About Emily

“I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.”
Adrienne Rich

Happy to meet you here, fellow multidimensional humans! As a trauma-informed, intuitive practitioner with 20 years of professional experience and skills in energetic, psychic, and somatic healing, it is an honor to be a guide on the path right along with you, creating containers for healing, unwinding, strengthening, and honing your gifts. It is important to become skillful in these transformative times, as we anchor our spirits’ radiance through our wise animal bodies.

If you desire to feel and embody your own energy and move through the world from your wholeness—I would love to help you create space for this. Accessing your creative energy, expanding your capacity to hold yourself & your relations through it all, and coming into communion with your senses is a worthy journey and one that will stretch you beyond your known edges. Within the context of safe relationship, you can practice leaning into and expanding beyond your edges in a titrated, mindful, and ultimately healing way. We are here to merge earth and spirit, to move and be moved, to experience and express from the joyful core of who we truly are. Grace is possible, even through tumultuous tides. Healing happens, with support and devotion.

I connect with and receive information through the Unified Field of Source Energy, so as to eliminate projections and illusions. I also receive information through the tissues of the body and the energetic field—I see, sense, and have awareness of patterns and pictures that play out as experiences and circumstances in present time and across timelines. I describe it as translating the soul’s language for workable magic in our everyday lives. It is an art form for me–one that requires not just a natural inclination or gift, but many years of training, self-knowledge, experience, every day inner work and a dedicated meditation practice.

I am inspired by the studies and application of knowledge from the ancient mystery schools, across many cultures. I bring in wisdom, mysticism and oracular skills from my ancestral Celtic lineage, and I also feel a strong resonance with Magdalene, Isis and Delphic wisdom from soul lineages. The aliveness of the natural world is an inspiring force, as well as Buddhist, Vedic and Taoist teachings, the teachings of Jesus, and the sensual world of Christian mysticism. As a devotee of Divinity, I find deep life-changing value in Esoteric and Gnostic studies and practices, through which direct experience of the Divine and self-remembrance occurs. From here, we can be of true service in the world.

My approach to energetic work is done in reverence for the physical process of healing–I respect the amount of time healing takes, and the courage it takes to move ourselves through the continual cycles of death, rebirth, and integration. I am here for the slow, deep process all the way. When we are able to validate the nuance and complexity of our humanity, we can more fully embody our divinity, integrate our soul fragments, dissolve energies and dynamics that we no longer agree to carry or participate in, and find greater access to a sense of beauty, curiosity and aliveness.

I feel that this work requires us to remain in love and devotion to not just our inner lives, but to our human and non human world. True freedom will always lead us back to knowing and acting from our interconnectedness. The wounds inflicted on the planet and humanity by energetic distortions and control structures that are extractive take time to clear and heal, but that’s what we are up to and why capacity building is so important–so we can approach all we do from a sense of wholeness rather than fragmentation. This feels like the most potent and sustainable ground for envisioning and embodying what is possible, making space to carry forth that which is being born through us—in service to our own soul’s evolution, and that of the collective.

I live with an ongoing commitment to personal soul work, healing, education, exploration, and training. I am profoundly moved by the poetics of neurological response and physiology of the sacred, and training and practice in psychic and somatic work is my passion. A brief background:

  • In 2004 I completed 500 hours of training in the healing arts at the Ojai School of Massage.
  • In 2007 I received Usui Reiki 1 & 2 attunement from Dragana Gobic.
  • In 2013 I completed a training with Eileen Donovan in the Upledger method of Craniosacral Therapy levels 1 & 2.
  • In 2016 I began a 3 month earth-based soul work mentorship with Laura Blakeman of The Rhythm Way. Through an animist lens and a depth psychology perspective, we journeyed throughout our inner and outer wildlands, in months of archetypal reflection, communion with the natural world, group council & creative exploration.
  • In 2017 I received my Reiki Master Teacher attunement from Jenette Traverson after ten years of practicing Reiki in the Usui lineage.
  • In 2017 I began a year of study with Erin Schroeder, including both a month long Essential Psychic Skills course and The Psychic Training, an intensive 8 month clairvoyant training program through which I received a Certificate of Completion. This experience was invaluable, with deep personal healing and energetic resilience building, as well as attuning my natural psychic skills beyond my own sphere—training to ethically read energy for others, move energies through the body and field, and hold powerful space for clients’ healing & intuitive growth.
  • In 2019 I began a training for practitioners based on Alaine Duncan and Kathy Kain’s book, The Tao of Trauma. By 2021 I received certification after completing 70 hours of training. My teacher Alaine Duncan’s approach is an integration of Eastern and Western philosophy, science and vibrational healing modalities— merging Five Element Theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine with Dr. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, Dr. Peter Levine’s model of trauma response (the five steps of the self-protective response aligning with the five elements as expressed in the body,) and Kathy Kain’s perspective of Somatic Experiencing work. We studied the neurobiology and physiology of trauma, cultivating skills and practicing techniques and approaches to healing trauma both in ourselves and with our clients, while weaving in the wisdom of the elements— to restore balance & regulation in the nervous system, and widen our zone of resiliency to hold the ebb and flow of the unbroken wave within and around us. This work is powerful as it feels like a synthesis of all I’ve learned and practiced over the years, a return to a sense of harmony through connecting with our cyclical nature, and affirming our natural need and ability to heal in the context of relationship.
  • For over 20 years, I have practiced various forms of meditation; it is the foundation of my intuitive development and connection to peace, creative energy and my essential nature. Most recently, my meditation practice has deepened as a student of the esoteric teachings of Pneuma Institute, weaving ancient knowledge and wisdom with breathwork and meditation practices. I am attuned to the truth that some of my most treasured education has both dissolved and emerged in the meditative space.

