“I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul” -Joy Harjo

The most important aspect of your healing will be the therapeutic alliance you build with your therapist/healer. The modalities and foundations for practice will also be something you want to consider for fit. I am trained in and utilize several approaches in my therapeutic practice. The therapeutic modalities and healing orientations I work with, are ones I have spent a considerable amount of time in deep study and practice with, and also have experienced them as part of my own healing journey.

My approaches overall are relational, eclectic, culture honoring, holistic, collaborative, creative, multi-expressive, and somatic based. I support wellness through approaches that address embodied, sensory, cognitive, social, emotional, expressive and creative needs, with an emphasis on culturally resonant, person affirming, and body-mind-spirit integrative healing. As we begin our work together, we will explore what modalities may be the best fit for you and your healing needs. Depending on your personal and therapeutic goals and we may use one or integrate multiple modalities over the course of our work together.

I extend gratitude for the collective wisdoms of colleagues, mentors, beloved community, personal healers, activists, BIPoC, Queer, and disabled activists who have supported the learning and practice of these healing orientations. I also honor the collective and intergenerational wisdoms that live with me and exist from experiences at my own identity intersections, ancestral wisdoms, traditional healers, and from many others who have shared their wisdoms about healing and liberation across time, many struggles, and history.

Somatic and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

  • Somatics is a broad term used for working with and honoring somatic (soma = body) experiences, the sensory, embodied, felt sense, movement experiences as part of healing. It is an orientation and approach that supports individual healing, community healing, collaborative generative work, and abolition practices.

    All therapeutic modalities that are informed by “somatics” have roots in multiple global Indigenous practices that have existed in communities long before they were formulated into Western therapeutic models and approaches.

    Somatic therapy supports the healing of traumatic and wounding experiences, developmental, complex, historical, intergenerational trauma, social/systemic/institutional trauma, chronic stressors, anxieties, and living with chronic or terminal illness, or physical pain.

    Somatic practices can help us to develop a deeper relational attunement with ourself, others and the non-human world. It offer practices for present mindfulness, grounding, nervous system regulation, ongoing needs assessment, self-compassion, and bearing witness to new experiences.

    Somatics helps us reclaim our own authentic, sensory, and expressive being-ness and in how we experience and engage with the world and find healing that is sustainable.

  • Description text goes here

  • Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a therapeutic modality for trauma and attachment issues. SP welcomes the body as an integral source of information which can guide resourcing and the accessing and processing of challenging, traumatic, and developmental experience. SP is a holistic approach that includes somatic, emotional, and cognitive processing and integration.

    SP enables clients to discover and change habitual physical and psychological patterns that impedes optimal functioning and well-being. SP is helpful in working with dysregulated activation and other effects of trauma, as well as the limiting belief systems of developmental issues.

    SP helps clients cultivate their strengths, while providing enough challenge to stimulate growth, long lasting change, and well-being.

    Principles of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

    Organicity

    Organicity refers to the internal wisdom of all living systems. Thus, the therapist does not “heal” the client; rather the healing power and intelligence is within and each person has their our own unique, mysterious and emergent growth path.

    Unity

    We exist within a complex organic system of interdependent parts. Unity acknowledges that we are all connected, and that we have individual and group differences. Although unity is ever-present, it is recognized and experienced more fully through communication.

    Mind/Body/Spirit Holism

    Mind, body and spirit are intimately related, essential aspects of each of us. We keep the whole person in mind, and consider mind body and spirit in context and relationship, rather than work with these elements in isolation.

    Non-Violence

    Our work is not forceful. We believe that people do not need to be “fixed” or changed. We avoid criticizing, judging, or pathologizing, and we encourage curiosity, and follow the natural organicity to promote change.

    Mindfulness/Presence

    We encourage awareness of present moment internal experience–both ours and our clients’–as well as the impact we have on others, and others on us, We strive to be in deep resonance with our clients, cultivating a state of presence that is conducive to intuition and inspiration.

    Relational Alchemy

    We recognize that each relationship has a unique nature that creates something bigger than its parts. We honor deep, authentic connection as well as interpersonal challenges that are avenues of personal growth, accepting the imperfection of the human condition.

