i didn't choose this work
with my mind.
my body
led me here
Why we repeat certain patterns even when we know better?
Why some parts of us are easy to love and others much harder to meet?
What happens when the life we’ve built no longer fits?
And what becomes possible when old fears, expectations, and ways of protecting ourselves no longer have to shape how we live?
These aren’t questions I came to only through my training as a therapist.
They’re questions I’ve lived.
My own life has asked me, again and again, to leave what is familiar, listen more closely to myself, and find my way without always knowing where I was going.
And it is from this place, alongside years of training as a somatic psychotherapist, that I meet the people I work with.
hi, I'm Fiona!
i know something about finding your way back to yourself
finding your way
I grew up in Istanbul and moved to Canada in my early twenties. I was curious, independent, and determined to build a life of my own.
For a long time, I did what many of us learn to do: I kept moving forward. I adapted. I achieved. I figured things out.
Until my body began asking something different of me.
In my twenties, I became quite unwell. What began as physical symptoms became a much larger turning point in my life. I could no longer move through the world in quite the same way. I had to slow down. I had to pay attention. And I began a much deeper exploration of myself—my history, my relationships, my body, my patterns, and the ways I had learned to survive and belong.
That period changed the direction of my life, but it wasn't the end of some neat healing story.
Life has continued to ask things of me.
I have known grief and loss. I have had relationships change and end. I have left homes, countries, identities, and versions of myself I once thought I would keep. I have had to learn when to hold on and when to let go, how to stay connected to myself while loving other people, and how to trust what is emerging before I can see where it will lead.
I am still learning.
And that matters.
I used to understand healing as something that would eventually make life easier.
These days, I understand it differently.
For me, this work is less about reaching a version of ourselves that is finally healed, secure, or unaffected by life, and more about changing the way we meet what comes.
i don't believe we ever arrive
I DON'T BELIEVE WE EVER ARRIVE
i don't believe we
arrive
a way of living
Can I stay with myself here?
Can I hear what is true beneath the fear?
Can I make room for grief without becoming only my grief?
Can I recognize an old protective pattern without letting it make every decision for me?
Can I allow myself to change?
Over the years, this has become much more than a therapeutic philosophy for me.
It is a way of living.
A practice of becoming more honest with myself. More able to listen to my body. More compassionate toward what learned to protect me. More willing to loosen my grip when life is asking something new of me. And more interested in being fully here than in getting everything right.
This is the same orientation I bring into my work.
explore the work
I don't sit across from you as someone who has figured life out.
I bring years of clinical training and experience, but I also bring myself: my warmth, curiosity, intuition, humour, honesty, and willingness to go with you into places that may be difficult to put into words.
I am not afraid of complexity.
You don't need to make your experience neat for me.
You can love someone and be angry with them.
You can know something intellectually and still not be able to live it.
You can want change and be terrified of it.
You can be grateful for your life and know that something about it is no longer right.
There is room for ALL of YOU here.
Sometimes I will sit quietly with you. Sometimes I will ask you to notice what is happening in your body. Sometimes I will name something I see very directly. We might talk about childhood, relationships, fear, grief, desire, spirituality or the decision you made yesterday that you can't stop thinking about.
And sometimes we will laugh.
What matters to me is that there is enough honesty and trust between us that you can begin to hear yourself beneath everything you've learned you should be.
what i bring into the room
the work has changed me, too
Becoming a therapist wasn't the conclusion of my own journey. In many ways, it deepened it.
Sitting with people year after year has taught me how intelligent our protective patterns are. How much can live beneath a behaviour that looks irrational from the outside. And how often the parts of ourselves we most want to get rid of are the very parts that once worked so hard to take care of us.
It has also taught me that change doesn't always look dramatic.
still learning
those moments still move me.
Sometimes it is noticing that something which once consumed you doesn't have the same hold anymore.
Saying no where you once abandoned yourself.
Feeling anger without being frightened of it.
Letting someone love you without disappearing into them.
Trusting your own perception.
Resting without having to earn it.
Realizing that the voice you thought was yours belonged to someone else.
Or simply finding that there is a little more room inside you to choose.
beyond
the therapy room
I love being somewhere unfamiliar. Different cultures, languages, landscapes, ways of relating, and ways of understanding life endlessly fascinate me. II have always been drawn to the question of what makes somewhere or someone feel like home.
My spirituality is an important part of my life, although I don't belong neatly to one tradition.
I am drawn to contemplative practices and to ways of understanding life that make room for mystery, embodiment, nature, surrender, and something larger than the individual self.
I write. I move my body. I am deeply interested in what it means to live a life that actually feels like mine. I love deep conversations and ridiculous ones. I can be serious about the human condition and laugh very hard five minutes later.
Beneath much of what I do is a curiosity about who we become when we begin living less from fear and more from what is true:
Who are we underneath what happened to us?
What becomes possible when we aren't organizing our lives entirely around fear?
What might we hear when we become quiet enough to listen?
Becoming isn't about turning into someone better.
It is often the opposite.
a little bit more about me
A gradual shedding of what was never quite ours, so that more of who we already are has room to live.
I love being somewhere unfamiliar. Different cultures, languages, landscapes, ways of relating, and ways of understanding life endlessly fascinate me. II have always been drawn to the question of what makes somewhere or someone feel like home.
My spirituality is an important part of my life, although I don't belong neatly to one tradition.
I am drawn to contemplative practices and to ways of understanding life that make room for mystery, embodiment, nature, surrender, and something larger than the individual self.
I write. I move my body. I am deeply interested in what it means to live a life that actually feels like mine. I love deep conversations and ridiculous ones. I can be serious about the human condition and laugh very hard five minutes later.
Beneath much of what I do is a curiosity about who we become when we begin living less from fear and more from what is true:
Who are we underneath what happened to us?
What becomes possible when we aren't organizing our lives entirely around fear?
What might we hear when we become quiet enough to listen?
Becoming isn't about turning into someone better.
It is often the opposite.
training & background
I am a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) and somatic psychotherapist with a Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology. I offer online somatic psychotherapy to clients across British Columbia, alongside embodied guidance and immersive work for clients internationally.
My work has been shaped by extensive study and training in somatic psychotherapy, trauma and the nervous system, attachment, relational psychotherapy, parts and inner-child work, mindfulness, breathwork, and contemplative and body-based practices.
My work extends beyond clinical training. It has also been shaped by spiritual study and embodied experience, including Holy Essentials with Jeannie Zandi, plant-medicine ceremonies, psychedelic-assisted somatic therapy, and contemplative practice.
These experiences have deepened my capacity to stay with complexity, listen beyond what can immediately be explained, and make room for the psychological, embodied, relational, and spiritual dimensions of healing.
beyond formal training
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy - 2026
Integrative Somatic Therapy Practice (ISTP)™ 2024
Masters Center for Transformation - Professional Training 2023
My body asked me to stop. I began listening.
The work continues to deepen and
change me, too.
What began as my own healing became my life’s work as a psychotherapist
Built a new life and the career I had worked
hard for
Left Istanbul and began building a life of my own in Canada
my journey
daily self-reflection journal
for the life that happens between sessions
Reflections, questions, and embodied practices for noticing yourself more closely and staying in conversation with what is moving within you.
