“…love is an interactive process. It's about what we do, not just what we feel. It's a verb”

- bell hooks

about

I’m a seasoned, creative practitioner, offering attuned, responsive, embodied listening, playfulness, and warmth. I carry deep respect for the turbulent and beautiful practice of living Earth in these times. I’ve been developing as a therapist for 25 years and developing as a teacher and group leader for 39 years.

CREDENTIALS

  • Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California

  • Registered Marriage and Family Therapist in Canada

  • Registered Clinical Counselor in BC

  • Registered Canadian Art Therapist

  • Certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist

  • Approved Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Consultant

  • Faculty and Trainer for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute

  • Faculty member with the Kutenai Art Therapy Institute.

  • Certified Soul Motion Improvisational Dance-Movement Teacher

  • Registered Yoga Teacher-200hrs

 

I carry an ever deepening creative synthesis of Movement Based Expressive Arts and Somatic Psychology, Play & Improvisation, for working with individuals, couples, families, and groups.

I carry the fruits of 25 years immersive reflexive practice and learning in working with the impacts of complex and collective trauma woven with historical and contemporary systemic oppression. I’m a trainer and mentor of younger therapists doing this work.

I am a student of poetry and movement, a student of ecological relations, and a multimodal artist - weaving movement, visual art, creative writing, photography, theater, song, play, and mixed modes improvisation.

I am a gender fluid Queer woman, pronouns she/they. I am part of a neurodivergent, Queer family. I listen with my whole body of resonance, rooted in deep learning about supple embodied attunement. I am Profoundly, Unilaterally Deaf, and am disabled by cacophonous soundscapes in hardscaped human-made places. I am neurodivergent, as a Deaf human, who is HSP, with hyperacusis and misophonia. My sensory experience is very engaged, sensitive, alive to the biodiverse play of the sensory magic of life. I seek places of quietude and hold deep appreciation for the practice of creative solitude and intimate listening presence within Land. As a vocalist I work with prosody, rhythm, and sound-tending through this resonant body instrument. I am a group enlivener, group facilitator, embodied storyteller, and teacher conjuring sensitive supple magic in the collective through Relational Ecology.

I am a committed learner and practitioner of embodied social justice, through interwoven lenses. As a white bodied human, a settler/treaty relative on stolen land, a European Canadian, my life is woven with the living history of harms of the past. The traumatic brutality of the European genocide of Indigenous peoples and the European enslavement of African families still ripples through our collective today. Given my place in the living history we are moving with, together with contemporary access to financial resources and a safe place to live and shelter, I hold a tremendous amount of response-ability for inner and collective change. I am a participant member of culture. I practice the ongoing work of noticing and disarming colonial white-bodied entitlement, arrogance, violence and Eurocentrism from my own psyche, weaving generative movements in relations with others of Earth, and helping other white bodied settlers to do the same.

I am a feminist. A listener. A curious artist. An Earthling.

“LOVE AND JUSTICE ARE NOT TWO. WITHOUT INNER CHANGE THERE CAN BE NO OUTER CHANGE; WITHOUT OUTER CHANGE, NO CHANGE MATTERS.”

— Rev angel Kyodo williams

Ethos:

We are part of this beautiful being called Earth. A place of streams and trees, ravens and bears, of cities of concrete, vibrant artistry, and the hum of machines. Our relationships with one another and with Earth are sources of nourishment and uncertainty.

Life is lived in context: our personal, familial, cultural, ecological, political, and historical layers of context shape our experiences. These contexts impact our sense of self, define our sense of possibility and our realities of dis/connection. These contexts inform the health of our nervous systems. And we also play a role in shaping those same contexts, we have a voice. We are dynamic carries and creators of culture, shaped by and shaping the atmosphere we are immersed within.

I am interested in understanding our experiences in context. We live in the midst of ongoing stressful and traumatic collective circumstances: climate destruction, disasters, gun violence, wars, genocides, and ongoing brutal structural/systemic inequities: poverty, white supremacy, transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, to name a few.

We live as part of this pulsing, wild, magical world of creative ancestral lineages, of poetry, song, dance, theater, play, athleticism, art, and musical soundscapes. We are inventive, responsive, dynamic, supple, loving, tender beings full of light and shadow. Together we can create transformative flow.

Psychotherapy and creative groups are venues for personal and collective transformation, spaces to soften and strengthen.

When we metabolize the impacts of harm, tending anxiety, depression, and grief, we are more able to respond to life with flexibility.

The process of metabolizing our experiences leads to a sturdier and more supple nervous system, a sturdier, more supple relationship with our wisdom, so we are able to dance with the stressors we face. We can grow a clearer sense of our gifts and our purpose, a deeper sense of worth and belonging, more skillfulness reciprocity in our relationships, confidence, sense of agency, and capacity to cocreate transformative flow in the places where we move and live.

