Welcome. I am truly glad you are here.  I would love to share with you how Sanctuary came to be, a dream that slowly emerged from my own lived experience of healing, restoration, and deep inner work.

By profession, I am a certified Florida educator and Herbalist. By calling, my desire in developing Sanctuary has been that of heart work, and is rooted in what Henri Nouwen describes as the “wounded healer” — the understanding that our own wounds, when tended with honesty and grace, can become places of compassion, connection, and service to others.

As Nouwen writes in The Wounded Healer: “Our service will not be perceived as authentic unless it comes from a heart wounded by the suffering about which we speak.”

My path toward Sanctuary unfolded through seasons of heartache, pain, loss, and personal searching, for a better way, apart from the constant activity, anxiety and performance I knew all to well.  In that tender space God met me.  As I sought Him, I encountered unexpected healing in quiet solitude, in nature, and in simple, sacred rhythms — slow meals shared around candlelit tables, unhurried conversations, moments of stillness, and spaces where striving softened into presence. It was a brand.new.way to live.   

It was there, in slowing down, that I began to return — to my senses, to myself, and to God, who I discovered, had been present all along.

Somewhere in that returning, God planted a quiet desire — that others might experience this same gentle restoration. Sanctuary began as His invitation to my own heart, and gradually became something I have felt called to steward: spaces and experiences shaped by the healing He had already begun in me.

Both counseling and authentic community have been essential in my own healing journey. I remain deeply grateful for the spaces where I learned and continue to lay down masks, practice vulnerability, and receive guidance from skilled and compassionate therapists and supportive groups.  

Further, teaching has always been woven into my life. Long before any formal classroom, but from a childhood playroom, where at ten years old I enthusiastically gathered my siblings and neighborhood children around a Little Tykes chalkboard to teach the ABCs. That early love eventually led to teaching public education, and later to home education, which became not just a method, but a way of living.

Our days were shaped by curiosity and creation — experimenting in the kitchen with sourdough, beeswax candles or salves, gardening successes (and fails!) and homemade meals,  reading literature on picnic blankets, volunteering in our community, wandering through state parks, beaches, ancient redwoods, flowing rivers, the Alps, the sands of the Sahara desert, our eyes and ears and hearts learning through the beauty of the natural world.  These rhythms formed not only my approach to education, but my understanding of what nourishes the human spirit.

Over time, my experience grew into homeschooling cooperatives, as well as supporting families through tutoring and students with diverse learning needs. These experiences deepened my love for relational learning and the essential role of emotional safety in education.

Alongside this work, I trained with the Simplicity Parenting Institute, an experience that shaped my understanding of children, family rhythms, and the role environment plays in emotional well-being. This perspective continues to influence my educational approach within Sanctuary’s children’s offerings.

As a mother of four, I became deeply committed to cultivating emotionally safe environments where children could feel, heal, and grow. Children, in their honesty and sensitivity, often mirror truths adults have learned to suppress. Supporting their inner lives became inseparable from my broader work of care and restoration.

Sanctuary grew from these intersecting paths — healing, education, nature, motherhood, and most essential, my faith.

For a season, life carried our family abroad where we lived in a small village nestled in the Monferrato Hills of Italy. Here, I worked in a Kindergarten classroom of a beautiful forest school, a chapter that further deepened my love for slower rhythms of living, connected to nature.  In that same spirit of listening and growth, I pursued formal training in herbalism, drawn by a desire to understand God’s design of our body’s natural capacity for balance and restoration through plant remedies He placed for us on Earth.

Sanctuary is my offering: spaces intentionally shaped to be warm, invitational, and compassionate — just an extension of God’s invitation also to you. Together we can practice “being” in a world that constantly demands doing.  

We are, in many ways, a tired people — distracted, overstimulated, and often disconnected from ourselves, from one another, and from God.  Even our attempts at growth or spirituality can begin to feel like more effort, more noise, more striving.  

Sanctuary exists as a gentle alternative.

Together, we can explore life rhythms that cultivate depth, presence, and restoration — rhythms that renew our relationship with God, with others, and with our own hearts.

Come. Rest awhile…and maybe even, play.