Helping you lead a life of meaning and connection: Finding the path to a good life.
Countless studies have shown that at the end of the day, good relationships = happiness.
So simple, yet so hard - for so many of us, our relationships with ourselves and our partners are fraught with challenges and conflict.
As human beings, our brains give us a gift of amazing potential: we can reflect on our actions and our past, we can plan and we can set goals. We can connect with meaning, stories, metaphor, spirit, the unknown.
And our brains also want us to survive. We have a hair-trigger system that shuts down our thinking brain and activates our survival system when we perceive threat. Under threat, we defend, protect, avoid, fight, distract with substances or screens, and do other things that cut ourselves off from our best selves and our loved ones. We conflate the present with the past and we insist that those around us are repeating the wounds we experienced long ago.
Using the tool of mindfulness as well as knowledge of how the brain and body work, we have the possibility of learning about our very personal and particular patterns, and practice new ways of being in relationship - with ourselves and others.
It is excruciatingly painful to be disconnected. I work with individuals and couples with a trauma-informed, body-centered, attachment-based approach that helps wire new awareness, habits, and ways of being that ultimately help people live lives of greater meaning and connection.
Countless studies have shown that at the end of the day, good relationships = happiness.
So simple, yet so hard - for so many of us, our relationships with ourselves and our partners are fraught with challenges and conflict.
As human beings, our brains give us a gift of amazing potential: we can reflect on our actions and our past, we can plan and we can set goals. We can connect with meaning, stories, metaphor, spirit, the unknown.
And our brains also want us to survive. We have a hair-trigger system that shuts down our thinking brain and activates our survival system when we perceive threat. Under threat, we defend, protect, avoid, fight, distract with substances or screens, and do other things that cut ourselves off from our best selves and our loved ones. We conflate the present with the past and we insist that those around us are repeating the wounds we experienced long ago.
Using the tool of mindfulness as well as knowledge of how the brain and body work, we have the possibility of learning about our very personal and particular patterns, and practice new ways of being in relationship - with ourselves and others.
It is excruciatingly painful to be disconnected. I work with individuals and couples with a trauma-informed, body-centered, attachment-based approach that helps wire new awareness, habits, and ways of being that ultimately help people live lives of greater meaning and connection.
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I'm a licensed professional counselor, a teacher, a professional outdoorswoman, and the mother of two young children. I have over fifteen years of clinical experience working with people dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, relationship struggles, and more, in hospital, crisis clinic, wilderness treatment, and private practice settings. I teach for the Wilderness Therapy Masters program at Naropa Univeristy. On top of this I have almost twenty years of experience as a professional wilderness and climbing guide. I offer counseling for individuals and couples in Golden, CO, as well as outdoors on the trail.
I am passionate about helping people connect with themselves, other people, and the world around them. This work - whether in the office or in a mountain meadow - will help you have more freedom and more choice, and it will help you engage with life more fully, in body, heart, mind, and spirit. |
