The Moon was Full Last Night :: why I work with trauma

Why do I work with trauma?

Why have I spent so many hours and years wondering and working to understand what happens in trauma.

The truth is I did it for myself. When I was 14 I sank into a deep depression. I stayed in bed for days. I had no idea why, I just felt horrible. It came back when I was 16 in the form of an eating disorder and then again when I was 18 in myriad forms.

By the time I was 23 I had had enough glimpses of the roots of my pain to know that either I was crazy/depressed, but that I was suffering from something that had happened. Something had happened. I just didn’t know what it was. I refused to think there was something wrong with me and started searching for ways to make sense of it all.

I found refuge in religious devotion and in the quiet reflection of the humanities. Most of my twenties were awash with pain and suffering.

There were beacons of light along the way. Of course.

There was David Whyte’s Poetry of Self Compassion and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. There were good friends and adventures, but always lurking was the devil of despair.

I was always searching for healing, ways to figure out and mend what I knew had gone so terribly wrong within me. There was rolfing, and vegetarianism. There was New Age positive thinking and crystals, therapy and meditation, poetry and dating. On top of it all, I got a good education, but I still felt broken.

After a decade in academia I embraced the real world and became a creative cofee guzzling work-a-holic. I gave up searching sometime in there and just started accepting myself… as much as I could. Things were pretty good.

And then something happened.

I had a baby and something cracked open in me, a remembering that I had a mission, that I had an urgent wound that couldn’t be ignored with a child in my arms.

I set out on the search again and this time the world turned up something real. I recognized it immediately, traces and distant calls. The world was catching up to what I had been needing and I was in a place to join in the movement, the revolution of true and lasting healing.

My first child is now 8. I have been on this tour of my life’s spiral for the last 8 years or so and am ready to share all that I have learned and developed with you in a seasoned and organized way.

That’s why I created the Soft Animal E-Salon

Soft Animal a space for your journey into wholeness. It relies on the sacred wisdom of the body and true and lasting resolution of trauma (we all have it) so that we can reclaim our birthright of authenticity and freedom, agency and joy.It is a space of depth and light, of grief and of laughter.

Why do I work with trauma?

Because there is no evil thing, big or small, gross or subtle, external or internal, global or local that does not have its roots in unresolved trauma.

Join me in becoming whole, like last night’s moon . . . .