Bridging Medicine, Mind, Earth, and Spirit
There are moments in life that ask you to become your own experiment in healing.
My journey has been one long apprenticeship to that question: What is wellness?
My Roots
I was born to parents from opposite ends of the American diaspora. My mother, the daughter of missionaries and a descendant of Choctaw lineage; my father, a nuclear scientist from the Midwest. When my mother passed away, I was ten and I quickly became the emotional bridge in a household marked by mental illness and grief. That was when my search for wellness began, not just for myself, but for anyone who’s ever had to hold the weight of others before learning to hold their own.
I left home at seventeen and began studying human behavior through the lens of criminal justice and deviant psychology, curious about what drives both harm and healing. I wanted to understand suffering and what it takes to become whole again.
The Elements of My Healing Perspective
Over the years, my path has revealed itself through the four elements: Mind, Body, Environment, and Spirit. Each has been both teacher and mirror, guiding me toward what I now call Existential Humility: a way of being that honors both our human limits and our infinite belonging to the Great Mystery.
The Element of the Mind
My first doorway was the mind, the vast landscape of thought, emotion, and perception. I earned my Master’s degree in Psychology and began working as a therapist, exploring the intersection of cognition and behavior. Psychology confirmed what I had always sensed: that healing requires both courage and context.
The mind teaches you to ask questions, not to control life, but to participate in it. Through study and practice, I came to see how the brain and body are inseparable, each responding to the other in constant dialogue. Your thoughts, your hormones, your breath — all move together in rhythm.
This understanding continues to shape my work: that insight alone is not enough; it must be paired with compassion, curiosity, and the willingness to grow.
The Element of the Body
The next teacher was the body — sacred, intelligent, and alive with memory. I trained as a massage therapist and later became a Naturopathic Doctor and midwife, spending 17 years in clinical practice supporting women, mothers, and families through birth, healing, and transition.
My medical studies in anatomy, physiology, and homeopathy deepened my respect for the body’s natural wisdom. Birth work, in particular, taught me awe — the same kind of awe I would later encounter as a death doula. Both experiences invite surrender, trust, and reverence for the cycles that hold us.
In every cell, there is intelligence. The body knows when to expand and when to rest. When you learn to listen to it, the body becomes your teacher: not something to fix, but something to follow.
The Element of the Environment
When my Seattle clinic closed, I turned toward the Earth for guidance. In the garden, I found reflection and renewal. Through my studies in permaculture, I saw affirmed what I had known all along — that everything is interconnected. Every system, whether in soil, society, or the human heart, depends on relationship.
The land reminded me that regeneration takes time, compost, and care. The garden became a sacred classroom where decay and rebirth coexisted in harmony. Healing, I realized, is not a linear process — it is cyclical, communal, and ecological.
You are made of the same matter as stars, oceans, and soil. Science and Spirit both remind us of this truth. When you tend to your own healing, you participate in the healing of the whole.
The Element of Spirit
Eventually, my curiosity brought me home — back to my Choctaw and Chickasaw roots, and to my Lakota teacher, Char Sundust at the Sundust Oracle Institute in Seattle, and Matilda Laughingwaters. Through their guidance, I remembered what my mother had once shown me through dance and ceremony: that spirit lives in everything, and our role is to stay in right relationship with it.
In the years that followed, I became a death doula, walking beside those in their final thresholds of life. Just as birth work had taught me reverence for beginnings, death work deepened my reverence for endings. I witnessed the profound peace that can arise when a person understands the process of dying and is given the space to meet it with choice and dignity. Those experiences affirmed that Spirit is not confined to ritual or religion; it is present in the quiet courage of a final breath, in the tenderness of loved ones gathered nearby, in the mystery that holds us all.
Spirit continues to be my teacher, inviting me to walk gently and listen deeply. It reminds me that healing and dying, beginning and ending, are all part of the same sacred rhythm, and that our task is not to master the mystery, but to be in right relationship with it.
