My personal journey
My winding path to this work—and what it taught me about healing
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 of therapy—sitting in a professional office, sharing intellectual insights—has evolved into something much more meaningful to me. I now think of counselling as creating conditions for transformation—staying curious about what wants to emerge rather than applying techniques to fix problems. Everything I have experienced in my life contributes something to what I offer my clients, and I can see how each piece is contributing to the whole.
When understanding wasn't enough
In my teens, I went to talk therapy with a psychologist. I was depressed, dealing with insomnia, and incredibly tightly wound—working myself too hard and struggling with body image through intensive dieting and exercising. She listened a lot but didn't offer much back. While I benefited from having someone sympathetic to talk to, this experience didn't change my situation much. I was already good at analyzing myself and generating insights about my patterns and history. Doing it in the presence of another person didn't evoke radical change.
The cognitive understanding I gained wasn't translating into felt experience or concrete shifts in how I lived. As the saying goes: to know and not to do is not to know. Something was missing—a bridge between intellectual insight and embodied transformation.
From philosophy to embodiment
My university years began with studying psychology, but I quickly found myself drawn to philosophy instead. These studies felt like an anthropological exploration of Western culture—revealing how deeply the mind-body split runs through our thinking. The mainstream of Western philosophy has treated consciousness as separate from embodied experience, as if we're minds saddled with bodies that need feeding and walking. Though philosophy has produced excellent critiques of this split and there is now an abundance of more holistic views, this narrative still needs to play out in institutions like healthcare. That arc fascinates me.
This inquiry culminated in my undergraduate thesis on traumatic memory through the lens of philosophers of embodiment. I was studying how trauma lives in the body, how memory is encoded in our tissues and nervous systems.
By then, I was already on a healing path. Years earlier, I'd struggled intensely with body image—treating my body as an object to control rather than inhabiting it as the locus of my experience. Through Vipassana meditation (which I'd discovered in 2012) and daily practice, I was learning to actually live in my body instead of just thinking about it. But old patterns persisted. Even as I studied embodiment, I was burning myself out—taking on too much, staying up late, driven by perfectionism. The split between understanding and living what I understood was closing, but slowly.
Awakening through practice
During my first Vipassana meditation 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 nervous system 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, and for the first time, I felt what it was like to fully inhabit my body. This was an early introduction to the principles of somatics—that the body holds and can release stored experience.
Meditation became my daily practice—and remains so today, though in a more sustainable form than those early two-hour sits.
Learning from the land
Working as a canoe guide and Earth skills mentor, I watched how physical tasks brought people into their bodies and in touch with their primal selves. I became part of the primitive skills community in Quebec and Ontario, where there was a sense of culture that made deep sense: sitting around sacred fire, the importance of song, having relationship with what you eat and the tools you make. This kind of naturalist knowledge wasn't about taxonomy—it was about relationship.
Although my work has moved indoors, those values and principles continue. In craniosacral therapy, I work with the body's tidal rhythms: the fluid and energetic fluctuations that connect our bodies with the rest of the natural world. In Somatic Experiencing®, I help people reconnect with their primal impulses and the body’s inherent wisdom. The setting has changed, but the spirit remains.
The winding path home
Looking back, my path to this work makes sense—but it didn't feel that way at the time. After my philosophy degree, I continued to work in outdoor education, which I loved but which left me depleted from the constant extraversion. Then I took shift work at a remote lodge construction project, drawn by the promise of ‘getting ahead’ and the chance to live somewhere stunningly beautiful and wild. I convinced myself I'd have to choose between meaningful work and the opportunity to live in a place like that.
A crisis with a family member's mental health became the turning point. Through that experience, some resistance in me gave way to readiness to step into healing work. It took some more twists and turns, but eventually I found counselling and craniosacral training. And I returned to Nelson—discovering I didn't have to choose at all. Here I get to do work that truly matters in a place as beautiful as any I'd encountered.
That journey taught me something I now see with clients: our bodies often know we're out of alignment long before we have language for it—and often before we're ready to do anything about it.
Learning through living
Important lessons also came through my own encounters with 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 connection 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.
Walking together
What excites me most is how my continual deepening into a fuller embodied experience of my own life enriches my work with clients. The practices we cultivate in sessions—presence, self-compassion, 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.
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.
Curious to learn more? You can read about my practice and approach, explore how I work with clients, or get in touch to schedule a free consultation.
During my time in Nelson, I've been grateful to participate in creative projects with local artists. Below is a music video for Ru Rose's song 'The Womb,' filmed at Little Slocan Lake, exploring themes of embodiment and connection to place—threads that run through both my personal journey and my work with clients.
Rooted in the Kootenays: performing backup vocals for Ru Rose's 'The Womb,' filmed at Little Slocan Lake.