I’ve always been drawn to this work.

When I was a kid, I was the person others confided in. People seemed to instinctively bring me what felt tender, and I found myself deeply drawn to understanding people.

Health and science always fascinated me, and I was convinced I would become a doctor. In college, I studied neuroscience on the pre-med track. I found myself drawn to psychology classes which felt like a way of understanding not only other people, but myself. I had grown up inside complexity and was quietly trying to understand the pain I carried.

I spent years immersed in psychology, working inside psychiatric offices, behavioral therapy clinics, volunteering as a CASA and at children’s homes, drawn to people and their stories, yet increasingly aware of something difficult: I could not hold the weight of others’ pain without first learning how to tend to my own.

That realization eventually pulled me deeper into research.

I pursued a master’s degree in biomedical engineering with a fascination for qEEG brain mapping and the possibility of seeing the brain in real time. After graduate school, I began scanning hundreds of brains, in research and applied settings. I was able to witness something extraordinary unfold: meditation, hypnosis, and mind/body work could create measurable physiological changes in the brain.

For the first time, I could see something I had always intuitively sensed. Our inner world matters. Around this time, I began exploring deeper modalities for healing, drawn to the relationship between mind, body, emotion, and perception and quietly returning to questions that had followed me for much of my life.

Later, I entered the world of surgical robotics, an environment built around precision, performance, and high-stakes decision making. We were constantly refining systems and optimizing outcomes under pressure.

This work oddly, reflected back so much about being human.

Again and again, I saw how easy it was to prioritize efficiency and quick fixes while deeper patterns remained untouched. One problem would be solved only for another to emerge somewhere else downstream, until something significant forced us to look beneath the surface at the underlying programming itself.

The parallels kept nagging at me, and I kept getting drawn back to questions around human behavior, the mind, and what actually creates lasting change.After more than 15 years spent studying the relationship between the brain, body, emotion, and behavior through neuroscience, qEEG brain mapping, biomedical engineering, and clinical environments, I felt myself being pulled back toward something deeper, a desire to understand not only how people function, but how they heal, reconnect to themselves, and feel fully alive again.

In many ways, I was returning to where I started, drawn again toward the relationship between mind and body the truth that had followed me for much of my life. I began deepening my own mind-body practice, sensing there was something important I had not fully understood yet.

Then motherhood cracked me open.

I found myself wrestling with questions many mothers carry: Can I be deeply present and still ambitious? Can drive and devotion exist together? Can I stay connected to myself inside a season that asks so much of me?

I stayed home longer than expected, unwilling to accept the story that women must choose between ambition and presence. Then came the loss of my daughter, Vera. Grief changed the landscape of everything.

What had once felt intuitive no longer felt simple. Trust felt harder to access. My body felt like a failure.

Hypnotherapy became the first thing that allowed me to feel pain without becoming consumed by it. Rather than asking me to think my way out of grief, it helped me understand what I was carrying, where it lived in my body, and how quickly suffering can begin shaping the beliefs we hold about trust, safety, worth, failure, and who we are.