About Trish
The Biography
Trish grew up in a white, lower middle class, Irish Catholic family in a conservative, working class town in Upstate New York. Trish attended Catholic school for the first 8 years of their education and managed straight A’s in everything except for religious studies.
Trish first went to college for Music Therapy, but sensing that the timing wasn’t quite right, rerouted to a community college before going on to attend Saint Michael’s College where they received a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Gender Studies. Trish also received an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Vermont and later an M.A. and Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Trish served as an Assistant Professor of English Literature at SUNY Adirondack and an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College before leaving academia in 2019. Trish’s book, Transnational Testimonios: The Politics of Collective Knowledge Production, was published in 2018 through the Decolonizing Feminisms Series at the University of Washington Press.
In this lifetime, Trish finds expression as a white, non-binary, queer, anti-racist writer, educator, and spiritual activist. Trish currently lives on The Big Island of Hawai’i where they are becoming quieter and relearning how to listen to nature’s wisdom and rhythms.
Trish is a firm believer that more equitable futures are possible only when we are each committed to realizing, and to helping each other become, our own best selves; when we transform sources of vulnerability into sources of strength; and when we plant the seeds of a more just world through our daily actions and relationships.
Trish specializes in working with healers and empaths who are in need of healing younger selves as well as those seeking to heal their ancestry.
The Journey
In 2012, while going through a divorce, parenting a 3 year old, completing a doctoral dissertation, and feeling energetically out of balance, Trish stepped back onto the yoga mat for the first time in 10 years. Soon after, Trish began a daily asana (physical yoga) practice, a decision which dramatically, and unexpectedly, altered their life course. It was also at this time that a childhood mentor resurfaced, making Trish aware of what it meant to be an empath and opening them up to the world of energy medicine.
In 2015, Trish completed their 200-hour Bhakti Yoga Certification at the Govardhan Ecovillage just north of Mumbai, India with Gopi Kinnicutt. Soon after, Trish moved back to Burlington, Vermont after accepting a professorship at a local college.
While Trish did not plan to teach yoga more than as an occasional sub, Trish soon landed their first regular yoga class and found it to be much more nourishing than they had expected. Before long, Trish was teaching six yoga classes a week at local studios.
After teaching a yoga class one day at the college, a student came up to talk to Trish about Ayurveda and energy work. Soon after, Trish was at a work gathering and began talking to a colleague about each other’s personal meditation practices. These two moments helped Trish to realize how rigidly they had compartmentalized the different pieces of their life, and how good it felt to openly share their spiritual beliefs and practices with others.
It was around this same time in 2016 that Trish enrolled in an intensive 8-month healing curriculum and training to become an Inner Alignment Coach under the mentorship of Kim Beekman. During this deep healing work, Trish was offered the opportunity to reflect on traumas accrued early in life and how their unwillingness to confront and heal from them was severely impacting their quality of life in the present. Within three months of this deep mind, body, spirit work, Trish began releasing old pain bodies and confronting deep seated unworthiness stories and belief systems that were keeping them stuck in unhelpful patterns. After a particularly intense healing session, Trish emerged feeling both broken open and completely new. After years of getting nowhere in talk therapy, it was both a relief and jarring to see how quickly it was possible to release years of unhelpful self-sabotaging behaviors!
It was out of this experience that Transformative Consciousness gradually emerged through sustained meditation. Over the next year Trish began to outgrow their academic world, finding conversations with students and colleagues to feel more like well-being consultations, and their “side gig” of yoga and coaching taking up more of their focus and attention.
In early 2019 while in Hawai’i for a plant-medicine retreat, Trish discovered that the Wanderlust yoga festival was taking place on the other side of Oahu. Deciding to attend on a whim, Trish sat for a sankulpa practice (a deep heart meditation) with Tracee Stanley. During this meditation Trish very clearly received the heart wisdom that they could no longer stay in academia.
It was on this same trip that Trish first heard the call of the plants and found Eileen McKusick’s Tuning the Human Biofield tucked in their backpack from a previous trip to Zanzibar. Trish started reading the book on the flight home, and registered for the upcoming Foundations and Practitioner Biofield Tuning Trainings in Burlington, Vermont as soon as they arrived home, along with a 6-month community herbalism apprenticeship with Spoonful Herbals.
Each of these opportunities opened up more doors and synchronicities. In August Trish created the intention and set the container for completing one more year in academia. Trish had no idea what would come next, only that it was time to let universe know their intentions and to trust that the next step would appear. By December Trish was working full-time at Biofield Tuning and became a Certified Biofield Tuning Practitioner, and soon after began working in the Biofield Tuning Clinic.
Since then Trish has taken the Advanced Module 1 Biofield Tuning Training with Eileen McKusick. Trish also completed a 200-hour Ayurveda Immersion program at the Ayurvedic Institute of Vermont, which allows Trish to connect the dots between yogic philosophy, sound therapy, and plant wisdom. Additionally, Trish has undergone Druid Training with the Green Mountain Druid Order, and is currently undertaking 2+ years of intensive study with a Native Hawaiian teacher in Lomi Lomi and La’au Lapa’au.
There is no one more surprised than Trish that this is the arc of their life. A natural skeptic when left to their own devices, Trish enjoys working with clients who are similarly navigating a balance between mainstream life and their soul’s call for something more. Trish is particularly drawn to working with clients with strong analytical minds and helping them find their way back into their hearts and intuition. Trish specializes in working with healers and empaths who are in need of healing younger selves and with those seeking to heal their ancestry.
After years of needless suffering in their own personal journey, Trish welcomes the opportunity to hold space for clients to come back home to themselves and carries out this work with a great sense of joy and humility.
