My Approach

My approach is collaborative, and my style is warm and gentle, though the work we’ll do together will invite you to be vulnerable and brave.

The words people who work with me most often use to describe me and my approach are: warm, compassionate, caring, fierce, empathetic, generous, brave, genuine, honest, insightful, intelligent, kind, open, and passionate.

We will engage in conversations and practices for  learning and healing, centering your lived experience, your strengths, hopes, and values to grow in ease and wellbeing, and working through challenges and obstacles* that may be standing in the way of you living a full and gratifying life.

*Some of these obstacles are systemic, and I understand that change in this realm needs to be collective. I will not pathologize adaptive responses to harmful systems and adversity, and I actively continue to do my own work to unlearn internalized oppressive narratives.

We will together make sense of your story and explore how your particular context has shaped your experience of embodiment, health, and wellbeing. If you are a practitioner, we will get curious about how this shows up in the work you do supporting others.

We will create space for the grief that comes from the inevitability of facing illness, dis-ease and pain that living in a human bodymind involves, and from particular experiences of adversity. From my own lived experience, and that of the many people I've had the honor to help in my practice, I know that we can find radical healing and come to wholeness even in the presence of illness, and pain, and loss. I don’t know what this will look like for you, because no one else (including me) can tell you what health and wellbeing should/could/might be/look like for you — or what a thriving, impactful, and rewarding practice looks like for you.

I will listen and bear witness with genuine curiosity, compassion, warmth, and some humor.

Attuning to your particular needs and adjusting as we go,
I draw from a rich repertoire of modalities and practices
to help you activate lasting healing and transformation. 

The connecting thread for all these modalities and practices is
a collaborative, trauma-integrative approach

All of my work is grounded in a collaborative, trauma-integrative approach that honors your whole being and lived experience — body, mind, story, and context. This means we address the impact of trauma and adversity — including systemic oppression and collective trauma — gently, skillfully, and compassionately, so that healing becomes possible through safety, attunement, and self-trust.

I will center your knowledge, voice, and agency, and invite you into a space for mutual learning, connection, and co-creation of meaning where you’ll be supported in reclaiming your own insight and authority in the process of recovery.

The touchstones of this work are:

  • Choice, Consent & Safety
     We create spaces where you always have a choice. Every practice, reflection, and conversation is an invitation, never an expectation or prescription. We move at a pace that allows space for pausing, listening inwards, and honoring your needs.  

  • Curiosity, compassion, and dignity
     Your responses, symptoms, and survival strategies are not dysfunctions or disorders — they are adaptations to disruptions. We meet them with care, respect, and curiosity, without any judgment or pressure. 

  • Agency & Empowerment
    This mentorship supports you in reclaiming your voice, intuition, power, and peace on your terms. This includes gently unraveling urgency, perfectionism, and the pull of performative roles. 

  • Post-Traumatic Growth & Possibility
    It is possible to find meaningful personal transformation in the aftermath of adversity. It doesn’t mean the pain and loss don’t matter — it means that, over time, you may discover new strength, clarity, connection, and purpose as part of your healing. 

  • Relational Awareness & Equity
    I recognize the power dynamics in the provider-client relationship. I do my best to make this space transparent and collaborative, offering predictability and ongoing consent every step of the way. I know healing happens not just through what we do, but how we relate.  

  • Ongoing Healing & (Un)Learning
    I walk this path too. I remain committed to my own growth, accountability, and unlearning, so that I can show up in integrity and care.

In Practice, This Means:

  • We co-create a space that moves at a gentle pace, so your nervous system can soften.

  • You’re supported in meeting your inner world with kind awareness and greater self-trust.

  • We integrate somatic, reflective, and relational practices attuned to your needs and boundaries. 

  • You build resources and insight not just for addressing symptoms, but for living in deeper alignment with your values, longings, and purpose. 

  • We hold space for grief, celebration, messiness, and growth — all are welcome here.

