I came to this work through the body. For over two decades I practiced as a licensed professional counselor, accompanying people through the places where body image, trauma, identity, and culture collide. That work led me to co-found the Center for Body Trust with Dana Sturtevant — one of the first organizations in the country to center weight-inclusive, liberation-oriented care at a clinical and organizational level.
Through CBT I trained thousands of providers, co-authored Reclaiming Body Trust: A Path to Healing & Liberation (Penguin Random House, 2022), and learned firsthand what it takes to build something meaningful over the long haul — and what it costs when the container isn't strong enough to hold the people inside it.
Grief entered my work not as a detour but as a deepening. I trained with Francis Weller as a grief ritual facilitator and began co-facilitating grief courses and gatherings with Carmen Cool. What I discovered — and what I now bring to organizations — is that grief is not a problem to be managed. It is a fundamental human experience that shapes how we work, how we lead, and whether people stay. Organizations that hold grief well keep their people. Most organizations don't know how.
EMBER grew from all of this. I created it for therapists, coaches, and dietitians who are trying to build practices that hold them — financially, structurally, emotionally — without disappearing into them. So many helping professionals were never taught how to build businesses that reflect their ethics and still pay the bills. EMBER is the antidote: strategy and emotional integrity, side by side.
Everything I teach is rooted in social justice, emotional honesty, and a belief that building anything — a business, a team, a life — requires us to honor what has been lost and imagine what's possible.
