Beo Saol | Live Life
— The Ancestors
The people, places and ideas that shaped my philosophy of healing.
Land Acknowledgment
I gratefully acknowledge that I live and work on the ancestral homelands of many Indigenous peoples who have cared for this region for thousands of years. This includes the Erie; the Haudenosaunee nations, including the Seneca and Cayuga; the Lenape (Delaware); the Shawnee; the Wyandot; the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi peoples of the Anishinaabeg; the Miami; and others whose histories are woven into this place.
As someone whose work is rooted in healing, relationship, and remembering, I recognize that this land carries stories of stewardship, resilience, displacement, and survival. As the daughter of a formerly colonized land, I hold the tension of living as a settler here while working toward and trusting that some good will come from my presence. I offer this acknowledgment with gratitude, humility, and a commitment to continue learning from Indigenous voices while supporting the flourishing of Indigenous communities in the present—not only honoring the past.
Our earth
we are of the land
I’m a long way from home
I grew up on the wild western Atlantic coast of County Sligo, narrow roads are lined with stone walls and hedges abounding with wildlife. Green fields meet glassy lakes and dissolve into the mist and where on a clear day Queen Meave watches over all of Sligo from her neolithic tomb atop Knocknarea mountain.
When I think of home, I smell rain and turf fires (y’all call it peat), the blanket of moss and heather that seems to hug the entire island and the rich boglands that provided winter fuel for generations of my ancestors. Bread that tastes like bread, the kettle always on. And growing up amongst a tribe of cousins remembering squeals of laughter and adventure when all gathered together.
Today, I call Northeast Ohio home.
Cleveland has a nickname: The Land. I always smile at that. It feels fitting for a city that's taught me so much about belonging.
Like Ireland, it's green. It's scrappy. It's full of contradictions. However, where the Ireland I grew up in was unfathomably homogeneous - Cleveland is a vibrant eruption of diversity. So much life. They built a whole city on a crooked river, and honestly, how boring would life be if everything moved in straight lines? Lake Erie feels like home to someone who grew up facing an ocean, and after years of wondering if I truly belonged here, it was the heart of Cleveland—the resilience, humor and fierceness of its people—that finally won me over.
Ireland Gave me Roots
Cleveland gave me space to grow
Our ancestors
we are of our ancestors
Ancestors who walk alongside us
I don't think of my ancestors as people who lived long ago.
I think of them as companions.
They survived enough for me to be here, and I carry both their resilience and their unfinished stories. Some days the work of healing generations of inherited grief and repression feels like an honor. Other days it feels impossibly heavy. Either way, it feels like an act of belonging.
Years ago, sitting in a sweat lodge in Mexico during a pretty transcendent experience, I felt them give me a message but it was in Irish:
Beo Saol. Live life.
I didn't even know what it meant at the time.
I had to look it up.
(All diaspora children understand the sheepishness of that.)
Now it has become something of a compass.
I think that's what they wanted for me all along.
Not perfection.
Not productivity.
Not for me to fulfill any role.
Aliveness.
If you grew up Irish, or Irish somewhere else, or another post-colonial land, you may know the feeling of carrying a culture in your bones while still trying to understand what it means.
I don't think reconnecting with our heritage is about looking backwards. I think it's another way of coming home to ourselves
Our Teachers
we are of our teachers
that which affects us creates a lineage through us
I’ve had a lot of great teachers.
And yet some of my greatest teachers have never been people.
They've been questions. Experiences. Ideas. Yearnings.
The places where certainty fell apart.
When I first discovered personal development, I thought those teachers had all the answers. The new age movement showed me how positive thinking, intention and mindset changed my life in meaningful ways.
It taught me that I had agency—that I could participate in shaping my life rather than simply reacting to it.
But eventually I reached the limits of thinking myself better.
Healing asked something more of me.
It asked me to stop thinking my emotions and begin feeling them.
It felt like my body was being torn open, like the years of work I had done earlier still hadn’t touched the most vulnerable part of me.
Coming home to my body changed everything. Through somatic work, I discovered places within me that had been numb for so long I didn't even know they existed.
I learned that healing isn't about becoming perfect. It's about becoming fully human.
The people I most admire didn't avoid suffering—they refused to let it become someone else's. It's that how we metabolize suffering shapes who we become. My heroes aren't the people who achieved something extraordinary. They're the people who encountered suffering and refused to let it harden them into cruelty.
Again and again, I've noticed that the people I most admire allowed their hearts to break open rather than close. Their pain became a source of courage, compassion, and action. They were willing to risk comfort, reputation, and sometimes even their lives in service of a more just and loving world.
I carry deep gratitude for those who came before us—for the activists, truth-tellers, protectors, and martyrs who showed us what moral courage looks like. Their lives remind me that love is not passive. Sometimes love asks us to stand firmly for one another, even when the cost is high.
Perhaps the deepest teachers of all have been grief and anger.
An apprenticeship with Grief
Francis Weller writes, "Grief and love are sisters." His work helped me understand something I now bring into every session: we don't heal grief so we can move beyond it. Grief itself is part of the healing. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be witnessed, honored and carried with enough capacity that they no longer consume us.
That changed the way I see therapy.
I no longer believe healing is about removing every painful experience from our lives. I believe it's about growing our capacity to stay present with life—all of it—without abandoning ourselves when the road gets rocky.
I've also been deeply shaped by wisdom traditions from many cultures and feel our loss of ritual and human rites of passage. Rather than trying to borrow or blend them into something they are not, I approach them with respect and gratitude, listening for the values they share: relationship, embodiment, reverence for life, and belonging.
