I’m a mindfulness-based psychotherapist, specializing in integrating mindfulness into my work as a therapist, retreat and workshop facilitator, presenter and writer. Weaving Western psychology and neuroscience with the wisdom and meditative practices of Eastern contemplative and spiritual traditions, I developed a powerful approach that helps relieve stress, reduces anxiety and depression, and strengthens resilience for facing life-changing challenges such as serious illness, trauma, grief and loss. As a cancer survivor myself, I bring my personal experience to my professional work and I’m passionate about teaching mindfulness as a powerful way to live well and thrive with cancer. Recognizing the need for more resources for people living with serious illness I was inspired to create the Awake and Alive: Mindful Living with Cancer Retreats in 2013. Held annually, this in person retreat has been online for the last two years. Throughout the years, we have built a thriving group of alumni. I have continued to create mindfulness retreats and programs for people living with cancer in the USA and UK. I have taught for Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center, Swedish Cancer Institute, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CancerLifeline and the Palliative Care Institute, and am on the faculty of Harmony Hill Retreat Center where I facilitate cancer retreats. I led mindfulness and cancer retreats and created and taught online classes with The Mindfulness Project in London. I completed extensive post-graduate training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer at the University of Bangor, U.K., and trained with Jon Kabat-Zinn as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction instructor at the Center for Mindfulness in Massachusetts. I began meditating in my teens and now have more than 40 years of extensive meditation experience. I studied and trained with many of the foremost meditation teachers of our time. I traveled through Asia for a year in the 1970’s, finally arriving in Japan where I trained at a Rinzai Zen Temple for another 3 years. I met the beloved mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat in the 1980’s and was ordained as a senior practitioner in the Order of Interbeing.
