About Me

For as far back as I remember, I’ve studied how to do things differently to relieve suffering. I think my stint on the playground as an 8-year-old hypnotist may have predicted my future, often found absorbed in self-hypnosis and attracting bystanders to talk, self-reflect and learn alongside me. Needless to say, I am still compelled to push beyond the conventionally understood limits of the mind to evoke healing, draw in knowledge and find harmony within ourselves, to evolve from what we’re capable of now into more. We habitually repeat our familiar patterns of behavior until somehow there is a pause in our attention, which allows the choice to shift, to grow, to deliberate how we wish to proceed. It is important to pay attention to these spaces, to take time to make pauses as there is much healing, information and magic available within these moments.

In my career pursuit, since 1993 I have worked with various biofeedback technologies to facilitate expediating a learning curve in self awareness and understanding. Initially I worked within multi-disciplinary teams treating chronic pain, chronic headache/migraine patients within outpatient hospital settings. [Feedback technologies are one way of gaining those spaces, glimpses of information about our body, brain, mind in which to reflect and choose how to proceed with ourselves.] I gained a wonderful foundation and couldn’t help but observe the outcomes comparatively between traditional medicinal treatment approaches and complimentary holistic care treatment teams. I feel very fortunate to have been surrounded by incredible care providers, specialists from many medical fields coming together to create and engage in healing programs, especially within a hospital setting, which at the time was investing in expanding services by integrating holistic methods. It was an exciting but challenging time, often bringing together a clash in medical ideology amongst providers. Yet those moments of disagreement or opposing views also provided the opportunities or at least the potential for mutual growth, understanding, and improving outcomes.     

Clinically my professional capacity ranged from neuropsychological presurgical assessment and treatment, post-surgical rehabilitation; outpatient psychotherapy for adults, adolescents, and children with chronic health conditions; onto creating my own private practice stretch into the broader mental health needs within communities. With the help of Neurofeedback (also called EEG Biofeedback), I began seeing more clearly the relationships between co-existing medical conditions and mental health symptoms. By nature, my inclination is to explore these cross-over areas to see how the management of medical symptoms impacts mental health and vice versa. The ultimate goal being how best to reduce and ultimately resolve co-existing symptoms by working with a larger interacting picture of a person’s health constitution. I saw myself gaining more effective means for mental health symptom reduction and treatment resolutions by addressing underlying physiological issues such as inflammation, metabolic issues, mitochondrial dysfunction, dietary and sleep quality contributions, microbiome imbalances, detoxification issues, and nutrient dysfunctions relating to genetic SNP issues.  All these greatly contribute to difficulties across the neurological spectrum (mood disorders, addictions, PTSD, attention deficit, pervasive developmental disorders, phobias, and bi-polar disorders). Beautifully for me, I developed my own way of working with EEG data and found it capable of providing immense insight to sleuthing out each person’s unique collection of issues.

Through Neurofeedback, I was able to notice shifts in EEG data across my clients as a group. These moments readily expanded my awareness for how environmental factors in our culture, climate, and lifestyle impact significant subsets of our population during seasonal changes, or during clusters of antibiotics use, or timing of vaccine rollouts. My first “ah-ha” came when 2/3rds of my clientele EEG data all displayed increased fatigue measures within the same 2 weeks. Concurrent with this data shift were exacerbations in their symptoms, despite their symptomatology being quite different within each person’s diagnosis. This continued to be evident every year I remained in practice aligning with the pollen count data for my geographical area. I identified the seasonal peaks and coached clients how to improve their inflammatory care regime to mitigate these impacts. Thus, this window into the brain I’d embraced greatly aided my understanding of connections between medical and mental health conditions. By observing clustered shifts within my fulltime client case load, I more readily identified issues causing acceleration to human health decline. Working with my clients, together we pursued how best to resolve or better manage individual health issues for greater relief and ways to expand these successes within their families. This work I modeled equally with my personal pursuits and family care, as I’ve known since a very young age of my own struggles and “knots” to overcome and held great desire to prevent my ails from passing on. My motto became breaking the abysmal cycles, as I do not see any sense in letting future generations simply repeat the same declining statistics we have witnessed. I am wired to strive towards superior methods and understanding so we pass on success. 

Much of my passion for health complexities and the urge to study healing emerged as a young child, as a 4-year-old having massive digestive pain and headaches I distinctly recall receiving a phone call from my then pediatrician explaining to me as a child that I was merely attention seeking as the youngest of 4 children in our family. I knew then, the world of adulting was not always a reliable resource. Imagine, if I had believed him! Instead, that phone call motivated me, and I went on to discover what caused such immense pains and how to resolve them for the long haul. Yes, discernment and a critical eye set in early for me. 

Entering my teen years, I often dreamt of a process to enhance my awareness, looking for those magical openings for self-growth and ways to choose change; to have a mirror of sorts useful during any phase of life’s circumstances to find my way forward. (Star Trek reruns were still popular on TV at the time, thus Spock’s gadgets spoke loudly to me.) Those dreams materialized early into my career reality. Neurofeedback became my predominant tool. I found this developing technology from the 1960’s continually accelerating it’s efficacy as a healing modality. The better the EEG tools became, the greater my ability to pause, to reflect at a level where I was able to get out of my own way and see how I could improve. My preference is to stretch with excitement towards a self that is more naturally balanced, where I feel my best. To me, it is a new magic bus, one I do not need to ingest for a recreationally enhanced brevity. Rather, Neurofeedback provides me a sustained space where I can rediscover naturally how to strengthen my intelligence, hum to my true rhythms, hear my own masterpiece concerto striving for harmony and discover the next step beyond what I've known. As Joseph Campbell expresses through ‘The Hero’s Journey,’ I found my own story has the latent potential to be a hero, as does yours. Whichever chapter you are on I hope you find inspiration and ideas to discover more of your own clarity to bring forward and transform your life as you too turn your pages. 

 
Bio and Neurofeedback provider since 1993, Behavioral Therapist/Limited Licensed Psychologist since 1997.