Meet Brighter
I work with tools drawn from many traditions, clinical and otherwise. I’ve trained in functional medicine, emergency medicine, energetic medicine, and midwifery.
I believe there’s something fundamental and whole in every person. I think symptoms are that part making do with what it has lived through and been given. I listen for that, and I help you to.
Why This Approach?
I look at the whole person rather than an isolated complaint. I look for patterns rather than single data points and I try to find the thread that connects what feels like unrelated problems.
Most people who find me are looking for a way of understanding their body that makes sense of what they've actually lived. This is the thinking behind my work
The Body Is An Adaptive System
A living body is a continuously self-organizing system. It is always sensing, adjusting, and compensating in response to everything it lives. This includes stress, sleep, food, light, water, emotions, and relationships.
So, a symptom is not a malfunction. It's the system's best available response to the conditions. And a pattern in one place often has roots in another.
Symptoms Are Information
A body that can't sleep is telling you something. So is poor digestion, refractory fatigue, headaches, skin rashes, physical and emotional pain. I listen for the message inside the symptoms and offer layers of understanding so you can work with your body and not against it.
The Distance Between Feeling And Knowing
Mainstream medicine is extraordinary at what it does best: emergencies, acute illness, injury, and conditions that can be clearly identified and treated. Many of us are alive because of it.
But many people live knowing something is off, and no one can say what. Their labs are normal, their experience doesn't fit the categories. That gap is where I spend my time.
How I Got Here
I managed a naturopathic medicine clinic and sat in appointments beside the doctor. I provided treatment and sat in developmental meetings with psychiatrists at a neurofeedback center. I worked in the back of a rural ambulance as a single provider, and later helped train the new ones. I walked people through long wellness programs. I formally apprenticed in out-of-hospital birth midwifery.
I was eleven when my cousin and I delivered a litter of collie puppies in a house with no grown-ups home. Several were born in the caul. I unwrapped them, and we warmed them until they breathed. I was a frequent flyer with bruised wildlife at the local veterinary teaching hospital.
I kept turning up where something was wrong. Episodes, injuries, a stranger down. I didn’t know the work yet but I always walked toward it and got involved. In high school I became an advocate, an activist, an angsty young person with a clear view that we have enough, enough to make this much better, even wonderful, and that most of what stands in the way is how we've agreed to do things.
So I went looking for systems that knew better ways. Holistic medicine. Brain science. Functional physiology. Vibrational medicine. Birth and death traditions. Spiritual lenses and practices. Each pointed me toward something wider. While each was a true language for the body, none was the whole of it.
So I stopped looking for the one right room and made a place where the languages can talk to each other. You can come to hear what each has to say, plainly, and decide yourself. And I'm still walking toward things.
