08/09/2026
Happy Monday friends. If you are thinking about joining our 13 Moons ReClaiming the Sacred Feminine Journey this fall, maybe you'd like to know a bit about my background.
My spirituality has been an earth walk, learning from nature and healing in nature, and walking a path of learning from the cycles of the moon and the seasons of the year. This began in 1996.
In 2000 I quit drinking and drugging, age 23. My experimenting started early, around 11, and from some time the year I turned 17 until I quit I didn’t have a single totally sober day. Recovery saved me, has steered me, helped me restart myself and continues to ground, center and resource me. As a practice for me, recovery is integrative, or informed by several different areas of support.
At the winter Solstice in 2001 I spent several days of alone quiet time that were truly restorative for the first time in my life. Intuitively a realignment was occuring that allowed me to go deeper into my body then I’d ever been comfortable going. In 2002 I finally wrapped my undergrad in Creative Writing. I also began paying closer attention to my own moon, and began to see emotional and thought and other patterns in my own life this way. Particularly during the few days before and of my bleed.
The next ten years I tended quiet time, what I call Red Tent time, at my personal dark moon. So much healing happened for me, particular to how I related to my self and my worth, and how I related to others and showed up to my relationships, including my own with my body, spirit and psyche. During those years I taught adults to speak English or workforce ed or how to read among other skills. In my personal life within my recovery circles I also began hosting periodic, informal women’s circles. During these years I closely studied the poetics of Diane diPrima and Gary Snyder, and the works of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, Joseph Campbell and began to become interested in Carl Jung.
This led me, after some soul searching, to pursue my Masters in Counseling with Depth Emphasis at Pacifica Graduate Institute. My research focused on Sacred Stories of the Feminine and applying a praxis of the moon and seasons of the year as symbols of phases in the development of the feminine psyche. I suggested dark moon, whether during PMS, or the phase of the moon every month, as a time of self-reflection would embody conscious transformation and create an accessible, internal landscape of sacred support.
This is further strengthened by relational time in nature, what we might call deep ecology or deep animism.
Women’s Embodiment and Ecopsychology as a therapeutic praxis solidified into a vision I’d been having since the early 2000’s. In 2016, a year after graduation in the fall I opened The Delmarva Free School on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a pay it forward non-profit. We provided traditional mental health services, offering depth psychotherapy and other counseling, and trauma-informed, somatic and restorative recovery skills for 8 years. In 2021 we actualized our 5 year goal of getting land to rewild and do our work as a community. We received a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust and have been doing backyard habitat restoration in the upper Pocomoke river basin, an area full of ancient bald cypress swamps.
Women’s Embodiment remains our central focus, against the backdrop of applied Ecopsychology. Exploring the archetypal feminine in meaningful, applicable ways remains my passion! I want to broaden my community and open affordable access to women that may find this sort of support enriching. If you are interested, and want to experience it yourself, know that supporting my work supports the whole Free School community! Join us, journey with us!
