Welcome
Hello friend, and welcome to my website. I am happy that you have found your way here and imagine that you're in a process of exploration that's been unfolding for a while. When a person arrives at a place where they have decided to reach out for help, they have often struggled alone. There is a fine distinction to be made between suffering without trust in oneself and in the process of growth, on the one hand, and, on the other, a moving through difficult maturational processes with an awareness of the wisdom that resides within, guiding us, enjoining us with community, embedding us in larger systems, and reminding us that we, with all the suffering, have a place and purpose in this lifetime.
Psychological suffering exists on different levels and manifests in different ways, in psyche, body, spirit, interpersonally, socially, both consciously and unconsciously. We crash and stumble over it. We can sink into it, often only with the question of "why?" or "why me?" It is more important to ask what it is that is happening. What are the causes and conditions that have led me, in this place and in this time, to this uniquely "me" dilemma? When we can be curious in this way, we see that our grappling is set within a vast familial, social, historical, ecological, and energetic landscape; nested and overlapping systems much larger and more complex than our conscious psyches can comprehend. ​In realizing this, new questions arise with an urgency that can be existential.
How do we live consciously with oneself and with others, within communities and systems, and as a part of this Earth? How do we show up for ourselves, our friends, partner/s, and our communities? Although there are many forms of approach, there are no absolute answers. Ultimately there is nowhere absolute to settle, and we grow with time to trust the process of coming undone in the service of ongoing growth and evolving relations with self and other.​
About me & my approach
As with you, my journey to this point has been long unfolding. A lifetime. It has consisted of trauma, of right and wrong, whole and broken, sick and healthy, responsibility and ignorance, pride and fear, and of relationship and alienation. And also, when collapsed into the present moment, these dichotomies vaporize and exhaustion softens into acceptance.
​​I provide a safe space to listen deeply, to thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, fantasies, and bodily experience. By listening in new ways, we expand our capacity to hold more, respond with greater flexibility, clarity and ease, develop compassion, and become empowered to make positive changes, both personally and in the communities we're a part of.​​​
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My work is based in the understanding that body, psyche and spirit are unitary and that our suffering and joy in any of these areas leads to suffering and joy in the others. My work is trauma-informed, attachment-based, and neurodivergence-affirmative. I regularly use mindfulness skills and techniques from Internal Family Systems to assist my clients in developing their ability to expand their awareness, self witness, and integrate parts that have been dissociated.
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​​My work is also informed by an understanding of how systems work, how our embeddedness in systems can lead many of us, particularly those who are members of historically marginalized communities, to hold burdens of suffering that are not of our own making. These burdens might be unhealed traumatic wounding from our ancestors. It might be collective trauma from legacies of oppression or domination. Therapy and rites of passage are a powerful way to transform this suffering into empowerment, community, transformation, and liberation (both individual and collective).
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I was born and raised in California (Chumash territory) and Cape Town, South Africa, and very much identify as a west coaster, even though I've lived on the East coast for many years, because of jobs, community, education and other good reasons. I am trans-queer and have arrived at this "identity", or process, in my adulthood after many years of weaving through various forms of queerness.
I am culturally Jewish and Buddhist, with a longstanding practice in the Soto Zen tradition and a daily Ashtanga Yoga practice. I have experience with spiritual/existential emergency and see this type of experience as a powerful initiation and rite of passage, as a closure of one phase of a life and emergence into a new one. I've learned that this process is ongoing and ebbs and flows in accordance with the conditions of one's relationship to mind-heart-body, family, community, society, and history. My practice includes the study and use of entheogens for the purposes of therapeutic growth and spiritual evolution.