At the heart of my practice lies an unwavering commitment to safety, offering a compassionate abiding presence and fostering transformation.
I am committed to ethical integrity, duty of care, informed consent and honoring my clients autonomy. I acknowledge and hold the monumental responsibility I have as a facilitator with deep reverence and care. This allows me to offer a safe and integrative approach that honors the entirety of a person’s healing journey while maximizing therapeutic benefits and minimizing harm.
Hi, I'm Dawn
my story and my why
I knew at a very young age that I wanted to help people, I just didn’t know exactly what that looked like or how to help. When I was 20 I embarked on a 25 year healing journey where I began learning how to lovingly hold and integrate the substantial amount of traumas I had experienced in my life. The knowledge that I attained on my journey back to health and wholeness led to a deep knowing that my purpose is to share these gifts with those who are feeling called to dive deeper.
As a young girl wanted to be a doctor. When I was in my 20’s I became a personal trainer, like my Mom, to help transform people's bodies and their health. That was very rewarding for a time but something inside of me felt off. With some self reflection I realized I needed to turn my attention inward and integrate the trauma’s I had already experienced. Before the age of 10, I experienced multiple childhood trauma’s (ACE’s), as well as developmental, generational and attachment trauma. Between 10 - 20 years old I also experienced 2 near drownings and an attempted kidnapping. At the age of 15 I was raped by a guy I liked and on the same day I was molested by my rapists Uncle. The sexual assaults led to a meth addiction to numb from that pain. As a result of the meth use I was often in scary situations; once I had a gun held to my head and another time I was in a car that got shot at.
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I knew that I would have to feel it to heal it
I’m human, the path I walked wasn’t perfect and that is OK; life can be really fucking hard! Like a lot of people, I would resist the trauma wounds and how they caused me to feel numb, angry, depressed, detached, hopeless, worthless, insecure, self hating, anxious, suicidal… I hated it. I wanted it to just go away so I didn’t feel like that anymore. I wanted to avoid it and bury it. It is completely understandable to feel that way. I also knew that what is buried or repressed doesn’t just go away on its own, it creates unhealthy coping mechanisms and disease, so I knew that I would have to feel it to heal it. When I felt ready and resourced enough I began to process and integrate those traumas with the tools that I had been learning and practicing over the span of my transformative journey. Distilling it down into a paragraph can make it seem simple but it was not and believe me when I tell you I tried just about every healing modality on my path back to health and wholeness.
Starting in my 20’s spanning the last 25 years, I continued to experience these various forms of trauma: complex, medical, shock, acute, sexual and secondhand/vicarious. As a result, I had a very narrow window of tolerance and I lacked resiliency. My nervous system was dysregulated, meaning it thought I was safe when I wasn’t or it was on high alert, constantly thinking there were threats everywhere when there weren’t.
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Welcome everything, push away nothing
This caused me to be more susceptible to developing chronic health issues in 2008 when I started working at a restaurant where I was exposed to moderate levels of sewer gas for 3 years. The restaurant also had a lot of mold and weekly raw sewage back-ups from the drains in the floor. I still manage these chronic health issues today, although I have learned over the years how to heal some diagnoses that there is supposedly “no cure” for and I’m functioning very well considering the amount of things I have been diagnosed with. Knowing what I know now about the body’s innate ability to heal and the body-mind connection between stress and disease, I probably could have avoided having 2 major surgeries and saved a lot of money on treatments I didn't need.
Another trauma that has taken a great toll and has been incredibly difficult to feel and integrate was the process of my mom dying. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, the things I saw her go through in the 2 ½ years before she died just gutted me. When her bones started spontaneously breaking I became her 24/7 caregiver for 8 months, watching her get closer to death every day. The things I saw and endured changed me. Death and grief are really hard to process and sit with. Medicine work has been a crucial part of this process for me.
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I have never felt anything as powerfully, in every single fiber and cell of my being
In 2016 I sensed it was time to start working with medicines ceremonially. I also still felt as though my purpose was to be in service, so around that time I began extensive training in somatic coaching and trauma work and I thought that was supposed to be my offering. After a while, something inside of me told me that coaching wasn’t quite my calling but I would still put all of that training to very good use. For 8 years beginning in in 2016 I began working extensively with 2 of the 3 master medicines and many other sacraments. I honored myself by integrating those experiences rather than “collecting experiences”. While I was doing this work and taking the training courses I continued to unfold into this reverence and acceptance of myself. I did this by traveling to the darkest depths of my being in order to offer love to those exiled and terrified parts of myself. This allowed me to die before I die, the death-rebirth process and allowed for full catastrophe living. More simply put, the human experience is being stretched between agony and ecstasy, I endeavored to accept it all, the full catastrophe. That is when I felt the truth of it, that I have been preparing for this (facilitation) my whole life. I have never felt anything as powerfully, in every single fiber and cell of my being, as I do with this deeply inspired calling as a facilitator. Holding that purpose in my heart, I then began extensive training specific to embodied and trauma informed facilitation.
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It is important to understand that someone can only hold safe and loving space for you at the level that they have journeyed to and worked on within themselves. So, I want you to know that I don’t have all the answers. I’m not always thriving- that is a process of full acceptance of what is. What I am is human and humble and I’m honest about the fact that I struggle too. What I am is someone who has traveled to the darkest depths of my being in order to offer love to those exiled and terrified parts of myself.
What I am is someone who understands that the human experience is being stretched between agony and ecstasy and I endeavor to accept it all.
