Please call me by my true names
So that I may wake up
And the doors of my heart will be left open.
-Thich Nhat Hanh

Of Western European, Celtic, and Ashkenazi descent, with ancestors who escaped to these shores of Turtle Island, now known as the United States, in waves—18th, 19th, and 20th centuries—I carry in my bones generations of farmers and professors, attorneys and textile workers, artists and house-tenders, soldiers and peacemakers, colonizers and the colonized. Like you, I carry a tapestry of loss in my heart—one with a weft of personal losses threaded over an under and a warp of collective ones. Like you, I am evolutionarily conditioned to seek stability, safety, familiarity, and consistency, and find myself in a world of instability, mystery, and an almost unbearable quantum of vulnerability. In light of these propositions, I am so grateful to have come to a place in my life where I understand grief as an endogenous healing technology for the heart just as essential as the healing dance of platelets, histamine, and neutrophils is after a wound to the flesh.

I grew up in Southern California, where most of my family still lives. I attended UC Santa Barbara (as well as the Universities of Padua and Venice during a year abroad) for my undergraduate degrees in Religious Studies and Art History. Learning about the world’s faith-based, contemplative, and artistic traditions catalyzed the cultivation of four interrelated and invaluable capacities: 1) a profound sense of wonder, 2) critical analysis, 3) the ability to hold space for paradox, and 4) meaning-making through story, metaphor, and symbol. These skills have become indispensable allies in the arts of grief counseling, group facilitation, ceremony design, and teaching as I practice them today.

In 2012 I moved to Oregon and began attending the Conflict Resolution Master’s program at Portland State University. After completing advanced training in mediation and facilitation, I chose to focus the remainder of my graduate work on exploring cultural and spiritual attunement in end-of-life (EOL) care through the lens of peace-building. Beyond the confines of academia, I have deepened my understanding of grief, dying, and the cultural frameworks from which we meet those two universal experiences by studying with Stephen Jenkinson of the Orphan Wisdom School, Dr. Robert Neimeyer of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition, as well as by completing a Grief Tender Mentorship with Laurence Cole and Thérèse Charvet of Sacred Groves in the lineage of Malidoma* and Sobonfu Somé of Dano, Burkina Faso. I have further been meaningfully influenced by the work of Martín Prechtel, Frances Weller*, Ahlay Blakely, and Joanna Macy.

In 2016 I began a career in the EOL field that would see me through many roles, a number of which I held, and still sometimes hold, simultaneously: hospice bereavement coordinator, volunteer coordinator, and spiritual care provider (i.e. chaplain); community death and grief educator; public speaker; group facilitator; and grief counselor in private practice. I became a core member of the now defunct End-Of-Life Care Collaborative, where I got to share time on panels with creative, brilliant, and committed practitioners of traditional and conventional death-centered arts—death doulas and midwives, celebrants and funeral directors, hospice social workers and counselors, energy and body workers. I am fortunate to have been featured alongside a number of wonderful voices in the field in the 2024 documentary, “Death – Out of the Shadows.” I have been blessed many times over by the opportunities that have been given me and I try to make myself worthy of them.

When I am not working, I am often in the garden or the creek, throwing pottery, sitting quietly on a cushion in the meditation room of our Oregon City home or on retreat, engaged in a natural building project, writing, participating in nonviolent direct action that seeks socio-economic and racial justice, watching old movies, or walking in the woods with my partner, Amanda, and our two doggos, Magnolia (“Maggie”) and Sama.

In closing, I wish to pay homage to the many teachers ancient and contemporary who, while not specialists in grief and death, have shaped me and my work in meaningful ways: Ada Limón, Dr. Amanda Byron, Dr. Angela Davis, angel Kyodo williams, bell hooks, Dr. Christine Thomas, David Whyte, Doyle Banks, Gotama Buddha, Roshi Jan Chozen Bays, Judith Handelsman and Greg Smith, Jack Kornfield, Jorie Graham, Joseph Goldstein, SN Goenka, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Dr. Jose Cabezon, Leigh Brasington, Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.*, Mary Oliver, Dr. Mary Zinkin, Bhante Matale Wijewansa, Michael Meade, Mohandas Gandhi*, Dr. Rachel Cunliffe, Rinzan Pechovnik, Shinzen Young, Mr. Slattery, Stephen and Noah Levine*, Amma Thansanti, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Thich Nhat Hanh, Bhante Vimalaramsi, and Bhante Dr. Walpola Rahula.

Please continue reading the “How I Work” page and/or explore the ITC Instagram page if you want to get a little more of a sense of what it is like to work with me. Also, please feel free to subscribe below for (infrequent) updates about offerings and events.

But then you suddenly realize: Grief is the awakening. Grief is a sign of life stirring towards itself. -Stephen Jenkinson

*I have used an asterisk next to the names of teachers in my lineages of learning and inspiration who have also engaged in harmful sexual behaviors. This practice represents my desire to grow broad enough to hold the paradox of giving grateful credit to those whose work shaped my own, while also acknowledging the harm borne by the women and girls in their orbit (all those I have starred are heterosexual men). I do not expect human gateways for wisdom to be perfect in their behavior, but I also refuse to erase the harm they have done.