Welcome. I’m honored you are here.
I’ve shared more of my story below for those who feel called to read it. I value knowing the helping professionals in my life in a deeper way, and I’ve shared this here in case that way of connecting resonates with you.
Guiding People Through Life’s Most Challenging Landscapes
For more than 25 years, I have devoted my work to designing and guiding transformational experiences that help people and communities navigate challenge, grief, healing, growth, and profound life transitions. Across very different landscapes—from outdoor and experiential education and organizational leadership to grief support, somatic healing, and trauma recovery—the through-line has remained the same: creating intentional, deeply human spaces where people can meet themselves and one another with greater presence, authenticity, and compassion.
From rock faces and wilderness trails to movement classes, private practice, retreats, classrooms, support groups, and organizational boardrooms, each landscape has taught me how to meet people where they are and create the conditions for healing, growth, and transformation.
At its core, I believe healing and change become possible when we are supported to be fully human—to experience the full range of being alive without hiding, performing, or becoming someone else. To feel anger, grief, joy, uncertainty, fear, hope, and contradiction, or simply not know. To be met with genuine attention, care, acceptance, and curiosity; to feel seen, understood, and valued in our full experience. I believe people need relationships with enough trust for honesty, enough steadiness to stay with difficulty, and enough freedom to explore, make mistakes, and discover who they are becoming. My role is not to define that process, but to walk alongside it—to listen deeply, honor what is present, offer perspective when helpful, and support the conditions for the whole person to emerge.
When there is room to speak honestly, grieve outwardly, feel anger, make mistakes, be loud or quiet, play, create, explore, and push beyond what feels familiar without fear of rejection or abandonment, something opens. We can begin to heal what has been wounded, understand ourselves differently, discover new possibilities, and make room for parts of ourselves that may not have had space to emerge before.
That is the thread running through all of my work: creating the conditions for people to meet themselves more fully, heal what is ready to be healed, and discover what becomes possible from there.
A Foundation in Experience, Nature & Connection
I earned my degree from Western Washington University through an interdisciplinary course of study spanning Fairhaven College and Huxley College of the Environment, bringing together experiential environmental education, eco-social justice, ecofeminism, natural history, ecopsychology, and field-based experiential approaches to learning. My education taught me to see people within the larger systems of body, relationship, community, culture, and the natural world—and to understand learning as something experienced, not simply taught.
While still in college, I began designing and leading experiential programs for young people and went on to work as a U.S. Forest Service interpretive ranger, climbing director, outdoor educator, naturalist, and traveling educator for the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics.
Through this work, I learned how powerful it can be to bring people into experiences that engage the whole person—body, mind, emotion, relationship, and connection to the natural world. Whether navigating a physical challenge, moving through unfamiliar terrain, or simply being given space to notice what is happening within, people can discover capacities and possibilities that are difficult to access through conversation alone. My role was to create the conditions for that discovery: to meet people where they were, invite them into the experience, and offer steady presence, encouragement, and witness as they found their own way through.
From Guiding People to Leading Change
That work eventually expanded into organizational leadership.
I served as Executive Director of the American Mountain Guides Association for nearly a decade, leading a national professional organization through significant growth, rebranding, organizational development, and cultural change. I worked alongside guides, guide services, industry leaders, educators, and boards to navigate complexity, build trust, develop new programs, and create a shared vision for the future.
I helped advance professional education and certification pathways that changed the landscape of guide and climbing instructor training in the United States.
But what stayed with me most was the human work of leadership: helping people let go of old ways of doing things, navigate uncertainty, build something together, and grow into what they were capable of becoming.
I learned that meaningful change requires more than strategy. It requires relationship, trust, vulnerability, persistence, creativity, and the willingness to stay engaged when things get hard.
Eliza
Everything changed when I lost my second child, my daughter Eliza.
At 31 weeks, we learned she had Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. At 33 weeks, we received a second diagnosis of Trisomy 18. Together, these 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.
She died in utero at 41 weeks.
There are experiences that change your life, and there are experiences that change the entire landscape of your life.
This was the latter.
I learned what it meant to live in the space between love and loss, hope and knowing, attachment and anticipatory grief. After her death, the life I had built no longer fit.
I moved across the country, moved through another pregnancy, stepped away from my career, and began asking much deeper questions about who I was, what mattered, and what I was here to do.
Looking back, I don't think Eliza gave me a new purpose so much as revealed something that had been present all along.
I was still being called to accompany people through difficult terrain.
Only now, the landscape was grief, loss, trauma, healing, and profound human vulnerability.
The Work Took a New Shape
My path into this work began with formal bereavement training through Resolve Through Sharing and perinatal mental health training through Perinatal Support of Washington. I helped develop a bereavement doula training program at Swedish Medical Center, and began bringing Nia—my long-standing movement practice integrating dance, martial arts, mindfulness, and somatic awareness—into retreats and spaces for bereaved mothers. Movement became both a way of living and a way of teaching: an invitation to experience grief, connection, and healing through the body rather than words alone.
