today you woke up
looked at yourself in the mirror
and said:
i am a beautiful revolution
i am alive
and i can love myself,
and i can begin.
again.
AVA
Hello. My name is Paloma.
I am a queer-cis (she/ella) Xicana. A borderlands mestiza, a nepantlera, hecho de Nuevamexicana Norteña Xicanisma, of Indo-Hispaña-Mexicana and (re)sister herencia. I live between Seattle, Washington and New Mexico, the tierra sagrada of mis raíces. I live with invisible disability related to a chronic and progressive autoimmune illness and find my kin in queerly disabled and healing justice grounded community.
My own journey of healing continues, from complex trauma to medical and psychiatric abuse, and tending to the ways intergenerational and historical trauma has moved in my lineages, we are all journeying in our own ways and guided by our own wisdoms and connections. I take the work of my own healing and knowing my center and practicing my practices as critical as I take yours. Healing is a sacred space, a vulnerable space, that requires deep presence and intention, humility, and building trust with our practices. I honor this unique space and relationship of healing with care and in gratitude. I honor that showing up for you means I must continue to show up for me and be the practices, the values I hold and the words I speak. My cultural, somatic, and art practices keep me humble, centered and connected to this healing I believe so deeply in and the creative sometimes painful. also joyful, journeying it entails.
Healing is not a by-pass of our lived realities. Our lives and present experiences shape us, our wounds, and also our healings. We hold contradiction and we can learn to embody what is means to move with this while finding and trusting our centers of wisdom, while tending hope as we grieve, cultivating joy with rest, and we can meet ourselves within our bodies, minds, and spirits, just where we are at, without judgement and with deep curiosity. A healing journey has the potential to hold us in our deepest humanity as we as we struggle, challenge, voice up, truth tell, deconstruct, de/internalize, contextualize, imagine, dream differently and “(re)right, (re)write, (re)rite” (Cutcha Risling Baldy). I believe in healing as our deepest and fiercest resistance to oppression, it is survivance, it is a way to continue healing for our cultural and community thrivance that moves beyond survival, that leaves evidence of our power, and works towards liberation in the practices of embodied reclamation, metamorphic transformation, (re)membering and (r)evolution.
I am a fiercely politicized as a healer. This means we are holding healing in history and context. I am grounded in community wisdom and place my trust in the ever-evolving pluralvisions of our people and the earth. I practice generative practices that hold the sole intention to be for decolonial wellness. My work is Xicanx, Indigenous, and ecologies grounded, it is healing for liberation and you-oriented transformation. As a social justice worker and clinical activist, I have deep knowing of and do not believe in these systems that harm, only in their inevitable dismantling and new visions that will come of this. I view the healing journey as a birthright, an ancestral continuum; practices for individuals, connected to community, sacred, messy, complex, challenging, and beautiful, opening of the pathways towards both personal and collective transformative change.
I support healing in all the ways healing happens; tending to the personal, spiritual, somatic, expressive, creative, embodied, the forgotten, the re-membered, the silenced, what haunts, the loudness, the historical, political, economic, social, and tending to the awareness of how coloniality is insidious and how we navigate, refuse the oppressive contexts, by which we are living in and do our healing work in - all this and us in our unique healing wisdoms are the shapes of our journeys.
I am a licensed clinical social (justice) worker (MSW, LICSW) and Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT). I am an adjunct lecturer at the University of Washington. I teach BA and MSW level social work courses. I also offer immigration evaluations, end-of-life planning, community healing for non-profit community organizations, state and county social services providers, other healers, and Seattle high schools. I have over 27 years of experience in community and care work including, working in government and non-profit social services, community supportive living and caregiving, grassroots organizing, intimate partner/interpersonal violence/abuse shelters, vulnerable adult abuse investigation, community violence prevention, supporting unhoused and sexually exploited youth services and unhoused substance using folks, mental health court, psychiatric abuse awareness, disability services, disability justice, independent living centers, co-chairing a city human rights commission, restorative justice, victim/offender mediation, intergroup dialogues facilitator, mixed race, bi-cultural and intersectional identity exploration, queer, disability, neurodivergent affirming and cultura-centered healing, abolition, anti-oppression, and racial justice practices in social justice work
What I Value and How I Practice
I am fiercely politicized as a healer. This means we are holding healing in history and context. I am grounded in community wisdom and place my trust in the ever-evolving pluralvisions of our people and the earth. I practice generative practices that hold the sole intention to be for decolonial wellness. My work is Xicanx, Indigenous, and ecologies grounded, it is healing for liberation and you-oriented transformation. As a social justice worker and clinical activist, I have deep knowing of and do not believe in these systems that harm, only in their inevitable dismantling and new visions that will come of this. I view the healing journey as a birthright, an ancestral continuum; practices for individuals, connected to community, sacred, messy, complex, challenging, and beautiful, opening of the pathways towards both personal and collective transformative change.
I support healing in all the ways healing happens; tending to the personal, spiritual, somatic, expressive, creative, embodied, the forgotten, the re-membered, the silenced, what haunts, the loudness, the historical, political, economic, social, and tending to the awareness of how coloniality is insidious and how we navigate, refuse the oppressive contexts, by which we are living in and do our healing work in - all this and us in our unique healing wisdoms are the shapes of our journeys.
