I'm a Doctor of Counseling and Master of Existential Psychology turned Feminist Coach

I’m actively challenging the old status quo that puts credentials first, person second — the model that says authority must be guarded, clinical, and emotionally distant. I believe that embodiment is the art of role modeling. And to role model vulnerability, we have to be willing to be vulnerable.

I share highlights of my story here not to perform, but to practice what I preach — to lead, hold, and simply be in a way that is honest, integrated, and human.

I’m a feminist psychotherapist, coach, professor, author, and mother with over 20 years of experience walking alongside women and changemakers. I’ve led intimate circles, guided outdoor healing adventures (with over 2,000 miles backpacked), taught graduate students, facilitated psychedelic journeys, and designed transformational programs for women reclaiming their voice, their power, and their leadership.

My path here wasn’t built on credentials alone — it was forged in the fires of lived experience.

I grew up between worlds, traveling the globe from a young age — visiting Syria and Venezuela at nine, studying abroad in Greece at fifteen (including a weeklong sailing trip marked by sunrise mornings, dolphin swims, and sleeping to the pulse of the ocean — a journey that etched the explorer into my soul), and later living in London at sixteen. Along the way, I fell in love with philosophy, mythology, poetry, and the art of curiosity: listening deeply, interpreting what people were saying even when we didn’t share the same language.

I grew up belly dancing (a nod to my paternal Syrian heritage) and Irish step dancing (for the Irish in my mom), performing in theater, and singing in chamber choirs. I carry that spirit of movement, expression, and rhythm into everything I do — from how I hold space in a healing circle, to how I walk a trail, to how I speak truth on a stage.

Since my teen years, I continued to travel the globe — often feeling more at home abroad than I did in the places I was supposed to belong. That longing for connection, culture, and something deeper than the American Dream eventually led to a post-grad pilgrimage.

After completing my Master's degree in 2006, I bought a one-way ticket to Costa Rica and lived mostly off-grid in a jungle house with a giant German shepherd-mastiff who had no business living in the jungle climate. He was named Toro and he was partially the reason I felt safe alone in the wilderness. There, I remembered what it meant to move with the rhythm of nature — dancing barefoot along volcanic rocks, chasing waterfalls, swimming naked, mastering the art of extreme hammocking, and unlearning the capitalist scripts of hustle and self-sacrifice. It was one of the first places I began to truly reconnect with my voice.

I’ve learned to hold my story in a place of deep gratitude — gratitude for the privilege, the grit, and the grace.

The bicultural home I was raised in was full of fierce love and resilience, but also deep struggle and violence. My parents divorced when I was eighteen, after my father came out as a gay man — a revelation that nearly broke my mother. She had every reason to stay hurt. Her father, my grandfather, had every reason to stay angry at the man who broke his only child’s heart.

And yet, over time, they chose healing. They chose humility. They chose strength.

One of the many things I specialize in — and believe in with my whole heart — is child-centered, conscious uncoupling. Not because it makes divorce “easier,” but because I’ve witnessed the ripple effect of what becomes possible when adults choose repair over resentment. When they prioritize love, even in the midst of heartbreak.

My father has now been with his husband for over 20 years. We’ve shared holidays together as a family — not right away, but eventually, and largely because of my father's humility and mother’s grace. We all grieved together when my maternal grandfather passed. And when my grandmother died, she left my father a love letter.

I know firsthand what it looks like when people choose forgiveness, repair, and human love — and how powerful that choice can be for children, and for generations to come.

I believe in family systems work because I’ve lived inside one — with all its beauty, pain, and complexity.

We’ve stood beside my brother as he battled addiction and gang violence. We’ve held space for another as he lay in a medically induced coma, given less than a 10% chance of surviving H1N1. I poured myself into reforming high-control systems, only to walk away when I realized the system itself was the illness. I’ve held the feet of loved ones as they took their final breath. I’ve carried the quiet, private grief of client suicide.

And not all grief comes loud. Some of it is quiet, private, invisible — like the grief of not understanding your own mind. I know what it’s like to feel shame for something you don’t yet have language for. To perform your way through school, to overcompensate in every other area, while silently asking yourself why something so “basic” feels impossible.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I learned there was a name for it — dyscalculia — the reason numbers flipped and blurred in my mind. I excelled in most classes but barely scraped by in statistics. Anything math-related felt disorienting, except for geometry, which offered some sense of order through its visual logic.

When I was finally diagnosed with dyscalculia, so much clicked into place: the years of second-guessing, the inverted numbers, the unspoken fear of being found out. The diagnosis was both disorienting and deeply validating. It helped me understand that what I had internalized as a personal failure was, in fact, a neurocognitive difference. And though I’ve often questioned the limits and harms of Western diagnostic frameworks — especially the way they pathologize pain — I also know how powerful it can be to have language for a particular kind of struggle.