Our work together is not about “fixing” you or “improving” you.
It’s about returning to yourself — with tenderness, with authenticity, and with the tools and support to build a life that honors you.

The pillars of my approach

At the heart of my work is a commitment to healing that honors the whole person and the wider world we’re part of. While each pillar —Mindfulness & Compassion, Somatics, and Complexity, Criticality & Contextual Understanding — offers distinct tools and perspectives, they are united by common threads.

Each invites a shift:

  • from fixing to understanding,

  • from isolation to connection, and

  • from blame to agency.

They support a relational, values-based approach to healing that integrates mind, body, spirit, and context. Together, these pillars help us meet pain and complexity with more clarity, care, and integrity—creating the conditions for transformation rooted in wholeness, dignity, and liberation.

Below you’ll find a little bit about each pillar, as well as how they all translate into guiding principles for the work we’ll do together.

If you’d like learn more about how they can support you, let’s meet for a Wayfinding Session.

If you want to jump straight to the list of modalities I integrate, click here.

Mindfulness & Compassion

  • Mindfulness and compassion are practices of turning toward ourselves and the world with presence, acceptance, curiosity, and care. In the midst of pain, fear, or struggle, they invite us to pause — not to fix or avoid, but to gently meet what’s here with clarity, openness and kindness, remembering that suffering is part of being human, and that there is freedom in how we choose to relate to it.

    Together, these practices help us shift us out of the cycle of striving and self-blame, soften the harsh inner voice, reconnect with our humanity, and access the strength that comes from tenderness. Through cultivating them, we learn to stay present—not just with what’s pleasant or peaceful, but with the full range of our experience. Over time, they help us build the inner resources to meet life as it is—with more patience, equanimity, and love. 

  • Healing can feel like a test we’re failing anytime symptoms appear — and the pressure to control or eliminate them can keep us stuck. These practices can help you step out of fixing mode, self-judgment, and shame, and meet yourself and others with spacious presence, acceptance, and kindness — even in the midst of pain and other challenges.

    Additionally, they help you harness neuroplasticity and engage the relaxation response in support of healing.

  • Mindfulness and compassion reconnect you to your own humanity, helping you meet your work with presence, boundaries, and heart.

    These practices support you in tending to yourself as you care for others—reducing burnout, strengthening empathy, offering attuned and impactful care, and aligning with your core values.

Somatics

  • Somatics is a holistic, body-based approach to personal and collective transformation that recognizes that our individual “shape”—how we show up in the world—has been formed by personal experience, social conditions, and systemic forces. Through somatic awareness, intentional practice, and community support, we can begin to reshape how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.

    Somatics invites us to embody change: to shift long-held survival patterns, heal trauma, and cultivate new ways of being. It teaches that transformation isn't just something we think our way into—it’s something we practice, feel, and live into through the body.

    At its heart, somatics is about creating the conditions for safety, dignity, and belonging. It’s about taking action rooted in our values, and building a life—and a world—that reflects our wholeness and interconnectedness.

  • Chronic symptoms are not just medical events — they live in your body, shaped by experience, emotion, and history. Somatics offers tools to understand and shift how pain lives in your bodymind, not just through ideas, but through felt, lived experience. It helps you move out of survival mode and into more agency, connection, and choice—so you can respond to life from a deeper sense of safety, integrity, and self-trust.

  • Somatics invites you to stay in touch with your own body, values, and aliveness as you support others. Instead of operating on autopilot or intellectual understanding alone, you learn to embody the care you offer—creating more authentic and attuned presence and connection. It also supports you in honoring your needs and boundaries, staying grounded in your values, and bringing resilience and clarity to your work, even in complex or high-pressure contexts.

Complexity, Criticality, and Contextual Understanding

  • Contextual understandings emphasize that pain and healing are shaped by the full circumstances of our lives — not just our biology, but also our environment, relationships, history, and social conditions.

