Hi, I’m Karen. I am a white, cisgender, currently able-bodied woman seeking to hold awareness of my identities and social location with compassion and accountability. I am trained as a Clinical Social Worker (Smith College School for Social Work) and as a Certified Meditation Teacher (Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program). I specialize in trauma work and have seen this as where I can most contribute toward social justice and the alleviation of suffering, two pursuits that deeply resonate with my personal values and the Jewish and Buddhist traditions that most influence my spiritual development.

I love and take joy in a lot of things, including living in underdog cities, being in connection with nature through bird watching, plant life, and kayaking; reading with one or two cats on my lap; and balancing reverence with irreverence, like writing silly things that probably feature potatoes.

For the majority of my career, I have been most focused around treating the human-caused trauma of sexual assault and abuse. This includes eight years working in college mental health systems as a trauma specialist and coordinator (2016-2020 at the US Naval Academy and 2020-2024 at the Johns Hopkins University) and three years (2013-2016) at Baltimore’s social service agency for survivors of sexual assault, abuse, and interpersonal violence.

It has been an honor and a privilege to sit with so many survivors over the years, and to be a witness to their experiences and their work toward healing.

However, as each year has brought more and more catastrophic weather events, extreme efforts to foster and maintain denial, and a deep sense of grief for current and future human, animal, and plant life on this planet, I have wanted to be contributing more to the movement to stop the climate crisis, to build Joanna Macy’s vision of a “life-sustaining society.”

As I learned more about the harassment that many climate professionals (e.g. scientists, journalists, advocates, and activists) are facing, and considered how the themes of exploitation, denial, silencing, and existential threat that are so central to interpersonal trauma also show up in climate-related trauma, I knew this was where I could contribute my skills and training as a trauma therapist. Moving from university work into private practice became a chance to extend my trauma focus to include the impact of the also-human caused climate emergency—the polycrisis of our time.

I named my practice Future Path Collaborative to honor three guiding principles and inspirations:

• EMDR therapy’s Future Vision protocol, created by Deany Laliotis, which starts with clarity around where we want to get to, and then weaves back to the past to help address what stands in our way

• the Noble Eightfold Path, the Buddha's teaching of how we move toward liberation, which is not a linear series of milestones to attain but a set of deeply interconnected ways to practice.

• No one can be alone in this work and no one person can be the doer. A collaborative recognizes the co-constucted nature of therapy, the community of practitioners, and the work we need to do together to create a life-sustaining society, a livable future for all.

Through Future Path Collaborative, I look forward to working with people who are seeking healing - for themselves and for the planet.

I am most drawn to EMDR therapy, a gold-standard treatment for trauma and a whole psychotherapy approach that is responsive and relational. I particularly enjoy working with clients with standard EMDR and IFS-informed EMDR, as well as early EMDR and group EMDR interventions.

That said, I take an integrative approach to therapy, drawing upon EMDR, Internal Family Systems, mindfulness, relational, psychodynamic, mindfulness, interpersonal neurobiology, feminist, and cognitive theories and approaches. I believe that therapy works best when the process is co-constructed, when a “safe-enough” space can allow for the unfolding of vulnerability and risk taking, and when what gets nurtured in the protected space of therapy can be transferred out into your daily life. I strongly believe that a trauma lens is valuable for understanding the impact of racism and other forms of systemic and generational oppression and that a person-in-environment model recognizing intersectional identities and influences is important for understanding who and how we are.

At this time, I am most interested in working with clients who are ready or want to be ready to engage in trauma/memory processing with EMDR therapy. Due to the intense nature of this work, I am not currently able to work with clients who are actively suicidal, struggling with life threatening substance use disorders, or in need of treatment for eating disorders.

I started my daily meditation practice in 2014, intent on finding a way to hold space for the sorrows and vicissitudes of life. As my practice has deepened–through meeting with teachers and other students, through sitting in silent meditation retreats, and through study–it has become so much more than a way to be with sorrow and suffering. It has also opened so much more space for joy, for wise compassion, for being present and heart-forward.

As a meditation teacher, I seek to teach what I know - how mindfulness and other teachings of the Buddha help us to meet the world with clarity and compassion. I also bring into my teachings a keen awareness of trauma, accessibility factors, and groundedness in collective liberation, and seek to help each student find their own particular gateway to the path.

While I am certified as a teacher, I most identify as a student, and am so grateful for the teachers I have learned from in training and retreats, including Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Devin Berry, Tara Mulay, Kaira Jewel Lingo, Dawn Mauricio, and Tempel Smith, my sangha leaders La Sarmiento and Eileen Tupaz, and my MMTCP mentor Deb Kerr. I encourage you to seek out their teachings, and the teachings of so many amazing teachers, all freely given, on Dharma Seed.

I am also immensely grateful for the love and labor of the Asian practitioners, both monastics and laypeople, who, since the time of the Buddha, have nurtured and shepherded these practices for over 2500 years, allowing and encouraging them to evolve to reach new people in the languages and idioms of their own time and place.

• Education

  • B.A. Harvard College 2006-2007

  • M.S.W. Smith College School for Social Work, 2012

• Licensure

  • LCSW-C, State of Maryland, License #18478.

• Certifications:

  • CMT, Certified Meditation Teacher – MMTCP Class of 2023, certified through the Awareness Training Institute, Sounds True, and the Greater Good Science Center.

  • Climate Psychology Certification Program - California Institute for Integral Studies. Accepted into program scheduled for Sep.-Dec. 2024

• Professional Memberships:

  • EMDR International Association (EMDRIA)

  • Climate Psychology Alliance North America (CPA-NA)

• Selected Trainings

  • EMDR Basic Training - EMDR Institute (2017-2018)

  • The Flash Technique - Flash-trained Therapist, 2023

  • IFS-Informed EMDR trained - Syzygy Institute, 2024