About Me

The oldest of four children born and raised in the Boston area, I learned from an early age to take care of others, minimize my own emotions, and perform well academically in order to receive positive attention. I escaped into books, school, and eventually friendships to cope with difficulties at home. After attending Columbia College in New York City, my escapism took the form of wanderlust. I spent three years teaching English in Japanese junior high schools, followed by another year traveling through Asia and volunteering in India.  

It wasn’t until my late twenties, when undertaking a yoga teacher training back in NYC to heal from an injury and follow my spiritual interests, that I began to discover how disembodied, anxious, and disconnected from my own emotions I was. Much of my healing has involved coming home to my own body and learning to feel, accept, and express my emotions and myself.

Through teaching yoga at a Manhattan public high school and elsewhere, I realized that I wanted to deepen the healing I was experiencing internally and supporting in others. To do so, I knew needed to gain a greater understanding of trauma and how it manifests in our bodies as well as our psyches. I followed this inner calling and moved to the Bay Area in 2013 to obtain a Masters in Counseling Psychology with a focus on Somatic Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Since graduating from CIIS in 2016, I have been running my own therapy practice, initially under the auspices of Grateful Heart Holistic Therapy Center. I also spent several years working as an elementary school counselor at a Berkeley public school as an employee of Bay Area Community Resources. From 2016-2017 and 2023-2024, I completed two year-long certificate programs in Mindfulness and Embodied Psychotherapy, respectively, through the Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science’s Contemplative Psychotherapy Certificate Program.

My experiences living and traveling abroad and working in diverse public schools have taught and continue to inform me about cultural humility, interdependence, and the diversity as well as universal aspects of the human condition. I acknowledge and work to understand my privilege as a white, able-bodied, cisgendered queer woman who is married to a man. I live in Oakland with my husband and daughter and am a performance artist and regular participant in the Bay Area Pun-Off.