For many years I was a trauma critical care nurse. I sat with people in their hardest, darkest, most vulnerable times, and learned there that the mind and body cannot be separated. It taught me to attune, to listen, to be present, and to hear what the body could not say.

While working as a nurse in Nepal, in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake, I first saw how closely the well-being of people, animals, and land are bound together. That led me into veterinary medicine and One Health, the understanding that to treat a person, we must understand all three. My time in veterinary medicine, a lifetime of working with animals, and my own experiences with the animals I’ve loved have given me a particular understanding of the bond we share with them, and of the heartbreak that comes when they fall ill or die.

Studying One Health in Alaska showed me how much climate change affects mental health, especially in rural and Indigenous communities, where families grieve the loss of land and life, often with almost no clinical support nearby. I came to believe that what was needed most was relational, depth-oriented care: care that can sit with grief, trace patterns across generations, and hold suffering bound up with land, history, and culture. That belief led me to psychiatry.

Psychoanalysis has become a central thread in my life, the discipline of listening for what lives beneath the surface: attachments, dreams, the patterns that repeat until they are understood. I have trained at psychoanalytic institutes across the US and internationally, and I continue to study and learn. I am passionate about bringing psychoanalysis to communities and to unreached places, because I believe everyone deserves access to this kind of deep healing.

My training, experiences, and studies have taught me that none of us are only one thing. We are made of many parts, many identifications, gathered into a single life. I am a potter, because I believe clay can be a great teacher. Working with it asks us to observe, to move slowly, to be patient with the process, and to sit with not knowing. It is an integral part of my practice. I am a community herbalist, committed to being an active steward of the land and to sharing the joy of plants with my patients, and a trained death doula, holding people at the other edge of life. And I am drawn to psychedelic work, to the deep unconscious states it can open, and to the healing it can bring: closure, restoration, and peace.