Meet Nikki
Welcome
My life experience has shown me that healing and development require humility, and that the more we allow ourselves to feel humble, the more energy we have for our growth and health. My experience has also shown me that while creativity can exist without healing, healing evokes a journey or shift from one state into a new state, thus healing emerges through creativity. Due to this learning, some of which I discovered through my own intense struggles as a young woman, I approach psychotherapy through a lens of creativity, and take seriously my role in courting creative solutions and transformation through the potent intersection between what clients share and what I offer. I have found that over two decades of meditation and yoga training have helped me to develop a keen intuition and attention that inspires a vital inter-emergent space and creative capacity with clients.
My own healing journey included work with psychotherapists, intuitive healers, 12-step groups, international aid work, pilgrimage, meditation, and yoga over decades and within different contexts. I was on my knees without an understanding of how to heal myself more in my adolescence and early twenties than I was clear that I would heal. Yet my life has taught me that this very gap into which we cannot easily place a quick answer to dissolve our suffering or confusion is the well through which the mystery of healing unfolds. I am grateful for the love and skill of those who guided me in my early years, for my yogic practices, and for my relationship to what is greater than I, as each helped me to recover my life and health, and to embody clarity, abundance and joy. I am blessed to share life with many loved ones and friends, to have benefited from a longtime relationship to two spiritual teachers, and to have found my ground in my dedicated commitment to yoga and meditation.
How I Practice Therapy:
Creating a safe environment is where I begin. I see therapy as a collaborative process that can lead you toward a greater capacity for self-awareness, trust, clarity, a sense of meaning and freedom. Life gives us surprising obstacles, which can make us feel stuck, depressed, alone or scared. With therapeutic presence, creativity and guidance, we can change our relationship to obstacles and transform. Our darkest point may mark the moment we realize we want to change.
I use yoga and creative writing in my practice, and have training in yoga therapy, mindfulness/somatic therapy approaches, gestalt therapy, marriage and family counseling, Motivational Interviewing, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, the Pragmatic Experiential Method for Improving Relationships, trauma-informed care and Depth Psychology.
What do I know about Mindfulness, Meditation and Yoga?
Hatha Yoga is a process of becoming, or growing toward a deeper realization of one’s self, through the clay of the body.
I discovered yoga at the age of sixteen, and have not turned back. It is a mystery to answer how I found my way into yoga twenty-five years ago; yet from my first class, I felt that I had come home. I understood that this practice is deeply kin to my existence. My study of yoga has included a number of 200 and 500-hour teacher trainings and two six-month apprenticeships with master teachers. My most influential teachers over the last two and a half decades: Sofia Diaz, Aadhil Palkhivala, Jeanne Heileman, Mary Taylor, Mati Ezrahty, Richard Freeman, Chuck Miller, Gary Kraftsow and Chad Hamrin. I am certified to teach at the E-RYT level.
One year after discovering yoga, I discovered meditation and began a daily meditation practice (on my dorm room bed, in the early years.) Meditation is not about having a special place to sit, such as a meditation cushion, nor is it about who you study with, or what retreat you attend, though all of these can help.
At the root, meditation is about learning to sit with our arising sensations and thoughts, and to allow ourselves to notice what occurs without overtly reacting to each thought or feeling. If I had to name what accounts for the greatest experiences of peace in my life, I would say sitting with myself, whether through hatha yoga practice or meditation. My training has taken varied forms, and has included several 8-10 day meditation retreats in Theravada and Zen Buddhist traditions, and study with myriad teachers and guides. I am lay ordained in the Zen tradition of Zentatsu Baker Roshi, and find my daily meditation practice to be a primary source of nourishment.
For a closer look at my degrees and trainings, feel free to email me at [email protected] for my CV.
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
I welcome all genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, religions or other demographics to my practice.
