Welcome to Restorative Empathy! I’m so genuinely happy to have you here, and I welcome the opportunity to contribute to your life.
As you consider inviting me to support you, here are some things you may enjoy knowing about me. I’m also open to your questions about my background and my work, as it serves your own learning and growth.
As the author of five books on relationships, spirituality, and social justice, I’ve spent 30 years exploring how we can transform our cultural and relational pain into lives fully and joyfully led.
Inspired by and extensively trained in a rich lineage of nonviolence, restorative applications of empathy, and diverse spiritual traditions, I hold personal healing and social/environmental healing as inextricably linked.
My Restorative Empathy work illuminates the myriad unconscious ways we’ve all internalized and perpetuated the domination-based culture in which we live, and then lovingly supports you in transforming the negative effects of that culture from the inside out. By “domination culture,” I’m referring to the interlocking systems of oppression—what author bell hooks calls “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”—that seek to divide and conquer us. I hold personal healing work in a politicized framework, as an essential avenue toward collective liberation.
Offering loving support to support individuals in fulfilling their unique life’s purpose is one of the greatest sources of joy and inspiration in my life. Ultimately, my approach enables you to choose strategies in which everyone’s needs matter, from a place of genuine empathy for yourself, your loved ones, and all of humanity.
I’ve studied with many teachers over the past 30 years, most extensively with the following:
—I’ve lived daily the life-changing consciousness practice of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication since 2006, which holds that all our emotions are signals to universal human needs, and that we are better able to live nonviolence when we can hold all the needs on the table and come up with creative strategies to meet all those needs (and have shared mourning for unmet needs). I took multiple classes with Meganwind Eoyang and the late Inbal Kashtan. I then completed BayNVC‘s yearlong intensive Leadership Program with Roxy Manning and Kit Miller in 2012, which led to me starting my own Restorative Empathy practice that year, initially focused on needs-based empathic support, coming into full choice, and transforming domination culture from the inside out.
—My reparenting approach, spiritual perspectives, and fluidity with inner-parts work were deeply influenced by working with Soonja Kim from 2004 to 2010. Soonja also brought me to Nonviolent Communication.
—I was one of Sarah Peyton‘s first core students and assistants, working closely with her from 2012 to 2021 learning relational neuroscience, somatic empathy, attachment theory, epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, resonant language, sacred vow work, inner parts rescues, ancestral healing, and constellation facilitation, including bringing constellation healing to a women’s prison. I was also the proofreader of her powerful first book, Your Resonant Self.
—I’ve sat in seven weeklong social-justice-focused metta meditation retreats (2013-2019) with Sylvia Boorstein, Heather Sundberg, and Larry Yang, developing an ongoing lived practice of lovingkindness (metta), equanimity without indifference (upekkha), compassion (karuna), and sympathetic joy (mudita).
—Starting in 2019, I’ve worked with Daniel Foor and Ancestral Medicine, training in Ancestral Lineage Healing and Practical Animism, becoming a certified practitioner and initiated ritualist of Ancestral Lineage Healing in 2023. I have my four most direct ancestral lineages healed (mother’s mother’s line, mother’s father’s line, father’s father’s line and father’s mother’s line), and am currently working on healing the next four lineages (father’s father’s mother’s line, etc.). I am in daily connection with my bright, vibrant, healed ancestors. I am also ongoingly working with Shannon Willis, my mentor in ancestral lineage healing, in deepening my connection with the forces of nature and honing my earth-honoring and spiritually expansive ritual practices.
The healing of my father’s father’s lineage led me into the world of documentary filmmaking, and I am currently directing and producing the film In the Wake of Our Ancestors, reckoning with the 400-year history of my early settler-colonizing ancestors.
I was born and currently live on the unceded ancestral lands of the Muwekma Ohlone people and pay a monthly Shuumi Land Tax as one form of reparations, in a multifaceted attempt to live in right-relation with the original people and spirits of the land colonized as the San Francisco East Bay Area.
I identify as a queer, gender-expansive (they/she) person, and I welcome my clients in holding their personal and political identities as expansive and fluid.
Curious to hear more? Read what past and present Restorative Empathy and Ancestral Lineage Healing clients want to share with you about their experiences. Or reach out to me today.