    From a complexity science and systems perspective, pain and other symptoms are emergent properties arising from dynamic interactions across biological, psychological, social, environmental, and meaning-making systems. We see the body not as a machine with isolated parts, nor as a computer with the brain as central processor, but as a complex, adaptive system where symptom patterns emerge from the interplay of factors like stress, trauma, nervous system sensitization, belief systems, learned responses, and social context. Rather than searching for a single cause or linear explanation, complexity invites us to consider how multiple influences — over time and across systems — converge to shape our experience of pain, and how change in one area can ripple through the whole in exploring possibilities for healing.

    Criticality helps us examine how power, social structures, and cultural narratives shape our understanding of health, illness, and care. It encourages us to question assumptions — such as the idea that symptoms are purely individual or biologically determined — and to consider how factors like identities, social locations, and access to care impact lived experience of suffering and healing.

    Together, these frameworks offer a deep and nuanced awareness of how power, culture, and relationships influence not only our bodies and minds but also the possibilities for transformation and liberation. They invite us to see healing and health within the full context of our lives—recognizing the complex systems, histories, and social conditions that shape our experience.

    Rather than viewing pain or symptoms as isolated problems to be fixed, this pillar invites us to consider what’s happening around and within us, including stressors, supports, cultural influences, and past experiences. It helps us move beyond narrow explanations to see how context influences both symptoms and recovery, leading to deeper understanding and more effective, compassionate care.

  • When pain is treated as a personal flaw or mystery to solve, it can be isolating and disempowering. This pillar helps you make sense of your experience within broader systems—biological, cultural, historical, and social—so you’re not carrying the weight alone.

    By seeing the complexity at play, you gain clearer insight, greater agency, more compassion for yourself, and more space to explore healing on your own terms, beyond the pressure to fix or explain everything.

    Additionally, it helps you root in your wholeness and relieves the pressure of finding the “one, right way” because it invites countless threads of possibility toward freedom, joy, and healing. 

  • Working with complexity and context allows you to move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to care. It helps you see the fuller picture of your clients' or patients’ lives—how systemic factors, power dynamics, and lived histories shape health.

    This lens brings depth and nuance to your work, and reduces the pressure to have all the answers—or the one right answer. It also supports your own resilience by affirming that your role isn’t to “fix,” but to partner in meaningful, liberatory healing in a way that honors you and is attuned to your clients’ stories and contexts. 

Six Guiding Principles
for the path we’ll embark on together

  • 1. You are a whole person—not a collection of symptoms (or a professional role)
    Healing is not about isolating pain or “fixing” broken parts. We will engage with your whole self—body, mind, history, and environment—with care and respect.

    2. Healing and learning happens in a nurturing and supportive relationship and context
    You are not alone, and you are not the problem. Your pain exists within a broader story—shaped by life experiences, relationships, and systems around you. Healing includes understanding these connections and providing supportive and loving presence.

    3. It’s not your fault
    Chronic pain can come with blame, shame, or the feeling that you’ve failed. We will create possibilities for releasing those stories and building greater agency, dignity, and compassion toward yourself.

    4. Understanding creates room for change
    Rather than trying to control symptoms, we will support deeper insight into what’s happening and why—so healing becomes about transformation, not just symptom relief.

    5. You matter—your values, your vision, your purpose
    My approach is rooted in respect for what matters most to you. Healing is not about conforming to a standard—it’s about finding alignment with your values and sense of meaning.

    6. You don’t have to do it alone
    We will invite connection, co-creation, and care grounded in mutual respect.

  • 1. Work with wholeness, not fragmentation
    Each pillar in my approach supports attending to the full person—body, mind, story, and context. Rather than targeting isolated symptoms, we engage the complexity and integrity of the person-in-relationship-and-the-world.

    2. Context matters—healing is relational
    The frameworks I integrate trouble decontextualized or individualistic models. They recognize that suffering and healing are shaped by relationships, lived experience, and the systems we live within.

    3. Interrupt blame and reductionism
    As providers, we can unintentionally reinforce shame or internalized failure—we are human, embedded in the systems we are trying to transform. These approaches help reframe pain within broader meaning-making, restoring agency and supporting more compassionate care.