To have a name is to find a place inside a system that might otherwise erase you. And in that moment, I understood the value of naming — not as a label that defines us, but as a tool that can liberate us.

At the time, I was in graduate school, immersed in a program grounded in existential phenomenology — a deeply humanistic approach to psychology that rejects the idea that people can be reduced to checklists and pathologies. Instead, it calls us to understand suffering through the richness of context, embodiment, meaning, and lived experience. Existential phenomenology taught me that while the disease model can offer clarity, it is never the whole story. It helped me hold the tension between naming and not reducing — to see diagnosis not as identity, but as a doorway. A possible beginning.

That training — and that moment — forever shaped how I hold others in their complexity, and how I teach others to hold themselves.

I’ve lived. I’ve lost. I’ve survived and thrived.

Not perfectly — but with intention, with heart, and with an unshakable commitment to keep growing.

These experiences didn’t just shape me — they sharpened me.
Not the kind of sharpness that cuts, but the kind that softens.
That refines. That clears the way for truth.

They revealed the limits of performance, the failures of perfectionism, and the deep truth that real healing is not a solo project. It’s relational. It’s systemic. It’s embodied. It’s political.

Psychedelics were one profound piece of my healing. But so was dancing in the wild. Singing into silence. Crying on the kitchen floor. Writing poetry. Studying the science of trauma. Witnessing the human experience with awe and wonder. Examining what it means to make meaning — through suffering, through joy, through the mess of being alive.

Learning, again and again, how to trust myself.

Through it all, I carry joy. I carry play. I carry a fire for systems change, spiritual integrity, and embodied feminist leadership. Because reclaiming our voices isn’t just personal — it’s ancestral. It’s revolutionary.

I help people reclaim their voices and resurrect their most authentic selves — not to become someone new, but to return to who they were before the world told them they had to shrink.

I’m here to help you rise — not by erasing your story, but by weaving it into your strength. 

I INSPIRE YOU TO:

• Reclaim Your Body’s Wisdom
  Rebuild trust with your body — not as something to control or override, but as an ally, a compass, and a wise guide. Your body holds knowing. It carries stories, signals, and truths that lead you back to balance, resilience, and wholeness.
• Break Free from Control and Perfectionism
  Release the diet rules, the overfunctioning, the endless performing. Nourish yourself — body, mind, and spirit — in ways that are grounded, intuitive, and freeing. You don’t have to earn your worth or hustle for your value.
• Transform from the Inside Out
  True change isn’t just about surface behaviors; it’s about shifting the way you see yourself, claim your power, and inhabit your life. We work at the level of identity, values, and embodied truth.
• Prioritize Yourself Without Guilt
  You are not here to be everything for everyone. Your well-being is not selfish — it’s foundational. Learn to take up space in your own life with boundaries, clarity, and fierce self-respect.
• Lead Your Own Healing Journey
  You are not a passive recipient in your own life. Step fully into your role as an active participant — making conscious, informed, liberated choices that honor your deepest needs and desires.
• Remember Your Innate Power to Heal
  You are not broken. You are not a problem to be fixed. You carry within you profound capacity for healing, growth, and reclamation — and you are deeply worthy of the life you long for.

What makes our work different from the average therapist or coach? 

Fierce Care. Deep Healing. Real Change.

The foundation of my work is a trauma-informed, liberation-rooted approach that honors your full humanity. I weave together somatic psychology, nervous system regulation and co-regulation, attachment and polyvagal theory, feminist theory, and real-world, lived experience. This work is non-pathologizing, relational, and rooted in respect for your wisdom — not in diagnosing your worth or pushing you toward a performance of healing.

This isn’t about “fixing” you — it’s about welcoming all parts of you back home.

Together, we create a space where you can slow down, breathe, and remember that you don’t have to do it all alone. My clients are often surprised by the depth of transformation that happens without needing to over-explain, push harder, or perform insight. Change doesn’t come from white-knuckling your way through — it comes from being witnessed, held, and supported in a way that your body can actually receive.

Trauma disconnects us — from our bodies, our breath, our power, our desires, our boundaries, and each other.

This work gently reweaves those connections.

In our work together, we build a new foundation. One rooted in resilience, self-trust, and felt safety. One that helps you:

• Regulate your nervous system and actually feel calm, not just chase it

• Sleep more deeply, breathe more easily, and move with less tension

• Reclaim your voice, your purpose, and your desires

• Understand your patterns without shame, and relate to your pain without being consumed by it

• Receive nourishment — in your body, your mind, your relationships, and your soul

• Set boundaries that don’t just exist in your head, but live in your body

• Build capacity to ride life’s ups and downs with more steadiness and less reactivity

• Root into your worth and come home to yourself again (and again)

This is real, embodied, relational healing.