My personal journey
My winding path to this work—and what it taught me about healing
Two questions that shaped my path
Two questions have shaped my journey to this work: Why does understanding our patterns so rarely change them? And how do we connect when words fail?
Why understanding isn't enough
In my teens, I was depressed, dealing with insomnia, and incredibly tightly wound. I struggled intensely with body image and developed a disordered relationship with food. I was working myself too hard through intensive dieting and exercising, treating my body—and my life—as something to control rather than inhabit.
I went to talk therapy with a psychologist during this time. While I benefited from having someone sympathetic to talk to, I could already analyze my patterns and articulate insights about my history. Doing it in the presence of another person didn't change how I felt or lived. I didn't realize I could ask her for something different.
The patterns continued into university. I pushed toward burnout trying to balance academics, a social life, and intensive exercise. I remember donating blood at campus blood drives because I thought it would help me burn calories. I thought my body would put up with this treatment indefinitely.
I gravitated towards studying Philosophy—exploring how Western culture perpetuates the mind-body split, eventually writing my thesis on trauma and embodied memory. But this intellectual understanding needed integration with other practices. As the saying goes: to know and not to do is not to know.
A 10-day Vipassana meditation course became a turning point. For the first time, I felt what it was like to fully inhabit my body. During one particular body scan practice, I recall feeling an electric jolt—my nervous system spontaneously processing a stored memory of a real electric shock from years prior. I began to understand that there must be countless other memories held viscerally in my system.
Finally, I had found something that helped me lighten my emotional load. I was avid about my daily meditation practice, believing it to be my way out of the version of reality I had been living.
But I started developing back pain from hours of sitting and strains from Ashtanga yoga asana. My body was teaching me again: even the solution was becoming rigid. I learned I needed to broaden beyond these strategies alone—to include gentle movement practices, nourishing relationships, nature connection, and radical acceptance of my experience in its entirety. I needed not just willpower and seclusion, but flexibility and acceptance.
When words fail
An important seed was planted at the time of my grandmother's death while I was in university. Sitting beside her when she could no longer make conversation, I desperately wanted to connect with her. I sensed that ways of being together in deep wordless presence existed, but I didn't know how to access them.
Around that time, I had my first encounter with energy work (Reiki). I was captivated—something about the dynamic between the two people, the receptivity, the depth, and the power of that nonverbal communication felt right.
This question returned years later during a family crisis. A loved one couldn't communicate normally, and I found myself in that same space again. I didn't know how to just sit with her in her pain. I felt like I had to DO something to make it easier to be there. But I sensed that it was important to just be with her—to offer presence without needing to fix or fill the silence.
This resonance with states of wordless presence would eventually lead me to craniosacral therapy. This spirit of simple presence underlies somatic therapy as well.
Where these questions met
During and after university, I worked in outdoor education—canoe guiding and earth skills mentoring. I saw how people came alive, and came together, through the primal and embodied tasks of life: foraging for food, crafting tools, building natural shelter, friction fire, play, circling, and song. This opened me to practices of mindfulness beyond formal meditation—connection to land, to community, to the body's inherent wisdom. Today, although my practice has moved indoors, those values continue. Somatic Experiencing® helps people reconnect with, honour, and complete their instinctive survival responses. In craniosacral therapy, we attune to the body's tidal rhythms as we are held within the rhythms of nature.
My path to this work wasn't straightforward. After leaving the outdoor education world, I explored different approaches to healing, looking for the right fit that would permit me to practice the mind-body integration I knew was so powerful. It was through the writings of Kathy Kain, an advanced Somatic Experiencing® trainer, that I began to see counselling as a possibility. But I wasn't willing to give up on my inner knowing about the importance of that deep, wordless space of connection. So I took on studying Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy at the same time as counselling, creating my own interdisciplinary course of study.
The integration of counselling and craniosacral therapy answered both questions. The wordless presence I'd been seeking, the bridge between understanding and embodied transformation—they came together in this work.
Walking together
My personal encounters with depression, perfectionism, anxiety, and body image help me meet clients from a place of empathy. The journey taught me that the wisdom of our bodies is always available when we learn how to listen, and that help is available from many unexpected teachers.
Today, as a Registered Clinical Counsellor and Registered Craniosacral Therapist in Nelson BC, I bring all these threads together. I look forward to walking alongside you on your own path, honouring both where you've been and where you're heading.
Curious to learn more? You can read about my practice and approach, explore how I work with clients, or get in touch to schedule a free consultation.
During my time in Nelson, I've been grateful to participate in creative projects with local artists. Below is a music video for Ru Rose's song 'The Womb,' filmed at Little Slocan Lake, exploring themes of embodiment and connection to place—threads that run through both my personal journey and my work with clients.
Rooted in the Kootenays: performing backup vocals for Ru Rose's 'The Womb,' filmed at Little Slocan Lake.