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My focus on mindfulness began five years ago and in mindfulness I found home.
My teaching primarily comes from my life experiences. As the 4th child in a dysfunctional family, I experience several traumatizing events at an early age, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.
Raised in a Pentecostal home, I was encouraged not to have friends outside of the church. I felt separate from the world and different from others all my life. I seemed to be limited to feelings of fear, sadness, and loneliness. I struggled to form lasting relationships, to be heard and understood. My sense of self-worth was fragile, leading to an eating disorder in my late teens. A fear-filled marriage and a nasty divorce left me feeling broken. A diagnosis of PTSD soon followed.
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I have been in and out of therapy most of my adult life, where I learned the great value of embodying self-acceptance, self-kindness, and the healing power of Somatic work. Exploring inquiry-based meditation and integrated breathwork, I uncovered subconscious beliefs and old hurts and started the task of healing each as they arise. Through the process, I discovered that “just like me,” others were suffering from a lack of understanding and feelings of not belonging. I was not alone. It was then that my desire to share these teachings with others arose.
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My study of Buddhist psychology is ongoing. The rewards; my sense of connection to the world grows daily. I am kinder to myself and others. Day by day, I continue to discover where clinging to things being a specific way affects my overall sense of well-being and how to release my grip. These lessons are the foundation from which I teach.
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In 2020 I pursued a teaching certificate from both the Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center of University of California, Berkeley. Here I gained invaluable personal and professional experience in interfacing mindfulness meditation with Western psychology and excelled in the instruction of Reparenting, R.A.I.N, and Inquiry.
I embrace and encourage diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and my practices have a central focus of mindfulness meditation with tools for body, heart, and mind and are specifically designed to address relationships, conflict, trauma, organizational wisdom, and societal change.