About

As a community somatic practitioner, I am committed to…

• Approaching our work together from somatic-based, non carceral, abolitionist methods of care. I prioritize community methods of safety over state sponsored carceral violence. This can look like forming a community care team for crisis, addressing accountability issues through community means, and more.

• Conscious and trauma-informed relational container building (especially for those with complex PTSD and developmental trauma, which is most of us!). Having a clear, well defined relational container is a cornerstone of repairing deep wounds created by developmental trauma. I am committed to creating a solid, boundaried, and safe-enough relational container in our work together in order to fully support your integration and healing.

• Utilizing somatic ritual that encompasses the individual body and the collective body - human and non-human relation, connection to ancestry, the land, spirits and landvaettir (land spirits), and animal and plant kin. All are welcome when we share space.

• Consent-based practice with all bodies (self, other, land, ancestral). Your choice and voice are encouraged and invited throughout each session. In our work together, I will support you in shared decision-making, choice, agency, and empowerment to determine your own unique path of healing. I don’t center myself as an expert, I offer myself as a space holder and carrier of wisdom and invite your expertise on your body/ies and lived experience.

• Non-stigmatizing practice and disability justice. I am firmly committed to presence rather than fixing. I am also invested in the reclamation of the word “mad” as used by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, Mia Mingus, The Fireweed Collective, and other disability justice advocates. I personally identify as a crazy or mad therapist as a radical reclamation of who can practice healing work. Labels in my practice (neuroqueer, diagnoses, etc) are used as a way to provide a container to an experience you are having, not as a tool towards further dehumanization.

• Recognizing the wisdom of the Land and centering relationship. I prioritize reconnection of people to their ancestral and inherited lineages (transness, queerness, etc) as an act of dismantling white supremacy and erasure.

• Bodies as holy and the erotic as a method of liberation (Audre Lorde). I honor the lineage of kink and BDSM/leather practice as a container for consensual relationship. I celebrate fatness in all its glorious divinity. I welcome polyamory in its multiple forms as decolonial methods of engaging relationship.

• Power-With Framework. I don’t work from a “power over” perspective. I am not the expert on you. I provide the tools, you bring yourself, and together we create transformation.

• Creating inspired, connected relationship.

I am a white, nonbinary trans (they/them), mixed class (functionally working class with lineage awareness of how to navigate social norms of middle upper class) gay boy femme. My people are of Swedish, British, French, Scottish, and Irish descent, and I am currently a white settler on ancestral Tohono O’odham and Yaqui/Yoeme land in the shadow of Babad Do’ag in Cuk Ṣon. Tsokanende were also in this area intermittently. Previously this land was inhabited by the Huhugam (or Hohokam) peoples, and before them, by the Clovis. This land has been inhabited by indigenous peoples for around 10,000 years. I was born on Séliš, Ql̓ispé, and Kutenai ancestral land in epɫx̣ʷy̓u (so-called Whitefish, Montana). I grew up on Hinono’ei, Tsistsistas, and Moghwachi Núuchi land in Niineniiniicie (so-called Denver, CO) and in the shadow of Tavakiev (so-called Colorado Springs, CO). I am shaped by a lineage of white supremacist domination and violence and EuroChristian harm, including those who enslaved and subjugated land and people, as well as intentionally cultivated ongoing generational subjugation. I am also shaped by lineages of weavers, gardeners, those who deeply knew the land, madness, disability, and queer/trans lineages leaning into reparation and repair. I am always endeavoring to practice repair and accountability with the lineages I hold, part of which is donating a portion of my income and my time to reparations.

Specific Trainings I Have Received

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Level 1 - Spring 2019
Project Lets: Suicide is Political - Fall 2020
Project Lets: Altered States Training - May 2023
IDHA Crossroads of Crisis - Oct 2022 - June 2023
Embodied Ethics with Dr. Christiane Pelmas - Fall 2023
Vision Change Win - Verbal De-Escalation Training, May 2023
MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy - Certified. Fall 2022
Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga - 1 Week training. Spring 2016.
RootEd Hatha Yoga Training - October 2014-May 2015.

Through receiving personal care as well as mentorship, I also utilize frameworks from Somatic Experiencing, generative somatics, and Kathy Kain’s practices on somatic based work. I sometimes utilize so-called “parts work” (I like to think of it as “inner people” work) which I have received personal care in and training around providing from my Clinical Masters program.

I hold a Masters in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in May 2019. During my Masters, I held a caseload of 12-15 clients, mainly working with folks around trauma and PTSD. Due to the carceral nature of licensure and mental health, I have divested from this lineage and now work primarily utilizing my somatic based skills for trauma resolution.

I have been doing 1 on 1 and group client work utilizing somatic practice since 2017, and have been doing 1-1 work utilizing tarot and hatha yoga based practices since 2015.

A note on my yoga training: Hatha yoga was the place where I first found somatic work. I recognize the deeply appropriative history of integration of yoga into the West for white folks such as myself. With that history in mind, I deeply honor and acknowledge the legacy and original Vedic lineage of yoga and Ayurvedic practice, both of which inform and guide my somatic practice.

I have been exploring the ins and outs of trauma, both in research and in my lived experience, for the past 16+ years.