  • Most of us have not had teachings, safety, access support, capacity, and/or opportunities to learn and continually practice being in curiosity, non-judgement and witness of what it is to be present with and attuned to our embodied, felt-sense, sensory, expressive experiences. While it is useful, and at times mandatory for survival, to be distant, disconnected, dissociated from our bodies, if this happens over and again, overtime it becomes an ineffective way to support healing and wellness. The resounding impacts of trauma, soul wounding, susto, systemic and historical harms, chronic stress/distress, overwhelm that remains amplified, often keeps us from fully processing our experiences in the way we need and deserve.

    Difficult, traumatic, and overwhelming experiences often become held in the body in different ways - embodied patterns, chronic tension, heightened, decreased, or overwhelmed sensory experiences (that may not be typical or at be at odds with our unique sensory patterns and needs), chronic nervous system dysregulation, chronic pain or illness, disturbing or intrusive thoughts, non-helpful dissociative experiences, and other challenges to the ways the body may function or processes information.This is what we often call symptoms.

    Somatic practices helps us learn how to welcome our body experiences and wisdoms as an integral and important source of information and guide for processing, grounding, resourcing, and healing that cognitive therapies do not.

  • My work in somatics and sensorimotor psychotherapy is shaped by formal training, I am formally trained in Somatic Experiencing (3 years) and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (2 years). My work is also grounded in the traditional healing practices of my own cultures and is understood intimately through my own healing journey with these practices. I am also in connection and healing community with Indigenous/Xicanx healers who are my mentors, other practitioners of embodied healing, and resources from many BIPoC wisdoms who share learnings about collective, culturally honoring, abolitionist, and community generative somatics.

    I often integrate somatic and sensorimotor therapeutic practices with expressive arts, EMDR, and narrative/plática/story therapies. My work with somatics and sensorimotor psychotherapy offers a holistic approach that includes somatic/sensory/vibrational, emotional/affective, image/meaning making/storytelling, movement/expressive, and cognitive processing integration.

    I practice somatic work through an anti-oppressive, decolonized, embodied liberation, person-centered neurosensory honoring, non-violent and collaborative, culturally responsive, relationally attuned, non-appropriative, and culturally honoring way.

  • Find out about Generative Somatics HERE

    Find out about Cultural Somatics and Somatic Abolitionism HERE

    Find out about Somatic Archaeology HERE

    Learn more at the Embodiment Institute HERE

    Listen to the Embodiment Time Podcast HERE

    Official website of Somatic Experiencing International HERE

    Read about Somatic Therapy HERE

    Official website for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy HERE

    Listen to Working with Trauma from the Bottom Up - Pat Ogden HERE

Expressive Arts Therapy

  • Expressive and creative arts as practices that are deeply rooted in global Indigenous wisdom and knowledge about healing and are powerful ways to heal trauma, grieve, support regulation of our nervous systems, reduce stress, disrupt and heal the impacts of challenging experiences, speak truth to power, learn more about who we are, tap into non-linear ways of knowing, discover what moves us and inspires us, how we process, grow, and engage with self and others and discover new perceptions of self and the world.

    You do not have to be an “artist” to heal and discover your gifts and wisdoms of healing with expressive arts.

    I offer expressive arts therapy using a multitude and integrative modalities including visual arts, collage, expressive writing and poetry, music, Dancing Mindfulness© (Jaime Marich) and other expressive movement, 3D assemblage, clay sculpture, self-portraits, photography, altar making, mask making, eco-art, and multiple fibers weaving.

  • Expressive arts therapy is different from what is typically known as “art therapy” in that it is multi-modal and the therapist does not use a person’s art to diagnose or interpret. Expressive arts focuses on the process of creating and expressing rather than a projected or determined outcome.

  • Expressive Arts Therapy works to make visible that which is often subconscious or difficult to express in other ways. Expressive arts therapy aims to provide a space to support de-intellectualizing healing, disrupting perfectionism, or stuck patterns in a gentle, reflective, positive, inquisitive, non-judgmental way and a space to focus on process more and outcome less, in witness and acceptance. Expressive arts therapy is also an embodied healing that merges with our innately creative spirits, cultural and traditional healing knowledges, and works well in relation to other healing methods for a more holistic healing experience.

  • I was trained in Expressive Arts Therapy in a year long program. I have 4 years of post-graduate experience, supervision, mentorship, and ongoing training. I am currently pending my application for formal credentialing as a Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT). I have been a member of the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association since 2018.

