Behind-the- Scenes Tools

What I bring to my work with people:

Myself

  • I bring myself: effusive, playful, optimistic, sensitive, connective.

    Personality quirks: If I do not do my morning routine of stretching and grounding I am easily distractible—jumping from project to project like the mouse in the kid’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Writing things down makes my brain work better. I often tell too many details and go on tangents in stories, thinking it is humorous, but not everyone is amused. If left to my own devices I will stay up late reading old journals, finding the perfect combination of fabrics for an elaborate sewing project or design a series of possible images for block prints.

  • I bring my identities and how these locate my perspectives: white, middle class, small town raised, child of lesbian moms, queer, partner of a trans masculine person. I bring the newly recognized categories of neurodivergence I fall into and how I have learned to cope: ADD, depression, anxiety, hypomania & heightened sensitivity.

  • I bring my journeys: shuffling between contrasting homes of divorced parents—always stuck in the middle, disappearing from my 20’s with an ill partner, grieving her death, disarming my inner critic, giving a mic to my patient & fierce inner bestie and snuggling the fearful and mistrusting creatures within.

  • I bring my world view: I come from a childhood full of wonder, rosy eyed and largely protected from the big bad scary world. I am still startled by despair when I let in the pain of the world. I come with trust in our resilience and an inherent belief in humans. I resist the insidious patterns of capitalism, patriarchy, oppressions, and colonization within me and in everything—and am determined to choose a different pattern in my heart and mind. I get sucked back in to that status quo and pull myself out over and over. I strive to imagine & create a just, equitable, abundant, collective, nurturing communal reality in all I do.

Connection Building

  • I wield tools for building & maintaining solid, nurturing connections with each person and group. Tools that make folks feel welcome, safe, heard, seen, understood. Tools that allow people to enter a creative collaboration & feel like they have support rather than slogging through & carrying the weight all on their own.

  • Tools that are the “soft skills” of quality relationships: listening, validating, normalizing, reflecting, empathizing. (Shhh, these are the secrets of the work).

  • Tools for supporting people in building themselves up: highlighting strengths, offering an outside perspective, challenging limiting stories, uncovering the silent fears & barriers to change, empowering self-trust, supporting reconnection to embodied knowing, nurturing new possibilities.

Tools I’ve Integrated

This is not a junk drawer!!!

  • I have steadily been collecting tools… while pursuing a masters in psychology, therapeutic movement classes, and courses on nervous system regulation. While offering counseling to LGBTQ+ folks and mindfulness and conflict resolution skills to kids, I have been collecting. Tools to show up able to follow folks wherever they need to go and guide them into new territory.

  • I worried about needing the very fanciest tools that got at the root of pain and trauma— tools with precise formulas and procedures. And yet I knew somewhere in me that I didn’t fit inside these formulas, but still needed tools that reached deep. So I went searching for different tools— tools that felt like old friends—I knew how to hold them and lean into them.

  • In my tool belt, I carry tools that help us come back into our bodies, re-kindle the inner fires of knowing and settle in to the rocking chair. Tools that sensitize our eyes to nuanced hues and sharpen our hearing for deeper tones at the cinema of our lives as we make the needed edits to our stories. I embrace the tools that work for me in supporting the gentle humans who may not fit inside the formulas either.

“Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.”

—Barbara Kingsolver