About Phoenix

About Me: The Path from Actor to Intuitive Healer

As a young child, I was already becoming an intuitive healer – though I didn’t have the words, boundaries, or consent around my experiences. I felt like I was drowning in an overwhelming sea of other people’s trauma, emotions, and energies. When I was introduced to theater, I finally found a way to channel everything I was experiencing into something that made sense. Something that I could hide behind, and survive. And something that could bring me joy in order to keep going.

As an actor, I used my skills as an empath and intuitive to create highly complex, nuanced characters on stage. I channeled my intuitive, sensitive way of being and my ability to absorb the feelings and energies of those around me to bring other people’s stories to life. During these performances, people would describe feeling uniquely seen, understood, and heard since I reflected their complex lives back to them from the safe distance of the stage. I played with the shadows of the human experience and brought forward emotional vulnerability and sensitivity in a way that remained distant enough to be safe – for them, and for me.

Discovering the Path to Healing

Then something happened. The more I reflected these stories back to viewers through performance, the more they thought they really knew me. People came up to me after performances and wanted to be friends. They believed they had just witnessed some core part of who I am. Because they felt so seen and heard, they felt close to me.

But I didn’t feel close to anyone. In fact, I was hiding. From the overwhelming pain of this world, from the immense trauma of my personal life, from the demands of unacknowledged emotional labor, from the secret fears of my identity. As long as I was behind a mask, I felt safe.

Seeking My True Self

One day I created a performance piece out of this phenomenon. I crafted different masks representing different roles I was playing, and designed a variety of outfits to go along with them. I put them all on and practiced wearing all these roles at once. It was hard to move – it was hard to breathe – it was exhausting. But I knew how to do it, because it was what I was always doing.

For the performance, I slowly took off all the masks and outfits except one. The one that I thought was me. But as I did it I realized – this wasn’t me either. The truth was, behind all these masks – I didn’t know who I was. 

I got the part because the director thought I was authentic. But it didn’t feel right. I was still performing, and I couldn’t stop. It took me years of confusion, messy experiences, and mistakes to finally realize –  I wanted to be more than a role in someone else’s script. 

I wanted to be me. 

Stepping off the Stage – From Actor to Intuitive Healer

This brought me to explore the healing power of the arts. I had personal experience of just how healing the arts can be. It was one of the only places I could turn to explore and express my feelings, trauma, fears, joys, and ideas safely. It helped save me. I poured all of my traumas – everything that felt different and unspeakable about me and my life - into making characters that felt believable to others. And they rewarded me for it. On the stage, I could be anything. 

But I wanted more. Some core part of me realized one reason I loved acting was because of its potential to heal – myself, and others. However, I wanted to use this power consciously, to turn that healing journey into something I could then offer to others. Off the stage.

It became clear that I specifically wanted to create and guide others on their own healing journey. I wanted to use the arts to become a healer.

Growing up I had never been interested in therapy because I don’t believe in pathologizing people. I walked into one psychology class in high school and walked out halfway through. I quit the class that same day. It remains the only class I’ve ever quit. 

I disagreed with what was being taught there. As a queer, non-binary, neuroqueer trauma survivor, and as an empath, hsp, and intuitive, I knew that people were rich, complex, multi-layered beings with so much more than a set of symptoms to define them. I believed we all have our own journeys to travel, and that a healer should be someone who walks with us on that journey. Not someone who defines and limits us. 

Becoming an Intuitive Healer

As an intuitive healer, I serve others who feel deeply and are seeking a guide on their own journeys. As an expressive arts therapist, I bring forward healing tools that go beneath your everyday way of being. Incorporating the arts into the healing process connects you to an ancient way of being that is alive in all of us. These places inside hold your offerings, your legacies, your trauma, and your healing – and once explored reveal their gifts to you. Therapy allows you to explore them safely, and embody the wisdom you gain from your journeys.

I am committed to helping you explore your own roles and masks with compassionate understanding. You co-created these roles and masks for a reason. They have served you throughout your life, even as they have also limited you. It’s important for us to know how, when, and why they were created, and what they offered. To honor when they are needed, without judgement. And to cultivate places where they can be removed – and you can be replenished, supported, and known.

Finding Yourself Beneath the Masks

When you take the time to truly understand something, it changes you. Just like when you watch a performance and feel seen by an actor – whether or not they play a “good” or “bad” character, doesn’t matter. The experience revealed some new, unknown part of you. A part of you that you didn’t know. And this changed you, even if you don’t know how.

When we give ourselves the time and space needed to truly understand the roles we play, it changes us. When we consciously work to understand and step away from the roles we play, we change our lives forever. 

