I ‘m Samantha
I have been a student of psychology and body-based therapies for over a decade. My relationship with this work began in my teenage years, when I was sent to a therapeutic boarding school and first became immersed in therapy. Middle child who rebelled in the 2000s. Around that same time, I was introduced to Astrology, which helped me better understand myself and the dynamics within my family system.
Over the years, I’ve moved in and out of different healing modalities, often gravitating toward paths that felt slightly outside the mainstream. After experiencing frustration and confusion within the Western medical system in my early 20s, I discovered Ayurveda, which brought me a sense of relief and resonance. I was drawn to its intuitive approach—listening to the body and using symptoms as guidance for nourishment and daily life.
This exploration led me to study yoga. I went on to teach both publicly and internationally, including at a retreat center in Costa Rica. After returning, however, I began to feel disillusioned with aspects of the wellness community, particularly the subtle puritanism I observed beneath its surface.
My curiosity then expanded into plant medicine, ceremony, and ancestral healing practices. Alongside this, I became increasingly aware of addiction patterns within my family. Before the age of 30, I lost my brother to an overdose—an experience that profoundly altered the course of my life. In the aftermath, everything felt as though it was unraveling. At the time, I was working in a more corporate role, questioning not only my career but where I truly belonged.
I knew I was deeply drawn to the study of the unseen—the unconscious, the psyche—but I often felt out of place in spaces that identified as strictly “spiritual.”
Eventually, I made the decision to move across the country to San Francisco to study somatic psychology. Learning to understand the body as a holder of psychological experience—our lived psyche—was transformative.
Through each modality, I’ve gathered insight and perspective, while also noticing what is often missing: community. To me, true community requires a tolerance for difference and complexity.
I am currently continuing my studies through a program called BioMystica, which integrates psychology, symptom work, and frameworks such as German New Medicine to explore healing as a form of liberation.
For most of my life, I have held the desire for deeper connections and a stronger sense of community. In moments of significant change and sorrow, I longed for that sense of a "village". An expanded sense of family that supported one another.
A forever dream of mine has been to create and help build the modern-day village. Hosting events that nourish all the bodies we inhabit- physical, spiritual, and emotional.
The lessons from grief and the surprise of an unplanned pregnancy only sharpened this vision for me.
Working Together
I offer monthly grief groups along with personalized grief support offerings. See below for details about Personalized Rituals, Community Grief Circles, and Consultations.
The Five Gates of Grief
Francis Weller developed this framework to identify the different categories of grief.
1 Everything we love we will lose.
● Losing someone or something we love ● Loss of those who depart this Earth before us; our parents, spouse, children, friends ● Loss of home, beloved animals, places you have loved ● Loss from illness or injury; treasured skills capacities ● Loss of a life dream ● Abortion ● Miscarriage
Second Gate: The Places that have not known love
● Places in ourselves never touched by love ● Places wrapped in shame and banished ● Places lived outside of compassion, warmth and welcome ● Parts that we hate in ourselves and hold in contempt, that we deny the healing salve of community ● Outcast portions of our soul appearing as addictions, depression, anxiety and other symptoms calling for our attention.
Third Gate: The Sorrows of the World
● The losses of the world around us ● Daily diminishment of species, habitats and cultures noted in our psyches ● Sadness for the Earth (not personal but shared and communal) ● Where we experience the soul of the world
Fourth Gate: What we expected and did not receive
Things we may never realize we have lost, because we weren’t born into village with full joyous welcome of our gifts And so we carry: ● Unconscious disappointment ● Feelings of loneliness and aloneness ● Diminished experience of who we truly are At the core of this grief is our longing to belong and longing to be longed for.
Fifth Gate: Ancestral Grief Unacknowledged and untended sorrow of those who came before us, born of
● Lost connection to land, language, imagination, rituals, songs, stories of their/our ancestors ● Sense of homelessness, orphaned between old and new worlds ● Experience of woundedness, loss and abandonment, where grief and shame are intermingled, residing in the psychic history of our lineage ● Collective soul grief of abuses of millions
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