I am the daughter of long time Buddhist practitioners and teachers, raised at San Francisco Zen Center and at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Steeped in Buddhism from an early age, I have both benefited from Eastern teachings of non-duality and mindfulness, while confronting how Buddhist teachings fall short for a Western psychology. 

From an early age I was drawn to home birth midwifery and pursued my training at a birth center on the border of Texas and Mexico, where women came across the border to attain citizenship for their babies. Over the course of my 20 year career as a midwife I worked in a variety of settings including Planned Parenthood, free standing birth centers, and as a home birth midwife in both the Bay Area and in New York City. While in New York, I also got my bachelors degree in Nonfiction Creative Writing and poetry from the New School. 

Overtime I came to realize, although I loved the work of women’s health and delivering babies-as well as being of service to communities in need-the best expression of my inherent expertise lay in the interpersonal. 

My path to becoming a therapist took over 12 years to complete. I attended the California Institute of Integral Studies to complete my masters in Integrative Counseling Psychology. During this time I was also studying the Diamond Approach and took breaks from schooling to have both of my children and consider other trajectories. 

In the end I believe I stuck with therapy because of my own experience of being healed through therapeutic work. For many of us who lacked the emotional holding, resonance, boundaries and support that was developmentally needed as children, we can enter into adulthood compensating in various ways for that deprivation. Therapy rewrote my attachment bonds and helped me to come out of the past-out of the attachment trauma-and into the capacity to have a real, loving relationship. Through the therapeutic relationship I felt finally able to shift what had felt irrevocably stuck within me. 

I now live in Lagunitas California with my spouse and two children and enjoy our abundant garden, running in the mountains, the gift of nature and the simple pleasures and daily hurtles of family life.