today you woke up
looked at yourself in the mirror
and said:
i am a beautiful revolution
i am alive
and i can love myself,
and i can begin.
again.
AVA
hello. hola. pialli.
my name is paloma
I am a queer-cis (she/ella) Xicana. A nepantlera. A deeply rooted Nuevamexicana, Indo-Hispaña Norteña, a borderlands mestiza. I spend my time moving between Coast Salish Seattle, Washington and Pueblo, Diné, Apache New Mexico. I live with invisible disability related to a chronic and progressive autoimmune illness and find my kin with queer, disabled, neurodivergent, 2SLGBTQAI+POC folks and humans grounded in healing justice, in practice of disrupting coloniality, and oriented towards collective liberation. I am passionate about my communities and live the path of a nepantlera, living in many in-betweens, finding sacred journey in the complexities and intersections of my identities and experiences of my lineages. I am a mixed media artist, a textile weaver, writer, poeta, photographer, an art-chivist, a chistosa, a land and plant tender, food grower, an animal nurturer, a collective dreamer, a deep thinker, a water protector, a deep listener of tierra madres wisdoms and cycles, a healing justice luchadora, moving at pace with and deep respect of Indigenous peoples and their pluri-visions of decoloniality and liberation,
I am a licensed clinical social justice cultura cura worker (MSW, LICSW), Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT), and Somatic Experiencing practitioner. I am also a Washington state approved clinical supervisor. In addition to cultivating intentional, care-full, spaces for healing, I am an adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington - School of Social Work teaching BA and MSW level social work courses. I also offer immigration evaluations and end-of-life planning. I find deep joy in supporting other community activists, healers, community organizations, social services providers in creative, expressive, collective healing and offer care for the vicarious impacts of daily life as people who care for and support others. I am currently a PhD student in decolonial depth psychology with a focus on Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-psychologies. I am in the early stages of starting a non-profit Arte Querencia that will offer fully funded sabbaticals to artist healers, activists, organizers to explore and engage and experiment with multi-modal art and writing practices, with a focus on expressive arts as a decolonial, liberation, community, Indigenous, earth connected, and embodied method of community wellness and tending.
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“Healing makes room for us to fight in the places where it is necessary and love in the places we long to”
—Prentis Hemphill
Healing cannot by-pass our lived realities. Our lives and present experiences shape us, our wounds, and also our healing journey. We hold contradiction and we can learn to embody what is means to move with this while finding and trusting our centers of wisdom, while tending hope as we grieve, cultivating joy as we rest in grief, and meeting ourselves within and attuned to our bodies, minds, and spirits, just where we are at, without judgement and with playful and inquisitive curiosity. A healing journey has the potential to hold us in our deepest humanity and relationality with other earth kin and each other, as we as we struggle, challenge, voice up, truth tell, deconstruct, de/internalize and resist pathology, contextualize, imagine, dream differently and “(re)right, (re)write, (re)rite” (Cutcha Risling Baldy). I believe in healing as our deepest and fiercest resistance to oppression, it is survivance, it is a way to continue cultura and healing for community thrivance that moves beyond survival, that leaves evidence of our power, and works towards liberation in the practices of embodied reclamation, metamorphic transformation, (re)membering and (r)evolution. I am here to support your vision of decolonial healing and liberation.
Healing is a sacred space, a vulnerable space, that requires deep presence and intention, humility, and building trust and moving into and with our practices, in our own visions. I honor this unique space and relationship of healing with care and meet others with gratitude, openness, and curiosity. I honor that showing up for you means I must continue to show up for me and be rooted and embody the practices, the values, the learnings that I offer and the words I speak. My cultural, somatic, and expressive art practices keep me humble, curious, centered, and connected to this healing I believe so deeply in; the creative and generative, the innate, embodied wisdom, that is sometimes painful, and also joyful, journeying in our healing entails meeting the pain and the beauty and joy. Every being is deserving of healing and care. Every being is deserving of being witnessed. Every being is deserving of thriving.
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I am grounded in the work of tending to all the ways coloniality has been and continues to impact wellness and healing. Tending to decoloniality in therapy and healing is a task I take up with support from mentors, elders, other healers, community, writers, artists, and academics. I am rooted and responsible to way that holds my own support and growth my own healing journey and how this translates to supporting you. Coloniality, imperialism, capitalism, racism/anti-blackness, ableism, heteronormativity, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and classism are important contexts to understanding your needs and honoring your full health and wellness. I ground myself in pluriversal, interconnected, and reciprocal knowledges, relational intentionality, radical uncertainty, and fierce resistance, to continually disrupts and understand how coloniality takes shape and the ways our relation to it impacts our healing. I resist and persist to dismantle the harmful systems rooted in racist, ableist, earth exploiting, colonial thinking. I follow guidance from Indigenous psychologies, liberation psychologies, community psychologist, non-academic brilliant thinkers, disability justice, abolition movements, cultura cura, barrio medicines, poets and artists, activists, earth and animal wisdoms, and ancestors.
