RIGINS
Cocoon was birthed during my endeavors in hospice care where I often encountered the vagaries of life limiting illness and patients inhibited access to health services. As patients’ proximity to death narrowed, troubling realities of unmet care needs often spawned anticipations of legacies of burden and subsistence conflicts that framed reflexive health-related decisions and enduring negotiations of dignity, safety, independence, comfort, and quality of life. Jolted by elevated risks of hastened and/or agonizing deaths, I grew intentional in negotiating care pathways potentiating opportunities for psychosocial stabilization, self-determined resolution, and an honorable end of life experience.
Journeying with these care aims offered the merit of biography, storytelling, cultural insights, numinous events, skills archiving, and metaphorical reflection that enlivened my practice with considerations of ambiguous losses endured across the life span, the fluidity of the human experience, contextual horizons of systemic and structural forces, and the value of literature/sensate resources as therapeutic mediums. Evolving from this distillation of service approaches were care outcomes of affirming esteem, survival and resistance excavation, experiential remembrance, dignity restitution, values clarification and honoring, articulated self-stories, embodied release of burdens, and redefined legacies that strengthened patients’ intra and interpersonal bonds.
Enthralled with the restorative and pragmatic bandwidths of narration and somatosensory techniques, I grew engaged in narrative, bibliographic, somatic, and sensate studies where my practice aptitudes deepened with attention to broader relations of power, relational negotiations of lived experiences, the abiding presence of subordinate resources, and generating life experiences nourishing of personal and collective wellness. Present day, I continue to draw on my foundational teachings to innovate attuned therapeutic climates that support care participants through trauma recovery, environmental injustice, attachment and abandonment, relational instability, adjustment/life transitions, identity complexities, grief/loss, and more. With presence, compassion, and candor; I invite you to take part and parcel in tending to your care needs with salves of intuition, compassion, embodiment, and connection for meaningful influence across varied dimensions of your life.
In sharing Cocoon’s origins and contributions, I give deep gratitude to my service participants, family, and friends-living and transitioned-whose trust, vulnerabilities, guidance, and/or support have privileged my therapeutic endeavors in this season of my life.