Welcome. I provide therapy and guidance to help heart-centered change makers achieve a sense of balance, connection, and purpose in their lives and in their work. Healing white supremacy starts at home.

You’re a Healer, Educator, Leader, Parent, Activist/Artist. Bottom line, you’re a HELPA, and right now the world needs your gifts more than ever. 

Are you dismayed at humanity’s lack of response to the climate crisis, but don’t know how you could possibly make a difference?

Do your values and beliefs often leave you feeling isolated or misunderstood by family and friends?

Or maybe you’re already actively involved in antiracist activism, but you keep teetering on the edge of burnout.

It’s hard for us HELPAs to ignore the many ways in which the world is suffering around us. Pandemics, systemic racism, climate change. And yet most of us are no closer to solving our own problems than we were before 2020. Health problems, relationship problems, career problems. It’s long been my belief that a sick culture reproduces itself by making sure its HELPAs remain too sick to help anyone else. Take a look at this list:

1. Fear
2. Perfectionism
3. Either/or thinking
4. Prioritizing quantity over quality
5. Individualism
6. Defensiveness and denial
7. Fear of conflict and discomfort
8. Sense of urgency

Do any of these sound familiar to you? Have you noticed how these issues tend to get in the way of your ability to truly give your gift? You’re not alone. But did you know that all of the items on that list are characteristics of white supremacy culture?

That’s right. The American journalist and meditation teacher Sally Kempton has said, “You can’t fight an enemy that has outposts in your head.” As HELPAs, if we want to help the world, we first have to help ourselves.

Fortunately, I believe that all of the problems that we are facing as a species are connected, and so are their solutions. 

• If right now your inner wisdom tells you that you need to focus on personal growth or healing, I can help you with that. And you may be surprised to find out how learning to truly take care of yourself will have a positive ripple effect on the world around you.

• If you’re impatient to start making a bigger difference in the world, I can help you with that, too, but don’t be shocked if in the process we take a look closer to home and address some needs that you didn’t even know that you had.

• Sometimes when we go through a growth process and start working on our purpose, we find that old relational patterns still limit our impact. Maybe you’re already making a difference but you’re having trouble finding peace, connection, and understanding with your family or community. I can help you with that, too.

I believe that seva (Sanskrit for selfless service) is an important part of any spiritual practice, and I also understand how sometimes caring so much for the world can feel like quite a burden. Together we will conduct a head-to-toe review of your life and your values to find what’s not working, what needs are going unmet, and what you can do to come back to wholeness. HELPAs need helping, too. You don’t have to do this alone.

Remember, selfless service without
self-care is self-sabotage.

My passion for helping clients bridge the gap between personal growth and social change arose from paradoxical elements of my upbringing: I grew up in a multicultural extended family beset by addiction, abuse, and divorce, all the while receiving a robust social justice education from the Berkeley public school system as well as from members of my own family. As I grew older and did my own personal healing work, I began to see the connection between humanity’s collective pain and systems of injustice. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, said, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.” Yes, it is true that “hurt people hurt people,” but isn’t it also true that hurt people let hurt people hurt people? I began to recognize the silence of good people as a trauma response, and consequently I began to see healing work as essential to social justice work.

How can I help you?

• Psychotherapy for depression, anxiety, stress, overwhelm, shame, low confidence and self-esteem

• Social justice-informed education and coaching on healthy communication and boundaries in relationships

• Spiritually informed activism coaching for the pre-post-apocalypse

• Find your spiritual and life visions and start putting them into action

In my work with clients, my first commitment is to listen with patience, curiosity, and care as they tell the story of their pain. My second commitment is to honor their pain while providing education about its purpose and its causes, in order to help my clients become aware and let go of their story of not-enoughness that has become fused with the pain over the course of their life. My third commitment is to give my clients tools and strategies to start using their pain as a guide that can lead them back to their true selves. Hari Kondabolu says that therapy is like taking a class about yourself. You better believe that my class has homework.

When my clients begin to see how their pain is connected to the pain of people all over the world, and to the pain of the planet itself, the story of not-enoughness that they have been telling themselves their whole lives becomes less convincing. Once the story loses its authority, they are free to begin their healing work in earnest, inspired to be the change that they want to see in the world. Because no personal growth program is complete without a social justice focus.

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If you have a question or comment, you can use the form below, or send me an email at nauserbeartherapy at gmail dot com. You can also call me at (510) 394-5373, or click the button below to schedule a free 20-minute phone consultation.