My approach to this work has developed over many years and across several different traditions.
I began studying psychology in 1998 and entered the healing arts more formally in 2011. Since then, my education has included structured professional training and certification, ongoing mentorship, independent study, personal therapeutic work, contemplative practice, and many years of working directly with clients.
I don’t consider any one of these traditions to be the complete explanation for how human beings work.
My practice has developed in the places where they overlap—and through paying attention to what remains useful when ideas are brought out of the classroom and into real life.
Education & Formal Training
Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology
University of California, Davis
My formal education in psychology gave me an early foundation in human development, personality, cognition, relationships, mental health, and the scientific study of human behavior.
Lionheart Institute of Transpersonal Energy Healing
Certified Mind Body Counselor
I began training at Lionheart in 2011. The program combined the study and practice of energy healing with extensive personal process, meditation, embodied awareness, character structure, therapeutic presence, and the development of the Healer’s Stance.
An important part of the training was learning that doing healing work responsibly requires attending continually to our own material—not simply learning techniques to use on other people.
ThetaHealing Institute
Certified in Basic and Advanced Theta Healing, 2020
Training in the ThetaHealing method and its approach to meditation, belief work, intuition, and energetic healing.
Energy Transfer Reset Method
Certified practitioner, 2023
Training and certification from Evolving Soul Academy.
Human Design
I discovered Human Design in 2011, the same year I began training at Lionheart, and began studying the system intensively in 2013.
For more than fifteen years, Human Design has been both a field of study and a personal experiment.
My study has included the foundational teachings of the Human Design system, extensive independent reading and coursework, online teachers and educational resources, chart analysis, and years of observing the system in my own life and in work with clients.
When I returned to client work after my daughter’s second experience with cancer, I began asking clients for their birth information and privately observing their designs alongside the work we were already doing. Over time, Human Design became increasingly explicit in my sessions.
Today it provides the central framework for my practice.
I am particularly interested in Human Design not simply as a system to understand intellectually, but as an experiment in decision-making: noticing the difference between the mind’s attempts to create certainty and the quieter signals already present in our experience.
I call this Applied Human Design.
Additional Study & Influences
My work has also been informed by substantial independent study and experiential learning in areas including:
- Somatic Experiencing
- TRE / Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises
- meditation and contemplative practice
- nervous-system regulation and interoception
- trauma and post-traumatic growth
- character structure and body-oriented approaches influenced by Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, John Pierrakos, and Barbara Brennan
- consciousness, presence, and witness perspective
- neurodivergence and neurodiversity-affirming frameworks
- psychedelic experience and integration
- relationship dynamics, attachment, boundaries, and family systems
I distinguish this ongoing study from professional certification in those modalities. Some have been areas of deep study and personal practice rather than disciplines in which I hold a clinical credential.
Practice & Client Experience
I opened my own practice in 2011.
Over the years, my work has included individual energy-healing sessions, meditation, Human Design readings, ongoing private Human Design work, group facilitation, and longer-term relationships with clients navigating significant periods of change.
My current sessions developed gradually from that experience.
They combine conversation, Human Design, close listening, reflection, and an embodied guided meditation practice designed to help clients move out of mental over-efforting and into a quieter, more receptive relationship with themselves.
I have found that the work is most powerful when it is practiced rather than merely understood.
For that reason, my primary work today is with people who want to explore Human Design over time and apply it to the actual decisions, relationships, transitions, fears, and possibilities arising in their lives.
Life as Laboratory
Some of my most consequential education did not happen in a classroom.
My understanding of these practices has been tested through parenting, caregiving, cancer, relationships, divorce and custody conflict, career changes, financial instability, homelessness, neurodivergence, major identity shifts, and rebuilding life more than once.
Those experiences changed my relationship with many of the spiritual ideas I encountered early in my training.
Some became more useful.
Some became more nuanced.
Some fell apart completely.
I became increasingly uninterested in teachings that require us to deny fear, pain, material reality, or the limits of our own nervous systems in order to be considered “aligned.”
What survived was simpler: attention, presence, curiosity, discernment, compassion, the willingness to tell ourselves the truth, and a growing capacity to recognize the difference between what the mind believes should happen and what actually feels true now.
That ongoing experiment is the foundation of my work today.
A note about scope
My work is educational, contemplative, and experiential. I have a degree in psychology, but I am not a licensed psychotherapist and do not provide psychotherapy, diagnosis, or medical treatment.
Applied Human Design is not a substitute for appropriate mental-health or medical care. I welcome working alongside those forms of support when they are useful.