All of these experiences, and many more, have been vital threads in the tapestry so far— including a stint at UC Santa Cruz studying Creative Writing & Women’s Studies, taking ceramics, sculpture, and environmental studies courses at community college in the early 2000s, teaching myself the tarot, and embarking on soul expanding adventures around the world—including over six months of solo traveling with my backpack, living and working abroad over the course of three summers, 2016 to 2018, with the majority of my time spent in Italy and the Netherlands.

In 2018 I co-founded Community Healing Sanctuary in Ojai with psychic & energy healer Karina Duffy, where we created a collective of over 15 healing practitioners who provided a variety of modalities (acupuncture, intuitive readings, bodywork, energy work, nutritional counseling, and more) once a month at a low cost. After the Thomas Fire, we found there was a great need in our community for easily accessible healing and care as we navigated the difficult experience. I organized and worked as a reader and bodyworker at these community healing events until the world and my own life changed again in 2020. In 2020 I shifted my work completely online and paused in-person sessions for a year; it was during this time that I realized how powerful online healing sessions could really be (which was surprising to me based on my history as a hands-on practitioner.) These days, I love both distance and in person sessions, depending on my clients’ needs.

I am also a partner to a wonderful soul, and a stepmother raising teenagers into young adulthood. My family of origin and the family I have stepped into are incredibly important to me. I live my life in devotion to community care, with awareness of our inextricable connection to each other. I am a devotee of Divinity, the Earth, my human and more-than-human kin as we traverse the landscape of life, death, transformation, and everything in between. I am grateful for the opportunity to be here now, with all of you.

What does it mean to be “trauma-informed?”

Since “trauma-informed” is a big buzz word that I see many people using to describe their work, and one important way I describe my work, I wanted to share a little bit about what it means to me.

Being trauma-informed to me indicates specific training and ongoing practice in understanding and being able to recognize the physiological processes a body undergoes in response to too much stimuli occurring too fast for that particular body to hold, as well as the complex and nuanced emotional, energetic, and relational impacts of trauma.

A practitioner who is trauma-informed also must be aware of and intentionally working through their own physiological & energetic processes, in order to effectively hold their clients through whatever they are meeting in themselves.

Since what we are doing in a healing context is helping people heal their nervous systems in safe relationship, a trauma-informed practitioner understands growing one’s capacity to be with unresolved pain or stuck energy on any level (physically, emotionally) is a process that takes time & can only happen with a relationship built on mutual respect and trust.

It’s an artful practice to help a client build resilience through leaning into their edges. Creating a deeply safe container means not taking someone beyond what is manageable to their specific system in the moment.

I understand this word “safe” can be very subjective, as each person has a distinct capacity and thresholds. What I mean by safe is: a relationship where there is mutual respect, where boundaries can be addressed calmly, with understanding of each person’s agency, and each individual taking personal responsibility for their processes. A client’s agency and choice in how they meet their own processes is also essential for a trauma-informed practitioner to understand.

When I use the word “healing” I do not mean making “bad or wrong” the tension, discomfort, pain and suffering we all experience to varying degrees while we are in-body, functioning in societal systems that are widely destabilizing and unsupportive. What I mean is we are expanding our ability to hold what feels impossible to hold, while shedding outgrown patterns and layers. Through this we are expanding our ability to hold others through pain and discomfort we cannot take away, but can love and care for each other through. Part of the gift we offer each other in a healing space is holding the possibility of transformation and a new way forward. I feel the healing journey to be a deepening of that love and care, and a recognition of our inextricable connection to each other.

“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
Raymond Carver