Personal change ripples outward through our movements in the collective.

lineage of learning

I am grateful for my teachers: Thich Naht Hahn, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Fyre Jean Graveline, Jean Tait, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, David Abram, Rev angel Kyodo Williams, Lee Maracle, Andrea Olsen, Christi Belcourt, Pat Ogden, Kathy Steele, Steven Porges, Rachel Yehuda, Resmaa Menakem, Joanna Macy, Kekuni Minton, Anna Halprin, Daria Halprin, G. Sotto Hoffman, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jim Knipe, Roger Solomon, Robin Shapiro, and Kathleen Martin, Lama Rod Owens, Joan Halifax, Sandra Sammartino, Vincent Martinez Grieco, Zuza Engler, and John O’Donahue.

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING:

I started my training in Art Therapy, Hakomi (a form of body-centered psychotherapy), Yoga, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Creative and somatic approaches have been a foundation in my training for the past 23 years. Throughout this time I have continued to deepen my wisdom and my gifts, continuing my specialization in healing personal and collective trauma with folks across the life-span through somatic and creative approaches.

  • 1999 -2001 graduate training in Art Therapy (2 year Graduate Diploma at the Vancouver Art Therapy Institute) - practicums in Indigenous community with youth and women, and folks in inner city contexts struggling with addictions.

  • 2001 Creative Approaches to Group Work (Justice Institute of BC)

  • 1999-2003 training in Hakomi: Body-Centered Psychotherapy, 230 hours

  • 1999-2001 yoga teacher training (200 hour) (with Sandra Sammartino)

  • 2003 Family Art Therapy with Shirley Riley

  • 2003 Began training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Trauma training (level 1) with Dr. Pat Ogden, 126 hours

  • 2003 Theater of the Oppressed with Headlines Theater Company, Vancouver BC

  • 2003 Sand Tray Therapy Certificates Level 1 & 2, Center for Expressive Therapy

  • 2003 Child Sexual Abuse Intervention for Counselors, Child and Youth Stream, Justice Institute of BC, 70 hours

  • 2005 Studio Art Therapy with Cathy Moon, and Expressive Arts Therapy with Sean McNiff

  • 2003-2006 Masters Degree in Ecosystemic Developmental Clinical Practice with Children, Youth, and Families (University of Victoria)

  • 2007 Movement Based Expressive Arts year-long Training with Daria Halprin at the Tamalpa Institute

  • 2007 - 2009 Soul Motion Conscious Dance Teacher Training

  • 2007-2008 Masters level coursework in Marriage and Family Therapy, 15 masters level units of study

  • 2008-2014 Supervised Clinical Internship in Marriage and Family Therapy, 3000 hours, followed by 2 Californian MFT licensure exams

  • 2008-2012 Fundamentals of Preschooler Mental Health Graduate Certificate, 160 hours, Alliant International University

  • 2009-2011 1.5 years of PhD Clinical Psychology training, Alliant International University (41 doctoral units completed; choose not to complete this PhD program when I became pregnant with twins - and because it was not really a great fit)

  • 2009 Alternate Route Training in Dance Therapy with the Center For Movement Education and Research

  • 2009 Bartenieff Fundamentals and Laban Movement Analysis with Peggy Hackney

  • 2011 - 2018 Immersive Apprenticeship in Embodied Leadership through Contemplative Movement, with Vincent Martinez Grieco, Soul Motion Institute

  • 2012 EMDR - basic training, early trauma EMDR protocol, EMDR for depression, and EMDR with children and youth.

  • 2012 EMDR for treating Structural Dissociation and Complex Trauma with Kathy Steele, Roger Solomon, Jim Knipe, and Kathleen Martin

  • 2012 Playback Theater Levels 1 & 2 with Jonathan Fox and Jo Salis

  • 2012-2013 Advanced training in treating complex trauma and dissociation with Janina Fisher, 20 hours

  • 2012 Theraplay, attachment based play therapy, level 1

  • 2012-2014 Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Training Level 2: Attachment, Development, and Trauma Training, 180 hours, with Dr. Pat Ogden

  • March 2017 Licensure as a Marriage and Family Therapist

  • 2017-2018, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level III: Advanced Skills and Certification, 144 hours, with Pat Ogden,

  • 2018 Certification as a Certified Advanced Practitioner of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

  • 2018 Authentic Movement Training, with Andrea Olsen

  • 2020 Clinical consultation training sessions with Resmaa Menakem

  • 2020-2021, Social Justice Skills in Action, training for yoga teachers, 4, 3 day weekends of training, with Michelle C Johnson, Llama Rod Owens, and Susanna Barkataki

  • 2020-2021 Apprenticeship to become an Approved Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Consultant

  • 2021 Certification as an Approved Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Consultant

