About Me
Hello! I’m Ashley (she/her). Folx also call me Ash.
Who I am as a healer, the very essence of how I do what I do, is a collective expression.
I believe healing ourselves, our communities, and our more-than-human world requires deep listening, embodiment, and traversing beyond binaries.
Original photo by Kristen Murakoshi
This leg of the journey begins in 2002.
College! Redwood trees flowing right up to the ocean. Wiyot land. Forest defenders and logging towns. In the beginning, I was a Wildlife Biology major, but everything made A LOT more sense in the Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies classes.
Race, class, gender, sexuality, ability—power over and power with. My burning questions: answered. That gut-wrenching feeling, the suffering I noticed everywhere: now I know why.
I found my heart beating in step with a collection of visionaries committed to justice. Years of focused direct actions and joyous celebrations transformed my sense of what is possible.
Following my comrades after graduation to the Bay Area, I stood on a corner in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco with a clipboard. Turns out, trying to convince people to fight corporate deforestation one credit card transaction at a time is not my jam.
My employment history continued as follows (with more than one instance of holding several jobs at once): peddler of overpriced chocolate to wealthy people, camp counselor for multiple summers, barista, substitute teacher, personal assistant, tutor, after-school instructor, youth mediation specialist, cheese-monger, and child care worker. I may be forgetting a few, to be honest.
And then, in 2010...
I joined thousands of impassioned rebels at the U.S. Social Forum and Allied Media Conference in Detroit. This is where I felt the power of healing trauma–individually and collectively–through embodied liberation. Guided by the principles of transformative justice and the practices of Generative Somatics, my path dramatically pivoted to pursuing a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology with a Somatic Psychology specialization. I started the program in 2011.
I began seeing clients in 2013 through the JFKU Counseling Center. For my first job out of graduate school, I was a case manager for young people ensnared in the prison industrial complex/juvenile “justice” system. Then, for the proceeding five years, I was fortunate to offer therapy to predominantly queer and trans youth, many of whom were taking part in my organization’s transitional housing program.
My Internal Family Systems era began in 2017 and continues to the present. I kicked off 2024 by completing my level 2 training with lead trainer, Pamela Krause.
Click the button below to check out my IFS Experience Timeline for more!
I became a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) in 2018. While my psychotherapy practice is totally virtual, I am currently physically located in Nisenan and Miwok territories. In an act of imperialist erasure, the Spanish military called this territory “Sacramento” as a reference to a Catholic rite of sacrament. Remembering is a form of resistance from Turtle Island to Palestine.
Divesting from white supremacist, settler colonialist culture through on-going reflection and action is my life-long commitment.
Click the pretty button to schedule your free 30-ish minute consultation call with me!
Values
My positionality as queer, white, able-bodied, cisgender female with access to class privilege calls me into a practice of centering folx whose worldview and lived experience I do not share.
Over the past 20+ years, I’m grateful to have been entangled with visionary movements and creative actions in support of prisoners, biodiversity, sex workers, victims of police violence, immigrants, refugees, poor people, trans liberation, alternatives to policing, homeless folx, young people, indigenous autonomy, participatory budgeting, survivors of sexual assault, and housing rights.
As an abolitionist, I believe we are all qualified to imagine and create new possibilities, to enliven new worlds in the here and now.
