Hello, I'm Charity
For most of my adult life, my primary work has been in mental health.
I have worked as a private practice therapist, in domestic violence, and emergency mental health; roles that lived at the raw edges of human life - trauma, loss, despair, resilience, and the work of helping others find their way.
Alongside that work, I found my own refuge in creative practice as well as spiritual and personal development. Art, ritual, and sacred study became not hobbies, but necessary harbors: places where I learned how to metabolize what I was holding for others, and how to tend to my own growth without hardening.
For years, my world-facing life was one of strait-laced professionalism, academia, and regulation. Beneath all that, something more was stirring.
Mind meets Soul...
I have loved and grown from my clinical work in many ways. Yet over time, I felt called to develop more personal and spiritual growth offerings. I longed for work that honored psychological depth but could go deeper, beyond the medicalized model of diagnosis and treatment.
As a therapist, I'd built my practice around an therapy method I loved deeply: Internal Family Systems (or IFS). IFS is profoundly effective in clinical work but has always been more than a therapy method. From the start, I was deeply drawn to the model's larger role as a worldview, and the ways IFS aides in growth, connection and conflict-resolution beyond the therapy room. IFS always felt spiritual to me, but because we live in a world of duality, this wasn't spoken of in professional circles until very recently.
As I learned and used IFS as a therapist over the years, I watched in wonder as two things happened. First, my clients were accessing a deeper kind of healing than even I thought possible. But beyond that, everyone I was working with through the IFS model - myself included - wanted more. We all longed to continue this work, even after the "problems" were solved.
My clinical practice didn't afford the space or permission to pursue this.
Soul meets mind...
My interest in spirituality was not new. From age 17 and into my twenties, I studied ancient devotional practices and nature-based beliefs. In a pre-internet era, this was a solo experience. But after years of channeling my love of life-navigation into a clinical career, my return journey to this deeper work began when I discovered a sacred feminine temple in Massachusetts and began attending circles.
There in ceremony, I found what felt like 'home' to me. I found space for all I wanted to weave together in my work. Again and again, I found commonalities between the sacred feminine and Internal Family Systems, in both theory and practice.
Over the following years, I enrolled in intensive training as a Ceremonialist and Priestess in a lineage known as the Thirteen Moon Mystery tradition, developed by Ariel Spilsbury. I learned the art of designing and holding ceremonies that invited participants into a very different transformational space. I learned to live into and guide a lunar-based daily practice, and to walk as love in communion with the divine.
This training gave me a language for deeper meaning, for threshold, for reverence, and a way to hold human experience that was not limited to diagnosis or treatment. It also afforded me the sovereignty and space to bring the deeper, more spiritual elements of IFS into my work with others.
Creative Process
Throughout this journey, art was an unwavering constant. Long before therapy or ceremony, I was a child in love with textiles.
When I was six years old, I was given a large collection of vintage gowns to play with, and I spent countless hours immersed in fabric, pattern, and adornment. My grandmother taught me the power of making things with my hands, of attention, patience, and the quiet dignity of craft.
Later, my time studying Psychology & Expressive Arts at Goddard College refined my understanding of the creative process itself: not merely as aesthetic, but as way to externalize struggle, a vehicle for our full Self-expression and - while we seldom call it by this name - as ritual.
I learned to combine creative practice with psychological theory, and how to implement many modes of art for both healing and growth. I created and taught graduate-level workshops, co-opted new method development for clinical use, and implemented art into my own life practice.
A Sacred Third...
Perennial Heart is the place where my loves of art, ceremony and leading-edge psychology converge. Here, my passions merge through my writing, my own art and guidance-based offerings that encompass my own approach to personal & spiritual development.
All that is found here is shaped by what I navigate in my own life, by what I have witnessed in others, and by my communion with the divine in her many forms, here on earth.
I still work in emergency mental health.
I still operate a very small private practice offering IFS therapy.
But Perennial Heart is where my work beyond the baseline - and beyond the couch - comes to life through my art, my writing, ritual kits and guided experiences.
Whether your next step is to browse, journey or join the list for my upcoming events, I am so glad you’ve found your way here.
In Love & Devotion,
Charity
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