I began leading retreats with Return to Zero: HOPE and later supported the organization through its transition into a formal nonprofit, first as a consultant, then as a board member, and ultimately as Director of Community Support. Over the years, I have helped shape the curriculum, experiential design, and evolution of RTZ HOPE’s support groups, workshops, and retreats. I have personally worked with hundreds of parents across the spectrum of pregnancy, infant, and child loss, led more than 100 support groups, and curated and led more than a dozen immersive retreat experiences, contributing to the growth of a nationally recognized model of grief support and establishing my own work as a recognized voice in the pregnancy and infant loss community.
From Grief to the Deeper Work of Healing
As I sat with hundreds of bereaved parents over the years, I began to see something clearly: loss rarely reveals only grief. It can illuminate early attachment experiences, family dynamics, relational patterns, old wounds, shame, and the ways we learned to protect and disconnect from ourselves.
I began to understand that supporting someone through grief sometimes means helping them understand much more than grief. That realization opened the door to a broader body of work and extensive training in somatic trauma therapy, attachment, mind-body coaching, complex and developmental trauma, the neurobiology of trauma, nervous system regulation, parts work, somatic EMDR, and embodied and relational healing. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to learn from and train with some of the leading voices in these fields, including Peter Levine, Richard Schwartz, Stephen Porges, Bessel van der Kolk, Diane Poole Heller, Deb Dana, Arielle Schwartz, Scott Lyons, Staci Haines, Kai Cheng Thom, and Richard Strozzi-Heckler.
Each training opened another piece of the picture—how early experiences shape us, how trauma lives in the body and in relationships, how protective patterns develop, and how change becomes possible when we approach ourselves with curiosity rather than shame.
The result is not a single protocol or fixed method, but an evolving, integrative way of working that adapts to the person in front of me.
What I Bring Into the Room
I bring more than 25 years of experience working with people, creating meaningful human experiences, and building spaces where people can feel seen, supported, and connected.
I also bring the perspective of someone who understands that our experiences are held in more than our stories and our minds. I pay attention to the body, the nervous system, relationships, protective patterns, and the parts of ourselves that may have learned to adapt long before we had words for what was happening.
And I bring lived experience.
I know what it is to grow up with emotional neglect, scapegoating, family dysfunction, and complex trauma—and to learn to disconnect from parts of yourself in order to belong and survive. I also know the earth-shattering reality of losing a child and the particular grief that changes the landscape of your life.
My own path toward healing has taken me through clinical work, movement, nature, spirituality, relationships, and many other forms of exploration. Over time, I learned that healing isn't simply about understanding what happened. It can require developing enough safety, capacity, trust, and internal steadiness to actually stay present with our experience—to feel it, listen to it, and begin to understand how it lives within us.
That understanding shapes how I work with others. I don't come into the room assuming I know what healing should look like for you. I come with curiosity, compassion, clinical and embodied knowledge, and a deep respect for the wisdom and protective strategies that have helped you get here.
I can sit with complexity. I can sit with grief that doesn't need to be fixed, trauma that doesn't have a neat narrative, and parts of you that may not yet feel ready to change. And I can help you gently build the capacity to know yourself more fully, reconnect with your body, understand your patterns, and create a relationship with yourself that feels more grounded, compassionate, and genuinely your own.
I don't believe healing means becoming untouched by what happened. And grief does not mean forgetting or moving on. I believe we can learn to live differently alongside what has happened—making room for what is true while discovering that connection, growth, and a life that is genuinely your own can still exist alongside profound loss and deep wounding.
Beyond the Work
Outside of my work, my life is rooted in family and community.
I am a mom to three children—two living and one who lives with us in spirit—and a partner to the man I have shared nearly 25 years of life with, including 16 years of marriage.
Raising preteens and teens brings school activities, sports, extracurriculars, carpools, mom hangs, laughter, conflict, and plenty of opportunities to keep working on myself. I'm still learning, apologizing, trying again, and navigating the messy, humbling, funny, and exhausting parts of this chapter.
Movement remains a constant. I teach Nia at the Y multiple times each week and love dancing with my community. Winter brings skiing; summer brings boating, waterskiing, surfing, wakeboarding, and swimming. Being outside and on the water has always been one of the ways I reconnect—with myself, with the people I love, and with something bigger than the day-to-day.
I enjoy music, dance and theater performances, comedy shows, getting outside, and gathering around a table with friends.
I love friendships that can hold the whole range of life. We might spend an evening waxing philosophical about relationships or what it means to be human, and then spend the next hour laughing and swapping stories from our day, or simply sitting together and enjoying each other’s company. I love that friendship can hold both the profound and the wonderfully everyday.
I am an avid nonfiction reader with an almost endless appetite for learning. I am continually curious about people, the body, psychology, relationships, neuroscience, grief, trauma, and what helps us grow and evolve. I am usually reading something, learning something, or following an unexpected rabbit hole.
And I love the simple pleasures: a nourishing dinner, a good Netflix series, puzzling or playing games, and hanging at home with people I love. Through it all, I am trying to live this life fully and with presence—to stay open to what it brings, from the ordinary and joyful to the complicated and hard.
Like everyone, I am still figuring things out—learning, growing, making mistakes, and trying again.
Whatever brings you here, you don’t have to navigate it alone.
If you’re ready to explore what support might look like, I invite you to reach out. We can begin simply—with a conversation, a little curiosity, and wherever you are right now.
Let’s begin there.