I have been an avid rock climber since 2010 and it gets me out in nature, connected with community and keeps my body so strong. I found climbing during the beginning of the chronic health issues and climbing helped me to feel incredibly empowered through it all. I love to hike and be connected with nature. I have a deep love for my beautiful friends who have become my family. I love gathering people together in breathwork circles, gathering in community so we can all feel heard, held and connected. I geek out on and am always immersed in learning all things trauma, neuroscience, somatics, addiction, disease, psychedelics and consciousness. I’m privileged every day that I get to do this work and be in service, it is such an honor to be beside people on their sacred journey.
I also want to share a few of the things that set my soul on fire and bring me so much joy.
“How may stress be transmuted into illness? Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence— and are influenced by— the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defenses and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body’s physical states.
Repression— dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm— disorganizes and confuses our physiological defenses so that in some people these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.”
When emotions are repressed, this inhibition disarms the body’s defenses against illness.
-Gabor Mate, from the book “When The Body Says No: The Cost Of Hidden Stress
“How may stress be transmuted into illness? Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence— and are influenced by— the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defenses and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body’s physical states.
Repression— dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm— disorganizes and confuses our physiological defenses so that in some people these defenses go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.”
Resourcing & Regulation
trauma healing & integration
Integrative wellness
somatic healing
Transformative Experiences
Resourcing & Regulation
trauma healing & integration
Integrative wellness
somatic healing
Transformative Experiences
Resourcing & Regulation
trauma healing & integration
Integrative wellness
somatic healing
Transformative Experiences
Please refer to my Code of Ethics to learn about the principles that guide my offerings and my work.
Trauma Informed Plant Medicine Facilitation
Somatic Inquiry & Healing Modalities
the neurobiology of trauma
psychedelic assisted therapy
I am privileged to be able to participate in these medicine practices, they are as ancient as they are profound. It is both a gift and a responsibility to work with non-ordinary states of consciousness. As such, over the past 8 years I have completed 2000 hours of extensive training with the most esteemed doctors, therapists and medicine facilitators in the following fields:
polyvagal theory
Training specific to Facilitation: I have 3 Psychedelic Assisted Therapy certifications through Numinus Wellness Inc. who is partnered with MAPS. In addition to that I’m certified as a Trauma Informed Plant Medicine Facilitator through Aya Healing Retreats and Atira Tan who is a Somatic Trauma Specialist, Therapist, #1 selling author and TedX speaker. My approach to this work has been multidisciplinary, inspired by ancient wisdom, backed by modern science and has included a substantial amount of experiential learning. You can view all of my certifications and their learning outcomes HERE. I am committed to safety, duty of care, ethical integrity and informed consent. I have monthly check-ins with a mentor to evaluate the three 2’s where Ego may be seduced. The three 2’s are: Survival and Security, Esteem and Affection, Power and Control. I also engage in frequent self inquiry to ensure that I’m uncovering any biases, burnout or countertransference that may occur in these sessions.
I am committed to safety, duty of care, ethical integrity and informed consent.
Let’s be completely honest here, we are in what is being called the “psychedelic renaissance” and so many people are trying to capitalize on this. The ‘sacred’ should not be capitalized on, it should be honored. This has led to far too many people facilitating medicine ceremonies that have no business doing so. This has led to super egos, spiritual and emotional bypassing, instagram shamen and spiritual materialism and this is all causing great harm to people who come to ceremony for a transformative experience. These facilitators often lack the full spectrum of training and self-work required to provide the most safe and beneficial experience. This is extremely concerning to me. It is referred to as the Dunning-Kruger Effect which is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter and more capable than they are.
I have participated in medicine ceremonies with facilitators who were not the least bit trauma informed or somatically trained and they did great harm by repeatedly being grossly negligent. Those facilitators also didn’t do proper medical screening so I wasn’t aware that the medicine I ingested posed a risk to my life. I have been in ceremony with other facilitators who were well intentioned and decently trained but still out of integrity in so many ways. I have been harmed by these experiences, so I understand how consequential this work is.
Another way I set myself apart is my commitment to offering a complete ceremonial experience. Far too often I see facilitators who are solely offering the sacrament itself. There is too much reliance on the sacrament as a “cure all” or “magic pill” that will fix everything and make it all better. I believe everyone has the right to a complete ceremony experience which includes informed consent, diverse psycho-education, a balanced breakdown on the benefits and risks of use, thorough medical and mental health screening, preparation sessions and post ceremony integration sessions. Integration is the most crucial part of the medicine work, it allows you to create new thought patterns and beliefs. It allows you to make meaning out of the insights and perspectives you receive in ceremony and utilize these as tools to become a living embodiment of your insights. If someone doesn’t understand how to metabolize and navigate the profound experience they had it can cause harm. When integration is not offered it can cause re-traumatization, confusion, anxiety, depression and sometimes even a crisis situation because old traumas can surface in medicine sessions.
Because integration is so important, I offer integration sessions beyond what the ceremony package includes, for a fee, if more is needed.
To heal assumes something is wrong or broken, to help assumes there is weakness, to guide assumes one is lost. I push aside this hierarchy and I choose not to guide or heal, I choose to serve. To serve is the work of the soul, when you serve you see life as whole. We will walk together, side by side, into the Great Mystery. Being held in a loving and safe space while truly being witnessed can be a profound experience. This can empower you to trust the wisdom of your body, your inner healing intelligence and reveal to you that ‘YOU ARE THE MEDICINE’. The sacrament and I are not responsible for the transformation you experience, YOU are.
To serve is the work of the soul,
when you serve you see life as whole
To serve is the work of the soul, when you serve you see life as whole
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