Integration:
A Whole-Systems Approach to Healing
Today, my work bridges medicine, psychology, permaculture, and spirituality — a whole-systems approach that honors the interconnectedness of body, mind, environment, and spirit.
I work with those who find themselves at the edges. People like you, who desire growth and have stagnation. Maybe if you’re overwhelmed or navigating emotional, mental, or spiritual dysregulation. I work with people who are neurodivergent. I work with the ones who have always sensed that their path would never fit the norm. Many of my clients are seekers, mystics, and thinkers who ask the questions others avoid. People willing to look within, rewrite old narratives, and create new ways of being.
I often say: I feel like a round peg trying to fit in a square hole.
Can you relate: What if the parts of me that I’ve kept hidden — my sensitivities, my curiosities, my contradictions — are not obstacles to my healing, but invitations into my healing?
Whether through mentorship, ceremony, or group work, I walk alongside you if you are ready to:
Reclaim your voice and agency
Explore your trauma with compassion
Integrate spiritual and psychological growth
Embrace the fullness of your humanity, even the parts that you once shamed or silenced
The foundation of my work is shaped by the four elements that have guided my own life:
Mind: Rooted in psychology, relationships, eroticism, and human behavior
Body: Informed by 17 years in naturopathic medicine, midwifery, and sexuality
Spirit: Grounded in indigenous teachings and divine feminine and feminist psychology background
Environment: Guided by permaculture and systems design principles
I help you walk that same bridge, from survival to sovereignty, and to trust that even the untraditional can be sacred ground.
How I Work
Healing is relational. It happens when you and I remember the threads that connect us to our own body, mind, spirit, to one another, and to the living world.
My work weaves together over three decades of clinical, psychological, environmental, and spiritual experience into a practice that is grounded, holistic, and deeply human. Whether through Mentorship, Ceremony, or Teaching, each offering is designed to meet you where you are and guide you back into right relationship with yourself and others.
I support individuals and communities in cultivating healing that is personal, ecological, and systemic — the kind of healing that restores connection between yourself, others, and the Earth.
My Services
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Mentorship
A one-on-one journey that bridges psychology, somatics, and spirituality to help you reconnect with your body’s wisdom, release old patterns, and embody new ways of being. Each session weaves science and spirit to guide you toward clarity, wholeness, and sovereignty.
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Ceremony
A sacred, experiential space to honor life’s beginnings, transitions, and completions. Blending prayer, ritual, and indigenous teachings, Ceremony invites you to move energy, reclaim belonging, and align your healing with the cycles of the Earth and your own becoming.
What Clients Are Saying
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Afia listened beyond my words - she heard my heart and my energy. It was masterful, really. Her reflections were precise, healing, and often infused with just the right touch of playfulness. Even months later, the session continues to guide me. It has been a lantern through my big emotions. It reconnected me to the deeper Self within that knows “All is well.”
-Ziona, Ceremony Client
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I am glad I found Afia in this last chapter of my life. Afia has helped me come home to myself. I am at peace.
-Gail, Mentorship Client
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After the tragic death of a dear friend, I came to Afia to do a ceremonial session. Afia created a space that allowed me to move beneath my heartbreak and access the deeper wisdom of my body. That in and of itself was so healing, as grief is an emotion that often puts my body into alarm. It can be flooding, and I shut down. But with her presence and guidance, I was able to soften and move into my grief with a lot of grace and sovereignty. I felt powerful.
-Kinsey, Ceremony Client
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Through our work, I’ve expanded my capacity to slow down and be present, to ground myself, to show up with care for both myself and others. I’ve learned to identify limits, communicate boundaries as I find them, and share the wisdom I’ve gleaned with those navigating obstacles she once helped me through.
-Trinity, Mentorship Client
Let’s work together
If you feel called to work together, let’s begin with a free discovery call. This is a space to connect, ask questions, and see if my offerings align with your journey.