up to the possibility that maybe they were never broken— just never fully seen. This work meets you with deep permission and steady curiosity. It invites your creative self not as a means to an end, but as a way to belong to your own life again.
You don’t have to be “ready.” You don’t have to perform healing to deserve it.
You just have to know that belonging to yourself matters.
