My passion is to live an authentic life and assist others in doing so as well. I believe it is in the body that we can find our authentic path.
As a psychotherapist, I work to build relationships of care and trust with the intention of co-creating a healing environment.
Since graduate school I have chosen to add the (w) to holistic to emphasize the wholeness that I believe we are all seeking in life. It's the mind, body and spirit that makes us human and yet we tend to, especially as North Americans, to live as compartmentalized beings, largely as thinkers disconnected from our hearts and our guts, the emotional and spiritual centers of our bodies, and what I believe to be, the portals to our soul, our truest sense of who we are.
(W)holistic is the umbrella under which I house my practice of embodied psychotherapy, mind-body connective work, and Internal Family Systems therapy.
Nearly twenty years ago as a young adult, in an attempt to heal myself I turned to yoga from an intuitive pull within. At this same time I started to work with a therapist. It was sitting with this person week after week as well as the discipline of relocating my body on the mat with various yoga teachers that I discovered the draw to healing work.
An aspect of my suffering when I was young had to do with the state of the world that I felt very helpless to do much about. I felt that if we each had the capacity to heal, one person at a time, the world would begin to heal. This was something that felt possible to me and so I committed myself to the healing journey both as one in need of healing and as one looking to offer healing. I still believe this and carry this with me in my life and in my practice with clients.
I have been practicing as a (w)holistic psychotherapist for twenty years now, having studied many somatic psychotherapy models such as sensorimotor psychotherapy with Pat Ogden and Yoga (both asana and chakra) in Psychotherapy with Anodea Judith along with mindfulness practices and self-compassion practices and, very close to my heart, The Discipline of Authentic Movement. I eventually came to Internal Family Systems (IFS) founded by Richard Schwartz, where I have fully committed myself, as this model, for me, carries all of this in one place and offers so much more. It was finally with IFS that I truly experienced healing, what I had set out for all those years ago, and what I have always intended to offer my clients.
