The map of our journey is within
Following the signs
I have been interested in human behavior, relationships, and what it means to lead a meaningful life for as long as I can remember.
When I was 5 years old, I was running along the beach playing and leaping through the white sand. Out of the corner of my eye, something caught my attention. I turned and skipped back. There, in the sand, was the body of a little dried seahorse. I picked her up and held her in my hands ~ taking in the beauty of this magnificent creature. She has been my traveling companion ever since.
The experience of seeing something out of the corner of my eye and turning to investigate further has remained an impulse throughout my life. I am curious about life, and love the ways that life is always calling our Authentic Self forward. A mentor and friend calls this “following the breadcrumbs” and I have adopted the saying. Life shows us with signs and signals which way to go — shows us who we are and what is meaningful to us.
Learning to pay attention and follow the signs delights me to no end. The seahorse signifies this way of living for me and is the cornerstone of my work here at Rising Rooted. As I sit with others, I am listening and watching for cues of the wise Essential Self that knows the pathway forward to a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
The terrain I’ve traveled
After completing my bachelors degree in Psychology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I began to explore the world beyond my upbringing in Vermont and Maine. Travels in South East Asia brought me into contact with basic principles of Buddhism and meditation. When I returned to the United States, I began to explore yoga, meditation, breathing exercises and nutrition. I became a certified yoga instructor at Kripalu in Western Massachusetts. As I taught yoga and mindfulness meditation, I began to notice wisdom within the body separate from the thinking mind. My desire to learn more about anatomy and physiology, led me to Boulder College of Massage Therapy, where I became a certified massage therapist.
Teaching yoga and working as a massage therapist, inspired me to dive deeper into the mind-body connection through the study of Body-Centered Psychology. I spent 4 years at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado where I received my Masters Degree in Somatic Psychotherapy. Following graduation from Naropa, I participated in the Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy training and became certified in 2002. I worked in many settings as I built my private practice, including Colorado Outward Bound and SafeHouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence.
I took a decade off from private practice to be with my children when they were young. When I returned in 2016, I enrolled in Martha Beck’s Life Coach Training and began to incorporate the tools and practices of life coaching into my Somatic Psychotherapy practice. In October 2022, I completed a year long training with Gabor Maté in Compassionate Inquiry®, which offers a map for working with trauma and addiction. I am currently moving through the Compassionate Inquiry® Mentorship program.
The foundation of my work
I support people as they learn to trust their own innate wisdom. For many of us, access to our inner knowing got layered over with beliefs about who we should be, painful experiences where we were alone and had no one to talk with, or traumatic events that left us feeling disconnected from our essence. The adaptations we made are to be celebrated as they helped us survive, yet over time they limit and constrict our lives. To reclaim our aliveness, we must excavate the hidden and disowned parts of ourselves and integrate them back into our lives.
Holding Space
When I sit across from another human being, it is with deep kindness and compassion.
I believe that each of us holds within the answers to our questions. I see my role as one of holding the space, listening, and reflecting back what I hear.
I invite people into the present moment through awareness of their senses, breath, and sensations in their body. As we practice being in the present moment and embodied, our habitual thoughts and protective strategies are less involved in steering the narrative, which allows for a deeper wisdom to come forward and inform our choices in the moment. The practice allows for a greater sense of ourselves, and knowing becomes less about a stream of thoughts and beliefs, and more about a felt sense, embodied experience.
Witnessing another soul
I trust life so completely.
We are taught to move away from pain, and our culture encourages this by making the outer world the focus. Consumerism, entertainment, addiction to substances, and images of what life “should” look like are endlessly streaming through our senses. And yet, within each of us there is a map for the life we are here to live. When we turn our attention toward our own experience of the present moment, that map begins to reveal itself and we have greater access to the magic of our own unfolding.
We all have protective mechanisms that keep vulnerability at bay and yet these same strategies imprison us and limit our lives. To have full access to our aliveness and life force, we need to lean in toward those places that scare us and, in doing so, the power those old fears have held is now available for living, loving, creating, and experiencing life more fully.
We literally take our power back.
“Trauma is not what happens to people, but what happens inside of people as a result of what happens to them. Trauma is what we carry with us from early experiences and it’s the part of our scarred psyche that limits our capacity to be present.”
— Gabor Maté
