For most of my adult life I have lived close to wilderness among the cliffs and canyons of Moab and Zion National Park. Living in relationship with these landscapes has profoundly shaped how I understand healing, belonging, and the intelligence of the living world.

My path into healing began in early adulthood when I entered a two-year period of weekly psychotherapy with a therapist who introduced me to Buddhism and often read poetry during our sessions. Through this experience I discovered how the language of poetry can open unexpected pathways for healing the soul.

Around the same time I joined a monthly women’s sweat lodge led by a Lakota grandmother. Through those years of ceremony I encountered the transformative power of ritual, grief work, song, and prayer, and witnessed the depth of healing that can arise in community. I later served as the fire keeper for the lodge, a role I felt honored to hold in support of women’s healing work.

Several years later I experienced a prolonged medical crisis that brought me into an extended period of profound suffering. When conventional medicine offered little relief, I was drawn into a deeper commitment to my own healing that ultimately reshaped the course of my life. In time I came to understand this period as an initiatory passage that opened a deeper calling to accompany others in their own healing.

During this time I immersed myself in contemplative practice, primarily within the Vipassana tradition while also studying Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. Meditation became a daily anchor, often practiced for several hours each day. I also studied yoga philosophy and practice, which helped me return more fully to my body and cultivate a deeper sense of trust in life. Dance became another important practice, allowing movement to express what often lives beneath language.

Nature-based practices also became central to my path. I began going on regular 4-night solo wilderness vigils in the desert canyons of southern Utah, a practice I continue today. Time alone in the wilderness has been one of my most profound teachers, deepening my relationship with the wisdom of the living world and opening a deeper sense of belonging to earth, soul, and the cosmos.

Along the way I engaged in many years of personal healing work that included Internal Family Systems therapy, somatic therapy and bodywork, soul work and dream work, as well as psychedelic and ancestral healing work. Through this process I gradually met and tended the places within me shaped by attachment wounds, neglect, betrayal, and narcissistic abuse, along with anxiety, insomnia, perfectionism, and long-standing patterns of self-protection. Over time these patterns softened, giving way to greater self-compassion, vitality, and trust in the unfolding of my life.

In recent years my exploration has continued through creative and soul-centered practices, including several years devoted to creative writing and self-portrait photography as a form of inner inquiry. I use image, landscape, and symbolism to explore the psyche and document an evolving relationship between the inner world and the living earth. This creative process has become another way of listening to the deeper movements of my soul and honoring the symbolic language through which the psyche often speaks.

All of these experiences shape the way I hold space for others. My work is grounded in lived experience, a long-standing dedication to healing and contemplative practice, and a deep respect for the intelligence of the body, the psyche, and the living earth. I feel especially drawn to working with thoughtful, sensitive people who sense that their struggles carry meaning and who feel called toward deeper healing, greater self-understanding, and a more soulful way of being in the world.