Professionally, I work at the intersection of the form and formless. This soulful practice is rooted deep and wide into the earth of our relationships. This groundwork includes the relationship we have with our bodies, our Self, our desires, our needs, our limitations, our beloved others, and our communities of care.

Practices that bypass our humanity and the needs of our nervous system set us up for depersonalization, instability, trauma, disillusionment, and the perpetuation of harm. But practices that are intricately woven with the needs of source, soma, soul, self, spirit, self, and shadow are rich wellsprings.

Personally, I find myself enchanted by the peaceful cacophony of the forest I live in. I’m interested in how the light changes throughout the year as seasons flow one into another. I savor the cyclical coming and going of weather patterns, birds, plants, leaves, and mushrooms. I love the rhythm of growing food and the angst of protecting some of it from all the beings that call this garden theirs too.

I’m deeply called by the numinous wonder that resides outside of my brain’s tenacious need to know and understand. As safety holds me more often, I find that I can yield into the mystery and simply enjoy the unfolding relationship I have with life in the present moment. I owe all of this to the love, care, and nurturance of my ancestors, my more-than-human kin, and the beloved humans that have walked beside me.

I am endlessly captivated by the origins, development, and behavior of humans. I have spent a lifetime trying to make sense of culture, belief, and human behavior.

In my daily life I’m very curious about the why’s and how’s playing out. My observational nature makes me a great somatic practitioner. I am watching, sensing, feeling, and deeply curious about what makes you you. People sometimes think I am psychic or a highly intuitive person but in reality I am a highly attuned watcher, tracker, and observer of human behavior.

I’ve casually studied the last six thousand years of human history to find through-lines and core traits across time. I find the human species to be brilliant, remarkable, and disturbing. It saddens me how we seem to forget our history and its lessons. It also excites me to know that humans have been engaging in primary practices for at least thirty thousand years. Practices like communal grieving, ancestor communion, animism, story telling, song/music, dance, shared eating, ritual, initiatory practices, and belief making/worship.

There is deep time wisdom and so much generative nourishment in remembering and practicing these ancient ways of being in relationship. Soul tending practices are ways we can rekindle our connection to these primary satisfactions.

I’ve never figured out how to do the emotionally detached healing professional thing, and frankly we can’t heal our attachment wounds with people who cut themselves off from their humanity. When there is consistent relational presence and a felt-sense of connection and safety, we will be able to repair our attachment wounds. 

We Practice Contact Nutrition 

• Vocal prosody
• Kind eyes
• Safe touch
• Shared rhythms 
• Reciprocal rhythms
• Ingestion behaviors 
• Delight
• Validation
• Focusing – Reflective Listening

We are in this together. Our way back to secure attachments starts with the interpersonal neurobiology of connection; how my brain-body affects your brain-body and vice versa. We are interconnected, always impacting and influencing each other’s nervous system states. 

Did you know that there are several types of empathy and everyones brains are wired differently. There is cognitive, affective – emotional, somatic, social, and compassionate empathy.

I am not wired for cognitive empathy. Cognitive empathy rationally understands someone’s perspective without sharing their emotional experience. It can also involve the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes and therefore understand why they feel and behave the way they do. I often need overt, top down help bridging the gap to understand cognitively the why’s and how’s. It’s why I study human behavior.

I am wired for affective (emotional) empathy and I respond with compassionate empathy. People like me are sometimes labeled as Highly Sensitive People, empaths, or intuitives. I have some concern with this in the therapeutic setting because I don’t want my emotional responses to hijack your session. It takes great skill and resilient boundaries to work ethically with affective empathy.

I do that by deferring to the wisdom of your nervous system, offering interventions that are invitational, uplifting your agency, and by co-creating a place of experimentation and exploration that moves in your direction.

My intuition is limited by my experience, my needs, my biases, and my beliefs. It’s perfect for me and my context. However, I never want to limit you to that. You came here to embody your wisdom. I want you to be able to track within yourself, in your nervous system, what is expressing, what is needed, and what is wanted so that you receive what you truly need.

I want you to know that I will cry and feel alongside you. And, I’ve got myself, I am well supported so you can be well supported and we always have our Sacred Pause to fall back on if either of us needs a moment to recenter in Self energy and our inner resourcing.

I am committed to providing you a trauma informed, ethical, and resourced container. I am continually learning, practicing, and evolving through mentorship, supervision, and my own therapeutic work. I suspect this will be a lifelong practice.

I want this container to be a place of kindness and compassion for your humanity and mine. There are things I have more skill with and there are things you have more skill with. We are different people with different needs, challenges, beliefs, and brains. I am only an expert on myself and my aim is to offer you a “safe enough” space for you to be fully you.

I am walking beside you not as someone who knows better than you but as someone who desires to know you and be with you as you get to know yourSelf, your nervous system, and your animating parts better. This is relationship.

A common invitation I offer is the Sacred Pause. At any time, either of us, when needed or wanted, can invite a Sacred Pause. Tracking when we need a pause, to integrate, regulate, rest, or secure the Seat of Self, is an essential relational practice. During a Sacred Pause we turn inward, breathe, and reground. We put our somatic practice into action, offering ourselves holding, validation, reassurance, or time to assess what care is needed.

Joy runs close to the surface with me and I’m prone to weave a bit of levity into the darkness. I have never taken things too seriously or bought into belief systems like others seem to do but I love studying them. I question, explore, investigate, did I mention I ask questions?

I love the depth of things. The sacred and intimate, the tender and precious, the ecstatic and wild, the playful and irreverent. Those exquisite moments when one conscious awareness is in communion with another beyond any concept that is known. Just numinous presence outpouring into our connection, divinity to divinity, souls overlapping.

