My journey to private practice starts with my own lived experience of growing up in a family of healers who practiced various forms of holistic and Western medicine, yoga, psychology and body work. I was raised with the idea that we are always in relationship and responsible to our communities, that having privilege meant holding space for and actively addressing oppression and the suffering of others, and I had a deep curiosity around how people navigated identity and belonging. Although I studied cultural anthropology and philosophy in college, I found myself drawn to teaching individuals and groups how to move their bodies and I worked in the fitness world while taking classes towards being a physical therapist.

However, I felt something was missing within purely body based work and my own life experiences kept nudging me in the direction of doing a form of inner healing work with others. At the time I was engaged in meditation, breathwork, yoga, ecstatic dance and self-reflective practices. I had become a recovery coach and began working at a residential treatment center for substance use where my experiences led me to pursue a career as a therapist. My graduate school internships were in long-term care, hospice and a drop in shelter for teens and post-graduation, I continued my clinical work in a residential treatment center for eating disorders and substance use. From there, I wanted to focus more fully on specializing in mindfulness and body-oriented trauma treatment and began working in a collaborative practice where I saw individuals for outpatient therapy, facilitated intensive outpatient groups, and led the training program for new clinicians to gain therapeutic skills.

The more I pursued trainings in somatic practices and had profound shifts in my work with clients using these approaches, it became clear that I wanted to specialize more completely on body-oriented work. I created Hummingthreads Therapy as a space for me to more clearly offer my practices to the folks that were looking for something beyond talk therapy and felt drawn to working with the body. My personal and professional story is not linear, it is flowing and toroidal- it has the rise and fall of being drawn towards top-down healing and bottom-up healing at different points in time. My view of the healing journey is similar – that at different times focusing on the mind or body as the starting space can offer needed shifts or profound guidance – but the full wholeness of living comes when they are experienced as an integrated flow.

When I am not working, I can be found doing anything outdoors, dancing, reading, sewing, yoga, singing, watching One Piece, enjoying music and travel adventures with my friends, caring for my family and showering my dog Teddy Thunderclap with affection.