About

Hello! I’m Maya, an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist practicing online and in person on the Ohlone land of Huichin, currently known as Berkeley, CA. This world is a wild one, it’s a true honor to get the opportunity to meet you in the wilderness of your unique experience.

My approach to therapy is dynamic and relational, balancing deep inquiry with playful curiosity and spacious presence to see what emerges from your many forms of knowing. Decades of navigating my own chronic pain led me to therapies that center our present-moment embodied experience as integral to hearing what aspects of ourselves need attention. This can be painful. It can also bring expansive joy and ease. Therapy is a process of attending to what feels stuck, confusing, painful or beyond words to open up space for your innate wisdom to come through. It’s a practice of uncovering and exploring together, inviting in more felt experiences of aliveness, self-knowing and belonging in a world designed to keep us out of sync with ourselves and each other.

I believe that we experience the world through our mind, body, heart, and spirit as well as through a web of relations (whether or not we actually feel connected to that web). The more we are able to feel our experience in-the-moment, the more connected we are to ourselves and to others, the more fully we are able to inhabit our lives. 

In session you can expect me to:

• Follow you in your present-moment experience, at your own pace. 

• Collaborate with you to find a rhythm of being that feels true to you through curiosity, experimentation and reverence for all the multitudes you hold.

• Offer lots of direct questions and warm reflection.

• Show up to build trust through an authentic connection.

My practice is non-pathologizing and justice-informed. I am an LGBTQ+, poly, kink, sex work and gender queer-affirming therapist with personal and professional experience with these communities.

A note on personal healing as part of collective liberation 

It is both a spiritual tenet and lived practice of mine that our personal wellbeing is intrinsically woven into the wellbeing of all peoples and life on this planet. On top of all that we carry in our individual stories, lineages and bodies, the pace, expectations, and power structures inherent to our society cause different levels of harm, instability and dis-ease in all of us. I continue to unlearn and re-pattern how these structures are embedded in my own system to more fully show up for the wellbeing of our collective. For me, the awareness of our interconnected belonging necessitates a dedication to the liberation of all human and non-human life. I believe wholeheartedly in the wisdom of our distinct lineages to bring us back to a felt sense of dignity, agency, belonging, and interdependence. The more we get free in our own bodies, the more whole-heartedly we are able show up for the world around us. 

As someone who grew up moving every few years, without a sense of being a part of an ecosystem, I often consider how notions of home, (un)belonging, culture and structures of power impact how we move in the world. I integrate ancestral explorations, transformative justice and liberation psychology into my work. We will explore the context of your distinct environment to support you in reweaving your multitudes and move more fully into how you want to be in the world.

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