I'm a writer and wonderer, teacher and mental health advocate, a mother and a craftswoman. My passion is bringing dignity, warmth and understanding to those 'not beautiful' places in us that feel perplexing, maddening, and misunderstood.

I call this Growing Humankindness.

Growing Humankindness arose from two things:  from bearing witness to the beauty, courage, and persistent love of other people’s journeys through shame, loss, eating disorders, depression, and anxiety, and from my own experiences through these gates of grief.

My 20 years of eating disorders - and the ways they perplexed, saddened, and silenced me - sent me on a journey of understanding into attachment theory, grief, healing, self compassion, and interpersonal neurobiology. That journey eventually became the cradle of my work as a mother, woman and writer.

If I had to describe in a sentence how Growing Humankindness offers her particular medicine to the world, it would be thus: may we soften our hearts towards what we fear, misunderstand, and shame, in ourselves and in one another.

May we hold our human vulnerability within our hearts.

May we see our noble beauty.

The word that best conveys this softening is respect, a word whose origins are rooted in ‘seeing with new eyes.’ As poet John O’ Donohue so beautifully said, “when we approach things with reverence, they have powerful ways of approaching us.”

And so I wonder:  what rises to meet us when we offer reverence to those things that we most fear in ourselves, and in others?

Breath by breath, my wish is that we may embody our wholeness – our deeper story – and live from this knowing. I believe that listening to each other’s stories and witnessing the vulnerable courage of each other is one of the most powerful ways we can soften what divides us, both within and without. And so I bend my knee towards these stories in many forms.

I write books, courses, and a reader supported newsletter, O Nobly Born; teach classes, and offer talks and poems to nurture a more tender world. I love to dive into the depths of poetry and soul, and as a craftswoman, I do as much as possible with my body and my hands. I'm currently writing a book about reframing and embracing the vulnerability that lives underneath overeating and other food compulsions.

You can find me at Growinghumankindness.com and in Austin, Texas, where I tend my ancestors and my family alongside beautiful oak trees.