Welcome

I'm a child of the late '70s, born into Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation community in the middle of Iowa's cornfields. I loved my early childhood. Lots of singing and dancing. Campus improv comedy shows. Summer nights at outdoor evening concerts running around with all the other meditator kids in the downtown square lit up by fireflies. Racing bikes down the street, skipping rocks in the pond. So many potlucks. My parents loved Maharishi's early ambitious vision: gather the square root of 1% of the global population. If 7,200 people meditated together, it would raise the vibration of consciousness. The ripple effect would be world peace. What a profoundly beautiful world we would live in. Unfortunately, you already know the plot ending. We aren't quite yet living in a lovingly reciprocal and equitable utopia free of racism, sexism, genocide, and extraction. Still... that they were even trying and hoping is something...

I ended up being raised between two very different worlds a few years later: by my older, conservative white grandparents and my single mom who was an ecstatic dancer and social worker caring for people with addiction and the mothers who had their children taken from them by the system. Straddling those worlds and being raised by two generations made me endlessly curious about how to be embodied in the physical mundane while feeling deeply attuned to something beyond it.

When my mom died — six weeks after my first and only child was born — my astrologer's closet door blew wide open. So did many windows looking into how deeply whitewashed the industry of self-development and ‘wellness’ most often is; ‘peace & love’ as a surface individual aesthetic at the expense of the very humanity it's supposed to serve. The moodmaking without the collective care. I couldn't have seen it without dear friends to open those windows, and without also examining the Japanese part of myself from my immigrant grandmother.

Once you see, you can't unsee.

I do my best to offer guidance that is free from spiritual bypassing and wishful thinking; free from hyper-individualistic navel-gazing and linear improvement that centers oneself. Embracing the hard stuff and integrating our shadow side, seeing our individual capacity in relationship with the collective is what I'm most interested in amplifying. My hope is for people to feel the messiness and juiciness of their life in the greater context of all beings, and know every part of themselves as integrated and whole.

I live and practice on the ancestral territories of the Multnomah, Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Clackamas, Kathlamet, Molalla, and many other tribes and bands of the Columbia and Willamette regions that is overwritten as Portland, Oregon.