My path has not been a straight line. I grew up as a highly sensitive child, the eldest of two, navigating my parents' divorce. Even at a young age, I found an unusual satisfaction in babysitting, doing the dishes, and tidying up—I have simply always loved helping parents find a sense of ease. Looking back, I can see that I possessed a rare compassion and perspective for a child; I could feel that my parents were carrying their own unprocessed traumatic grief, and I worked hard to accept their reality. That sensitivity was my early training ground for looking beneath the surface of a home.

Right after graduating as an Occupational Therapist, I traveled through Southeast Asia, India, and Nepal, nurturing my love for adventure, human connection, and ancient rhythms. When I returned, I threw myself into the clinical world, working in physical rehab, acute care, and at a specialized children’s treatment center. But everything shifted when I tried to become a mother. Facing the painful reality that I couldn't make pregnancy happen, I had to learn how to optimize my health conditions, make concrete changes, and deeply surrender to the process. Then, life raised the stakes completely. While pregnant for the third time with our firstborn, my husband, Mark, was diagnosed with cancer. I gave birth to our baby right in the middle of his intense medical treatments.

The storm didn't stop there. After the birth of my second baby, I faced a devastating wrongful dismissal from my job—a deeply painful disruption that triggered postpartum depression and a heavy premonition that the cancer was going to return. On my 32nd birthday, holding a two-and-a-half-year-old and a six-month-old infant, my husband was given just two years to live. In those trenches, I discovered what true strength actually means. It isn’t about being a flawless, unfeeling robot; it’s about having the capacity to feel every raw emotion, realizing you are not defined by your circumstances, and learning that sometimes your absolute best looks like your worst. I survived by relying on deep spiritual connection, the power of prayer, a lot of luck, and the anchoring words of our wedding song: Steady as we go.

Amidst all of this heavy, overwhelming survival stress, my daughters began mirroring back intense, volatile emotions. I spent a long time thinking my eldest was simply the emotional one, but in reality, her nervous system had been exposed to extreme levels of stress and cortisol from the womb onward, and she was a sensory sponge absorbing the unvoiced trauma and fear of our entire home. Navigating that chapter forced me to look far beneath the surface of behaviour—confronting my own complex layers of guilt and shame as a mother, while learning how to truly regulate and heal a child's deeply overwhelmed nervous system. It was here that I learned the necessity of raw shadow work, deep self-compassion, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT tapping). Later on, the lens of Human Design gave me the vital perspective to understand our unique energetic wiring. It completely changed how I parented, helping us move from constant defense into a spacious family lifestyle. Today, she is a steady teenager—and while we still have our natural ups and downs, we are no longer living in a state of survival.

Through it all, I learned that true stability goes far beyond the food we eat, how much we exercise, or the hours we sleep. While those variables matter, the real medicine lies in changing our relationship to the dark and transforming the massive, invisible stress we carry. Today, my practice lives in the both/and. My twenty years of clinical O.T. experience is my unshakeable professional shield—but my lived authority, my resourcefulness, and my steady presence are my true medicine.