About Willow

About Willow

There are many ways we come to a turning in our lives.

Grief, illness, aging, death, relationship changes, spiritual questions, unexpected loss, and experiences that alter how we understand ourselves can bring us into unfamiliar territory. Sometimes what is needed is information or practical support. Sometimes it is a place to listen more closely to what is happening within. Sometimes it is simply another human willing to be present with what is here.

My work has grown from a long relationship with these places in human life.

I serve in the community as a licensed psilocybin facilitator, death companion/doula, grief tender, healing arts practitioner, educator, and body-oriented integration coach, based in Eugene, Oregon.

My approach is relational, non-directive, consent-based, and attuned to the whole person. I honor spiritual autonomy and the many different ways people understand healing, death, grief, consciousness, and what it means to live a human life.

Death Companioning & Doula Care

As a death companion/doula, I offer non-medical biopsychosocial and spiritual companioning for people living with serious or life-limiting illness, approaching death, planning ahead, or wanting to become more intimate with their own mortality.

I also support families, friends, caregivers, and others who are part of a person’s life and care.

My work may include end-of-life planning and education, bedside and vigil presence, attending planned deaths, grief tending, ritual, after-death support, and companioning people as they explore end-of-life choices, including Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) and Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED).

Some people I companion are surrounded by family, friends, hospice, or a larger care team. Others have a small circle, complicated relationships, or very little human support. Some are pursuing medical treatment, while others are choosing to stop treatment or allow dying to unfold with fewer medical interventions.

Wherever you find yourself, we may begin there.

Licensed Psilocybin Facilitation

When someone chooses legal psilocybin services in Oregon, I companion them through preparation, their journey day, and integration.

My facilitation is non-directive and responsive to the person in front of me. Rather than approaching psilocybin with a prescribed idea of what should happen, I support conditions for your own experience, body, inner knowing, questions, grief, imagery, silence, movement, and unfolding process to have room.

Integration continues this relationship by making space to listen for what the experience may still be asking you to notice, embody, tend, or bring into your life.

Grief Tending, Integration & Healing Arts

Grief has been woven through much of my personal and community life, and I understand it as something that asks for relationship rather than fixing.

I companion grief connected with death as well as the many other losses and changes that can alter a life: illness, aging, sudden death, loss of a child, relationship rupture, identity changes, ecological, ancestral, and collective grief, spiritual change, belonging and displacement, caregiving, and experiences that may have gone without language or witness.

My healing arts and integration work is informed by years of study and practice with the body, touch, movement, breath, sound, subtle awareness, ritual, and contemplative practices.

I worked as a licensed massage therapist for eleven years and am a graduate of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. I also trained as a yoga teacher and continue to study body-oriented coaching, nature-based integration, death and dying, grief, and the many ways humans make relationship with change.

Sound, voice, movement, breath, silence, creative expression, and ritual may enter our work when they feel welcome and supportive. They are invitations rather than requirements.

Sometimes our work is active. Sometimes very little needs to happen.

I listen for the pace of the person, the body, and the experience itself.

Community, Grief & Mortality

Community care is an important part of how I understand this work.

I gather with others around grief, aging, mortality, and the questions that arise when we have places to speak more openly about experiences our culture often keeps private.

At Soul Fire Temple, I co-facilitate ongoing community grief circles. At the Campbell Community Center in Eugene, I facilitate Death Cafés, Conversations About Age and Change, and death and grief education offerings.

I also co-facilitate community grief rituals and offer community outreach, education, and grief support in Eugene and surrounding areas.

For the past several years, I have participated in and helped hold one- and two-day community grief rituals informed by the teachings of Sobonfu Somé and the Dagara lineage. I hold these teachings with gratitude and respect for the lineage and culture from which they come, rather than claiming them as my own.

These experiences continue to deepen my relationship with communal grief tending and with the importance of having places where sorrow does not need to remain private or unwitnessed.

The Life That Informs My Work

My relationship with grief and death began long before they became part of my professional work.

Like many people, I have lived through experiences that changed me and asked me to meet life differently. Long-term recovery, relational rupture, identity shifts, experiences of oppression and harm, navigating complex systems, sudden and unexpected deaths, planned deaths, and meeting intergenerational patterns directly have taught me that human lives rarely unfold in straight lines.

There have been times of movement and times of pausing, times of contraction and opening, and experiences whose meaning became clearer only with the tincture of time.

These experiences inform how I meet others without assuming that I know what their experience means or where it should lead.

My own experience with long-term recovery also informs my care for people who are in recovery or exploring their relationships with substances, grief, change, and the ways they want to live.

I care deeply about child safety and about creating relationships and spaces where people are treated with dignity, respect, and care. I value community and social care: how we show up for one another, collaborate across different forms of support, and participate in creating systems of care that remain responsive to actual human lives.

I am a single mother of two. For more than a decade, I also worked with young children in Waldorf early childhood settings. While this is no longer the center of my professional life, those years continue to inform the patience, curiosity, imagination, and respect I bring to the many ages and stages of being human.

