I have spent more than 25 years guiding people through challenging landscapes.
My work has taken me from wilderness trails and experiential education, to organizational leadership, bereavement care, retreats, support groups and private practice.
The terrain has changed.
The heart of the work has not.
I began as a guide.
Before grief and trauma became the focus of my work, I was an outdoor educator, climbing director, naturalist, U.S Forest Ranger, and experiential educator. Those years taught me something I still believe: some things cannot simply be explained. They have to be experienced.
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My early work was rooted in experiential education, nature, and the belief that some things have to be experienced—not simply understood intellectually.
I began designing and leading programs while still in college and went on to work as a U.S. Forest Service interpretive ranger, climbing director, outdoor educator, naturalist, and Leave No Trace traveling educator.
Those years taught me how powerful it can be to help people connect—to the land, to one another, and to themselves. We did that through nature and movement, challenge and play—creating experiences that invited people beyond what was familiar and into something they could discover for themselves.
I learned early that you can't manufacture transformation. You can create the conditions for it: invite someone into an experience, meet them where they are, stay curious about what unfolds, and let discovery belong to them.
Then I learned to lead through change.
For a decade, I led a national organization through conflict, growth, and transformation. It taught me guiding people isn’t always about having the answers. It’s about staying present when the way forward isn’t obvious.
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My next chapter put those lessons to the test in an entirely different environment.
For nearly a decade, I led the American Mountain Guides Association through a period of conflict, change, and significant growth. I learned what tenacity, honesty, transparency, and real listening can make possible—even when people strongly disagree about the way forward.
We brought competing voices into conversation, made difficult decisions, took action, strengthened professional standards, and helped transform a struggling organization into a respected professional association.
It taught me that bringing people together doesn't mean eliminating differences. Sometimes it means creating enough trust, honesty, and shared purpose to move forward with them.
And then the landscape of my own life changed.
Everything I understood about navigating difficult terrain became personal when my daughter, Eliza, died.
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Everything shifted when I lost my second child, my daughter Eliza.
At 31 weeks of pregnancy, we learned that she had Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. At 33 weeks, we received a second diagnosis of Trisomy 18. Together, the diagnoses made it clear there was no viable path toward long-term survival.
We continued the pregnancy knowing her life would be brief.
I carried my daughter while simultaneously preparing for her death.
Eliza died in utero at 41 weeks.
There are experiences that happen within the life you know, and there are experiences that change the landscape of that life entirely.
Losing Eliza was the latter.
I came to know the strange territory between love and loss, hope and knowing, attachment and anticipatory grief. After she died, the life I had built no longer fit in quite the same way.
I moved across the country, moved through another pregnancy, stepped away from my career, and began asking different questions about who I was, what mattered, and how I wanted to spend my life.
Looking back, I don't think Eliza gave me an entirely new purpose.
Her life and death revealed something that had been there all along.
I was still drawn to accompanying people through difficult and unfamiliar terrain.
Only now, I knew this particular landscape from the inside.
The work took a new shape.
Grief led me toward work I never could have planned: pregnancy and infant loss, bereavement care, perinatal mental health, trauma, movement, and eventually somatic practice.
What began as a lived experience became more than a decade of specialized work alongside hundreds of grieving families.
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I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I was meant to walk alongside others through this terrain. Something about the way I had lived through my own loss, what I had learned, what had helped, and what I had discovered about being with the unbearable felt like something I was meant to carry forward and offer to others.
And that knowing wasn't enough for me.
If I was going to accompany people through some of the most vulnerable experiences of their lives, I wanted to know that I was doing so with integrity. I wanted education, training, mentorship, and a deep understanding of the grief, trauma, and mental health experiences that can follow profound loss. So I began studying.
I pursued formal training in grief and bereavement care and perinatal mental health through organizations including Resolve Through Sharing and Perinatal Support International, and later expanded my education into trauma, attachment, somatic practice, parts work, and mind-body approaches through The Embody Lab and other advanced training.
At the same time, the work itself kept teaching me.
I helped develop a bereavement doula training program at Swedish Medical Center. I began integrating Nia, my long-standing movement practice combining dance, martial arts, mindfulness, and somatic awareness, into retreats for bereaved mothers.
I began leading retreats with Return to Zero: HOPE and eventually became deeply involved in building the organization itself, serving as a consultant, board member, and ultimately Director of Community Support.
Over the years, I have helped shape the curriculum and experiential design of its support groups, workshops, and retreats; personally accompanied hundreds of parents across the spectrum of pregnancy, infant, and child loss; led more than 100 support groups; and curated and facilitated more than a dozen immersive retreats.
And through thousands of hours of listening, witnessing, teaching, facilitating, and simply being with people after devastating loss, I began to understand something more clearly:
Loss rarely reveals only grief.
Grief has a way of touching everything.
Grief has a way of illuminating what was already there: old wounds, patterns, fears, and the ways we learned to protect ourselves and stay connected.
