Before I began healing my relationship to my body and it’s trauma, I felt deeply disconnected, undesirable, and out of touch with my power.

I felt lost because I couldn’t access my feelings deeply, and in extent, couldn’t quite access what I really wanted. What I did feel was shame, guilt, and deep discomfort in my own body.

I experienced tremendous gender dysphoria and sexual trauma. Sometimes it took courage just to walk out the door and be seen.

I endured at work, in my relationships, in sex, all in the name of doing what I thought I “should”, instead of facing what was.

I knew I had to change. Talk therapy alone wasn’t cutting it.

I looked up “queer spirituality” on Google and everything moved quickly from there. I intuited that healing for me meant accepting the sacredness in my body. From that search I found an Intimacy Coach who helped me transform my capacity to be seen, to feel, and to surrender to the wisdom of my body, in all its pain and pleasure.

I continued to hone my presence and to undo the traumatized parts of myself that escape through the mind, through externalization, and dissociation. It was through my experience with my coach that I entered other modalities for more somatic deepening, and enrolled in the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education.

I learned to be still, to vocalize my desires, to share my pain, and find love and compassion for the parts of myself I had been denying.

I received more than I ever could have imagined. It was through an Emotional Release Bodywork workshop that I was able to finally move through the last bit of my debilitating gender dysphoria. The rage I had towards my offenders was also able to be deeply expressed, witnessed, and integrated.

Now I’m near completion of my schooling at the Shift Emotional Release Therapy School. Combined, my unconventional modalities for healing gave me the tools to move homes, change careers, transform my relationships, and show up more authentically for myself and others.

My ancestry

I think it’s telling that I used to dream from an unusually young age about becoming a nun.

Like a nun in a nunnery, I thought, I also wanted to be free from unfulfilling marriages and the pressures of masculinity. I wanted to be free to express, witness, and study the sacredness of human life. I wanted deeper connection, spiritual understanding, tenderness, and free queer expression. That was a fantasy.

It turns out I can have those things I want without enlisting in the Church. Also, not all nunneries or nuns are like that. In fact, nuns and nunneries have committed some of the most heinous crimes you can think of in the Americas and across the world. My ancestors, the Spanish, dispersed their religious trauma onto unwilling masses, under the belief that it was their God given prerogative to terrorize.

Many parts of my ancestry are a mystery to me. What I do know is that my Lithuanian great grandparents fled the Bolshevik War on a boat to Buenos Aires. That my Spanish ancestors who seem to have left around the time of the Spanish Inquisition, and then moved north through Mexico to what is today New Mexico.

Our bodies carry the memory of our ancestors and their ways of survival. We also how carry our ancestor’s unsettledness and then project our fears outward.

Emotional Bodywork is deeply important to me as someone hoping to change these cycles of harm. Harm carries on until it is felt and understood, responsibility is taken where appropriate, and folks actively choose to move differently through the world.

My ancestor’s legacy of policing gender, queerness, commerce, and every facet of life exist in our bodies.

This work is about choosing a new way of being in relationship to ourselves, our lovers, our friends, and family. For all the parts that were too afraid to be seen, heard, and changed, because it didn’t feel safe enough.

Education

• Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) BFA in Photography & Creative Writing, 2012-2016

• Blue Throat Yoga — Non-Dual Tantric Studies & Meditation
  Level 1, 2022-Present

• Reiki Certification (Ventura, CA) Certified, Levels 1 & 2 with Kelle Evans, 2022

• Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education (Victoria, CAN) Modules 1 & 2, 2023-Present

• Shift Emotional Release Bodywork School (Portland, OR) 2024-2025