I come from a hard-working family in Chicago, though it has been a long time since I called the Midwest home. Over the years, I have lived coast to coast across the United States, as well as abroad, traveling extensively through more than forty countries and at times living for months or years throughout Europe, Morocco, and South America. Much of that movement took place before I owned a cell phone, when travel still required a continual surrender to uncertainty. I feel lucky to have existed in a time when I could move through the world with little more than a folded map, no clear sense of where I would sleep, and no idea who I might meet along the way. Other journeys arose from deeply formative relationships and eventually led me to live abroad in study with spiritual teachers and Indigenous elders. Along the way, I trekked through forests, leapt through waterfalls, and encountered the world through new and humbling perspectives.

In more formal academic settings, I studied at New York University, in Aix-en-Provence, France, and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I received my graduate degree. After graduation, I was offered a position as a professor in the UNLV Honors College, where I taught multidisciplinary seminars for nearly fifteen years. You can learn more about that role here.

I am also a writer, currently completing a four-book literary speculative fiction series concerned with remembrance, sentience, ecological grief, and the ethical limits of the mechanization of consciousness. Much of my fiction explores the effort to remain fully human within systems that increasingly pull away from depth, reverence, embodiment, and relationship to the living world. My literary site can be found here. 

​My background as a counselor and practitioner has evolved through decades of shamanic work, ceremonial experience, and dedicated apprenticeship with intuitive therapists, contemplative teachers, scholars of mysticism, and Indigenous medicine carriers who generously shared their guidance, knowledge, and transmissions with me. I remain especially grateful for the fourteen-year relationship I shared with my primary teacher and curandero, whose integrity, alignment, and capacity for attuned presence profoundly influenced the way I work with clients today. Out of respect for his privacy, I’ll keep him unnamed here, but I could not speak about my path without acknowledging the role he played in it.