BIO

My interest in human consciousness, the sacred and the creative process is the connective thread that has woven through my entire life.  It goes all the way back to my parents alternative exploration and creative upbringing. They were both disillusioned Christians, yet seeking a larger identification educated themselves on all major religions and created rituals from the deepest mystical teachings. My parents raised us on ritual, educated us on all the traditions and teachings of the major religions, taught us the core mystical teachings that transcend culture/religion and handed over the concept of God to our imagination, inviting us each year to draw our current idea of God. I am deeply grateful for the rich, imaginative and inclusive start my parents offered me. I have been lighting candles, reading mystical poems and connecting to the sacred in creative, unprescribed ways since I was a very little girl. Thanks mom and dad for giving me this open and imaginative way of personally exploring the cycles of life, the thread of evolution and the interconnectedness of humanity and life.

My first research paper I ever wrote, when I was 15, was on the effects of meditation. I drove out to Spirit Rock, in West Marin, and interviewed people who had long-standing meditation practices. There was a state and feeling I witnessed in that packed, yet silent room. Watching these people meditate I could feel they were connected to something I wanted to know.  It was around this time that my mom went back to school to become a therapist and started taking me to shamanic journey workshops. I met my power animal, traveled to the lower world, met my guides and established a connection to the world behind the world.

After High School, I received my undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley in Religious Studies with an emphasis in Mythology. I was drawn to the universal language of symbols, archetypes and myth and to the teachings of the mystics, the core tenets of how humans have experienced their link to the great Mystery.

Mythology was a natural language for me and I loved the vitality, complexity and taboo nature of the Indian goddesses wearing skulls around their necks and the epic wars of the Ramayana, the half human-half animal guides and spirits. To understand these myths I needed to learn the language of symbols and metaphors – the most fundamental, universal, mother-tongue language of the soul. Metaphor, the language of the right brain is in fact the language we all speak before we learn the language of our culture. It is the most natural way for us to understand, organize and make meaning of our experience.

Always drawn to the body, I was pre-med for several years at Berkeley, but found the medicine of myth more of a draw. After graduating from UC Berkeley my interest in the body guided me a few years later when I enrolled in Massage school. In this chapter of my life I learned the anatomy of the body (now very helpful in doing detailed dialogue within the body) and learned the language of touch. The first time I felt energy moving under my hands my entire being lit up!

Around that time I met a woman who shared with me the story of her son. He was labeled ADD and exhibited major aggression. His behavior had gotten so destructive at school that she was home-schooling him at the time. Just when things felt very bleak for her she discovered Cranio Sacral Therapy (CST).  Her son started getting regular treatments and everything changed. I enrolled in my first CST course at the Upledger Institute shortly after that encounter.  Cranio Sacral Therapy introduced me to the intricate anatomical realm of the central nervous system. And through the study of Somato Emotional Release I learned the ways emotions and memories are stored and can be released from the body.

I have studied the map of the electrical highways that run through our body and the power of dialoguing, through imagination, with the body.  We can actually change the patterns of our nervous system and shift our response to life. Our systems are profoundly self-regulatory and self-healing. We can enhance and participate in that healing process.

In the year 2000 I met Mary Swanson and my life changed. I learned about the chakras and energy systems, how to read information using our imagination and subtle senses. Energy was a language I had been speaking my whole life, having been born with a sensitive constitution. Learning to ground and protect my energy and to dialogue with my intuition and deep soul opened me to an empowering avenue of self-healing. After feeling overwhelmed by my experience of energy my whole life, I now experience my sensitivity as a tool and a skill.

For many years I happily integrated the energy work and intuitive arts with Cranio Sacral Therapy and Somato Emotional release. Amazing miracles happened for many clients and I got to support a myriad of people working with physical and emotional trauma as well as individuals who simply wished to enhance their own capacities and learn the tools that transform.

In time, the type of clientele that came to see me, the depth of their trauma and corners of the psyche they pulled me into, inspired me to understand more deeply the psychological underpinnings of their experience. I found myself wanting to work in even more creative ways with people and enrolled in a Psychology program at The Institute of Imaginal Studies, now Meridian University.  This soul-centered approach to psychology emphasizes that the care of the soul requires an awareness of the images/organizing myths that mediate our perception and relationship to life. At the core of my work is the principle that deep capacities of the soul reside in all of us, wisdom that can be evoked and cultivated through transformative practices such as: somatic practices, creative arts, mythology, ecopsychology, ritual, spiritual traditions, mystical philosophy, and cultural history.

I have now completed my Masters in Psychology and the coursework for my Doctorate.

Along the way, over the last many, many years I have had a deep love affair for astrology. Astrology is a natural language for me, integrating my love of mythic language and honoring the cycles and rites of passage that support the evolution of the soul. Because Astrology reveals our mythic story – and offers a map for creatively embodying the archetypes we are born to express and learn from.

I feel we are living in exciting and terrifying times of rapid change.  The images we anchor into and are guided by will sculpt our future world.  Knowing how to move forward creatively, anchored in the deep images of soul, has never been more important.