For over 35 years, I have supported children, youth and adults in the work of liberation and healing.

I have been curious and passionate about the human psyche and spirit since childhood when my multisensory perception was awakened through a combination of experiences and encounters with the more-than-human-world.

My journey into working in the helping professions began when my first job at 16 at a preschool for socially and economically disadvantaged children awakened in me a call to service and stirred a longing to face the legacy of transgenerational trauma and oppression that I had inherited from my poor, southern white roots. Thus began my exploration into the worlds of non-ordinary states of consciousness via psychedelics, ecstatic dance, and the study of esoteric arts, including tarot, astrology, mythology, story, poetry, music and communion with the natural world.

I became a first-generation college graduate, earned a Masters in Education and began teaching literature, mythology, creative writing and personal development in both secondary and community college programs.

When I became a mother at 27, determined to be the breakwall that protects the next generation from the transmission of trauma, I devoted myself to the work of transforming the inherited burdens of past generations. My own journey of healing fueled my passion for public service, and I spent 18 years serving at-risk children and youth as an educator and counselor.

Then, in 2006, I became thoroughly disillusioned with the standard, coercive and compulsory system of schooling in the US. I could no longer participate in the oppression of young people and knew that I needed to leave the field of formal education.

As my first career began to fall away, I simultaneously underwent a series of initiations which led me to the study of shamanism. I trained in Native American (Sioux/Lakota) lineage as well as Seidr traditions of the Norse peoples and in the plant medicine traditions of the Amazon. Through these studies, I was initiated as a healer and shamanic practitioner, and I began supporting people with energy clearing, soul retrieval, compassionate depossession, ancestral lineage healing, and spiritual direction work.

After working for 10 years in these capacities, I became dissatisfied with the role of “healer.” I saw over and over again how deep, lasting healing work was not possible in single, one-time rituals or ceremonies that exist outside of a larger integrative community context. I had also come to believe in people’s inherent capacity to heal themselves through their own spiritual and emotional development.

I uncovered my true calling -- building relationships of trust, safety and co-regulation that allow people to reshape their own neural landscapes, heal their legacies of oppression and transgenerational trauma, and recover from the impact of toxic egocentric culture to build lives of wholeness, meaning, resilience, and caring relationships. In order to fulfill this purpose, I devoted myself to the study of trauma healing, Internal Family Systems therapy, and liberatory practices. 

I completed a 2 year facilitator training in Family Constellations and then returned to the world of academia to obtain my MA in Counseling Psychology at the Leadership Institute of Seattle at Saybrook University. I became a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and went on to train in IFS, level 1 and level 2, and became a Certified IFS therapist.

Through my desire to reclaim my own sense of embodiment and inner knowing, and a lifetime spent on healing my trauma history, heartbreaks, losses and failures, I have developed the capacity to walk through the underworld with eyes that see in the dark and to cultivate a faith in the ability of the boundless heart to access beauty, compassion and joy, regardless of hardship, and often in spite of despair.

It is an honor to be with people in their truth and transformations.