My Personal Journey
My winding path to becoming a therapist and the evolution of my understanding of the healing process
Although the idea of becoming a psychotherapist was planted in my teenage years, I am grateful that my path to this work was a winding one. What started as a two-dimensional idea – sitting in a professional office, sharing intellectual insights – has evolved into something much richer: a living encounter between people, responsive to each moment's needs.
My own struggles with body image revealed this split personally. Through intensive dieting and exercising, I was treating my body as an object, not as a subject – reenacting the very mind-body hierarchy I was studying. I was treating my body like a status symbol, not as the locus of self and my entire experience of the world.
This inquiry culminated in my undergraduate thesis on traumatic memory through the lens of philosophers of embodiment – pointing me toward the integrated approach I now practice.
From philosophy to embodiment
My university years began with Psychology, but I quickly found myself drawn to Philosophy instead. These studies felt like an anthropological exploration of Western culture. Though philosophy may seem rarefied, I could see how the dry, pedantic, disembodied thinking of some streams of philosophy reflected broader cultural trends – brilliant at understanding mechanisms, yet missing how consciousness and body are not separate at all.
Finding home in Nelson
I felt intuitively drawn to move here after just hearing about Kootenays. Though I grew up across the country, this place feels like home. I draw deep nourishment from the landscape here.
As the suffering of the land becomes more evident – clearcuts, forest fires – it raises questions about what it means to call a place home and have responsibility to the land and all the communities here: Indigenous and settler, human and non-human.
Awakening through practice
Meditation has been my most constant companion since 2012. During my first Vipassana retreat, while doing a body scan, I suddenly felt an electric jolt through my system – a clear memory of an electric shock from years before. I hadn't realized this shock was still so present in my body. My mindbody was spontaneously processing this small trauma it had been storing. I began to understand the countless other memories that must also be held viscerally in my system.
My work as a canoe guide and Earth skills mentor revealed similar truths. I watched how real-world tasks – making fires, tracking creatures, learning edible plants – brought people alive and out of self-consciousness into intuitive presence. The motto "be more, need less" captured something essential: connection to nature and our primal selves engenders the peaceful vitality that is the foundation of mental health.
Learning through living
Important lessons also came through my own encounters with issues such as perfectionism and anxiety. With anxiety, I've learned to discern its layers – the universal need for stability in an uncertain world, echoes of times when safety felt absent, and habitual patterns keeping old fears alive.
With perfectionism, I discovered how this well-intentioned drive can become life-negating. When I root into my values and meaningful projects, perfectionism softens. Being aligned with what truly matters creates motivation based on love rather than fear.
These personal journeys help me meet clients with genuine understanding, knowing intimately the courage it takes to befriend these parts of ourselves.
An evolving path
What excites me most is how my continual deepening into a fuller embodied experience of my own life enriches my work with clients. The truths I share in sessions – about presence, self-compassion, and staying with difficult emotions – continue to reveal new layers in my own experience, making each therapeutic encounter more authentic and alive.
Healing is not a singular event but an expression of love – love of life, love of each other, and love of ourselves.
Walking together
Today, as a somatic therapist and counsellor in Nelson BC, I bring all these threads together – philosophical inquiry, embodied practice, nature connection, and lived experience.
I look forward to walking alongside you on your own winding path, honoring both where you've been and where you're heading.