What is felt will complete itself
My story began...
at twenty-two, I lost my father to a twelve-year battle with cancer. Twelve years of my developmental years revolved around the question, “Is my dad going to die today?”
As he took his last breath, it took my breath away. A loss so deep and a constriction so tight, it took me to the underworld, where all initiations begin.
Before his passing, life was chaotic; divorce, infidelity, addiction, illness, moving, money problems. Childhood was a blur of dissociation, not a nostalgic memory. Being the eldest daughter also colored my experience.
Losing my father brought what was buried deep within me to the surface, childhood trauma. It was one prolonged spiritual awakening that began in the form of panic attacks and ulcerative colitis that shocked me out of numbness.
I attended one funeral for him, but since then, many of my own. I knew I had survived, but now the work for me was to come back to life.
I began “the work” as a student and on the therapy couch. Both normalized my experience and gave me the language to talk about what I had been through. I earned a BA and MA in Psychology and was the mentee to a renowned Jungian Analyst, as well as to the direct protegé of Peter Levine. Both directly influenced my healing journey.
Alongside my academic pursuits, I was a personal trainer, collegiate athlete, competitive bodybuilder, and a professional equestrian show jumper. I was groomed from an early age to be an athlete, and while there is a standard of excellence I believe this provided me, it also further desensitized me from my body.
I learned to push through, to compete, to perfect, to take no days off, to always be in pursuit of a goal, that rigidity was the path to success. I learned to prioritize my aesthetics above how I felt. This was a recipe for disconnection, disembodiment, and dismissal of my feminine feeling body.
I had been living in functional freeze and completely unconscious to how cut off at the throat I was until the panic ripped through me. Even my greatest protectors of intellectualization and structural dissociation couldn’t stop the panic.
I was forced to stop performing and feel.
Slowing down was terrifying because it led me back to sensation.
I moved away from competitive athleticism and found my way to yoga.
Yoga led me all over the world, stretching as far as India, where I earned 500+ hours of Yoga Teacher Training Credentials. It was through yoga that my digestion improved and my felt sense came back online. I was inviting sensitivity back into my body, although discovering I didn’t yet have the nervous system capacity to wield it.
Even though high pressure sports were on pause, I was still gravitating to the intensity I had previously needed to feel anything but numbness.
I found myself drawn to narcissistic, codependent, and toxic relationships. Each one more stimulating and destructive than the last. Each one revealing deeper layers of childhood attachment trauma. Each one fragmenting me further.
I would like to say it was here that I did the relational work, but instead I carried on as a serial monogamous and hopeless romantic, who was naively empathetic and simultaneously unaware of my attachment patterns.
It wasn’t until a six year relationship ended did I surrender. It was the relationship that finally opened all of me.
My walls came down when met with gentleness. My emotions unfroze with warmth. My expression widened with presence. It was a gift to internalize the healing offered through emotional intimacy, and yet, overwhelming to meet the many previously repressed parts of myself.
Just as safety peaked, betrayal entered our container. I tasted something familiar. The breach of trust by a primary attachment figure that I depended on.
What bled from this wound was the repetitive experience of betrayal, objectification, and sexual trauma.
I had learned how to eroticize this wound by continuously giving myself away.
This relationship mirrored to me my split experience of love. How love and danger had never not coexisted in my relationships. How afraid I was of letting someone in close to me.
It opened a doorway to my hidden shame.
However dark and dangerous the dungeons of shame seemed, the deeper I went into the chambers of my heart, what I discovered was my core innocence. The grounds for the core Self to return.
The loss of this relationship taught me how sacred heartbreak is. It was in these fertile grounds that I discovered the heartbreak I had been living with since childhood.
It opened up a portal for sacred rage and grief, releasing me from the grip of panic. It showed me that I wouldn’t be able to release trauma and truly heal until I opened my heart to the child in me.
It was an initiation for my relationships to stop being containers for retraumatization and reenactment, but a place to rewrite my attachment patterns by choosing and protecting myself. I had to end the search for perfect love and an idealized parent.
I had to decouple scarcity, deprivation, invisibility, and humiliation from my relational template, and recode it with worthiness, core stability, incarnation, and individuation.
The desire to experience healthy love led me to study and practice the art of conscious relationships and sacred intimacy.
Discovering my core Self came through a deep breath in solitude, getting to know my own energy.
Solitude asked me to let go of every external anchor point in my life. To destabilize my external world until I could generate profound internal safety and security. To deprioritized romantic love from the pedestal and get serious about Self love. To dive into my human design, astrology, and gene keys, to be in true energetic alignment with my core Self.
Solitude took me to the jungles of Costa Rica to sit with plant medicine and practice the ancient art of Tantra. Both medicines deepened my capacity to feel, contain, and release, and ultimately how to be in my truth.
When I touched my truth is when I restored my sense of aliveness.
What I learned is that aliveness has less to do with stimulation and intensity, and everything to do with your capacity for sensitivity. To subtly notice the feeling of truth by the openness in your body and heart and expressing it into your relationships.
Childhood trauma impacts your sense of Self, diminishes your capacity for healthy relationships, and distorts the truth. The first half of my life was spent trying to find the exit from that reality. But my second act has been about building the capacity to go all in, be fully seen, and to live and love profoundly open.
As I return back to Los Angeles, where I call home, I’m honored to step into the next chapter of my journey; earning a Doctorate in Depth Psychology and Integrative Healing Practices and to continue my work with clients as a Relational Trauma Practitioner and Associate Marriage and Family Therapist.
My work is an honoring and continuation of my healing. It is my deepest offering in this world. Always evolving.
The medicine is inside of you.
If my story is of resonance...…
Learn more about my offerings and how I can support you
-
One to One
When you’re stuck in chronic stress, the emotional whiplash of anxiety panic and (functional) freeze, and repeating painful relational patterns.
Our work together will help you learn to soften into your center, trust sensation in your body, and expand your nervous system capacity to be fully seen, profoundly open, and deeply felt so you can earn secure attachment.
-
One to Two
When relational conflict, vulnerability, and healthy dependence trigger subconscious relational wounding.
Together we will bridge the emotional and physical distance created by attachment injuries, learn the art of truth telling through nonviolent communication, and create rupture and repair cycles that are regenerative, giving way to deeper intimacy.
-
SELF Sourced
When you crave deep connection, but don’t feel safe enough in your body to receive it.
Join an intimate group journey combining my one on one work with live virtual circles and in depth curriculum, and learn how to transmute the downward spiral of shame, shut down, and fear of intimacy, into self love, vulnerability, and subconscious self worth.