Hi, I'm Colleen. I am highly sensitive and have worked to embrace the depth and intensity of my emotional life. Even so, throughout my life, encounters with grief have perplexed me. Especially as a young person the proportions of grief I experienced within myself, I believed, often didn't match the circumstances before me.

Over time I have come to respect the mysterious dimensions of grief born of the transgenerational trauma we each carry. I am grateful for my inborn comfortability with grief, I regard this innate ability to navigate the treacherous inner terrains of grief as an invaluable inheritance. I am passionate about walking with others as they come to embrace the unknowns of their own inheritance, including the beauty, sacredness and potential within their unrealized, and so, unresolved feelings.

With a background in massage therapy, mediation and clinical mental health counseling, I came to the Grief Recovery Method searching for a clear, step-by-step method to help myself and my clients resolve overwhelming, often old, far-reaching, and seemingly entrenched grief. I immediately resonated with the Grief Recovery Institute's definition of grief as the "conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior". The Method is accessible and effective. It also equips us with tools that we can use in many other areas of our lives, not just when working through grief.

I offer the Grief Recovery Method in-person in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. I also offer the Grief Recovery Method online. I particularly enjoy facilitating online Grief Recovery Method groups where participants can forge lasting relationships born of mutual understanding.

I look forward to supporting you on your journey towards self-discovery and the inner peace that comes through emotional completion.

“If only we knew as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, we would smile too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone... Our faces would fall away until we, growing younger toward death every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration to merge with them perfectly, impossibly, wedded to our essence, full of silence from the carver’s hands.” David Whyte, excerpts from The Faces at Braga