my guiding principles

• change is constant

  • that age-old cliché is true! but what does this really mean for us? change is happening within and without us all the time, happening right now as you read this website! transformation and adaptation are your birthrights. i am here to act as supportive guide in noticing changes, visioning transformation, and putting adaptation into action. the change you seek already resides with you—together, we can practice really tapping in.

  • from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993): “All that you touch / You Change. / All that you Change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / is Change. / God / is Change.”

• microcosms & macrocosms

  • the small is a reflection of the large. from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy Institute: “small is good, small is all.” when change takes place on a small scale, i trust that it will ripple outwards and create new, overarching patterns in our lives. we center the question: what do you genuinely feel you have capacity for in this moment? we work with what works, allowing the rest to unfold with time.

  • the large is also reflected in the small! how have the systems we have found ourselves in—from family of origins to cultures and institutions—shaped our selves? and how does all the magic, miracle, and mystery of the universe find expression through you?

• nonlinearity

  • while change may be a constant, the way change moves is not. change does not always take place smoothly, predictably, or linearly. together, we will practice making and holding space enough for all that arises so we can honor the actual, lived human experience—which is often quite messy! another Emergent Strategy-ism comes to mind here: “there is always enough time for the right work.”

• interdependence

  • we do not exist in a vacuum! each and every one of us is interdependent with our varying contexts. i do not seek to “fix” you because i do not believe you are broken. i believe you are a gloriously adaptive person attempting to adjust within broken systems. so too do i believe that you are deserving of contexts that affirm your wholeness and the breadth/depth of your humanity. i believe finding these contexts can mean everything.

  • i also value the way in which our therapeutic time is mutually created, and nothing is outside the realm of “therapy talk” for me. anything that touches your life is important and deserving of attentive care.

• love

  • i follow bell hooks’s (all about love: new visions, 1999) definition of love as “a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.”

  • i also follow one of bell hooks’s points of inspiration. from psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled (1978): love is "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."

  • love therefore also relies on accountability. love is a commitment to an intentional ethics grounded in our interdependence. my practice is firmly rooted in an ethic of love, and i invite each and every one of my clients to hold me in loving accountability.