I am passionate about helping you to discover the you underneath the masks – the you who is a mysterious, sacred being whom only you can truly know. This core, sacred space of you is your gift to discover. 

It is from knowing and centering yourself in this sacred space of you that you can safely bring forward your unique gifts in this world. It is from this place that you can experience the true joy of being you.

Just as I rejected the pathologizing lens of therapy in my youth, I am still just as passionate about the life-long process of engaging in the decolonization of therapy and healing practices. You don’t need to be fixed, you don’t need to fit a model of wellness that someone else created, and you don’t heal alone. Your survival skills brought you here today, and they are needed. There is no one right way or definition of wellness. And you deserve a rich, nourishing community and many guides on the incredible journey back to who you truly are. We all do.

Intuitive therapy can help you do that.

Identities and Lineages

As part of my practice of decolonizing therapy, I believe it is important to name the different identities that shape my experience as a person. I continuously work to unlearn whiteness and white supremacy, and to expand my experiences and perspective beyond what I grew up with. However whiteness and colonization in particular are embedded in the very foundation of this country and society. So I am constantly unlearning, and honor that this is a life-long process. Below you will find some of the ways I identify. Feel free to ask about how I hold and relate to these identities, or questions about others that may be important to know about.

Ancestry & Identity – from roots to wings

My roots grew me as a white person supported by the lands of the East Coast – the occupied lands of the Pennacook, the Abénaquis, and the Wabanaki Confederacy, as well as the Munsee Lenape and the Wappinger. 

Though I was raised without a strong connection to my ancestry, I hold the lineages of Irish, French-Canadian, and Blackfeet descent within me and through my ancestors. These legacies, lost within my white identity and privilege, have shaped and formed my identity in ever-evolving ways. 

I am from a mixed class background, with the lineages of poverty mixed with working class values informing my upbringing. My family raised me to speak one language, American English, and both sides of my family had already lived in the occupied lands of Turtle Island, the so-called US, for a few generations. I come from a generational military legacy, though was not raised with any active duty family members. I was raised with a bit of Catholic, a bit of Buddhist belief systems, though we did not practice. My upbringing was very cis-heteronormative.

My wings brought me to embrace my path as an intuitive healer, therapist, ecospiritual facilitator, spoken word poet, and performer. I now live in so-called SF Bay Area, on the occupied lands of the Ohlone people. I am queer, genderfluid, non-binary, and neuroqueer. My pronouns are they/them. I am an empath, a highly sensitive person, an intuitive, and a witchcraft practitioner in the European earth-based traditions. My life is rooted in the practice of earth based spirituality, and I believe healing is inseparable from the path of liberation. That our own healing is intrinsically connected with healing our communities, lineages, and the Earth. 

I fully believe in each person’s unique and sacred healing journey – and I would be honored to support and travel alongside you.

I offer variety of services that can support you on your journey:

• For solo journeyers, we will work together to build a sense of safety, connection, and embodiment so you may reclaim your joy, self-love, aliveness, and community.
• For partners, I also offer couples therapy. We’ll create a path of more clear and aligned communication, practices to get both of your needs met, and ways to deepen your intimacy with each other and your own selves.
• For groups, I offer Soul Sanctuary: LGBTQ Empaths. We will come together to explore how to incorporate creativity, spirituality, and healing on the path of activism.
• I specialize in supporting LGBQA and TGNC folx. I also offer a variety of therapy modalties, including: spiritual therapy, somatic therapy, expressive arts therapy, and ecotherapy

Training and Certifications

• (Monthly – Ongoing) Topographies of (Dis)Connection: Re-membering Self, Community, and Land with Institute for the Development of Human Arts
• (Year long, April 2024) Embodied Private Practice Cohort V, mentorship program with Kintsugi Therapist Collective
• Suicide Prevention in LGBTQIA+ Clients with The Affirmative Couch
• Psychological Preparation for Medical Transition with The Affirmative Couch
• Certification in Working Psychologically with Spiritual Issues, Traumas, Teachers, Students and Communities with Mariana Caplan, LMFT
• Ecotherapy Immersion with Ariana Candell, LMFT of The Earthbody Institute
• Certified Hypnotherapist in Spiritual Practice of Depth Hypnosis with Dr. Isa Gucciardi at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream
• Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Expressive Arts Therapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies
• First Level Externship of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy
• Certified Sex Educator at San Francisco Sex Information Hotline (SFSI)
• Rape Crisis Counselor certification program at San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR)
• Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama from NYU Tisch School of the Arts