About

About Sirius

Sirius Heart (they/them) is an Aquarius sun, genderweird, mad and disabled ritualist and practitioner who is highly pragmatic in their work. They espouse grounded body practices that are oriented to the day to day, while connected with earth/river/ocean/cloud/spirit ways of being.

Sirius was initiated into death, somatic work, and ritual as a child, and re initiated as an adult in their 18th year with the mass shooting death of their siblings. Sirius has intimate familiarity with darkness and intensity as sites of creation and rebirth, and has learned through years of practice that a combination of daily practice, communal practice with other humans, and spiritual practice create the 3-stranded thread that weaves a joyful and meaningful life from pain. They first found this practice of svādhyāya, or self-study, from hatha yoga practice, and their yoga practice of 11+ years shapes all of what they offer.

After years of cult survivorship in their family and growing up in the Evangelical church, Sirius is firmly anti-carceral and anti-pathologizing. Carved with a strong understanding of what it means to be consistently pathologized, they are resistant to any form of it and intentionally practice noncarceral care in their work. They resistantly refuse to involve cops (including therapists and mandated reporters and really anyone who seeks to confine people against their will) in the care they provide. They’ve been off and on suicidal since they were 15, and have experienced altered states, chaotic relational interactions (“BPD”), intense ritualistic movements (“OCD”-like symptoms) and plurality. They do not utilize the DSM diagnostic system because they believe they are beyond definition and categorization according to the “state” and mental health industrial complex. Instead, they seek to understand their body-mind experience as is, through direct contact and deep listening to themself and their own stories.

They bring this deep listening to their clients, and practice doula-ing their clients through their experiences towards a more affirming and joy-filled, creative life. Sirius often works with neuroweird, mad, creative folks and finds the most joy in working with other deeply sensitive folks who feel the spirits and the rhythms of the earth and have experiences that defy the ‘norm’. If you are someone who often cites your tarot reading this morning, the astrological placements, how the trees and berries and flowers were talking to you, the offering you gave to the ocean on your walk the other day, you’re probably a good fit for working with Sirius.

Sirius is politicized but firmly disillusioned with the non-nuanced form that “politics” often takes in western and colonized contexts. Instead of categorizing their identity, they instead seek to embody autonomy from the ground of the body upwards. They are organized in a colonial context under identities of “white”, “nonbinary”, “transgender”, and “mad”. They seek to embody something wholly more mysterious than any label can define them, and to consistently defy violent labeling with tangible action (while recognizing how power can and does seek to label us without consent, and the impacts of that labeling in a racialized and capitalist system). One tangible way they’ve done this is to divest from counseling licensure and clinical therapy as a profession.

When not offering their work via 1 on 1 relationship, workshops, podcasts, groups, and Patreon, they are often somewhere outdoors without cell service communing with the trees. They do not want to be found. They have 3 cat familiars who often assist with sessions (along with their previous cat owner ancestor Ellen Melamed, may her memory be a blessing). They are also often found in their room journaling or doing “weird” ritual work to connect with and listen to spirits and the land. They are an avid poet and love reading poetry, and create cinematic playlists to match their emotional experiences. They have a very strong yoga practice within a hatha yoga lineage, first brought to them by Jessica Patterson at Root Center for Yoga and Sacred Studies.

Some spirit and land beings they love are Orkney, Alba, pine trees, the ocean especially northern oceans, Cuk’son, ocotillo, western diamondback rattlesnake, Blekinge County, Sweden where their great-grandmother is from, especially in the golden light, and the so-called San Luis Valley in so-called Colorado.

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
Relational Uprising - Intro to Relational Somatics, Spring 2024
Intro to Hakomi - Spring 2025
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 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.

Hatha yoga was the place where I first found somatic work and deeply shapes my work. I denounce the ways in which yogic practice and spiritual practice is being used currently to reinforce caste-ism in India.

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

As a ritual seiðr and somatic practitioner, I am committed to…

• Recognizing the wisdom of the land, nature, land spirits, ancestors, spiritual realm, and centering relationship. As Klee Benally says, "there is no authority but nature.”

• Approaching our work together from somatic-based, non carceral, abolitionist methods of care. I do not espouse harm reduction methods in this particular point, and am wholeheartedly committed to no cops in care, EVER. I have 6 years in lived experience practice of non-carceral work. I trust those who come to me to define their own crises, and support them in tending to it if they so choose. I center community methods of accountability around issues of harm and abuse.

• Conscious and trauma-informed relational container building. I am committed to creating a solid, boundaried, choice-centered relational container in our work together in order to fully support your integration and practice.

• 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 invited when we share space.

• Consent-based practice with all bodies (self, other, land, ancestral) and power-with framework. I come to you and your body with the awareness that you are whole, holy, and divine as you are - my role is to support that wholeness and divinity, and your sovereignty. In honor of that, all practices are at invitation. I don’t center myself as an expert, rather as someone with a particular highly developed skillset with tools to offer that may or may not resonate -for you-.

• Non-stigmatizing practice and disability justice. I am firmly committed to presence with your body and mad mind as it is, as a site of the whole and holy. 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 practitioner as a radical reclamation of who can practice healing work. Labels in my practice (neuroqueer, diagnoses, etc) are self-defined (you define them for yourself and I may support if you like).

• Bodies as holy and the erotic as a method of liberation (Audre Lorde). I honor queer, trans, and BDSM + leather lineages of erotic joy and perversion. I celebrate fatness in all its glorious divinity. I welcome polyamory in its multiple forms as decolonial methods of engaging relationship.

• Creating inspired, connected relationship.