    4. Shift from fixing to understanding and co-creating change
    Instead of aiming for control or symptom elimination alone, these practices help uncover patterns, meaning, and opportunities for deeper transformation in the healing process.

    5. Root your work in ethics and values
    These are not just methods—they’re ways of practicing that are aligned with justice, equity, care, and respect. They support showing up with integrity and clarity about what matters in your work, and your life.

    6. Practice power-with, not power-over
    Effective healing relationships are collaborative. These pillars support shared decision-making, voice, and mutual learning—inviting both client and provider into a space of connection and growth.

Modalities and practices include:  

  • Neuroscience & Psychoneuroimmunology Education. What we believe and understand about our symptoms has an impact on our embodied experience. Learning to make sense of your symptoms in a different light can change your experience of them in real time.

  • Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT). This evidence-based system of psychological techniques helps the brain unlearn persistent pain and repattern neural pathways. Certified at the Mastery Level, I offer collaborative guidance and practice that accounts for your whole self and story. 

  • Mindfulness & Compassion. Healing can feel like a test we’re failing anytime symptoms appear — and the pressure to control or eliminate them can keep us stuck. These practices can help you step out of fixing mode and self-judgment, and meet yourself and others with greater presence and kindness — even in the midst of pain.

  • Emotional Awareness & Expression Therapy (EAET). Depending on our life story, we may learn that certain emotions are unsafe or unacceptable. Pain can become their messenger. This work helps you listen in, befriend the full range of emotions, and move forward with more freedom, hope, and joy. 

  • Nervous System Regulation. A hyperalert, oversensitized, or dysregulated nervous system keeps threat physiology and stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop) activated, eliciting pain and other symptoms. You’ll learn to engage your relaxation response to shift from survival mode to resilience and well-being. 

  • Grief Tending. For many of us, symptoms arise during or after experiences of loss that we were expected to just “get over.” As we honor the full spectrum of human experience, our nervous system can shift from protection to integration. 

  • Self-Trust & Discernment. We get to reclaim our agency and sovereignty instead of our pain, or pain experts, making decisions for us. With discernment you’ll exit the revolving door of medications and treatments, and pare down to what’s truly helpful.

  • Graded Exposure to Movement. With visualizations, affirmations, and small steps, you can gradually regain the strength, flexibility, and trust in your body to get back to the long walks, bike rides, exercise, and dancing you love. 

  • Narrative Practices. Narrative practices recognize that the stories we tell—about our bodies, our pain, our past—shape how we understand ourselves and what healing means. They help reframe illness not as a fixed identity, but as part of a fuller, evolving story, opening up new possibilities for agency, creativity, and healing.

  • Supportive Boundaries. As caring people, we want to be good to others. And, people-pleasing can get in the way of meeting our needs — building resentment and eroding our inner trust. Rooting in your values, you’ll learn how to set kind boundaries that honor your worthiness and create the space and peace you need to heal and thrive. 

  • Restorative Rest. Intentional rest is a radical and tender act of care — especially in a world that asks us to push through and override our needs. This practice invites you to step out of urgency and into a gentler rhythm, not to escape your experience, but to meet it with presence. Through deep listening, you’ll soften your pace and replenish your bodymind. 

  • Joy Reclamation. We’ll identify what brings you peace and pleasure, and help you bring that into your everyday life, even if it sounds impossible. As you expand your capacity for joy, you’ll restore the energy and vitality you need to heal. 

My Lineage

Throughout my life, I’ve found belonging in a lineage of rebels within academia and the healing professions. While I can’t name everyone who has shaped my path or supported my own healing, I want to acknowledge those whose influence feels most present for me right now. It matters to me that you know who I’ve learned from—and that I name and thank those who’ve been a gift in my life. Citing them here isn’t an endorsement of their full body of work, but a way to honor the threads that have informed my own.

To every patient, student, and client—thank you for the privilege of walking beside you, and for all that I’ve learned with you and from you.

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