i am a politicized somatics practitioner & facilitator. the seed of my work is an unshakable knowing that the wisdom of your body is your birthright, and that this wisdom is the heart of transformation & healing for personal & collective liberation. the primary lineages i study & practice within include somatic experiencing (SEP), generative somatics via vanissar tarakali, biodynamic craniosacral therapy, and mad pride.
i have 15+ years of experience doing community support work, training, and facilitation. i’ve facilitated some style of trauma-informed, broadly accessible, fat-positive somatic practice for groups since 2011 & 1:1 sessions since 2015.
i am nourished in this work by longtime personal practitioners & bodyworkers & peer supervisors (mostly queer femmes), the turtle tank school for radical purpose where i have studied & practiced since 2016, countless thinkers & collaborators & family members in transformative justice (a primarily Indigenous lineage) & abolition (a primarily Black lineage), yoga āsana & therapeutics (mostly iyengar), radical dharma via lama rod owens & angel Kyodo williams & goenka-style vipassana & a prior lifetime of meditation practice & scripture study that started at age 3, wxmb cxre & other movement workshops, leatherdyke community, and underground house & techno as music/dance/culture. i have trained & practiced in trauma-aware conflict transformation with rain crowe, suicide intervention at provincial professional standards & as community caretaking practice, and birth work. i am grateful to all my teachers & all of their teachers.
my approach is grounded in mad pride/disability justice models, particularly peer education & support, harm reduction, and queer lineages of radical desire, consent & power. my training is lifelong & intentionally outside institutional/academic frameworks of social work, psychology, psychiatry, and policing. i often work with clients & facilitate workshops around tending madness & trauma beasties (especially of the shame variety), leather & D/s, non-monogamy, writing & other creative/care practices, and relationships including consent, boundaries, and conflict. many of my clients are queer, trans, bipoc, sex workers & otherwise living/working/creating for liberation.
“As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.”
––Mary Oliver, “Evidence (Part 1)”
i am a cis queer femme who places herself through many lineages of blood, choice, learning, experience, and impact. i live & make family as a white settler of british isles & german jewish & gentile descent in tiohtià:ke/mooniyang, unceded territory whose caretakers are the kanien’kehá:ka people, past, present, and future. this land has been a meeting place for many nations, including algonquin, huron-wendat, and haudenosaunee nations. i grew up near the ocean on kumeyaay territory (san diego north county), with blood family & ancestors on ohlone, tongva, northern paiute, and cherokee lands (as far as i currently understand). legacies of white supremacist dominance, including the illegitimate ownership of stolen lands & stolen people, as well as intergenerational madness, abuse, and addiction, are part of my blood & cultural inheritance. as someone who benefits from historical and current colonization & white supremacy, i am working to hold that power with integrity and accountability. for more details about reparations, see my fees page.