Aspasia was born from the kind of knowing that lives in the body long before it has words. My earliest memories are marked by trauma, not the kind that shows up in tidy timelines or medical charts, but the kind that seeps into the nervous system and shapes how a person feels the world. Long before I ever wore a stethoscope or carried credentials, I was studying survival. Learning to read a room before I could read a book. Learning that safety was not a given — it was something you had to create.

That childhood made me intimately fluent in trauma long before I became clinically trained to recognize it.

For years, I worked within healthcare — as a forensic nurse specializing in trauma-informed care, and as nursing faculty — bearing witness to the fracture points of people’s lives. I held space for patients navigating violence, crisis, and aftermath, while quietly carrying my own unspoken history beside theirs. Including the years I spent in an abusive marriage, attempting to unpack my own wounds while tending to everyone else’s.

But alongside all of it, I carried a different kind of knowing. A fierce, quiet conviction that true healing required something more than pills and protocols. Something more embodied. More honest. Eventually, I walked away — from the marriage, and from the clinical system I had built a career within. Not because I had lost faith in healing. Because I believed in it more fully than the structures around me could hold.

That is how Aspasia came to be.

She was named for Aspasia of Miletus — an ancient thinker who lived outside convention, who convened philosophers and leaders in her home, who mentored Socrates and advised Pericles, and who wielded intellect and dialogue as instruments of change at a time when women weren’t supposed to have either. She didn’t dismantle the world she lived in. She created something better inside of it. That felt right.

Through The Aspasia Connection, I bridge the neuroscience of stress and trauma with the lived intelligence of the body — offering somatic and breath- based practices that help people return to themselves. This isn’t about diagnosis or symptom management. It’s about reclamation. About recovering the wisdom the nervous system has been storing all along, and building the kind of safety that doesn’t depend on circumstances being perfect.

What I offer is rooted in lived experience, clinical insight, and a deep devotion to creating spaces where safety isn’t just spoken — it’s felt.

Aspasia is for those who have endured. For those who are searching. For those who believe there must be another way forward — and are ready to reclaim it.

Not broken. Not fixed. Just here. Just human.

Welcome!