My Story

There is a profound awakening taking place throughout the world. My expertise is to offer myself as an intuitive coach, helping you to walk the path that serves your highest and purest Self. How will you recognize your path? It is the one filled with passion, joy, and abundance, infused with meaning and purpose. Together, we hear it in your voice, see it in your vision, and delight in its alignment with the regenerative needs of our planet.

I was raised in upstate New York, primarily in the Hudson Valley, against the background of the Shawangunk Mountains. My childhood did not always feel safe, and I could not count on daily peace, but I found solace early in my deeply felt connection with nature. My mission and my story are mutually informed by each other, deep empathy resulting in living my human life. After some years of personal healing work, I found I was able to create a world of love and trust, and this has enhanced my work with others, utilizing a restorative framework, and operating from a heart centered place of love. What I found as personally healing became an area of professional study, and has led to an extensive background in the healing arts, specifically in the areas of alternative medicine and nutrition, energy therapy, and the arts in general, focusing on the integration of body, mind and spirit.

With a lifelong interest in natural food and farming, and during a four year period of self discovery on the West Coast, I was introduced early in my 20s to the work of Rudolf Steiner, biodynamic farming, and the teaching of Alan Chadwick in Santa Cruz, CA. Within a short time I found myself gardening by these principles as I and a partner were offered a caretaking job on three acres of beautiful land with fruit trees at almost 7000 feet, surrounded on all sides by 10,000 ft mesa, right beside a Zen Monastery and natural hot springs, in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, part of the Santa Fe National Forest. We established 6 large compost areas, established organic gardens, and created an understory of grasses for the lush peach orchard on the property, raising livestock, including milking goats, sheep for fiber work, and a flock of chickens. This was sacred time, for I was able to put to work the principles of regenerative agriculture before I had incorporated such language into my psyche.

Eventually, we returned to Santa Cruz, and I worked in the areas of reproductive women’s health, and in adult psychiatric care, and pursued college life, transferring to Boston University School of Nursing in 1983, and graduating with a BSN in 1985. I worked at Boston’s Children’s Hospital for 3 years, in psychology and somatic medicine, with babies, children and teens. By 1988, I had had enough of the conventional paradigm of medicine, and enrolled in graduate school, in a self-designed Master of Arts program at Lesley College in Cambridge, MA. My desire was to move beyond clinical psychology, and incorporate the consciousness focus and spiritual paradigm of Carl Jung, along with elements of Transpersonal Psychology and Archetypal Astrology, with the aim of helping people achieve their highest creative potential. I was fortunate, as I was able to travel to Santa Rosa, CA that same year to attend the 25th International Transpersonal Conference. In addition, I was honored to have Thomas Moore (author of Care of the Soul), a professor of mine at the time, agree to serve on my graduate committee.

After completing my program, I continued to work as a nurse in the fields of pediatric psychiatry and also, for a season or two, in women’s reproductive health, while advancing my trainings in holistic modalities, including Zero Balancing, and years later, achieve certifications in Healing Touch Energy Therapy, TRE (trauma and tension release exercises), GAPS training (Dr. Natasha McBride’s Gut and Psychology/Physiology Syndrome), Plant Medicine (primarily New England and Orchid flower essences), and of course, all along developing my own version of Spiritual, Evolutionary and what I now call, Narrative Astrology, to be used in a private practice.

In 1990, I embraced my own role as mother and wife with a whole heart, moving to a small town, north of Boston, near the sea. I fought to keep pesticides and artificial turf from spreading on our playing fields. I promoted a Rachel Carson ethos with the precautionary principle, as I educated my community as best I could. I taught my children to value the out-of-doors, and to be in nature as often as they could, and to recognize natural, whole food as distinct from processed food. As they went off to college, I became increasingly unsettled by what modern medicine had become. In 2010, I left the clinical setting of psychiatric nursing practice behind for a new direction, embracing my holistic practice with an enhanced commitment, and pursued a second advanced degree in teaching. I completed a second Masters Degree in Nursing Education with an emphasis on Integrative Health, and was immediately invited to design and teach a number of courses in Restorative Practices to undergraduate students.

This was as authentic a time period as I have ever experienced in my working career, and a profound joy infused my work, which lasted for 5 years and 10 consecutive semesters. The courses were extremely well received as they offered the students some contrast to the prescriptive, reproductive learning which would lead to the successful outcome of passing their licensure exam. My courses were designed in a seminar format: the students expected to fully engage during each class, and were given tools to learn the value of slowing down, developing an interior self, and consider the importance of cultivating a relationship with nature. Students experienced enhanced self awareness through the visual arts, through various forms of creative hand work, through deep reading and writing from head and heart; through practicing the principles of deep nutrition with the knowledge of ancestral diets as discovered by our ancestral people and documented by the research of Dr. Weston A. Price (good fats, chicken soup and bone broth, lacto-fermented recipes, the real dangers of sugar!) ~ the students were given a chance to discover the link between organic, biodynamic, and regenerative agricultural practices and the healing of the microbiome of the human gut and the soil, while learning how a healthy microbiome creates a healthy body and mind, and builds a healthy spongy soil that holds water, mitigates extremes of temperature, feeds the roots of plants to create nutrient dense, mineral rich food, and sequesters and holds increasing amounts of carbon from our atmosphere.

During this time, I entered into a PhD program through the California Institute of Integral Studies, through their Transformative Studies Doctoral Program. My focus: A feminist, narrative study of mothers who follow a real food diet for the health of their children. It was a journey of the heart … and I completed my dissertation within four years. This program, with its trans-disciplinary focus was essential for the development of my vision for what is possible in higher education.

I began to realize that there was a need for this kind of curriculum in core courses across disciplines, as I began to attract enthusiastic students from other areas of study. I began to suspect that there might be at least a dozen like minded faculty on every campus … and considered how to foster the kind of curriculum and pedagogy that has shown such great promise, on campuses nationwide, and into core courses (as opposed to electives), across all disciplines of study. I began to formulate a vision of how I might establish a consortium of these faculty and promote transdisciplinary discourse on every campus, with an ethos of ecology and regenerative processes. It became clear to me that I needed to develop a stategy, both in person and online, with perhaps a place-based Ecology Center, accompanied by an online, open source communication platform, to encourage both intra- and inter- institutional discourse, sharing the latest and most exciting content, projects of excellence, exciting internships, and student engagement with solutions-based initiatives recognized across the globe.

My story culminates at this time with this emerging vision which I call, “The Jupiter Learning Project”, a non-profit in the making. My work with the young and emerging adult has demonstrated to me just how great the need is to create fertile ground both literally and metaphorically, to foster a climate of human and planetary flourishing. I believe strongly that there is a great need to reimagine the kind of education and mentorship which is best suited for our next generation of leaders. I envision a forum where educators are free to build into curriculum the space for the student to cultivate what I call their “true and interior Self” ~ to become Self aware, to have the choice to step into that elevated and authentic space … and to find the intersection between their passions and those needs of the world ~ to have the opportunity to collaborate with intergenerational projects as they access their unique gifts, and act for the benefit of person and planet. I invite you to join me in embracing this vision and find your own place in this era of awakening…

We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us—it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we’ve slept, the kitchens where we’ve cooked, in the food we’ve prepared for the people we love and in the walls we have shaped with our hands.”

Pam Houston, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country

Where I am NOW