About Alexis
Alexis, MA, MFT (she/her) is a mentor & threshold guide, facilitator & educator working at the confluence of healing and social change. For over two decades she has been supporting youth and adults, individually and in groups, to reimagine relationships and deepen intimacy with the self, each other, the natural world and the mystery. She weaves together twenty five years of experience in depth oriented practices and frameworks – including depth psychology, somatic trauma work, mindfulness, ecology, dream work, communal grief practices, ritual and ceremony, wilderness guiding, social justice, permaculture and rites of passage work.
Alexis has partnered with a variety of people, communities and organizations to create spaces of deep listening, authentic communication and transformative community practices. Including non-profit organizations, retreat centers, women combat veterans, assisted living facilities, community mental health clinics, public and private schools and universities, juvenile detention centers, homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, international peace projects, a variety of wilderness settings and private practice. Her work is informed by years of Buddhist practice, her own healing journey, anti-racism and anti-oppression frameworks and a long apprenticeship to the wild within and without. Alexis brings presence, compassion, humor and wisdom to the human experience.
She received her master’s degree in Depth Counseling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and is licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist. She serves as Adjunct Faculty at Antioch University where she teaches seminars at the intersection of social justice, psychology, and ecology, such as Decolonizing Mental Health. Alexis trained in rites of passage work with School of Lost Borders and The Ojai Foundation (now Topa Institute), where she previously served as a guide. She is a former yoga teacher, truck driver, beekeeper, natural builder, and psychotherapist.
A descendant of Celtic, Jewish and Germanic relatives, she lives on the Santa Ynez River in the chapparal woodlands of Southern California in the traditional territory of the Chumash people.
My work has arisen directly from an early and deep heartbreak at how we treat one another and our living earth, and a long lasting apprenticeship to shame. As well as an enchanted, natural and devotional relationship to the holy wild. Initiated in my dreams, in the absence of intact cultural traditions from my ancestors, I sought out mentors who reminded me of essential aspects of my natural being. All of them brought people together in intentional spaces and containers of healing and peacemaking. I am indebted and beyond grateful for their wisdom, courage and guidance. I have spent my adult life in steadfast commitment to love, healing, peace and justice, dismantling internalized structures of oppression and separation, and cultivating gestures of reciprocity and respect with all beings in the human and non human world. I am a student of the social and contextual components of our inheritances, the impact of trauma, moving from separation to communion, within, and without and of the beauty, mystery and blessing of our world.
Gratitude to my mentors and elders, and all the people who have helped me along the way. Those I have worked with intimately, namely, Deena Metzger, Gigi Coyle, Joanna Macy, Francis Weller, Darrel Bob. Those I have had the opportunity to sit, learn and study with - Sobonfu Some, Malidoma Some, Martin Prechtel, Joan Halifax. Those who have inspired me with their courage through their written or creative work. I am deeply grateful for the love and support of my family, birth and otherwise. I have had many other inspirers, too many to name, including each of the people, of all the ages, I have had the honor to mentor and serve. And mostly I am thankful for the wild, wondrous and beautiful world.