My Story
We are living in a time when many people are overwhelmed, disconnected, and searching for belonging. My work supports individuals and groups in restoring balance after experiences of stress, loss, or conflict. I use a trauma-informed, community-based approach that helps people feel safe, seen, and supported as they move through life’s challenges. I am carrying a lineage of wisdom that predates psychology, social work, and counseling by millennia. I offer therapy in its original form — communal, embodied, story-based, and rooted in relationship with Earth and Spirit.
The approach I use comes from an ancient lineage of Earth-centered healing carried by my Yoruba ancestors of Benin and Nigeria. Long before therapy existed as a profession, our communities held what we call ‘well circles’ — sacred gatherings for storytelling, reflection, and collective care. These circles helped people integrate grief, trauma, and transition by reconnecting them to each other, to the land, and to their sense of purpose.
In practice, this looks like facilitated storytelling, deep listening, and ritualized conversation in a safe, respectful setting. Participants explore shared experiences, identify collective strengths, and find new ways to move forward together. It’s a deeply human process that supports emotional regulation, empathy, and community resilience — the same outcomes sought by modern therapeutic and restorative practices.
While my path hasn’t followed the Western model of therapy training, I come from a long lineage of healers, storytellers, and community guides who were prepared for this work through apprenticeship, ritual, and lived practice. These were the first schools of emotional care — the places where humans learned to listen, heal, and reconnect. My work continues that tradition in a way that meets today’s needs while honoring the wisdom of those who came before.
These well circles offer a culturally grounded, healing-centered way to restore the human connections that modern systems often overlook. It’s not therapy instead of therapy — it’s therapy’s oldest ancestor, returning home to help us remember how to heal together.
photo by: Laura Mcknight
Our Story
The Emotional Recovery Covenant honors and weaves together the ancestral wisdom passed down through generations of Storytellers, Pattern Seers, Circle Keepers, Culture Bearers, and Tribal Counsel members.
We pay tribute to all those who have paved the way before us, creating space for our voices to be heard in this moment. This includes researchers, sacred scientists, ancestors, and all beings, seen and unseen, whose contributions have shaped the wisdom we now carry forward.
Collective healing circles have long been a part of southern Louisiana, a tradition that has supported native and indigenous communities for thousands of years. The Chitimacha and Houma tribes, among other first stewards of this land, such as my African ancestors from the Yoruba tribes of Nigeria and Benin, used these circles to restore peace and well-being in the community during times of transition, loss, change, disaster, conflict, and other trauma-inducing experiences. Restorative Storytelling Circles have enabled communities to move beyond trauma responses, creating a path toward the restorative and regenerative culture we truly seek.
As such, the Emotional Recovery Covenant and the programs we cultivate are founded from those same healing practices that are inspired by Nature, backed by Science, rooted in Ancestral wisdom, and accessible to All.Our approach centers ecological, sustainable, and inclusive paths to well-being, promoting health equity through a trauma-informed lens. We recognize that we are all on a lifelong healing journey—one that requires understanding the individual and societal traumas we’ve inherited, as well as the biases and behaviors that have emerged as a result.
Together, we are intentionally working to create more balanced, trauma-informed systems that foster shared understanding, belonging, and healing for everyone.