  • 2020 Feldenkrais and Body Mind Centering Training, through the Moving On Center embodiment studies program

  • 2021 Expressive Art Therapy as Somatically Based Interventions with Trauma: Using Rhythm, Movement, Sound, Imagery for Embodied Awareness, with Cathy Malchiodi

  • 2021 Post-graduate studies in Indigenizing and Decolonizing Healing Arts with LIFE: As Medicine

  • 2021-2023 Graduate Certificate in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, UBC

  • 2022 Somatic Abolitionism Foundations with Resmaa Menakem

  • 2022 Radical Dharma Camp with Rev angel Kyodo williams, 5 days each at Cortes Island and Drala Mountain Center

  • 2022 Sensory Relations with Earth, Storytelling from Land, workshop with David Abram

  • 2022-2023 Apprenticeship to become a Faculty and Trainer for Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

  • 2023-currently Faculty Member of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy

  • 2024 Dell Arte International Summer Intensive in Physical Theater.

social locations

I’m a 50 year old white-bodied being of Northern European descent: Danish, Scottish, Finnish, and English. I’m a Queer, gender-fluid woman, with Single-Sided Deafness. I grew up with a feminist mamma and a feminist older sister, both involved in Queer Liberation and feminist activism. I’m grateful for their guidance. I come from a line of doctors, social workers, engineers, furniture makers, and farmers, from a middle-class background.

I live and work in the Ancestral, unceded territories of the Qualicum, Snaw'naw'as Mustimuxw, Snuneymuxw, and Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations. The people and their ancestors have lived on these lands for over 10,000 years. I am grateful to live in this beautiful land.

Land acknowledgement is a way to name truth. Unceded means the land was never willingly surrendered, but was stolen through broken promises and colonial violence. The related complex and deep layers of harm still continue to ripple through lives and communities today.

Healing the living wounds of history is a collective endeavor. Land acknowledgement is a small, tangible way to advocate for ongoing truth telling about our shared history and advocate for deeper collective acts of repair and restoration.

origins:

Why be a therapist helping to transform the living impacts of personal and collective experiences of harm?

This is a question I’m often asked. This path is in my blood and my bones, and is part of my Dharma.

I am the daughter of a mother who spent her first five years of life living under Nazi occupation in Copenhagen, Denmark. She raised in me an ethos of love, care, and respect for humanity. She taught me of the brutality of antisemitic racism that led to the unfolding Holocaust, and raised in me knowledge of the traumatic impact of collective violence. She taught me that very person has power to make a difference, to help prevent and to heal collective harm. She raised in me a knowledge of my inherent power as a living being. She taught me to grow and steady my voice, and to participate deeply in social transformation.

I am the daughter of a father who was sent away to a (physically abusive) British boarding school at the age of 4. His father was away working as a medic in the second world war, caring for soldiers injured in the fight against fascism, and his mother was overwhelmed and so she abandoned her child to an institution that was brutal. My father raised in me the practice of loving kindness in relationship as a central force for change in the world.

I came to the deep work of therapy through this ancestral history. And, I came to this work through the door of uncoiling my own personal experiences of trauma - the trauma of sudden hearing loss at age 12, the trauma of sexual assault and intimate partner violence and abuse as a teen, the collective traumas of growing up in a community stalked by a serial rapist and serial killer targeting young women my age, the impact of the Montreal Massacre, and the every day aggressions of homophobia and sexism.

I came to the work of psychotherapy through the liberating ground of intersectional feminist studies and feminist anti-violence activism, through my mother’s AIDS/HIV activism and PFLAG activism, and through the wonderfully affirming and profoundly freeing Queer Liberation Movement.

I centered my undergraduate degree on understanding historical and contemporary collective trauma: anti-Queer violence, the Holocaust, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Colonization and Indigenous Genocides, gender-based violence, histories of slavery, exploitation, and racialized violence, and waves of wars. I situated my explorations of collective trauma in the department of intersectional feminist studies.

I came to this work through the healing doorways of art, yoga, dance, and poetry, through the ways these forms nourished my heart and soul and led me to train in Art Therapy, Yoga Teaching, and Hakomi: Body Centered Psychotherapy.

Out of familial and personal history and activism, my academic studies, and the arts, I grew a focused commitment for healing the impacts of personal and collective harm and co-creating social transformation through tangible, collaborative movements.

Throughout time this work has continued to feel life-affirming, crucial, fascinating, and so very fun. I’m grateful every day for this beautiful, transformative work and the people I come to know as I walk along side them tending growth.

As a white bodied being, steeped in the harmful insidious noise of colonial white supremacy culture, I am also motivated by a commitment to transforming living systems of domination, to disarming this noise as it lives in me and my communities every day, and cocreating life-affirming reciprocal, loving, collaborative relations, gatherings, and organizations.

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

Jalal Al-Din Rumi