Our work together is about meeting yourself in your most tender moments, trusting your process, becoming who you truly are and healing from within.
I give myself full permission to love people in an all encompassing, limitless way and endeavor to help others internalize that same freedom. We are alive to expand, see, heal & touch one another deeply. I cherish the quaking, raw beauty of being a creature in process alongside another and finding the awe, terror, dignity, humor, complexity and mundanity in the adventure. I’m into all of it, the whole damn spectrum. I explore consciousness like it’s a playground. I commit to walking into the darkness with you and revelling in the radiance cloaked behind the shadow. I delight in building trust, safety and play in all places. I wholeheartedly believe all of you sacred. All of you is welcome.
Each session is a homecoming.
I have a lifetime commitment to examining and interrogating social norms and beliefs about gender, race, sexual orientation, mental health, ability, intuition, ecology and relationship.
As a light-skinned, mixed-raced woman of color, I am sort of an “in-between” person living on the borderline of racial and ethnic ambiguity. I don’t sit on either side of the fence but on the fence itself which gives me a unique perspective, with both the advantages and disadvantages that entails. My combination of life experience as a survivor of childhood abuse, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, adolescent mental health oppression, a lifetime of grappling with belonging, and the complexity of holding both oppressed and oppressor identities deeply informs my liberation work with people across many different intersections of identity. This has gifted me the ability to daily deconstruct and re-draw the boundaries of what is welcome and just in our hearts, community and culture. I’m so down to help you do the same.
Together, we work to create a space of belonging with your dignity, safety and mattering at the center.
For over 15+ years I’ve had a private practice as a trauma-focused healer, somatic therapist, and counselor. I work as a community organizer, gender justice advocate, social justice activist, lead a climate action community education team, and am a former yoga teacher and violence prevention workshop facilitator within the criminal justice system. I have a passion for sharing conscious movement, nonviolent communication, and body-based mindfulness practices with communities rooted in strength and resourcefulness despite histories of systemic oppression, including bodies of culture (BIPOC), LGBTQIA+ folk, incarcerated populations and those reclaiming joy and belonging in the face of the weight of intergenerational harm.
I deeply believe that we can only heal what we can hold and I aim to move at the speed of trust.
It is my deepest desire to work with you to co-create the kind of support that is most resonant with your unique body, mind and heart.
My approach to healing and wellness is non-diagnostic and NEVER based on pathology.
You are not the things you struggle with. As a fierce advocate for those who suffer from injustice, abuse and oppression, I actively participate in fostering community based on the principles of restorative justice. I trust in the beauty and power of the human heart to help overcome the obstacles of our conditioning. You are wise beyond measure and your body holds the keys to your own liberation. When you feel yourself as magical, strong, connected, purposeful and alive you will naturally relate with the world in more empowered, courageous, engaged ways. Through positive, collaborative, mutual relationships, we can all get more free.
You already possess an innate ability to heal and powerful inner wisdom.
Through dedicated partnership you will come to know your body as your most potent ally.
My work continues to evolve alongside me, ripening from the fertile ground of traditional, earth-based medicine ways I engage with through lineage, study, and relationship. Through a weaving of somatic practices with contemporary psychology, mindfulness, embodied movement, and our interrelatedness with life, we explore and expand your capacity to sense your wholeness while bringing friendliness to your body, mind, heart, and the whole range of your lived experience. We come to experience the intelligence of overwhelm, fear, “stuckness,” anger, and hurt while building tolerance for joy, connection, uncertainty, and pleasure.
I encourage you to receive yourself. At a pace you can stay with. At the amount you can actually hold. We will build from there. Through steadiness, consistency, and connection, we creatively engage all parts of your being to nurture greater self-understanding, acceptance, and the ability to show up for and go after what matters to you. Right now, your body is soooo ready to be on your team. As am I.
And that’s why I do this work. I do this because I madly love people; I’m so curious about how we create the conditions to be more human together, even when it’s hard. Even when it hurts. I’m here in service to supporting the realization of a more full-bodied, expressed, wonder-filled love (in me and in you!) that inspires us to care for ourselves and each other well, so that we can continue to face the daily heartbreak of giving a fuck AND make a material difference in our lives and in the lives of all beings we are in relationship with.
Permission + Possibility
Collaboratively, we create a refuge so you can chase down or tenderly witness whatever you are carrying, while also creating little islands of calm so you can rest. I accompany you as companion, sometimes guide, compassionate witness, loving spiritual trickster, and mama jaguar to your experience. Wherever each session takes you, I will be right there with you, offering counsel, direct intervention, supportive contact, and what psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard.” ALL of you is welcome here.
I can hear the silent longing of other people’s hearts. I give voice to that longing.
