I'm Coming Out. And You May Choose to Not Work With Me

There’s something I want to name more directly about how I practice. In some ways, this feels like a kind of coming out.

Not about gender this time.

Not about sexuality.

But about my mystical orientation.

This has always been present in my work. It shapes how I listen, how I understand care, healing, and integration, and how I sit with suffering. It’s also intrinsically connected to my transness and queerness. That said, I haven’t always spoken about it explicitly, and I think it’s time to.

I don’t experience spirituality as separate from ordinary life. I don’t divide the mundane from the sacred. Being alive is already a spiritual experience. A therapeutic frame, to me, has always involved more than thoughts, behaviors, or diagnoses. It involves relationship to body, to land, to ancestry, to cosmos and cosmology, to meaning, to forces that can’t always be measured but are deeply felt.

This orientation is not theoretical for me. It is lived. It is embodied. And it is also the growth I was left with after trauma and survival.

For those that don’t already know, I’m a survivor of harm within the mental health system itself. Between the ages of 12 and 18, I spent years inside psychiatric and institutional environments that did not recognize my full humanity, where I was stripped of my autonomy while being psychologically and physically abused. What sustained me was not those systems and their models for “mental health,” but my direct connection to states of awareness beyond the mind, experiences of consciousness that gave me refuge, perspective, and a sense of truth larger than what those systems were designed to reflect back to me.

Long before I had language for it, my body knew how to return to awareness itself. Later, I encountered contemplative and ancestral traditions, including Buddhism and other lineages, that articulated what I had already lived: that there is a dimension of being that cannot be reduced to pathology, and that contact with it can be life-saving.

I am also a mestizo practitioner, carrying both Indigenous and European ancestry. For me, this work is inseparable from decolonization as a lived process of remembering ways of knowing that were suppressed, dismissed, or pathologized under colonial systems. The spiritual and land-based orientations that inform my healing practice are not trends or aesthetics; they are part of lineage, memory, and survival. Reclaiming them is part of how I understand ethical, whole-person care.

This is part of the medicine I carry. It is not something I can remove from my work without removing something essential.

At the same time, I want to be clear about what this is not.

I am not aligned with commodified, aestheticized, or extractive “wellness spirituality.” I am not interested in bypassing, magical thinking, or spiritual frameworks that avoid accountability, history, or power. Much of what circulates as “woo” spirituality today is disconnected from lineage, stripped of context, and often reproduces the very colonial patterns it claims to transcend.

The spirituality that informs my work is grounded, embodied, relational, and ethically accountable. It is inseparable from a de-colonial lens. Western psychology and science offer valuable tools, and I use them. But they are one system of knowledge among many. I do not see them as the sole authority on what is real, meaningful, or healing.

The idea that healing must be either “scientific” or “spiritual” is itself a false binary. That split comes from a Western, colonial worldview. It elevates one way of knowing while dismissing others as primitive, irrational, or invalid. I don’t practice inside that split.

Science can illuminate many things. It can also be limited by what it is designed to measure. Other knowledge systems, contemplative, ancestral, land-based, relational, have always worked with dimensions of experience that science is only beginning to explore. Holding multiple ways of knowing is not anti-science; it is a refusal of the hierarchy that says only one form of knowledge is legitimate.

Many people, especially those from Indigenous, mestizo, diasporic, and other non-dominant lineages, have always understood healing as inseparable from spirit, ancestry, and the more-than-human world. I stand in continuity with those understandings.

This does not mean every session is explicitly spiritual. Much of our work may be practical, grounded, and focused on daily life. But it does mean that I am open to ways of orienting to self and the world that move beyond a strictly materialist frame. I may, at times, invite attention to intuition, embodied knowing, dreams, or transpersonal experience always with care, consent, and attunement.

For some people, especially those who want therapy to stay entirely within a conventional, secular, medical-model framework, this may not feel aligned. That’s okay. Therapy works best when there is resonance between a therapist’s orientation and a client’s values. If you are looking for a therapist who brackets out spirituality, ancestry, or mysticism entirely, I may not be the right fit.

For others, this orientation feels like relief, like finally being able to bring their whole experience of reality into the room without having to shrink it to fit a narrow frame.

You cannot receive the benefit of this work while asking me to separate from the source of it.

This is me, stepping out more fully and saying it plainly.

This is the medicine I practice.Please choose accordingly.