Rising Rooted

Hi there!

I’m Rachel.

I am an Eco-Existentialist; an unwavering optimist, concerned with big questions of meaning and purpose, and always with nature in mind.

I believe that healing requires self-leadership, balance, and regulation. This requires both bottom-up (breathing and movement) and top-down (mindfulness and talk-therapy) approaches. For me, therapy is about sinking down deep roots of purpose, understanding our emotional responses and defensive patterns, and remembering the ways we experience joy, so that we can survive the storms of life.

I believe that YOUR inner wisdom is the best guide for your unique journey towards holistic healing and mental health. My job as a therapist is to help you unlock your own doors, and uncover the inner knowing deep inside you that tends to get buried under life stress, relational wounds and stigmatizing societal narratives.

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My journey to the mental health field has been a long and winding one. It all began with my own mental health challenges and an itching curiosity to find out what was wrong with me. Thankfully, I have learned I was asking the wrong questions.

I have an undergraduate degree in Anthropology (the study of human culture, both ancient and modern), which propelled me to travel and explore the world for half a decade, teaching English in Spain, Vietnam and Laos. This experience motivated me to help people immigrate to Canada, and so I moved home and went to college for Social Service Work, specializing in newcomer and refugee services. Though I thoroughly loved the work that this led to, I began to hate the busy city. I am a wild woman through and through, and Toronto was not feeding my soul. I decided to move to a small community in the Ottawa Valley to work at an alternative school that specialized in mental health and outdoor education. It was in this adventurous and supportive environment that I realized the path I needed to take, and so I went on to pursue a Master’s Degree in Counselling Psychology and later to build my own private psychotherapy practice: Rising Rooted.

I currently live in Madawaska Valley, Ontario with my partner, stepsons and dog. I spend my free time reading or adventuring this beautiful, wild landscape I inhabit.

My Approach:

I am a holistic and integrated therapist. This means I consider the whole person (mind, body, spirit and relationships) when addressing problems and goals.

To do this, I work with you to create an inner field-guide, which can include activities like:

• Mapping your internal landscape (Self) and getting to know all the different internal characters (Subpersonalities) that inhabit it, building a foundation for self-understanding, self-acceptance, and ultimately, self-leadership.
• Enhancing the communication pathways between your body and mind to increase your ability to regulate emotions and mindfully embrace life and its challenges.
• Reparenting work to enhance your ability to self-regulate your destructive impulses, create and hold healthy boundaries, and to keep the promises you make to yourself.
• Inner-child work to increase joy, hope and motivation, and to process childhood trauma or unresolved issues from the past.
• Developing a sense of belonging and rootedness through relationships with others and with nature.

All of these processes, and more, will support you through your deep healing journey and provide templates for the soul work required to access your intuition and unlearn the stories that keep you stuck.