EMDR Therapy

  • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy is a psychotherapeutic modality that supports healing from traumatic experiences or the lingering effects of an event(s) that overwhelmed a person’s system and was unable to be processed in a healing way. EMDR tends to many traumatic experiences and anything that was deeply impactful, disturbing, difficult, or chronically distressing. Unhealed experiences manifest as many things including anxiety, depression, PTSD, C-PTSD, mood or emotional distress, dysregulation or other symptoms. EMDR Therapy also helps to metabolize chronic experiences and decrease or eliminate the negative feelings, beliefs, and felt/real impacts of events/distress. EMDR is different than talk therapy as it does not rely on narrative or details to tend to the distress and helps the nervous system and brain to reorganize experience information with the support of embodied mindfulness and holding awareness in the present moment.

  • EMDR practitioners supports healing by helping folks to activate the difficult memories, connected to images, felt-senses and current negative beliefs and support the adaptive processing of these memories and negative beliefs through movements called bilateral stimulation (eye movements following a light dot, tapping, sound, or other forms of bilateral movements like walking or moving in alteration).

    Bilateral stimulation is used to tend to a particular memory while asking the client to hold different aspects of that event or thoughts in their mind and track different responses and images that arise through the process, while also staying present and embodied in the present and felt-sense moment.

    EMDR therapy helps the meaning of painful events to transform in emotionally integrative and adaptive ways.

  • I was initially trained through the EMDR International Association (EMDRIA) in 2019/20. I also trained in EMDR with an Expressive Arts Therapy focus through Jaime Marich’s Institute for Creative Mindfulness in 2022. I am currently working towards becoming a certified EMDR provider and consultant. I am also in training and working towards Advanced Certification in Dissociation Studies for EMDR.

  • Official website of EMDR International Association HERE

    Dr. Jamie Marich TEDx Talk (2015): Healing The Wounds that Keep Us Stuck HERE

    Dr. Nadine Burke Harris TEDxTalk (2015): How Childhood Trauma Affects Healing Across the Lifetime HERE

    EMDRIA: Introduction to EMDR Therapy (2019) HERE

    Healing from Systemic Racism Using EMDR and Brainspotting with David Archer HERE

    Eye Movement May Be Able to Heal Our Traumas - Tricia Walsh HERE

    Hand Model of the Human Brain: Dr. Dan Siegel HERE

    EMDR Therapy: Explaining Dual Attention Stimulus HERE

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy

  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is a form of psychotherapy that incorporates a combination of cognitive therapy, meditation, breathing exercises, and the cultivation of a present-oriented, non-judgmental attitude called "mindfulness."

  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) builds upon some of the principles of cognitive therapy and uses present mind techniques to allow for a more conscious attention to a person's thoughts and feelings without placing any judgments upon them, or without getting caught up in what should be, could have been, or might occur in the future.

    MBCT provides an opportunity to learn a deeper sense of presence with the here and now. MBCT supports interoceptive awareness – the ability to identify, access, understand, and respond in a more self-attuned way to patterns of internal signals, emotional and sensory experiences. MBCT offers tools to disrupt and release negative thought patterns that may be fuel to depression, anxieties, and stress responses. The combination of mindfulness and cognitive therapy is what makes MBCT so effective as it help you to notice your feelings as they arise, to be more present in the here and now, while using cognitive techniques to interrupt automatic thought processes and tend to emotional experiences.

  • I have taken classes with Mindfulness Northwest. I also am practiced at integrating mindfulness approaches with other modalities such as Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR and expressive arts therapy.

    I have been in my own personal healing practice of mindfulness skills, cultivating mindful present awareness, and somatic attunement for several years.

    I deeply value a consistent practice of integrating mindfulness practices into my daily life and therapeutic practices.

  • Find out about Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy HERE

Lifespan Integration

  • Lifespan Integration (LI) relies on the innate ability of the body-mind to heal itself. There are many different LI protocols. Some protocols heal birth trauma and or pre-verbal trauma, and others heal attachment deficits which may have occurred during specific stages of development. All protocols include repetitions of a Time Line of memories and images. Viewing repetitions of one’s ‘life review’ both integrates past experience and proves to the client’s body-mind system that time has passed. This ‘proof’ occurs at a deeper level than is possible with commonly used cognitive behavioral [talk therapy] methods.