I offering healing that meets you - where you desire to be met. My offerings are multimodal, culturally integrative, somatically attuned, and creative, expressive centered. My approaches include plática/narrative/cuentista ways of telling, creative/expressive arts, somatic experiencing, somatic abolition, sensorimotor psychotherapy, EMDR, grounded in plural-wisdoms of Xicanx, Indigenous peoples, Liberation psychology, Community psychology and Eco-psychology. See some of the books and art that guides me HERE
I specialize in supporting Xicanx, Hispañ@, Latine/x, Indigenous, Native, First Nations peoples, multiethnic and bi-racial BIPoC folks, people who cross borders and unjust boundaries, people who find resource in their own cultural herencia, people who find home in many places and had to take leave from other homeland for survival and out of survivance. I am disability justice and anti-ableist centered healer, coming from my own experiences of disability, being raised by intergenerational disabled caregivers, and years of community activism in collaboration with disabled and neurodivergent peoples. As a cis-queer Xicana, I am fierce in disrupting binaries and harms of heteronormativity. I honor and fiercely affirming trans and gender fluid/non-binary, gender non-conforming, questioning folx and uplift individual unique journeys within the 2SLGBTQIA+, communities, honoring healing at the intersections of all the multiple identity experiences we may have.
I am grounded in the work of decolonizing and depathologizing healing. Decolonizing therapy is a task I take up with support from mentors, elders, community, writers, artists and academics. It is the framework for how I support the healing journey and support you in contextualizing your needs in health and wellness. I ground my self in plural knowledges of what coloniality means in healing. I resists and persist to dismantle the harmful systems rooted in colonial thinking. I follow guidance from Indigenous psychologies, liberation psychologies, community psychologist, non-academic brilliant thinkers, disability justice, abolition movements, cultura cura, barrio medicines, poets and artists, activists, earth and animal wisdoms, and ancestors.
I do not believe in pathogization of symptoms or experiences. I practice healing that attunes to somatic wisdom, is creative and expressive, is founded in practices of slowing, listening, and deep curiosity. I seek to offer practices that I have been in practice of in my own healing. Healing that calls our wounded spirit home from wandering (dis-association, susto) and allows us to reclaim an embodied querencia the lands reside that live within, and we feel into our most authentic self, the places we find sanctuary, how we are able to connect with our deeper wisdom-strengths, and gifts, and the ways we honor the survivance, radical resilience, and healing within our lineages, our ancestors, our lands, at our multiple identity intersections, and among our cultura.
Academics & Training
Academics
Currently pursuing a PhD in Decolonial Depth Psychology with a focus on Indigenous, Community, Liberation & Eco Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara, CA.
Master of Social Work (MSW) focus on Community Centered Integrative Practice and Multicultural Mental Health, University of Washington, Seattle WA. June 2014,
BA in Ethnic Studies, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. June 2008,
BA in History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. June 2008,
License
Licensed Clinical Social Worker, License # LW61167644, Washington State
Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, International Expressive Arts Therapy Association
Certifications
Expressive Arts Therapy Certificate, Northwest Creative and Expressive Arts Institute, (Jun 2019)
Somatic Experiencing Somatic Experiencing International (3 years) (Beg. I, II, III - Int. I, II, III - Adv. I) (Jun. 2020 – Jun. 2023)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (L1. Trauma Themes & L2. Developmental Injury) (Jun. 2020 – Nov. 2021)
Somatic Stress Release, The Embody Lab (Jan. 2023)
Embodied Transformation & Liberation, The Embody Lab (Dec. 2022)
Somatic Attachment & Healing ,The Embody Lab (Dec. 2022)
EMDR I & II Certificate, EMDR Institute (Oct. 2019 - Feb. 2020)
EMDR and Expressive Arts Certificate, Institute for Creative Mindfulness (Oct. – Dec. 2022)
WPATH Gender Affirming Letter Writing, Washington State Society for Clinical Social Work (Aug. 2022)
Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, International Association of Trauma Professionals, (May 2019)
Psychodynamic Clinical Theory and Practice Certification, Wellspring Family Services, (May 2017)
Lifespan Integration I & II, Lifespan Integration Institute (Feb. - Apr. 2019)
Professional Mediation Certificate, University of Oregon, School of Law (Aug. 2006)
Crisálida is a metaphor for healing. I choose the name Crisálida for my practice, meaning chrysalis in Spanish, because healing is a slow and steady process of transformation. Lepidoptera or butterfly species, engage in a process of metamorphosis, while being held in their crisálida (cocoon). They transform, wholly, from one being into another. In their crisálida they are able to be vulnerable enough to be in the mucky, messy, goo of change, eventually becoming something different. Healing and transformation is not simple, quick, or intellectual. The change through an embodied process, trusting their own inherent power, and following their ancestral wisdom. Butterflies remain their essential self throughout the process, but also become something entirely different. A healing space should also feel like a crisálida; a place where the changes happening is centered on your needs, a place that is safe-enough, a space that allows you to attune to your ancestral wisdoms and offers what you need to make this radical and vulnerable transformation. Healing is often messy, can be difficult, confusing and uncomfortable. There tends to be a lot of grief leaving one way of being for another, and it often feels strange as it affects every part of us as we have to learn new ways of being. We heal to become what we are meant to be. Find a healer that can co-create a space with you that feels like your crisálida. Someone who you feel can hold that sacred, safe-enough, and you-centered, embodied space to be in your messy and muck as you become who you were meant to be with the wisdom that you already know.