I am on fire to help you be more unapologetically YOU more and more of the time. Not your “best” version, your real one. Your full range of choices, emotions, expression intact.
No.👏🏽well.👏🏽dressed.👏🏽dead.👏🏽people.👏🏽
Conformity not required.
I make it my business to help you get excited about your gifts and empowered to share them. I bring a whole lot of care, celebration, tenderness, a fair bit of passion, and just the right balance of fierceness to skillfully give just enough push so you can find yourself flying.
Simply put, I love the hell out of my clients.
♥
Some things are better told by the people who lived them.
These are my people.
They heal.
They give—and know how to receive.
They advocate.
They teach.
They organize communities.
They make culture.
They practice fugitivity.
They enter elderhood consciously.
This is who I stand among, tend, and am tended by.
I am shaped in relationship.
I have learned in classrooms and training rooms, on meditation cushions and yoga mats, in organizing spaces and prisons, around fires and in lodges, in Calmekac (traditional Nahuatl school of higher learning), through mentorship, ceremony, community, service, relationship, conflict, land, and practice.
My work has been formed through more than fifteen years of study, teaching, community work, and sustained practice (“putting in the reps”) across somatics, restorative and nonviolent communication, yoga and mindfulness, intuitive and energy healing, ecotherapy, and traditional medicine.
I have had the privilege of learning directly from and alongside teachers and practitioners including Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Nkem Ndefo, Roxanne Manning, PhD, Staci K. Haines, Hala Khouri, Maya Cooper, Resmaa Menakem, Bayo Akomolafe, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Bessel van der Kolk MD, Chrisandra Fox Walker, Sabia C. Wade, Soleil Hepner, Kai Cheng Thom, Gina Breedlove, Peggy Profant, Seane Corn, Katie Silcox, Karen Dawn Harris, Rod Stryker, Marshall Rosenberg, Michael Lee, Anna Dorian …and many others.
For several years while living in San Luis Obispo, I studied and practiced in community with Hua Anwa and Circles of Empowerment, participating in Long Dance, Home Lodge, Full Moon ceremony, sweat lodge, and community service.
Rooted in ancestral power, building homeland within.
Since April 2022, I have lived nomadically in a practice of reconnecting with my roots and family, and imperfectly learning to embody the understanding that home is a place I come from, not a place I go to. In that time, I wandered México, Puerto Rico, Colombia, the United States, and Europe, following the warm energy of yes.
Daily, I encounter the brutiful permutations of what I have carried, what I can unlearn or release, and what I still walk with as I tend the injuries of the frontera… Fracturas that have had me navigate life with some degree of seemingly permanent background pain and shame since I was old enough to sense ni de aquí, ni de allá. I realized I could do something about some of that pain.
In March of 2025, that movement brought me to live in Jalisco, México where the razor’s edge of “belonging” has asked me to study her more closely: living, studying, practicing, being and serving in ceremony and building relationships in a place where my family’s roots continue to run deeper than records can trace. I’m choosing to face and tend these fractures in my own lifetime.
Entonces, aquí ando yo, estudiando todo en español. (E poi italiano.)
Here, in Guadalajara, 20 minutes from my abuelo’s Pueblo Mágico, I study Medicina Indígena Tradicional, herbal medicine, curanderismo, and Mexicayotl. I began my formal study through AMITA Centro de Medicina Indígena y Terapias Alternativas and continue studying traditional medicine, Bach flower essences and herbalism with my teacher Karla Viramontes through Salud Nativa. I was initiated by Abuela Tere Rivas (Chicahuaxochitl) into the Linaje de Curanderas de Pies Descalzos, and continue learning and practicing in community with Maestro Opalmitzin (Rosalío Albarrán) through Mexicayotl, filosofía náhuatl, temazcal, ceremony, and other living practices.
Excerpt from My Abuela Had a Shotgun and My Nonna Sharpened Her Tongue:
…i come from 4035 Baywood Street,
“Frogtown/Toonerville”
mariachi y musica ranchera,
always full volume on the weekends,
heavy buttered rolled tortillas
warmed over an open flame
Tlaquepaque
the ceramic alma de Jalisco,
papel picado, maguey, blue agave
and the warm rains,
rayos y truenos from june to september
I come from Nona Mirella’s coveted spinach
always with the perfect amount of garlic,
and just enough salt
rosemary, olive oil and Roma tomatoes
i come from Louisiana,
Ventress. Taft.
African descendants of slavery
and white confederate plantation owners
that gave rise to the mixed-ness
of my downtown passing grandfather
who grew up black
in Jim Crow era south
Arnold Arons
and the love of being daughter,
being chosen (again and again)
dreidels, latkes, matza ball soup, haroset…
Fierce Love + Embodied Justice
♥,
