Writer | Speaker | Artist | Cycle-Breaker | Mindful Life Coach
Break free from toxic relationships with Fierce Boundaries: Practical Skills and Somatic Exercises for Healing in a Traumatized World
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I am a life-long student of the human experience.
My story is one of coming home to myself after decades of exile and self-abandonment, repairing a ruptured relationship with my body, and giving myself permission to belong wherever I am, and to be who I am unapologetically. Through that process, I have come to see somatic work, artistic expression, and nature-based practices as radical acts of reclamation.
I believe that cultivating embodied mindful self-expression can ripple healing through our lives and our communities. When we slow down and meet our experience with curiosity and care, we begin to live with greater clarity, courage, and presence. In being willing to turn our individual attention inward and cultivate mental fitness and compassion within ourselves, we can also radiate healing across past and future generations.
The Heart of My Work
My work blends mindfulness, trauma studies, storytelling, somatic psychology, and creative practice. It is informed by a doctorate in body–mind health, a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction, my Fulbright experience as an anthropologist in the Guatemalan Highlands, and more than twenty years as an educator and therapeutic guide.
I write and speak about nervous system health, mindful leadership, adoption and belonging, relational healing, emotional boundaries, and the practice of staying present through complexity. Each offering invites an honest exploration of our human experience, our relationship to being alive, and our deeper capacity to respond with kindness, integrity, and care.
I give people the skills they need to…
Interrupt
Interrupt cycles of burnout, anxiety, toxic stress, and emotional violence so they can connect with what truly matters
Investigate
Identify self-limiting beliefs, habits of mind, core patterns, and protective strategies that are keeping them stuck
Restore
Build self-trust, embodied confidence, attentional control, agency, and equanimity so they can rewrite their stories of belonging
Repair
Create boundaries, skills, and practices that enhance wellbeing, improve relationships, impact communities, and ripple healing across generations.
The Art of Trauma Healing
Exploring Creativity as Contemplative Practice for Individual and Collective Wellbeing
When I use painting as a mindfulness practice, I get to immerse myself in the thing I am painting. Become the thing. When I paint an owl, I get to focus my attention on owl. When I painted my dog in a paint-your-pet workshop, I got to spend the workshop feeling the warm fuzzies for him, even though he wasn’t even there.
My senses come online fully, I surrender to flow, and I release attachment to any outcome, achievement, or form. This gets me out of my head, and a way to shift into being mode for a while. If I’m lucky, I’ll even enter a flow state, where time and space drop away, and I’m just in it.
“Being mode” and “flow states” are critical components of trauma healing work. The nervous system can become hijacked after trauma and survivors can find themselves living in a chronic state of hyperarousal (anxious, reactive, tense, hyper vigilant). In order to integrate the traumatic experience, it’s helpful to start from a solid foundation of resource and regulation. So regulating the nervous system is the first and most critical step of trauma-healing work.
Art can be very regulating and supportive in managing post-traumatic stress because the body is moving, the right side of the brain is engaged, and this encourages a state of calm presence.
Emotional abuse is relational trauma.
Voice notes, emails, and text messages don’t leave purple marks that can be covered up with makeup or disguised with sunglasses. But when you are in a power-under relationship with a family member, friend, or co-worker, episodes of emotional violence can leave you trembling, hyper-vigilant, rattled, and afraid, just like a physical attack.
The damage may be hidden, but the trauma is real. There may not be eyewitnesses, video footage that would stand up in court, or a single, identifiable incident of acute threat, but ongoing psychological maltreatment is a legitimate cause of complex post-traumatic stress disorder that can leave deep scars.
As an adoptee, relationships are tricky. Attachment wounds leave deep scars.
The lack of secure attachment in a child’s early years has been linked to a large number of mental illnesses, unhealthy coping strategies, and addictive behaviors. When children experience neglect, abandonment, or a primary caregiver who is chronically unavailable or dysregulated, this form of exile creates a core wound to our sense of belonging in the world. Even intra-uterine and generational trauma can stay with us into adulthood, causing us to experience chronic anxiety, depression, and a lack of connection.
When we bring care and attention to our childhood wounding, we can start to recognize the patterns and strategies that were once essential for getting our needs met, but are no longer serving us. With that information, we can start to offer ourselves the love and care we didn’t get to receive when we were young, and transform our relationship to belonging in the world.
