I About

Movement was my first language.

As a child I trained in ballet, tap, jazz, modern. It was fun and play. It was also choreographed work that taught me to think my way through the next move. As an adult, I still dance, but without choreography now. It's a different kind of joy — I'm not thinking, just letting the music move through me. The energy of the room, the moment, what I'm feeling: I move with whatever's passing through. I became a better dancer the day I stopped trying to think my way into the next step and just let my body answer the music.

That distinction — between thinking your way into the next move and letting the body lead — has shaped everything else I've come to understand about healing.

II How I came to this work

My body started talking.

I lived in Venice, CA during a stretch when I was deep in every kind of healing modality the city offered: yoga in many forms (I became an aerial yoga teacher along the way), talk therapy, retreats, personal development workshops, ecstatic dance, sound healing. I loved them. I still do. They opened me, taught me, gave me ways to live. But certain things I was carrying weren't moving — and at a certain point, the conditions arrived for those deeper layers to come up.

I grew up with a single mother. I didn't know my father. Some of what I was carrying had been with me from before I could walk — pain that arrived early, and beliefs about myself I'd absorbed before I had language for them. There has been trauma along the way too. A lot of my own work has been untangling what was never mine to begin with, and meeting the rest with compassion, including a younger version of me who carried a lot. Those parts still surface. They still ask for gentleness.

There was also a stretch, later, when much of my life seemed to be breaking down at once. My romantic life was unraveling, my sense of purpose was in question, and the path I thought I was on no longer felt like mine. Heartbreak, grief, and that not-knowing were what drove me to look more closely.

What began to reach those layers was a different kind of practice: going inward in altered states. Eyes covered. Music on. No destination. New layers kept opening as I worked this way.

One session caught me off guard. I was learning a modality called Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy, and I was the one in the chair, being guided with a low dose of cannabis. Material I had talked about in therapy for years — and thought I was long past — began to surface. My body started talking. It moved on its own, trying to discharge what it had been carrying: energy from old experiences that hadn't had a chance to release.

It was the same body that had learned, in dance, how to move without choreography.

But this time what was moving through me wasn't joy. It was the residue of things I had lived with for years.

I wanted to keep exploring this, for myself and in how I worked with clients.

That session is why I do this work. Because it reached me.

III How I work

I believe you are the expert in your own life. My job is to walk beside you.

I work slowly. We start with rapport. We move at the pace your nervous system can hold, not the pace any timeline wants. I won't push you toward a journey before you're ready, and I won't make claims I can't stand behind. Psychedelics are not a fix. They are not a panacea. They are, when used with care, powerful allies for revealing the deeper layers within.

I work from a few core orientations. Healing is mind, body, and spirit — never just the head. All parts of you are welcome here. Healing, in my experience, isn't always a line you walk once. Sometimes it spirals, returning to the same threads at deeper layers as you live, and each return changes what you can meet.

I hold the clinical seriously. I also leave room for what doesn't fit cleanly into words: the mystical, the ineffable, whatever shape that takes for the person in the room.

IV Teachers and influences

The teachers underneath the work.

So much of what I know has come from other people. Teachers I've studied with, books that arrived at the right moment, loved ones in my life, and the relationships that have asked the most of me. I'm always still learning.

A few writers and frameworks sit underneath how I think about this work. Stan Grof's writing on non-ordinary states — and his framing of holotropic as movement toward wholeness — sits underneath much of how I understand this work. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score gave language to what I had already felt in my own body and seen in clients — that trauma lives in tissue, in posture, in the nervous system, long after the mind has tried to file it away. Gabor Maté's writing on addiction as an attempt to soothe pain that makes sense has shaped how I sit with the patterns clients bring. Internal Family Systems and its premise that there are no bad parts has shaped how I welcome whatever shows up in session.

My formal education began with a Masters in Social Work from Columbia. Since then, I've trained in Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy, whose framework for attachment, the autonomic nervous system, and psychedelic-assisted therapy has shaped how I understand trauma in the body. I completed my Natural Medicine Health Act facilitator training through Medicinal Mindfulness. Alison and Daniel McQueen, who lead it, hold the clinical and the spiritual together with real grace, and the way they do it has deeply shaped how I meet clients in altered states. I'm trained in EMDR and brainspotting as well: modalities I came to as a client first. They reached me before I trained in them. Alongside the formal training, I also bring my own practice in energy work into sessions when it fits.

My clinical work has spanned foster care, community mental health, university counseling at Berkeley, dual diagnosis treatment for substance use and high-acuity mental health, and private practice. I've sat with people in real crisis: addiction, psychosis, complex trauma. I've also sat with the quieter work of long-standing patterns and the slow loosening of old wounds.

Formal Credentials & Training

MSW, Columbia University · LCSW · Licensed Natural Medicine Health Act Facilitator (CO) · Medicinal Mindfulness NMHA Facilitator Training · Psychedelic Somatic Institute Apprentice Training · Journey Clinical Ketamine Assisted Therapy Certification · EMDR Level 1 & 2 · Registered Yoga Teacher (200hrs) · Certified Aerial Yoga Instructor / Trauma Informed Yoga · Sound Healing Training

V Outside the work

A different way of living it.

I'm married to James — a relationship I called in after years of doing the work it took to be able to meet it. These days I'm slowing down, eating with the seasons, trying to wake with the sun.

Movement is still my daily practice. Dance, yoga, walks in nature. The body is still where I start.

I see my own path as one of remembering: coming into more and more wholeness, letting go of layers and patterns and old conditioning, transmuting what's been painful. The work has become more embodied for me over time — not the end of it, but a different way of living it. I'm doing mine alongside yours.

If this work is calling you, the next step is a conversation.

A free 20-minute discovery call is a chance to meet, hear what's bringing you here, and feel whether we're a fit.

Book a discovery call