Collaborate together to co-create each session for your highest healing.
Approach your inner experiences with compassionate curiousity.
Explore hidden subconscious material safely in a mindful state.
Understand yourself better.
Release what no longer serves you.
Invite in a new inner experience.
Integrate this new experience outside of the session in a way that feels enjoyable for you!
I can help you address your concerns and explore your desires using the following pathways:
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Inner Child Healing
For inner child healing, I draw on my training in Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy. IFS Therapy is a non-pathological approach that helps us understand our psyche as made up of different "parts." We might have an angry part, a numbing part, a critical part, and various parts that feel weak, not good enough, sad, scared, ashamed, and alone. Often times the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of these parts are what gets in the way of us having the kind of harmonious and intimate relationships we desire.
IFS helps us realize that these parts are not the whole picture of who we are, but rather, they are sub-personalities of our psyche that have been fragmented and disconnected from our true Self, usually due to traumatic events, missing needs, and overwhelming emotions that weren't able to be processed in our childhood.
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These parts can often take over, making us believe, feel, and act in ways that we wouldn't consciously choose. I can guide you in not only being aware of these parts, but more importantly, connecting with them and filling in their missing needs - usually for acknowledgement, compassion, comfort, attention, understanding, empowerment, support, and care. They may need to be updated with new beliefs and offered different ways of functioning that may be more enjoyable for them too!
In this way, our "parts" can release their burdens and pain so they can go back to their natural states as welcomed and connected parts of the whole of you. This results in more internal harmony as all parts of your psyche start getting on the same page with YOU emerging as the rightful leader of your system.
Nervous System Healing
For nervous system healing, I draw on my knowledge of Polyvagal Theory, which posits that healing happens when we are in our ventral vagal state - when we feel safe, connected, calm, and curious. Therefore, our first order of business is to learn to shift into your ventral vagal state and stay there so we can access more and more of your system's inherent healing guidance!
In contrast to primarily living in our ventral vagal state, many of us are operating from our sympathetic nervous system (high stress, fight or flight) or our dorsal vagal state (collapsed, frozen, numb). This can often be because our system had to live in these extreme states to survive past events - and now it is stuck there. Nervous system healing requires us to connect with the fear that keeps us in a fight, flight, or freeze response and gradually help it relax into deeper layers of safety.
These layers of fear and safety can be accessed through the body. It has been known in recent years that the body holds memory of traumatic events, which is why cognitive therapies are often not enough to heal the impacts of trauma and produce lasting embodied change. I draw on my training in the Hakomi Method, which is a somatic/body-centered and mindfulness based therapy to honour the body's wisdom and see it as a valuable messenger of what needs attention.
I will often ask questions like, "What sensations do you notice in your body as we are speaking of this?" and "In what area of the body are you feeling these sensations?" and "What does the body want to do right now?" These types of questions require you to access your right brain to answer from a place of mindful listening, sensing, and following. It helps us come back into a respectful relationship with our body and maybe even understand the root causes of physical ailments.
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Women's Centered Healing
I draw on my own experience of being a female bodied being on this Earth. I am not an expert on these topics and continue to walk the path of what it means to be a human and a woman. It is an ever blooming relationship!
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Together, we can explore your relationship with:
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Gender and being a woman in the world.
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Transitions between the stages of a woman's life cycle.
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Your perception and interactions with women and men, especially as it shows up in dating and relationships.
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The dance of masculine and feminine energies within you.
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Your menstruation and menstrual cycle.
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Your pelvic organs (ie. Womb, Cervix, Vagina, Vulva).
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Your sexuality and sexual expression.
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Your Yes's and No's
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Pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and birth.
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As we explore these realms together, we often experience greater understanding, acceptance, and reverence for our female bodies. We begin embodying more and more the power and beauty of the form we are in.
Ancestral Lineage Healing
Many of the concerns we come to therapy with have roots in our ancestral history. It's not uncommon for my clients to say their parents and grandparents also struggled with similar patterns around emotions, money, health, and relationships. Not to mention that we are still carrying the impacts as a society of collective issues such as colonization, war, poverty, and patriarchy. As we broaden our view to understand that the pain from the past has not fully been resolved, we may realize that the key to healing from these systemic oppressions may lie with connecting with our ancestors.
Science has shown through the study of epigenetics that our cells hold memory of these events and our DNA has adjusted in order to survive such situations. It may not fully realize that many of those situations have changed, meaning we are often operating from old programming that is no longer serving us.
If the burdens are ancestral in nature, it follows that we may need ancestral support to heal them. The protocol I use, taught to me by the Ancestral Medicine Institute, helps clients connect to well and wise Ancestral Guides, who are often unknown to the client. Through the help of these Guides, we are able to connect with our lineages, understand the pain they went through, help them heal through prayer and ritual, and access and embody their gifts.
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This can sound pretty "out there." However, I have noticed it is not much different than connecting to a part of you using IFS Therapy. It is simply connecting with a part of you that is your ancestors. Through this process, it is common for folks to begin walking in the world feeling more supported by those who walked before them. It is also common for people to start feeling more spiritually connected and more connected to the land, as our indigenous ancestors once were.