I often feel like an irreverent heretic in most belief systems. There is conditioning for many of us that starts in our DNA and entrenches us further throughout our upbringing and life experiences. All of this unconsciously animates us with few taking the time to investigate and question why we believe as we do.

I can remember when I was young being utterly confused by the things people believed in. I could see how their life force and emotional struggles were directly impacted by their cultural conditioning. Like somehow everyone agreed to play-act their life instead of being true to themselves.

Studying human history and knowing that our current religions are only a few thousand years old and prior to that there were other cultures as intelligent as us that had completely different religions as complex and as beautiful as those we fight and die for today, has certainly expanding my ideas about things.

This deep intrigue with belief systems and human behavior has led to a life devoted to the study and practice of the sacred and profane. I’ve followed gurus, meditated at ashrams, traveled the world seeking enlightenment, practiced pagan rituals, practiced white tantra, and did all the way woowoo LightWorker type energy work stuff, and eventually I became an earth based non-denominational Community Minister. Which always makes me giggle because I get all sorts of prickly with the fundamental religious types and I don’t believe in one God, or even like to use the word God.

So yes, I have experienced the extraordinary. I have courted non-ordinary experiences my whole life. I have had several spiritual awakenings where all thought and egoic identification left only to return in time. I have had hundreds of mystical experiences that still weave wonder into my world.

I had a near death experience during a deprivation practice based workshop where I stopped breathing and I could feel my heartbeat slow and stop. I could see the synapses firing off slower and slower till a dark stillness consumed me. Then somehow in a place of total peace and surrender, Raven came to call me into service. Her iridescent blue-purple wing flapped in the dark stillness and a steering hot whiteness flooded my senses and breath and beat returned.

All of this IS wondrous, but reckoning with my humanity; my nervous system, my attachment wounds, my grief, my neurodivergence, my shame, my failures, that has been the best work of my life. It doesn’t devalue the miraculous, it fortifies and grounds it deep and wide. It has been the maturation my soul needed in order to be in integrity and in service to more than my mind and its conditioning.

Ten years ago my life imploded. I lost my partner, home, car, career, spiritual community, and all of my friends within a 6 month window. I drifted among the living and felt like a lifeless husk. This is wilderness of grief.

It was traumatic. It forced me into a reckoning I didn’t even know I needed. I had lived my whole life in the soup of complex developmental trauma, disorganized attachment, and undiagnosed neurodivergence.

I fled to the woods and hid from life. I adopted dogs, played in the dirt, sang to the trees, and listen to the stream talk. I spent so much time resting, listening, and watching.

I withdrew and surrendered. I gave up the hope of ever having a life with humans. Actually I was terrified of it, terrified to love and be rejected or exiled again.

Then against odds, the desire to live again began stirring within my soul.

So many companions, more-than-human, ancestors, and humans helped reweave me back into the tapestry of life. I am held and can hold complexity, nuance, and the unfathomable Now.

All of me is a song of gratitude for this small and exquisite life. It fits me just right.

I live on unceded and stolen lands of the Wabinaki peoples in rural Maine. Nestled on a hillside amongst a paper birch forest. Our homestead is outside of cell phone coverage. I live in a converted timber-frame barn that is slowly being reclaimed by the earth faster than I can manage to repair her. So sometimes it rains inside as well as outside. I’m incredibly grateful to my partner’s mother for giving me this sweet shelter and piece of earth to call home.

I’ve traveled to almost all the US states, hiked the Appalachian Trail and the Long Trail, trained in Bali and Finland, but nowadays I rarely leave my homestead and if I never have to move or travel again that will make me very happy. I love doing life online in the comfort and resource of this charming home and sacred land.

I am a white, non-binary, queer, disabled, AuDHer. They/them are my pronouns. I am often passing with all my identifiers and it sure does startle some people when they realize I hold marginalized identities they have yet to reckon with.

I love gardening and grow a very diverse medicinal garden that I mostly just delight in. I thought I wanted to do the herbalist thing, which I did for a few years, but I realized I almost never use products and instead I just love collecting and growing medicinals. And all of the pollinators love me for it. We have so many butterflies now. It is the best.

I used to think I hated dogs because my mom hated dogs and I was conditioned to think I did too. Then when I started doing shamanistic journey work a yellow lab always companioned me. Today I have two dogs and one is a fox red lab. They are everything to me. I sleep with them at night and not with my partner. I love having my own living space.

I am a mom to one adult bio-baby who is a trans AuDHer and one non-binary ADHD step kiddo. I have another ADHD step kiddo who thinks I suck and doesn’t talk to me. I think she is amazing, funny, brave, intelligent, and more than a bit scary. My nervous system can’t manage all the intensity and unpredictability of her emotional waves and her chaotic behaviors. Sometimes neurotypes just don’t jive. Ugh. It’s been so hard for both of us. I still hold hope that we can figure it out in time.

They all moved in with us at the start of the pandemic and two of them are still here. What a gift they have been to my life and the process of healing my attachment wounds.

Outside of my continuing education and client work, I spend a lot of my time alone drinking up this land or swinging in my hammock. My system is sensitive and I need more time than most to integrate.

My partner is a handful. So am I. He is a ADHD cisgender straight white man in a house of very colorful queer humans. It always feels like herding cats over here whenever we have family meals and game days. Our conversations are tangental and meander far and wide, and somehow it all makes perfect sense, eventually. Every second is precious to me and I am savoring every moment while I have the gift of them under these roofs.