I am deeply to committed to and center my work with the values of the communities that raised me, that call me kin, and call me home, that I have grown and continue to learn with, hold me, and that I feel fierce with. I primarily support Xicanx, Indo-Hispaña/o, Latine, Indigenous, Native, First Nations peoples, multiethnic and bi-racial BIPoC folks, people who move across many fronteras, or have cross socio-political geographies, experiences, and realities of unjust limitations or confinements, and people drawn to or committed to the wisdoms, resources and grounding in their cultural practices, their herencia, Mother Earth/Tierra Madre/Pachamama/Coatlicue/Tonantzin and other than human kin, and people who find home in many places or have to leave homelands for survival and survivance. I am a disability justice and anti-ableist centered healer, coming from my own experiences of disability, being raised by intergenerational disabled caregivers, and over 27 years of community love, care work, and activism in collaboration with disabled and neurodivergent peoples. As a cis-queer Xicana, I am a Nepantlera, I carry the wisdoms and archives of lands, geographies, and hidden places as I continue to traverse among the multiple places I call home, rooted in the liminal spaces and connected to waters as a unique learning space of being-ness.
I support healing in all the ways healing happens; tending to the personal, spiritual, somatic, expressive, creative, embodied, the forgotten, the re-membered, the silenced, what haunts, the loudness, the historical, political, economic, social, and tending to the awareness of how coloniality is insidious and how we navigate, refuse the oppressive contexts, by which we are living in and do our healing work in - all this and us in our unique healing wisdoms are the shapes of our journeys.
I do not believe in pathologization of any aspect of our being or lived experiences and instead seek to understand and be with complexity and context by which our healing takes place. I practice healing that attunes to somatic wisdom, is creative and expressive, is founded in practices of slowing, listening, and deep curiosity. I seek to offer practices that I have been in practice of in my own healing. Healing that calls our wounded spirit home from wandering (dis-association, susto) and allows us to reclaim an embodied querencia, queerencia, collective capacidades in right relation with the lands we live upon, the places we feel into our most authentic self, the places we find sanctuary, and how we are able to connect with our deeper wisdom-strengths, and gifts, honor our collective survivance, radical resilience, and healing within our lineages, our ancestors, our lands, at our multiple identity intersections, and among our cultura.
I offer healing that meets you - where you desire to be met. My offerings are multimodal, culturally integrative, somatically attuned, and creative, expressive centered. My approaches include plática/narrative/cuentista ways of telling, creative/expressive arts, somatic experiencing, somatic abolition, sensorimotor psychotherapy, EMDR, grounded in plural-wisdoms of Xicanx, Indigenous peoples, Liberation psychology, Community psychology and Eco-psychology. See some of the books and art that guides me HERE.
Academics
Currently pursuing a PhD in decolonial Depth Psychology with a focus on Indigenous, Community, Liberation & Eco Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.
Master of Social Work (MSW) focus on Community Centered Integrative Practice and Multicultural Mental Health, University of Washington, Seattle WA. June 2014,
BA in Ethnic Studies, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. June 2008,
BA in History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. June 2008,
License
Licensed Clinical Social Worker, License # LW61167644, Washington State
Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, International Expressive Arts Therapy Association
Certifications
Body Trust Professional Training. Center for Body Trust (2024). Expressive Arts Therapy Certificate, Northwest Creative and Expressive Arts Institute (2019) Somatic Experiencing Somatic Experiencing International (3 years) (2020 – 2023) Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (2 years) (2020 – 2021) Somatic Stress Release, The Embody Lab (2023) Embodied Transformation & Liberation, The Embody Lab (2022) Somatic Attachment & Healing ,The Embody Lab 2022) EMDR I & II Certificate, EMDR Institute (2019 - 2020) EMDR and Expressive Arts Certificate, Institute for Creative Mindfulness (2022 - 2023) WPATH Gender Affirming Letter Writing, Washington State Society for Clinical Social Work (2022) Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, International Association of Trauma Professionals, (2019) Psychodynamic Clinical Theory and Practice Certification, Wellspring Family Services, (1 year) (2017) Lifespan Integration I & II, Lifespan Integration Institute (2019) Professional Mediation Certificate, University of Oregon, School of Law (2006)
My 27 years of experience in community care work includes working in non-profit social services, grassroots organizing, intimate partner/interpersonal violence/abuse, with unhoused substance using folks, conducting vulnerable adult abuse investigations, government and community violence intervention/prevention, supporting sexually exploited youth, mental health court advocacy, psychiatric abuse awareness, disability services, disability justice, independent living centers, as a city human rights commission, as a restorative justice facilitator, victim/offender mediator, intergroup dialogues facilitation, and trauma healing at the intersections of mixed race, bi-cultural and intersectional identities, Indigenous/Native/First Nations, Xicanx/Latine/Indo-hispaña, Queer, disabled, neurodivergent folks, cultura-centered and integrative healing. I believe in psychiatric abolition, decarcerating disability, racial justice, and decolonial and liberatory plurivisions.