About
Dr. Heather has been passionately investigating the great truths and mysteries of existence since childhood. She has maintained a daily meditation practice since 2004, with nearly four months of cumulative silent meditation retreat experience. She has experienced openings of consciousness that have permanently altered her understanding of reality and who she takes herself to be. It is from this embodied place of stillness that she works with others. She offers a mindful, compassionate, intuitive presence and tools to assist clients with their life, work, and relationship challenges, and their spirituality/existential/consciousness concerns.
Dr. Heather views wellness from a holistic perspective, in which interconnected physical/biological, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual aspects of a person interact with and mutually influence the contexts the person finds him or herself in, such as his or her network of relationships, family system, subculture(s) including his or her generational cohort, dominant culture(s), and the ecological environment he or she lives in and engages with. Heather values healing remedies, modalities, and nutrition, unique for each person, that work harmoniously with the body to increase its innate ability to heal itself and function optimally.
Dr. Heather holds a B.A. in psychology from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) and a Psy.D. (Doctorate of Clinical Psychology) from the California Institute of Integral Studies (San Francisco, CA). Her graduate work emphasized cognitive-behavioral approaches as well as transpersonal, existential-humanistic, mindfulness-based, experiential, and psychoanalytic/psychodynamic approaches. Heather has worked clinically with a wide variety of populations, problems, ages, and in many different settings, with individuals, groups, couples, and families. Clinical experience as a therapist/counselor has included working with sex offenders on the Navajo reservation, art/design students at the California College of the Arts, hospital and hospice patients using expressive arts and guided imagery, inpatients in recovery, elders with serious mental and physical health challenges, rape and domestic violence victims in the ER, eating disorders, and all varieties of patients in private practice. She completed her post-doctoral fellowship at Petaluma Health Center, a family medicine primary care setting involving all ages, many nationalities/ethnicities, and a diverse array of presenting problems. Heather has also worked in psychiatric research, in academic publishing, in real estate, and professional cooking. She completed most of the requirements for entry into medical school to become a psychiatrist before deciding to take an alternate path.
Dr. Heather completed her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Mental stillness: A qualitative exploratory study of the lived experience of intensive samatha-anapnasati meditation practitioners,” on the lived experience of dedicated practitioners of concentration “mindfulness of breathing” meditation leading to fully absorbed jhana states. Dr. Heather experienced a transformative spiritual awakening in 2011, and attained first jhana while on retreat.
Dr. Heather is a certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher under Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. She completed two years of the Awakening Dharma mentoring program for the advanced meditation students of Tina Rasmussen and Stephen Snyder. She is a certified Life Coach with the World Coach Institute and was certified as a Reiki master by Marie Manucheri. She is certified in Guided Imagery/Expressive Arts with the California Pacific Medical Center and has studied therapeutic modalities such as Holographic Memory Resolution (HMR), EMDR, dream work, Gendlin’s “focusing,” psychoanalytic psychology, and mindfulness-based psychotherapies, to name a few. She has studied Buddhism and other spiritual traditions in depth over several years of dissertation research. She is certified as a Level I certified practitioner of medicinal aromatherapy with Wisdom of the Earth.