EVOLVE AT EVERY STAGE
HEALTH | COMMUNITY | NATURE | ADVENTURE
A Self-Actualization, LLC Company
Making mind-body health and personal development easy, sustainable, and hyper-personalized for individuals and organizations using nature, technology, community, and science.
Life Stages was inspired by a synthesis of our founder’s 13+ years of professional expertise and unique personal lived experiences.
Founder Zulma, or Z. Y., Terrones grew up in urban Chicago knowing Lake Michigan, city parks, and Midwest cornfields and plains as her nature. After receiving her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago (AB’12), she worked for a couple years for local start-ups. During this time, she struggled with her own mental/behavioral health concerns and her own place in the world. On a leap of faith, Zulma decided to re-discover and reset her life by embarking on what was intended to be a yearlong backpacking adventure. Ultimately, she had the unexpected privilege of traveling for almost 5 years across Europe, Latin America and Oceania. Throughout this time, Zulma witnessed a multitude of individuals from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences engage in novel, challenging outdoor activities and be positively transformed.
Transformations varied from an increased positive demeanor and refreshed mindset to improvements in daily functioning and decreased psychiatric symptoms. Witnessing the array of positive outcomes motivated Zulma to scientifically research this outdoor-based personal transformation phenomena. She decided to pursue a master’s degree in Psychology and Education at the University of Cambridge (MPhil’18) with an emphasis in outdoor health.
While at Cambridge, Zulma partnered with a local outdoor therapeutic education organization working with adolescents experiencing developmental and/or behavioral disorders. She led a case-study investigating participant understanding and relation to therapeutic outdoor programming. Her research and graduate work provided her further insight to the power of outdoor challenges and motivated her to finetune her skills within clinical populations. She returned to the States in early 2019 to Portland, OR motivated by the city’s convenient access to diverse natural landscapes and strong community-based mental health services. For over two years, Zulma worked as a 24/5 crisis clinician for youth experiencing psychiatric symptoms and high-risk safety concerns. With the aid of experiential learning opportunities, she helped youth regain clinical stability and strengthen distress tolerance and adaptive coping skills to promote longer-term mind-body health. This period also encompassed the COVID-19 pandemic, which underscored the need for effective, evidence-based, and accessible hyper-personalized solutions for mind-body health, which inspired Zulma to officially found Life Stages in 2022. Zulma has synthesized years of rigorous peer-reviewed scientific research, trauma-informed clinical experience, and outdoor experiential learning to create Life Stages, an evidence-based model to help individuals improve their mind-body health at any stage in life. Zulma’s goal is to redefine and innovate the way the world thinks about overall health and well-being; outdoor adventure; and individual human potential by re-iteratively informing direct service, health research and, ultimately, global health policy.
Life Stages helps you build sustainable skills for well-being and personal development through a combination of our interactive, skill-building app along with enhancement options via our ecosystem of interconnected goods, services, and tools. We help you build the best current version of yourself so you can live a healthy and aligned life and contribute your unique talents to the world at any stage in life.
Inspiration for Life Stages originated from a synthesis of our founder’s own professional and personal experiences across 10+ years.
Founder Zulma, or Z. Y., Terrones grew up in urban Chicago knowing Lake Michigan, city parks, and Midwest cornfields and plains as her nature. After receiving her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago (AB’12), she worked for a couple years for local start-ups. During this time, she struggled with her own mental/behavioral health concerns and her own place in the world. On a leap of faith, Zulma decided to re-discover and re-set her life by embarking on what was intended to be a yearlong backpacking adventure. Ultimately, she had the unexpected privilege of traveling for almost 5 years across Europe, Latin America and Oceania. Throughout this time, Zulma witnessed a multitude of individuals from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences engage in novel, challenging outdoor activities, and be positively transformed.
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Life Stages’ mission is to directly tackle the increasing global mental health and social isolation crisis at the intersection of nature, technology, community, and science. We have an ecosystem of products and services to help people build and sustain a healthy, aligned life through science-based personal wellness and development skills. We aim to help individuals achieve a baseline of health and wellbeing so they can become their best selves and contribute their unique talents to the world.
Life Stages’ mission is to help people build and sustain a healthy and aligned life through science-based personal wellness and development skills. Our goal is to empower our users with transferable life skills to increase their self-understanding, connection to their local nature and community, and cultivate a practice of evidence-based wellness/development techniques. Our mission doesn’t stop at individual self-actualization. Our model is only a stepping stone to our overall mission of tackling the global burden of mental health and well-being disease, and its impact on human potential and global health costs
At Life Stages, we believe there is untapped potential in nature, self-knowledge, and wellness. We want to ensure all communities and individuals, but in particular women, youth, and historically underfunded communities, can gain a baseline of wellness, achieve their best selves, and contribute their unique talents to the world. We aim to be a key support and resource in this journey by making evidence-based wellness easy, sustainable, and hyper-personalized.
At Life Stages, we believe there is untapped potential in nature, self-knowledge, and wellness. Specifically, we believe outdoor adventure combined with interdisciplinary health research and intentional self-development are underutilized but critical tools in promoting human interconnection, personal development, and, ultimately, global positive change. Life Stages is here to tap into these tools and (r)evolutionize the way we as a society interact with ourselves, one another and the surrounding environment. Life Stages is passionate about providing support through the synthesis of research and evidence-based tools, knowledge-creation, and enhancement opportunities to promote science-backed preventative wellness and individual evolution.
Our approach synthesize decades of research across numerous interdisciplinary fields (including psychology; sociology; social work; counseling; neurobiology; and more) and across diverse populations, communities, and demographics (e.g. LGBTQIA+; BIPOC; youth, families, young adults, rural, psychiatric populations, and more). We use a strengths-based, trauma-informed lens in our design to help as many people as possible— yet, do so in a way that allows for adapting and customizing to the needs and uniqueness of each individual life journey.
We are conscious and intentional of our power to impact. Especially, as we are aware that general health and well-being (including but not limited to mental and behavioral health) is not fully accessible to many across the globe. We are re-iteratively evolving our model to ensure it continues to ensure we are integrating the latest research, technology and educational models to help make wellness and personal development as accessible as possible for the world. We value and build to support sustainable skills for well-being and personal development. We aim to help individuals continuously evolve into the best current version of themselves and build a healthy and aligned life at any stage in life.
Holistic Health & Abundance We do not simply tackle aspects of health but rather work in harmony with physical, mental and socio-emotional wellbeing to promote whole mind-body health, personal development, and individual and societal potential.
Evidence-based Knowledge Creation Knowledge is power and as such we empower you in building new knowledge and skills to work on your wellness in an evidence-based manner.
Community & Interconnection The world is intricately interconnected. We are committed to fostering a positive connection to the self, wider community, and local environment for all.
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Take this wonderful opportunity to learn to be present in nature, and to take care of yourself.
Thank you so much ZY for your work in the world, it is so important and needed and I loved the way you held space in the group.
“I’m not new to this type of instruction, and or any of the themes that were discussed in our workshop, but it was really nice to have a more structured discussion with like-minded individuals, and to share and discuss things that maybe I’ve had trouble with or that I think I can improve on. I really liked the merch we were given– the pamphlets have been helpful in my everyday life since I’ve done the workshop, and I think I will continue to share and use the resources I was given.”
Being able to do a leadership / mental health workshop out in nature is a dream come true! Zulma is an amazing facilitator and I really appreciated that she customized the workshop to our group's needs. I really loved the emotion wheel handout, having that as a visual was a great touch!
The hike was a good reminder that I need to slow down and pay attention to my own health.