Before entering the counseling profession, I taught environmental education for over two decades, leading children and teenagers on hikes while sharing my love of ecology and helping them foster a deeper connection to nature and themselves. This experience is infused in my therapeutic practice by way of mindfulness, somatics, playfulness, and a deep reverence for the natural world. 

Along the way, I dove into personal development and became certified as a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), yoga teacher, and Law of Attraction Life Coach. I also earned certifications in Emotional Freedom Technique and hypnosis. As a life coach, I helped my clients clarify their goals, uncover their unconscious limiting beliefs that were blocking their success, and then program in new, empowering beliefs. 

I am now working on my Master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Palo Alto University. In my therapy sessions, I combine my coaching tools as well as aspects of solution-focused, Existential, Adlerian, Constructivist, IFS, Psychodynamic, and Choice approaches. I also enjoy facilitating mindfulness-based solo hikes for clients and therapy sessions outside. 

Through empathetic and active listening, I help my clients become aware of their often unconscious self-talk (making the unconscious conscious, as Freud said), develop a more positive and effective mindset, reprogram harmful self-stories, and become more cognizant of the language they choose to use. 

I believe that we all have strengths and parts of ourselves that protect us. Often, protective strategies were created in our childhoods, when we lacked many resources and life experience. Those strategies, which were once effective, often become maladaptive in adulthood. I help my clients to recognize their strengths and understand why they behave and react as they do so that they can deepen their understanding and compassion for themselves and from that place, intentionally forge a new path ahead. 

Being our authentic selves and being lovable are often felt as being mutually exclusive. Through therapy, an achievable goal is to be both simultaneously.