I am a therapist and guide who found my way to this work not only through professional training, but through my own messy, human experience.

For years I lived from my head, running on thinking, solving, doing. Always trying to plan my way to peace. Always trying to have an answer.

And then the stress became louder than my life. And my relationships, and my body, paid the cost.

Despite my best efforts, I could no longer ignore that what I was doing wasn't working, and I knew deep in my bones that something had to radically change.

So I did what I knew how to do: I looked for something to fix it. More tools, more techniques, more talk therapy, more doing. Even my healing had become another form of doing, another belief that peace was something outside myself I had to find, earn, or achieve.

Along the way I was then introduced to Polyvagal Theory and somatic work, and they truly did change everything I understood about healing: the body isn't just where symptoms live, it's where the answer is. But, even that understanding became something I tried to master rather than actually embody. I was doing nervous system regulation the same way I'd done everything else: from my head. It wasn't enough. I needed more than technique. I needed relationship.

Then I stumbled upon Cha Dao (“The Way of Tea”). And at first, it was just another practice. One more thing to try. One more thing to fix how I was feeling. But slowly, it became something else.

Not a practice, but a relationship — to a plant, to what I can only call heart medicine, to the earth itself. In that relationship, I began to feel something I hadn't let myself feel in a long time: a kind of love and compassion that didn't have to be earned. It was just there, offered, again and again, cup after cup.

And through that relationship, through gathering the water, warming the kettle, watching the steam rise, noticing the scent, connecting with the plant’s Qi coursing through my body, I found my way into a calm and compassionate relationship with myself.

Slowly, my relationship to tension and fear began to change. I had spent so long trying to outthink every feeling, fix it, get ahead of it. Tea asked something different of me: to sit still while a feeling moved through me, without needing to resolve it. To trust, instead of control. To love, instead of fear.

That shift — from fear to trust, from doing to being — taught me patience, tenderness, and a steady groundedness. It taught me that healing happens in relationship, not in isolation. And it's that same essence and stability, that same willingness to be in relationship rather than to fix, that I now bring into my daily life and into the room with every client I sit with.