Most mornings you will find me walking the bluffs above the Pacific in Santa Cruz, listening to what the wind and the water know that I don't. I have been doing this for decades. Not to find answers, but to practice not needing them so urgently.
I am a Zen Roshi, a pipe carrier, a grandmother, a scholar, and an elder guide. For more than 25 years I have walked alongside people at the thresholds of their lives, the places where the old story ends and the new one has not yet begun.
What I know is this: you do not need to be fixed. You need to be met.
I received Roshi transmission through the Rinzai Zen lineage and hold a Ph.D. in Transformative Education and Recovery of the Indigenous Mind from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). My teaching draws from Zen koan practice, Indigenous wisdom traditions, contemplative arts, nature-based rites of passage, and the living teachings of this Earth.
I am the founder of Seven Directions Zen and have developed programs that address the deepest thresholds of human life: aging as a spiritual journey, death and dying as awakening, wilderness rites of passage, and the sacred geography of long-term relationship. I carry the pipe in the tradition of my teachers and hold my practice on the ancestral land of the Amah Mutsun people.
I am not primarily interested in transformation as a product. I am interested in you, your actual life, the grief you have not finished, the question that wakes you at 3am, the longing you have almost stopped listening to.
Those who find their way to me are often:
I offer individual spiritual guidance, Zoom sangha, elder rites of passage circles, and immersive wilderness quests. My teaching also lives on Substack ("These Beautiful and Difficult Times") and Patreon, where I share ongoing dharma, koan inquiry, poetry, and contemplative reflection.
If something in you recognizes something here, that is not an accident.
The threshold is real. Come as you are.
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