When I was sixteen, I was addicted to cocaine and crystal meth.
I'm telling you that not because it defines me. What matters is what came after: the depths I moved through, not just with substances but with everything that lives underneath them. The layered, complicated, deeply human experience of recovery in all its forms. I know what it costs to stay in it, and I know what it takes to choose differently.
I also know what it's like to come back — to begin again after a recurrence, carrying the particular shame of that. The shame that says: you should have known better. You had so much to lose. What does this say about you? I know that shame intimately. And I know it's a lie. The women who need to hear that most are often the ones least likely to ask for help — and so I'm saying it here, plainly: a recurrence doesn't disqualify you from the most beautiful chapter of your life. It just means you're human — and you can still choose it.
What I didn't know then — what took years of recovery to understand — is that leaving the substances wasn't a loss. It was the beginning of the most expansive, most alive chapter of my life.
Recovery enriched everything. My relationships, my creativity, my capacity to feel. My work, my motherhood, my sense of who I actually am underneath the coping. That's not a tagline. It's what happened to me — and it's what I've watched happen, again and again, for the women I've had the honour of walking alongside.
My Work
In 2011, my mother and I co-founded the SHE RECOVERS® Foundation — born from our own recovery journeys and a shared belief that women deserved something different. What started as a FaceBook page, has grown into the largest recovery organization of its kind for women in the world, globally recognized and registered as a nonprofit in both Canada and the United States. Together we've hosted over 65 retreats, built a community that spans the globe, and spent over a decade connecting, supporting and empowering women in - or seeking recovery.
I've been a trauma-informed yoga teacher for over 20 years — long before "somatic" became a wellness buzzword, I was guiding women through profoundly transformational journeys on the mat. Each class a doorway inward: into the body, into what's held there, into the aliveness waiting on the other side of it. I have presented at major recovery conferences and co-taught alongside incredible leaders such as Elena Brower and Gabor Maté.
That's the foundation everything else is built on.
I'm a Somatic Recovery Coach, and I work with women who are ready to explore life without substances.
Somatic means we work with the body, not just the mind. So often, recovery stays in the head — the thinking, the willpower, and the promises to yourself. But the patterns live deeper, in the nervous system, in the body that built its own ways of coping long before the mind could explain why. My work goes there: to where the craving lives, where the shame is held, where the old strategies took root. We meet it all gently — and we shift it.
I also work with scent. As a Certified Aromatherapist, Community Herbalist, Botanical Perfumer, and AromaPsychologist, I've spent years studying the relationship between plants, scent, and the nervous system. Essential oils aren't an add-on to this work — they're a direct line into the emotional and somatic state a woman is actually in, right now, in this moment.
This craft lives beyond the coaching room too — I'm the founder/perfumer of Moonlore Botanical Perfumery, where the intelligence of plants meets the language of the senses. I create bespoke scents and teach classes and workshops on the art of botanical perfumery.
This combination — somatic coaching and botanical wisdom — is what I call Enriched Recovery. It's the methodology at the heart of everything I offer: recovery that is embodied, botanical, intentional, and transformative.
When you bring somatic awareness into your healing, recovery deepens. When you engage with botanical wisdom — scent, plant allies, the intelligence of nature — recovery becomes richer, more reverent. When you weave ritual and ceremony into your practice, recovery becomes intentional, devotional. When you allow transformation to happen in your body, not just your mind, recovery becomes fuller, more alive.
Enriched Recovery is experienced through three layers:
The somatic — where your body becomes a place of wisdom, presence, and aliveness
The botanical — where scent and the wisdom of plants become sacred anchors
The transformational — where healing happens in layers, spirals, and profound shifts
Training & Certifications
I keep telling myself I'm done taking certifications. Turns out I'm addicted to learning.
Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy (in progress)
Mind-Body Coach (in progress)
Certified Recovery Coach
Certified Aromatherapist
AromaPsychology
Community Herbalist
Botanical Perfumer, Level 3 Slow Scent-certified under Mandy Aftel
Trauma of Money™ Certified Practitioner
Trauma-Informed Yoga
Makeup Artist (this was my world before I found yoga and my life was changed forever)