Excerpts from www.healingempowermentcenter.com:

My Previous Steps

My passion for healing and transformation began as a counselor and trainer in the public health field working for AIDS Action Committee and Departments of Education and Public Health in Massachusetts.  Later, my creative interests brought me to Parsons School of Design where I received my first education in psychology through a degree in Interior Architecture.  It was there that I began to understand the relationship between structure and function.  I realized in my design work that if the structure doesn’t support the function desired, the function can’t exist. 

For example, with a building it’s hard to feel free and possible inside it without open space, good air quality and access to natural light.  The same principle of structure-function relationship applies equally to the body.  It’s hard to feel free and possible inside a body without relaxed muscles, easy breathing and a balanced system.  The expertise I gained as an interior architect would later translate smoothly into Somatic Psychology where the principle of structure-function relationship is used in service of healing.

Because healing work has always been where the juice is for me, I began my career as an interior architect in healthcare design and medical planning.  However, I found myself more than a little disillusioned with our healthcare system, and the birth of the Healing Empowerment Center came about as an intervention for a system that seemed to be making us sicker. 

My first vision for the center began as a building that would support the work of going inward and working with therapists who could meet their clients at the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels of their being.  The Healing Empowerment Center was a response to the hegemony of allopathic medicine.  I decided it was time we reclaimed our power to heal ourselves.

Toward that vein, I received my certification in multiple forms of energy-focused body work starting in 2004.  Even while working as an architect, I knew my passion resided in healing and it was through combining energy work, touch, and spiritual practice with my clients that I witnessed the power of transformation.

In 2006 I moved to San Francisco to start a master’s program in Somatic Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies – a school that supported my holistic vision of health and vitality.  At the same time, I also began a three-year intensive training in teaching Tantra with Dr. Rudy Ballentine with whom I had been studying for some time.

In 2008 I completed my certification as a Tantra teacher and went to India to be initiated into a lineage that dates back more than 1000 years.  Combining ten years of spiritual practice and training with somatic psychology has forged the foundation of the Healing Empowerment Center.

In addition to therapeutic sessions with clients, I now teach workshops nationally in Tantra as well as mentor students through long-term practice.  I also see clients at the Center for Somatic Psychotherapy in San Francisco as a Marriage and Family Therapist trainee.  Throughout it all, I find my greatest joy in meeting the soul’s longing and helping people to remember who they are.

Bringing You Back to Yourself

We all get stuck sometimes. For some, what’s stuck shows up as a physical issue like pain or illness.  For others, what’s stuck has more to do with patterns in their life – ways of relating, working, and playing.  And for others, what’s stuck feels more like a hunger for something deeper yet hard to name.  For all of us, if we work only at the level of the issue being presented, we end up missing the bigger picture of what’s actually happening.  That’s why I work with clients at every level of their being.

I think of myself as a dance partner.  In making contact with the body, the mind, and the soul, we learn ways of meeting those places that don’t feel good, finding flow, and then feeling love.  It may sound funny but that’s what my work is ultimately about, dropping into love – body, mind and soul.

Next Steps

The Healing Empowerment Center will be a metaphysical clinic founded upon a true synthesis of eastern and western wisdom.  It will utilize a dynamic model of integrated holistic therapies based on power and responsibility from within, to build consciousness and create people’s lives anew.

The guiding principle is a belief that we already have within us the wisdom and power to lead happy and healthy lives.  The role of the healthcare worker then becomes that of a facilitator, holding a safe space for wounds and shadows to be faced, teaching skills and tools for clients to reclaim the healer within, and offering a multi-layered support system for the process of transformation to take place.

There is nothing offered in the Healing Empowerment Center that clients can’t then take home and do for themselves.  A successful Healing Empowerment Center will transform all of its clients into their own centers of healing and empowerment.