My Deeper Story : Soul Purpose
Honoring many ways of knowing, being, and doing
My mother tells a story that I was born into a room filled with international medical students who could neither speak English, nor each other’s language. Though hospital policy of the day did not allow my father in the room, a dozen students were there to witness a natural birth, which had become rare in the era of medical interventions. Mom would say with a smile that this is why I’ve always had a sense of urgency to communicate, and an unusual capacity to do so non-verbally, cross-culturally, and bridging difference.
Across the last thirty years, I’ve been deeply committed to my personal and professional development. Through engagement with Freudian, Gestalt, and Jungian therapies, and training in somatic practice and systems, I've built a life of meaning that cultivates and leverages the ability to make authentic contact and navigate across divides.
My life has been enriched by serving as a wedding officiant and birth doula and having the opportunity to be present and hold space for big transitions in people's lives. My personal life has also been greatly shaped by being in a family with significant neurodivergence and caring for my mother through her journey with Alzheimer's.
Professionally, I've served as a nonprofit executive working in maternal child health for 25 years. I’ve learned alongside colleagues from many different communities, negotiating equitable policy agendas across race and history of harm. Joining together, the collaborative groups I have stewarded mobilized from the grassroots to the treetops to advance their agendas as state and federal rules and laws. It's been an honor.
I feel deeply called at this time to shift from a focus on policy and system change within a single topic area, to supporting many people to be equipped in many ways to liberate themselves and the systems of their lives. Working from Self to System, I honor the somatic, emotional, and mental intelligence within each client. For as Bill O’Brien has put it, “the success of the intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener”.
The world desperately needs courageous and conscious leaders, partners, parents, and beloved community. When we take up the urgent work to confront our own oppressive and limiting beliefs, be they from family lineage, trauma, or social construct, we shift the Self, which shifts the System. Intrapersonal work changes interpersonal interactions. Quality connections are leveraged to hold loving families, and we build organizations and institutions of diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging. With enough momentum, this leads to system level change. Supporting this movement is my soul purpose.
I have founded Many Ways, LLC in recognition that the intrapersonal, interpersonal, structural, and systemic change I've been honored to be part of the last decade, is the work of our collective future. I support individuals, convene groups, guide organizations, and officiate ceremonies that facilitate our unfolding potential to navigate across difference.
This is my contribution to building a world where we are both autonomous and in each other’s care.
Many Ways, LLC is a learning laboratory for individuals and communities of practice to work together to become the conscious beings the world needs, by honoring the Many Ways of knowing, being, and doing.