My teachers are too numerous to name – and many of them are not easily named. Among the nameable – but not easily categorizable – are Joanna Macy and The work That Reconnects, historians Marija Gimbutas, Max Dashu, Adrienne Mayor, scholar, futurist and activist Riane Eisler and others for tirelessly rescuing and making available the stolen, silenced, essential threads of well women's culture and wisdom; Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Marion Woodman (and so many others) for so gracefully tending to the mythology of the wild female; Starhawk, Ruth Barrett and other fierce tenders and teachers of the ancient culture of animism, magickal craft as an expression of permaculture, erotic intelligence and the Earth; Susun Griffin, Germaine Greer, Mary Daly and other elder-women who have dedicated their lives to critical 'radical feminist’ thinking and have often been vilified for it; the countless devotional essayists and poets including Mary Oliver, Pattiann Rogers, Adrienne Rich, Jane Hirshfield, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Merton and more; all modern day bards who have not forgotten how to pray; Bill Plotkin for his mid-wifing of SoulCraft, Nature and The Human Soul, Wild Mind and The Journey of Soul Initiation.
And still, most profoundly, my teachers have been the other-than-human ones who have nurtured my own radical theosophy; those who so generously found me as a child and have remained with me throughout my life. The Wild has been, and continues to be, my greatest teacher and companion along with my lineage grandmothers and grandfathers, the ancient vibrantly well ones from whom I descend, whose brilliance I carry as a woven braid of care and ferocity for the wellness of the Earth and all its beings. The Earth grandmothers and grandfathers, the ancient elemental feminine, masculine and those beautiful ones who cannot be categorized (as none of us should), whose difficult and noble path is to walk the liminal lines, the in-between lines, the neither-this-nor-that lines. It is the most beautiful act of nobility to stay true to our essential nature when, all around us, is a violence to conform, fall asleep, become small by forgetting who we are and thereby to become an unwitting adversary to Life. We are all indebted to the ones who remain awake and to those who are courageously waking up.
While I have been a psychotherapist since 1992, I have also spent time in the worlds of business, entrepreneurship, high-technology, non-profit and political activism. I am not interested in conformity and my life reflects this. After flunking out of the 4th grade, getting kicked out of prep school and never graduating from high school, I received my BA, Cum Laude, in 1987 from Simon’s Rock of Bard College and my MSW in 1992 from Smith College’s, School for Social Work. Between 1992 and 2010 I have studied with numerous teachers in trauma & attachment, somatics and body-focused psychotherapy. In 2010 I became a Somatic Sex Educator and Certified Sexological Bodyworker and in 2017 I studied a formal method of Ancestral reverence and healing that has unearthed my own unique way of guiding and supporting others in discovering their unique way.
Before and in between those degrees I’ve been an AIDS activist, a grant writer and an Assistant Vice President in a Fortune 100 Venture Capital firm. I received my LICSW in 1992 yet my desire to be of service to a thing larger than our beleaguered human culture has moved me ever-more off the map of traditional hierarchical talk therapy. In 2007 I gave up my clinical license so I could attend to more layers and threads of our human wellness and wounding.
In my current practice I no longer do therapy or call myself a ‘therapist’. I work as a mentor and guide in the landscapes of the erotic, ecology, ethics, soul, myth, sexuality and intimacy. I accompany individuals, couples and communities in our excavation and exploration of the unique and brilliant embodied wisdom that lives within each of us, without which the world cannot be whole. Our soma (the entirety of our being-ness, from the physical to the ethereal) speaks a first language, one which is indigenous to all life. Remembering this language is the key in our capacity to take up our full space but no more than our full space, while being gracefully responsible for ourselves and with each other.
I am the founder of the Institute for Erotic Intelligence, and the OneWoman Movement and Project including OneWoman Radio and a co-founder of The Quickening Collaborative and The Verdant Collective. I am the author of Trauma, A Guide to Working With Body & Soul, available in German and English, and the Women’s Wisdom Guidebook and Card Deck.
I am also an ancestral healing and wholing practitioner, though the work is typically not a separate event from any other work I do with people. As I have experienced ancestral work, it is activism of the most intimate and cultural kind. One of the most effective tactics used by the global culture of Patriarchy is that it has alienated us from our belonging – belonging to the Earth and belonging to our people – and the power, intelligence and fierce dedication to purpose that comes from this belonging. We have been orphaned and made to fear, resent and belittle this fundamental and essential belonging. In my experience, ancestral lineage healing work is one of two primary steps in waking up and coming home to the primary relationship we have with the Life, with the Earth and with our people - human and otherwise.