Hi, I'm Joanna!
Joanna Pustilnik MS RDN CDCES CIEC
I'm a certified embodiment coach and somatic nutrition therapist/registered dietitian.
I coach and teach individuals, groups, and organizations how connecting with the body and the inner realm can lead to increased joy, better relationships, and improved health and self-care.
I started my career as a registered dietitian nutritionist, spending 15 years working with clients on nutrition, intuitive eating, disordered eating, and body image through my private practice, Bodacious Nutrition.
What I kept seeing — in client after client, and honestly in myself — was that the real obstacles to change and healing weren't cognitive. They weren't lack of knowledge or motivation or the right plan.
They were embodied: patterns held in the nervous system, in automatic reactions, in the body's learned way of staying safe and staying connected.
So I went deeper.
I trained extensively in somatic and feminine embodiment coaching, parts work and IFS-informed frameworks, positive psychology, the Four Elements model, and certified as a laughter yoga instructor.
I built a methodology — the Badass Joy Method™ — that works at the level where change actually lives.
I now work with individuals navigating disconnection, relational patterns, burnout, and the quiet sense that there's a fuller version of themselves waiting to emerge.
And I bring that same body-based approach into organizations as a corporate workshop facilitator, helping teams build the communication, resilience, and genuine connection that make work — and life — actually feel good.
A Bit About Me Personally
I’m a mom of three, married to my best friend, Dr. P. When I’m not hanging with my family, I run nutrition and embodiment for mental health groups for adolescents and young adults, read and write, go to concerts and Ravens’ games, do trail running endurance races, try to play chess with everyone I know, dance in my kitchen to my children's horror, take care of my mom, and spend time with my girlfriends.
I love this work with my whole heart. I genuinely believe that when people come home to themselves — really home, in their bodies, in their relationships, in their lives — everything changes. And it is my absolute privilege to be part of that process.
Questions? Let's connect!
Over fifteen years of working at the intersection of body, mind, heart, and behavior
HOW I WORK
What you can expect working with me
I am warm, direct, and deeply practical. I don't do fluff. I don't believe in one-size-fits-all approaches.
And I take your inner life seriously — not as something to be fixed, but as something to be deeply understood.
In our work together, I will bring my full training and toolkit to bear on what is actually showing up for you. Some sessions will feel gentle and contemplative. Some will feel surprising and alive. Some will ask more of you than you expected — in the best possible way.
I work somatically, which means we don't just talk about what's happening. We feel into it — through body awareness, breath, movement, imagery, and direct experience. I draw on parts work, the Four Elements model, mindfulness, and intuitive self-care to help you understand your patterns from the inside and begin to shift them where they actually live.
In corporate workshops, I bring that same approach into teams — with the added energy of laughter yoga, group practices, and the powerful shared experience of people discovering their elemental nature together.
What I promise: I will meet you where you are. I will not pathologize you. I will hold your process with care, humor, and full confidence in your capacity to change.
Credentials
Certified Feminine Embodiment Coach (SOEA)
Master of Science in Nutrition and Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN)
Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist (CDCES)
Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor (CIEC)
Certified Laughter Yoga Instructor
Training in Parts Work / IFS-Informed Coaching, Somatic Coaching, ACT, Positive Psychology, and the Four Elements Model
What Guides This Work
Embodiment over intellect
Understanding something is the beginning. Feeling it — in your body, your breath, your lived experience — is where change happens. This work always starts there.
Curiosity over judgment
Every pattern, every part, every reaction you have developed for a reason. We meet all of it with genuine interest rather than criticism.
Connection as foundation
Real change happens in relationship — with yourself, with others, and in the safe container of the coaching relationship itself. I take that seriously.
Wholeness, not fixing
You are not broken. You are patterned. There is a profound difference, and it changes everything about how we approach the work.
Science and soul, together
I am grounded in research — behavioral science, neuroscience, somatic theory, positive psychology, attachment theory. And I believe deeply that we are more than the sum of our measurable parts. Both things are true, and both belong in this work.
My Story- Why I Started Badass Joy
I grew up in a home shaped by divorce and complicated adults. It left me with what my sister accurately calls "superhuman imposter syndrome" — a nervous system wired for vigilance and striving, a mind prone to overthinking, and a deep, persistent undercurrent of self-doubt beneath it all.
From my early twenties on, I worked on it. Therapy. Meditation. Yoga. Setting boundaries. Slowly building a life that looked, from the outside, like it had come together.
By forty, I was genuinely okay. A marriage I loved, three kids, an online nutrition practice, a good life. The old patterns of overthinking and self-doubt still visited — but I had learned to manage them.
Then everything cracked open.
The week I turned 40, my mother had surgery that gave her dementia. A part of her was irreparably gone. I became her caretaker overnight, while simultaneously navigating a tidal wave of old grief, old fear, and old wounds that had been quietly waiting for exactly this kind of pressure to surface.
I knew I couldn't manage my way through it. I needed something different.
That search led me to somatic and embodiment coaching — to parts work, to body-based practices, to a way of meeting myself that went deeper than anything I had done before. I stopped trying to think my way to healing and started feeling my way there instead.
What emerged on the other side was what I now call Badass Joy.
Not surface-level happiness. Not toxic positivity. Not the absence of hard things. But a grounded, embodied sense of being okay in myself — even in the middle of the mess. A capacity to feel fully, express honestly, and stay connected to my own sense of aliveness regardless of what life was throwing at me.
My marriage deepened. My relationships became more real. I started doing improv — something the old, self-doubting version of me would never have considered. I felt, for the first time, genuinely at home in myself.
And I realized: this is what I want to help people find.
Not as a concept. Not as an aspiration. But as a lived, felt, embodied reality.