My Personal Journey

Although the idea of becoming a psychotherapist was planted in my teenage years, I am grateful that my path to this work was a winding one — that many other seeds were planted and watered along the way.

What started as a two-dimensional idea of what it means to be a therapist (sitting in a professional office, one leg crossed over the other, sharing fascinating insights) has broadened into an idea of therapy as an encounter between people, which is attuned to the needs of the client.

This connection can look very different from moment to moment.

Although I set off for university to study Psychology, I quickly found that my curiosity about human nature was being met in my Philosophy courses. Philosophy exposed me to perspectives on the psyche from throughout history, beyond the current mental health paradigm of our culture. It also showed me the origin story of some of the most unsustainable aspects of our society.

For one, I was intrigued to see how thinkers over the millennia had struggled with the question of the relationship between mind and body.

While this discussion might seem too abstract to be relevant to our everyday lives, I believe that we continue to see the legacy of this ‘mind-body problem’ in modern medicine, in which we have a far greater understanding of the mechanisms of the body than we have of the consciousness that animates it, or the mystery of how consciousness comes to live in a body at all. As brilliant and effective as our medicine can be, it does not normally fully account for the influence of mind and body on each other — or, more truthfully, how mind and body are not separate from each other at all.

I resolved to not only acknowledge and honour both mind and body in my perspective on health, but to become skilled in working with both.

Whether people come to work with me through talk therapy or craniosacral touch, my commitment is always the same: to embrace the wholeness of the person, to offer space for them to both make sense of their story and be deeply intimate with their felt experience.

I feel fortunate to have wandered down many trails on my path to this work. Whether traveling abroad and wrapping my mind around foreign languages, or going back to my roots and doing the work in family relationships, my most valuable experiences have allowed me to appreciate new perspectives on the world as well as consider those things we all have in common.

Nature connection, through gardening, homesteading, and spending time with the forests and waters, has been a major influence in my life. Working as a canoe guide and an Earth skills mentor for kids and teens was a crash course in both practicality and fun.

Connection with the Earth is a nourishing and grounding influence in my life, and maintaining that connection is a value that I hold in my practice.

Meditation has been my most constant and supportive mental health practice since falling in love with it in 2012. I view meditation, too, as a form of Earth connection, as we tune into the reality of what is showing up in a given moment, for ourselves and for the larger organism of the Earth that we all belong to. I incorporate mindfulness into my work in different ways, for clients who have familiarity with mindfulness practice and for those who just want to dip in a toe.

The healers who have helped me personally the most have not necessarily been psychotherapists. Some were acupuncturists, osteopaths, or yoga teachers. Others were work colleagues, gym coaches, or dear friends. Healing does not necessarily fit inside the box of a professional relationship, a healing retreat, or the label of any activity associated with ‘therapy’ or ‘self-help’.

Healing is an organic process that unfolds in the everyday moments of life.

I view my role as helping to create the conditions for my clients to have transformative experiences, while remaining open and curious to what those experiences will be. Some may be in my office, as breakthrough insights or as moments of truly bearing witness to your own pain. Other experiences may happen in a conversation with a loved one that would not have been possible before, in the courage to take a brave step towards a cherished goal, or in the surprising freedom of noticing that a life-draining habit no longer has its hold on you.

As I continually discover in my own life, healing is not a singular event with a 'before' and 'after'.

There are many moments of realization that leave us transformed. Healing is a process more than it is an outcome. It is an expression of love: of life, of each other, of ourselves.

I look forward to walking side by side on our healing journeys.

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