WELCOME
For more than twenty years, I have accompanied people through periods of healing, transition and profound inner change.
My work begins with a simple orientation: much of what we are seeking is not found by trying harder to change ourselves, but by learning to listen more closely to what is already happening within us.
I create spaces where we can slow down, become curious, and meet what has often been difficult to meet alone. Together, we pay attention to the body and nervous system, relationships and protective patterns, imagination, and the deeper questions shaping a life.
My approach is trauma-informed, relational and experiential, drawing from somatic psychology, mindfulness, attachment work, Hakomi, Internal Family Systems, psychedelic preparation and integration, and more than two decades of accompanying people through change.
The frameworks matter, but they remain in service to the person in front of me.
THE WORK BENEATH THE WORK
People often come to me at thresholds.
A relationship is changing. An old wound continues to shape the present. A psychedelic experience has opened unexpected territory. A chapter has ended. The life that once made sense no longer quite fits. Or there is simply a persistent feeling that something more honest wants to be lived.
Sometimes our work involves tending to what has been carried from the past: attachment wounds, protective strategies, experiences held in the body, or patterns that once helped us survive but now constrain how we live and relate.
At other times, the work is developmental.
Who am I becoming?
What matters now?
How do I live in greater alignment with what I know to be true?
How do I make room for creativity, intimacy, purpose and a life that feels genuinely inhabited?
I am interested in both movements: healing what asks to be tended and making space for what wants to emerge.
SHAPED BY LIFE
I came to this work through more than study.
As a young woman, I pursued the dream of representing my country at the Olympic Games as a solo sailor. Years of training shaped my relationship with discipline, performance, resilience and purpose. I ultimately did not reach the Olympics, but the pursuit changed me profoundly and began a much longer inquiry into who we become when the identities and aspirations that have organized our lives begin to change.
Life has continued that education.
Marriage and intimate relationship have taught me about attachment, difference, repair, and the ongoing practice of meeting another without abandoning oneself.
Motherhood has rearranged me in ways no training could have. It has asked for surrender alongside fierce responsibility and brought me again and again into contact with the limits of control, the depths of love, and the tenderness of caring for what I cannot entirely protect.
Living through periods of intense chronic illness brought another kind of initiation: into the intelligence and vulnerability of the body, into uncertainty, and into the humbling realization that I could not effort my way toward an answer. It asked me instead to listen more closely and cultivate a more whole and intimate relationship with the body and its many forms of knowing.
For more than twenty years, I have also explored expanded states of consciousness, allowing meditation, dance, ritual and sacred plant traditions to become part of my own inner education. These experiences have deepened my respect for what can become available when our ordinary ways of perceiving ourselves and our lives begin to loosen.
Creating communities, facilitating rites of passage, and becoming a steward of homes, sanctuary and land in California and Costa Rica have deepened my relationship with belonging, beauty, responsibility and place. They have taught me that what we tend also shapes us.
Across these seasons and initiations, I have known achievement and disappointment, creation and dissolution, belonging and uncertainty, the desire to move forward and the necessity of staying with what cannot yet be resolved.
I don't hold these experiences as credentials. They have shaped the person who meets you in the room.
Alongside more than twenty years of professional practice, they have given me a deep respect for the passages that change us from the inside, often before we have language for who we are becoming.
A LIFE OF PRACTICE
Since 2005, I have worked with individuals navigating significant life transitions, relational healing and psycho-spiritual development.
Since 2013, I have facilitated retreats and rites of passage internationally.
Community-making has also been central to my life. In 2011, I founded Dancing Without Borders, a body of work that brought thousands of people together across four continents through dance, ritual and embodied activism in service of collective and ecological healing.
Today, these different strands meet in my work: the athlete and the contemplative, psychological depth and creative expression, the individual and the relational, disciplined practice and the intelligence of allowing.
I work especially well with people who are ready to move beyond understanding themselves intellectually and toward experiencing themselves more fully.
AREAS OF WORK
Mid-life & major life transitions + identity shifts
Relationship + attachment
Psychedelic preparation + integration
Somatic + nervous system work
Stress + overwhelm
Psycho-spiritual development
Purpose + meaning
Creative expression
Women's transitions + motherhood
Belonging + rites of passage
SELECTED TRAINING + EDUCATION
Professional Hakomi Training
Two-Year Comprehensive Training, Graduate, 2023
Internal Family Systems
Levels 1 & 2, 2021
Vision Quest Apprenticeship
Nine-month training with somatic emphasis, 2013
Somatic Trauma Intensive
The Embody Lab, 2021
Somatic Psychedelic Intensive
Atira Tan & Dr. Devon Christie, 2021
Co-Active Coaching Institute
Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, 2005
Discover Your Purpose
Tim Kelley, 2009
Emotional Freedom Technique
Sonya Sophia, 2010