My relationship with healing and plant-centered practices has also included several journeys to the Peruvian Amazon for personal healing, learning, and experiences with plant allies. I carry gratitude and respect for the peoples, cultures, lands, and traditions that held and informed those experiences.

I volunteer with hospice and End of Life Choices Oregon, and my learning continues through ongoing study, practice, community, and relationship.

I am also an advocate for deeper and more equitable access to Oregon’s legal psilocybin services, including possibilities for people who are homebound, living with serious illness or disability, or otherwise unable to leave their homes and receive services at a licensed service center.

I hold deep respect for ritual, the ecological web of relations, and ways of living that remember our interdependence with one another, our communities, the living earth, and the more-than-human world.

Working With Me

You are welcome to come into this work through death companion/doula care, licensed psilocybin facilitation, grief tending, body-oriented integration, healing arts, community offerings, or a weaving of these forms of support.

You do not need to arrive knowing exactly what you need.

We can begin with what is present.

Your autonomy remains central. Your voice is held with dignity. Your pace, inner truths, relationships, beliefs, questions, and ways of making meaning are respected.

There is room here for what is known and what is still becoming known.

Your own living map emerges through your story, your body, your heart, your relationships, and the choices that are yours to make.

You are welcome here, exactly as you are.

If you feel a resonance, you are invited to reach out.

I am here to listen.

My Background Includes

Death Companioning, Grief & Community Care

• Certified Death Companion/Doula
• Companioning people and those close to them through serious illness, dying, planned deaths, sudden and unexpected death, and grief
• Non-medical support and education around Medical Aid in Dying (MAID), Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED), and other end-of-life choices
• Co-facilitator of ongoing community grief circles and community grief rituals
• Facilitator of Death Cafés and Conversations About Age and Change
• Grief educator and community facilitator
• Peaceful Presence Project elf Paced Death Doula Training
• End of Life Psychedelic Care Death Doula Training
• Soul Passages Death/Soul Doula Training
• Student, School of Thanatology — Art of Dying Institute
• Volunteer, End of Life Choices Oregon
• Hospice volunteer
• End of Life Psychedelic Care Member

Psilocybin, Integration & Recovery

• Licensed Psilocybin Facilitator, State of Oregon — #FL-D83A4719
• Psilocybin facilitation at Ripple Journeywork in Eugene, Oregon
• Subtle Winds Psilocybin Facilitator Program — Eugene, Oregon
• Body-Oriented Coaching — The Somatic School
• Nature-Based Integration Coaching — Earth-Based Institute
• Experience supporting people in recovery and those exploring their relationship with substances, change, grief, and ways of living
• Advocate for expanded and more equitable access to Oregon psilocybin services, including pathways for people who are homebound or otherwise unable to access services at a licensed service center

Healing Arts, Embodied Practice & Plant Relationships

• Founder, Soul Fire Temple
• Graduate, Barbara Brennan School of Healing
• Former Licensed Massage Therapist — 11 years
• Graduate, Educating Hands School of Massage
• Certified Kundalini Yoga Teacher
• Ritualist, singer, and songweaver
• Lead vocalist, songweaver & Creatrix of StarryRootz
• Years of relationship with sound, movement, breath, embodied and energetic practices
• Travel to the Peruvian Amazon on several occasions for personal healing, learning, and experiences with plant allies, held with respect for the cultures, lands, and traditions from which these practices come

Life & Community Experience

• Single mother of two
• More than a decade working with young children in Waldorf early childhood settings
• Ongoing involvement in community-based grief, death education, ritual, and social care
• Ecstatic dance and nature enthusiast

 My Background Includes

• Founder of Soul Fire Temple
• Licensed Psilocybin Facilitator in the State of Oregon #FL-D83A4719
• Psilocybin Facilitation at Ripple Journeywork in Eugene,OR. Please visit www.ripplejourneywork.com
• Student at The School of Thanatology with The Art of Dying Institute
• Body-Oriented Coaching, The Somatic School
• Nature-Based Integration Coaching through Earth-Based Institute
• Subtle Winds Psilocybin Facilitator Program, Eugene, Oregon
• Peaceful Presence Project Death Doula Training
• End of Life Psychedelic Care Death Doula Training
•  Soul Passages Soul Doula Training
• Community Grief Ceremony Assistant and Co-Facilitator
• Volunteer with End Of Life Choices Oregon
• Volunteer with Brighton Hospice
• Waldorf Early Childhood teacher and assistant roles (indoor and outdoor home-based and school programs)
• Mother of Two
• Singer and song weaver of soul medicine songs
• Lead vocalist, songweaver and Creatrix of StarryRootz (albums available at starryrootz.bandcamp.com)
• Ecstatic Dance and Nature Enthusiast
• Ritualist
• Certified Kundalini Yoga Teacher
• Graduate of The Barbara Brennan School of Healing
• Graduate of Educating Hands School of Massage