I grew up in mostly in Seattle with some time in Salt Lake City. I attended the University of Washington, joining the tech industry during the first Internet boom of the 1990's. In 2006, I moved to the Bay Area and worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years before returning to Washington in 2018.

Prior to counseling, I worked for almost 30 years in tech at companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla. When in Oakland, I was a co-founder and director of the 501(c)(3) non-profit hackerspace, Ace Monster Toys.

As a grown-up Gen X nerd, as well a poly Neopagan and Buddhist, I feel a strong affinity to people who have been pushed to the margins by society simply by being or acting different from the social norms. I identify as neurodivergent and was raised by people who were often neurodivergent, queer, and wonderfully weird. These folks have always been my own community. Since 2004, I have mostly identified as a Buddhist practitioner but maintain connections in many worlds and with a variety of spiritual practices from my youth. 

Education, Certifications, and Trainings

I graduated in 2022 with master's in counseling from Saybrook University, with an earlier interdisciplinary humanities master's degree and a bachelor's degree in cultural anthropology.

I have trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS) with the Internal Family Systems Institute and the  Internal Family Systems Counselling Association (IFSCA) of Canada. I completed the IFS Level 1 training program from the IFS Institute and the  "Stepping Stones" 16 week training program from the IFSCA.

I have also trained with the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) instructor. MBSR is an empirically supported 8-week program that teaches mindfulness meditation as a health intervention for anyone and is the most common form of secular mindfulness. I am also certified as a mindfulness coach within Unified Mindfulness, a secular mindfulness practice developed by Shinzen Young. You can find out more about it here. 

I have a 20-year background as a meditation practitioner, mainly in the context of Zen and Insight meditation communities. I maintain a daily meditation practice with regular time on retreats. I graduated from a small Buddhist seminary, the Prajna Institute for Buddhist Studies, with a Master in Buddhist Doctrine and then taught in that school as a professor for several years, until it closed a decade ago. 

More recently, I spent nine months practicing therapy with active duty members of the United States military, veterans, and their families while working for the Chaplain Corps of the U.S. Army at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM).

From April 2022 through March 2023, I was part of the inaugural year-long cohort for the Vital Psychedelic Training Program for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAP). I have also completed a progressive series of focused trainings from the Polaris Insight Center on ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP). This training was approximately 60 hours of classroom work with an additional five day residential training retreat.