About Me
My Story
People who know me well would say I’m thoughtful, calm, honest, open-minded, and that I have a sense of humor.
I was born and raised in a central part of Los Angeles. Growing up surrounded by rich diversity and traveling from a young age cultivated cultural humility, as well as a deep appreciation of the complexity and pain of our shared human experience.
After spending 7 years on the East Coast completing college and my first career as an event planner (including a brief stint as a polygraph examiner), I returned to California with the insight that I wanted to become a therapist. My first job in mental health was as a case manager helping federal inmates with mental health issues reacclimate to society. It gave me rigorous clinical experience, and further exposed me to the pervasive systemic obstacles marginalized people experience when faced with trauma, inequity, and mental health struggles.
When my life unexpectedly turned upside down a few years later due to grief and loss, I began a spiritual path that led me to pursue a yoga teaching certification. I then spent a year living at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur where I met my husband, and eventually entered California Institute of Integral Studies’ (CIIS) Somatic Psychology graduate program in San Francisco to train as a somatic psychotherapist.
My Clinical Experience + Orientation
I was led to the world of somatic psychotherapy (also known as body psychotherapy) by my interest in Dr. Richard Miller’s Yoga Nidra work with the VA and traumatized veterans. I am drawn to treatment modalities that on the surface appear unconventional and non-Western, but in actuality are backed by research and used by large government/educational/medical entities to bring about healing and change. This includes, but is not limited to, mindfulness, yoga, meditation, breath work, sound healing, nutritional psychology, and transpersonal (spiritual) psychotherapy.
I began my clinical training as a therapist in 2018 offering group therapy with neurodiverse children outdoors in nature. I then worked with youth and families in the foster care and juvenile justice systems, and in 2022 I began private practice in San Luis Obispo, CA where I currently offer individual, family, and couples therapy.
In the past 10 years, I’ve completed trainings in Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal Theory, Cranio Sacral Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Integrative Psychiatry, Ecotherapy, and Sound Healing in Psychotherapy.
I integrate Emotionally Focused Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Somatics, Interpersonal Neurobiology, Polyvagal Theory, as well as Humanistic and Transpersonal psychology to provide client-centered, trauma-informed, attachment-based, and culturally humble psychotherapy.
My current goal is to complete certification in Ecotherapy so that I can extend my offerings to include healing experiences in nature, which is the simplest and fastest way to connect with what neuroscientist Lisa Miller refers to as our “awakened brain.”
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct you and you will call it fate.”
“Feeling compassion for ourselves in no way releases us from responsibility for our actions. Rather, it releases us from the self hatred that prevents us from responding to our life with clarity and balance.”
“The body is always in tune, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man’s being to associate itself to some extent to the body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit, and through its spirit, the divine Ground.”
