I’m Melissa. Mother of five, wife of one, and Mythopoetic & Depth-Oriented Maternal Practitioner.

But more truthfully: I am a woman who has been taken apart and remade by forces older than my name. Motherhood didn’t exactly hand me sunlight and serenity.
It handed me blood and bone, the kind of love that breaks you open and the kind of loss that scorches you to the root. I’ve birthed babies. I’ve buried versions of myself. I’ve watched children drift into their own worlds, felt the ache of distance, endured heartbreaks that felt like annihilation, and stitched myself back together in the dark.

My life has never been linear. It’s been a spiral, the woman’s way. A rhythm of devotion and disillusionment, joy and grief, collapse and renewal. A rhythm as old as the moon.

I didn’t grow up with ancestral stories. But the stories grew up with me. The Dark Goddess found me long before I had words for her. She came in the nights when my heart was split open and I was certain I was losing my mind. She came as Kali with her fierce clarity, as Inanna dragging me through her seven gates, as the Selkie reminding me I had a skin of my own. She came as the Terrible Mother, the devouring, protective, transformative force at the center of all becoming. She came to initiate me. For years I thought I was breaking down. Now I know I was being broken open.

Astrology became a rope I grabbed in the dark. The kind that reveals the underworld chambers beneath your everyday life. My natal chart became a myth I could finally live with. My transits became the gods and goddesses who refused to let me stay small.

Depth psychology gave me language for my unraveling. It taught me to trust the imagination. It showed me the shadow was a doorway, not a curse. It taught me that the soul lives in the body’s cracks. It reminded me that a woman is meant to be both light and dark, both wild and wise.

Mythology braided it all together. It showed me that my suffering was a rite of passage lived by women throughout time. Persephone descending. Demeter grieving. The Cailleach wintering. Mothers across cultures, across centuries, across oceans.

These frameworks reflected me, the parts I had forgotten, the instincts I’d buried, the power I thought I’d lost.

And now? Now I walk beside other mothers who feel the trembling beneath their lives. The ones who sense they’re living a story that doesn’t fit anymore. The ones who feel the Dark Goddess rising beneath the surface of their motherhood. The ones who are ready to stop pretending, stop shrinking, stop apologizing, and begin to remember who they are.

I help them read their natal chart as a mythic map. I help them understand their psyche with compassion and courage. I help them reclaim the stories their bloodlines forgot. I help them integrate both the dark and the light mothers within.

This is the work I was shaped for.

If you care about the official version:
I hold a B.S. in Natural Resources, an M.A. in Integrative Health, an M.A. in Psychology, and certifications in Nutrition, Yoga, Integrative Wellness Coaching, Treatment of Eating Disorders, Transformative Imagery, Patient Navigation, and Compassionate Inquiry.

But the deeper truth?

My real credentials are in birthing both life and death, the nights I thought I wouldn’t survive, the myths that resurrected me, the underworld I’ve walked, and the story I’ve come back carrying. That is what I bring to this work. And that is what I offer you.