Whether through Irish ancestral traditions, yoga, martial arts, teachings of the goddess and the divine feminine, land wisdom, right relationship, and other cultural lineages that I've had the privilege to learn from, I find myself returning to the same truth.
Human beings remember themselves best in relationship.
With one another. With the Earth.
With the generations who came before us. And with the generations yet to come.
We must remember how to be together again, and we do this by first remembering ourselves.
An apprenticeship with Anger
For years, I believed I wasn't an angry person. I never lost my temper, rarely raised my voice and did everything I could to keep the peace.
Looking back, I realize it wasn't that I didn't have anger—it was that I had never been taught it was safe to feel.
I grew up in Ireland, where kindness, politeness and keeping the peace were deeply valued. Yet beneath the surface, I often sensed something else quietly at work.
Anger rarely disappeared; it simply found other ways to express itself. It became resentment, bitterness, frustration or silence. It lived in tight smiles, unspoken expectations and words that were never said.
I came to realize that many of us inherit these unspoken rules about emotion—not just from our families, but from the cultures and generations that came before us.
My own relationship with anger reflected that inheritance. I had become so disconnected from this powerful, protective emotion that I mistook its absence for peace.
What I eventually discovered was that reclaiming my anger wasn't about becoming more reactive or learning to rage. It was about reconnecting with a part of myself that knew how to protect what mattered, speak the truth and honor my own boundaries.
That journey became one of the deepest apprenticeships of my life and pulled me out of some darkness.
Anger is not violence. Anger is not cruelty. These are how we have seen anger be expressed but these are actions. I believe that the energy of anger, as with eros, is a force of incredible healing and it welcome its role in my life and in my work.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
One of the greatest privileges of this work is that I never stop being a student. The people below have shaped my thinking in countless ways. Some have been my teachers and mentors; others have taught me through their books, art, activism, research and life's work. Whether we've met or not, I'm deeply grateful for the generosity of their ideas and the legacy they continue to leave.
Mary Morrissey • Adele DiMarco • Erica Merritt • Marissa Peer • Mike Mandel • Timothy September • Michael Newton • Delores Canon • Peter Levine • Luis Mojica • Gabor Maté • Bessel Van Der Kolk • Terrence Real • David Grand • Bell Hooks • Harriet Lerner • Jonice Webb • Luis Mojica • Linda Thai • Deb Dana • Michael Singer • JonPaul Crimi • Cornelius Christopher • Francis Weller • Malidome Somé • Samantha diRosa • Summer Estes • Robin Clark • Sarah Durham Wilson • Rev Brianna Lynn • Dra Rocio Rosales Meza • Nikki Blak • Toi Marie Smith • Rachael Collins • Aoife Lowden • Layla Martin • Michaela Boehm • Elayne Kalila Doughty • Ariel Spillsbury • Clodagh O’Connor • Maya Luna • John O’Donahue • Tupac Shakur • Christy Moore • Assata Shakur • Che Guevara • Sinead O’Connor • Louise Hay • Hypno Badasses • Priestess Sisters • CPAC Comrades • Layne Redmond • Manchán Magan and so many more.
I want to also acknowledge the unnamed carriers of the healing lineages that I am privileged to continue. In particular I want to acknowledge the women whose presence was erased from their fields and those who were ridiculed, punished and burned for carrying their healing traditions:
lineage bearers of clinical hypnotherapy • of transpersonal hypnotherapy • of somatic practices • of so many various indigenous wisdom traditions • of breathwork practices • of energy healing practices • of trance-based healing practices • of shamanic practices • and so many more.
Buíochas agus Beannachtaí libh.
“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness."
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Our future
we are of the future
Breaking cycles of generational trauma for those who come next
I sometimes dream of the perfect world. The utopian one where we all finally just get along. A new earth on earth, a planet at peace with itself. A girl can must dream.
Lofty goals are helpful, but we also need active goals to get us there. Goals that we can get up in the morning and work towards.
I walk through life with a vision of a world where enough people remember who they are that we stop building systems rooted in fear, domination and disconnection.
I believe peace has little to do with borders and treaties. It begins the moment we stop abandoning ourselves.
The moment we learn to stay present with our own fear instead of projecting it onto one another, or the 21st century classic: projecting one collective group fear onto another group.
Healing is like activating an inner truth serum that transmutes vulnerability into strength and allows courage and compassion to exist in the same body.
Every session I offer is, in its own small way, an act of faith in that future.
Because people change the world and healing changes them.
A person who trusts themselves, parents differently.
Loves differently. Leads differently. Votes differently. Builds community differently.
Every person who remembers their own humanity makes it easier for someone else to remember theirs.
That's the future I'm quietly working toward.
One human heart at a time.
There is a loneliness in losing our selves.
connection is the difficult medicine
Difficult because Connection requires Self-Awareness, Self-knowledge, confidence, Humility, trust, boundaries & ability in the absence of safety and certainty; to feel safe Enough to try.
Our Belonging
we are of each other
our surroundings shape us
Everything you've read here is part of my story.
Thanks for sticking in there, you might be my kind of person.
But as I think you know, this page isn't really about me.
It's about the places, people, cultures, losses, joys and moments that shape every human life.
We all come from somewhere.
We all inherit stories we didn't choose.
We all spend part of our lives forgetting ourselves, and—if we're fortunate—another part remembering.
I don't expect your story to look like mine.
In fact, I hope it doesn't.
But I do hope my willingness to know my own roots gives you permission to become curious about yours.
Because belonging isn't something we find.
It's something we practice.
Together.
