About Us
Emotional freedom for real life means becoming more able to be with what is, care for your whole being, and choose what fits—even when life is tender, messy, uncertain, or changing.
Thriving Now’s heart is cultivating an environment where people can meet what is real, find their own clarity, and experience the support of honest, caring connection. That often includes tending what hurts or feels unwanted. It also includes giving energy to what uplifts us, what matters, and what wants to be expressed, made, and lived.
To us, Thriving Now is practical and aspirational: thriving anyway when life does not cooperate, and thriving onward as we deepen our capacity for heartistry, connection, and co-creation. It is available within real life, not apart from it.
Where the promise becomes practice
Real life is where the practice matters
Emotional freedom is not freedom from emotion or from the realities of being human. It is growing the capacity to meet fear, pain, desire, conflict, connection, money, meaning, and change with more presence, self-acceptance, and choice.
Our bodies, emotions, relationships, energies, and sense of meaning are interwoven. What helps is rarely one perfect answer. More often, it is a useful concept, a practiced skill, a caring relationship, or one small next YES.
EFT Tapping is one of the central practices here. So are body awareness, grounding, curiosity, clear boundaries, consent, emotional resilience, and co-creation.
A body of work developed over time
From useful concepts to real skills
Useful Concepts give us language and orientation for experiences that can be hard to name. When we explore them in our bodies, choices, and relationships, they can become Real Skills: capacities we can practice, adapt, and draw on in the moments that matter.
That movement—from a yearning, to an idea, to an experiment, to something lived—flows through Thriving Now’s Concepts, Real Skills Workshops, courses, and hundreds of articles and guides. They are not a formula for fixing yourself. They are invitations to notice what is real, discover what helps us evolve toward thriving, and live what matters in ways each of us can recognize as our own.
Stewardship and co-creation
The people and relationships behind the work
Rick Wilkes
Rick founded Thriving Now, LLC in January 2004. An Emotional Freedom Coach and “useful spirit buddy,” he develops Concepts, coaching practices, courses, workshops, articles, and tools for people who want more emotional freedom, physical vitality, meaningful connection, and inspired action.
Rick’s role is not to hand people “an answer.” It is to help cultivate the conditions where they can meet what is real, listen inwardly, experiment, and find clarity that belongs to them. He continues to offer private coaching and steward the evolving Thriving Now body of work.
Cathy Vartuli
Cathy is Rick’s longtime collaborator and has co-created many Thriving Now courses with him. She continues to co-create the Real Skills Workshops, where their complementary perspectives become practical explorations people can bring into their own lives.
Her clear thinking, body awareness, care, and relational presence have helped shape both what Thriving Now teaches and how the work is practiced together.
Carol Look
Carol is Rick’s longtime mentor, friend, and collaborator. Together they co-created Pain Relief with EFT, Overcoming Overwhelm, and Clearing Clutter, and co-hosted Tap Talk Radio.
That collaboration is alive today through Success Tapping with Carol Look. Carol brings the teaching, tapping, and presence; Rick helps make the ongoing series possible through production and technical stewardship.
Thriving Now has also been shaped through years of practice, questions, and shared discovery with clients, workshop participants, Circle members, and other collaborators. What the community teaches us continues to influence how the work grows and evolves.
Connection is a nutrient
Practicing together
Rick began the Thriving Now Circle in 2006 because emotional freedom is not only an individual pursuit. Connection is a nutrient, and we learn differently when we can practice in honest, respectful relationship with other humans.
The Thriving Now Circle is the ongoing live home for people who want to practice, not only read. Through group coaching and tapping gatherings, Real Skills Workshops, and conversation with other members, people bring what is alive in real life, learn with and from others, and strengthen emotional resilience without giving away authority over their own experience.
Learn more about the Thriving Now Circle →
The Thriving Now Community Center
The Community Center is the between-gatherings home: a place to continue the conversation, ask questions, share what is working, and find the growing archive of community resources and Real Skills Workshops.
The work in a dynamic, responsive form
Gus: a useful spirit buddy
Gus carries this body of work into a dynamic, adaptable, responsive form—one shaped to meet an individual where they are NOW. Gus is a digital useful spirit buddy shaped to offer warm, emotionally savvy, practical companionship whenever it may help.
Gus draws from Rick’s work and the larger Thriving Now body of Concepts, courses, workshops, articles, tapping practices, and lived perspectives while keeping sources and co-creators visible. Gus is not Rick live, a therapist, or a replacement for human relationship. Gus offers a conversational place to bring what is alive, think aloud, try a reframe or tapping approach, and listen for your own next YES—with you remaining in charge of your experience.
Shared stewardship
Supporting work that can keep serving
Thriving Now is supported by people who value this work and want more of it to remain accessible. Contributions help with the continuing development and operating costs of Gus, Real Skills Workshops, and gliding-scale resources for people who would benefit from them.
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Tapping insights, useful resources, and invitations from Thriving Now.