As a registered clinical counsellor and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, I center relationality to support folks with PTSD symptoms, developmental trauma and generational transmission. I integrate over two decades of somatic training, family systems, and anti-racism work across 13 years in non-profit and private practice settings. Moving at the pace of trust, we build resources to restore awareness and innate wisdom.

I hold a Masters in Counselling Psychology and a Masters in Fine Arts. My background as a visual artist led me to explore a more embodied way of living through body-mind practices, movement and dance. My personal work in therapy and my embodied presence remain my greatest resources for self-support and heart-centered care. I am grateful to my family, teachers, mentors, and all beings in the natural and spiritual world that have held and inspired me on this human journey. When I'm not immersed in creative process, I'm on a shoreline or in the mountains breathing deeply, calling myself home to an unbroken wholeness in relationship to all life.

How I work

The foundation of my approach is trust. To help people connect with self, we need to feel safe in relationship. But the ability to trust also comes from within. Bridging these two realities between self and other is a process that balances body, mind, emotion and energy within larger systems of culture. For this reason, I practice an holistic approach that places equal importance on all of these parts. We begin this process together through the collaborative cultivation of a safe and nurturing therapeutic relationship. 

A holistic understanding of human experience includes the complex interplay between culture, personal and heritable biology, early developmental experiences, and current life situations. I work at this interface between biology and culture to understand individual character, communication patterns and personal resources. I combine current research in neuroscience, early development, evolutionary biology and human physiology with traditional mindfulness and body-awareness practices that focus on experience in the present moment. In the here-and-now, we discover what feels safe in order to move beyond habitual patterns, current challenges and past traumas.

I have specialized training and knowledge in somatic psychotherapy and the interconnected system of body, mind, emotion, energy and interpersonal relationships. I am particularly interested in how stress, including anxiety, depression, and traumatic stress, impacts healthy development, well-being and resilience to stress. Together, we learn to attend to cognitive and somatic information through language, breath, body sensation, emotion and movement to support regenerative processes that promote integration, healing and resolution.

Working together in a safe and trusting therapeutic environment, we compassionately discover a "developmental edge" between current strengths and challenges. Through emotional attunement and therapeutic practices that emphasize experience in the present moment, clients feel safely supported to reconnect with previously intolerable emotions, thoughts, and body sensations, to process them towards completion. Current research and my experience with clients shows that with increased awareness with body and mind, innate conditions to heal are available to help heal the past and more forward with our lives. As we learn to reconnect and trust a felt sense of wholeness and vitality, we increase resilience to stress, nurture more satisfying interpersonal relationships and inspire hope for the future.

Healing is not linear. We need to return to earlier wounds while being present now. Is this process, time is like a spiral, overlaying events with new capacities and insights to re-organize the past. This process includes:

· Active resonant pacing, uniquely attuned to each person, to co-create attachment security and empower safety as an internalized experience in relationship

· Somatic Experiencing (SE), Bodynamics and family systems offer structure and practices to establish resources in later developmental stages that support earlier deficits

· Tracking sensations and skills development in self regulation of emotions include ‘presence skills’ for grounding, centering, boundaries and containment of high energy states

· Therapeutic touch offers additional containment and boundary work to support somatic awareness, self-regulation and energy management

· These skills help identify new and current resources for control and resilience before further trauma processing

· I also include harm reduction and integration for folks who have explored medicine work independently by operationalizing SE principles of titration to integrate innate wisdom and expanded consciousness

It is a privilege and an honour to support folks in pursuing this expansive work to create more ease and connection while working through emotional wounds or profound loss. Touching what matters most is not for the faint of heart. I respect all folks for the courage it takes to trust me to join you on this path. The collaborative nature of this work deeply enriches my life because it offers faith and evidence in what heals and how we grow and change. Human beings need to feel seen, heard and understood to experience a felt sense of safety and belonging. Only then, can we move forward together.