    If a client’s present problem is caused or informed by a past experience, the LI standard protocol can be used to guide the client to imaginally re-visit the past experience, bringing into the past whatever is needed to resolve the memory. After the memory is resolved, the therapist leads the client repeatedly through time to the present using a Time Line of visual images of scenes from the client’s life.

  • In Lifespan Integration (LI) therapy, a clients’ movement forward through their lifespan timeline is done in a way that clients watch multiple ‘movies’ of their lives. Each movie is a different rendition of the same life story.

    Different themes emerge which are often accompanied by new insights. These ‘movies’ are spontaneously generated by clients’ unconscious minds. Through watching repeated ‘movies’ of their life stories, clients see how the past continues to impact their behavior and choices in the present.

    Each repetition of the protocol shows the client a slightly different ‘moving picture show’. LI works well even with people who have trouble remembering their pasts. During Lifespan Integration therapy, clients who began with memory gaps are eventually able to connect the pieces of their lives into a coherent whole.

    Lifespan Integration is a very gentle method which works on a deep neural level to change patterned responses and outmoded defensive strategies. LI therapy helps people connect unpleasant feelings and dysfunctional patterns with the memories of the past events from which these feelings and strategies originated. Making these connections at a deep level of the body-mind ‘re-sets’ the neural system so that it is more in line with the current life situation.

  • I was trained in Level 1 and Level 2 of Lifespan Integration in 2018 through the Lifespan Integration Institute.

  • View the official website of Lifespan Integration HERE

“The future is born in the present.” -Dr. Jennifer Mullan

Therapeutic Foundations

  • It is foundational and necessary to healing liberation to be in our healing journey within decolonial and depathologizing spaces, by de-centering euro-centric, colonial values, practices, processes as the "norm" and all the ways these have become known as ways of being and healing but are actually deep harm.

  • Our cultural and ancestral roots, lineages, ceremonies, practices, and medicines matter in our healing journey.

  • I anchor my healing in querencia, cultivating the place we find our most fierce and authentic self, the home we call our spirits to, the way we see our ancestors in ourselves, how we find ourselves in our history, developing a concientización (critical consciousness) about who we are, how we came to be, and how we want to how we hold, share, grow and connect to our resilience for liberation, and how we discover ourselves as sacred as BIPoC peoples and tend to our healing within our histories and lineages.

  • Creative expression and taking delight and power through art is deeply healing and liberating. It is important to re-learn or to emphasize play, exploration, curiosity, and honor our own creative being-ness and express ourselves into healing and wellness.

  • We are healing in a wounded world. Anti-oppression and critical race consciousness as an embodied practice is an important orientation in the therapeutic relationship and space. In understanding the ways experiences of oppression, race/racism, privilege and power are part of your unique healing journey, we are better able to support our remembering, gathering, revisioning, ways of disrupting internalized harmful beliefs and wounds, the ways we enact harm on ourself and/or others. It is necessary to understand how healing and wellness is connected to the full context of experiences, while expanding our access to more culturally relevant, decolonized, anti-racist, anti-oppressive healing practices that are crucial to our healing in a world of wounds.

  • When we heal ourselves, we heal our communities, and our communities heal us. We are healing for future generations and ancestors; this is a form of justice and honors our collective liberation and individual birthrights.

  • Disability Justice, disrupting ableism, and disability histories are deeply important orientations for our healing, whether you identify as disabled or not. I honor the ways bodies are unique and essentially brilliant, and have multiple and varied ways of expressing and being known. All the ways bodies hold many wisdoms, process, move, sense, learn, communicate, engage/disengage, receive and give care, have both strengths and needs that deserve to be fully met, and have cellular healing knowledge.

  • All bodies are powerful, not despite our unique complexities but because of them; complexity is another word for intersectional, existing in fluid and expansive spectrums, and prisms of experiences that are our wholeness.

  • I honor the role of earth wisdom and reciprocation with non-human relationships for healing.

  • LGBTQAI+, Two Spirit, gender fluid, gender non-conforming and gender expansive peoples deserve fabulously affirmative, deeply knowledgeable and culturally and contextually resonant care that holds genuine space for being known, seen, and witnessed in fierceness and in their own unique journeys. Healing is Queer Liberation.

  • All people deserve to know what fierce embodiment means to them. Embodied healing includes fat and disabled body liberation, understanding and expressing our sensory needs, having access for body needs, feeling liberated in our bodies, and developing Body Trust®