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Grief can illuminate old attachment wounds, family dynamics, relationship patterns, identity, shame, fear, and the strategies we developed long ago to protect ourselves or remain connected to the people we depended upon.
Becoming a parent can do the same.
So can a relationship, a transition, or a moment that somehow awakens something much older.
I realized that supporting someone through grief sometimes meant understanding far more than grief.
Over time, my work became increasingly integrative.
Life doesn't happen in categories.
Grief can awaken trauma. Trauma can shape relationships. Parenthood can bring us face-to-face with our own childhoods. Our minds can know we are safe while our bodies remain braced for danger. We can desperately want connection and simultaneously protect ourselves from it.
Humans are complex. My work makes room for that complexity.
I wanted to learn how to work with that complexity.
The more people I accompanied through profound loss, the more I saw what grief could open and reveal.
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I wanted to learn how to work with that complexity. Not just understand it intellectually, but know how to safely and skillfully work with the ways our experiences live in the body, nervous system, relationships, and sense of self.
That led me into years of highly specialized training in integrative somatic trauma therapy, attachment, developmental and complex trauma, parts work, nervous-system regulation, and somatic EMDR. I have trained extensively through The Embody Lab and directly with leading experts including Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Richard Schwartz, Dr. Stephen Porges, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, Deb Dana, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Scott Lyons, and Staci Haines. And I continue to study.
Today, that depth of training allows me to work with complex stories, including developmental trauma and CPTSD, and the many parts of ourselves shaped by what we have lived through. We can work not only with what you know and can put into words, but with what your body remembers, what your nervous system has learned, and the patterns that once helped you survive.
Because sometimes healing requires more than understanding your story. It requires knowing how to work with the ways the story still lives within you.
What grief touched in me.
Grief had opened a door into a story that began long before Eliza died. What I did not expect was that, in learning how to grieve her, I would begin to uncover parts of my own story that had been waiting much longer to be known.
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As I learned to stay with what hurt rather than move away from it, deeper layers began to emerge.
Eventually, I came to understand that some of what I had carried for most of my life had roots in profound early trauma: abuse beginning in infancy and toddlerhood, followed by years of emotional neglect, abandonment, and being cast into a role within my family that taught me to question myself rather than what was happening around me.
Suddenly, so much of what I had struggled with internally made more sense. The anxiety. The insecurity. The shame and fear. The constant vigilance. The ways I had learned to adapt, anticipate, achieve, caretake, and survive.
My own healing taught me to become curious about these places rather than ashamed of them.
Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?” I learned to ask, “What happened here? What did I have to learn in order to survive? And what might I no longer need to carry?”
I know how much courage it can take to revisit these places. I also know that healing does not require forcing open every door or reliving everything that happened. Some of the deepest work can happen slowly, safely, in relationship, with tremendous respect for the protections that got us here.
Beyond the work.
I’m a mom, a partner, a survivor, a movement lover, a lifelong learner, and someone who finds wonder in the simple and meaningful moments of everyday life.
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Outside of my work, I am a mom to three children—two living and one who lives with us in spirit—and a partner to the man with whom I have shared nearly 25 years of life.
These days, family life includes raising preteens and teens, school activities, sports, carpools, mom hangs, laughter, conflict, apologizing, trying again, and plenty of opportunities to practice everything I think I know about being human.
Movement remains one of the constants of my life. I teach Nia several times a week and love dancing with my community. I ski in the winter and spend as much of summer as possible on the water.
I love live music, dance, theater, comedy, a nourishing meal, a good Netflix series, games and puzzles, and being at home with the people I love.
I am also endlessly curious. I read voraciously about people, relationships, the body, neuroscience, psychology, grief, trauma, and whatever unexpected subject has sent me down the latest rabbit hole.
And I treasure relationships where we can go deep, talk about ordinary life, or simply be together.
I am still learning.
Still discovering parts of myself.
Still trying to live this one complicated, beautiful life as fully as I can.
A steady presence for what’s next.
I walk alongside people in the in-between, when life has irrevocably changed and you are somewhere between surviving what happened and discovering how to live from here.
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I have spent much of my life learning how to be with people in the places where something is changing—when the way forward isn't clear, when what once worked no longer does, or when life has asked more of us than we ever expected.
I have walked through difficult terrain in my own life. I have accompanied hundreds of people through theirs. I have trained deeply, gathered many tools along the way, and continue to learn because I believe this work asks that of me.
And perhaps most importantly, I know how to be with another human being without needing to rush, fix, simplify, or decide for them what healing should look like.
I know how to listen. How to notice what may not yet have words. How to work with the body as well as the story. How to stay present when things are complicated. And how to offer tools, perspective, challenge, compassion, or direction when they are useful.
If you are finding your way through grief, unresolved trauma, relationship wounds, or a life that has changed in ways you are still trying to understand, I would be honored to walk alongside you.
