Commune with your Inner World

“The doors to the world of the wild self are few but precious…”

You may be arriving here with your heart in your hands and a longing to find your way Home. You have taken the most important step: seeking a companion to walk with you through the terrain of your life. As a psychotherapist, my work is to act as a guide in this landscape, be a witness to your unfolding and a mirror for your heart.

Who I Work With:

In my practice as a clinician, I specialize in supporting curious seekers, artists, healers, creative women, femme and non-binary people, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, first generation, immigrant and refugee communities. I offer a loving and non-judge mental container for your experience, affirm your voice, and accompany you as an ally on this journey.

I integrate talk therapy with art making, creative ritual, movement, myth and storytelling, Tarot and dreamwork as pathways for healing and doorways to the unconscious.

Clinical Approach

  • Depth and Jungian therapy explores what lives beneath the surface. Together, we look at the patterns that keep showing up in your life: in your relationships, your choices, the feelings you can't shake. We trace where these patterns come from: your family, your ancestors, the stories you've internalized about who you're supposed to be.

    Through archetypal images and symbols drawn from dreams, myth, and your own story, we illuminate the hidden threads woven into the fabric of your journey.

  • Sometimes words aren't enough. Through art-making, storytelling, movement, sound, and creative expression, we access what you can't yet say. Creating together in sessions allows feelings to emerge that thinking alone can't reach.

    Your body also carries wisdom your mind doesn't have access to. Tension, pain, butterflies, tightness—these aren't just sensations, they're information. We pay attention to what your body is telling you: where you hold stress, what makes you contract, what helps you open. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

  • Dreams are messages from your unconscious—the part of you that sees what your waking mind misses. They show you what you're avoiding, what you're longing for, what needs attention. Dreams speak in symbols and stories, not logic.

    In our work, we don't interpret your dreams for you. We explore them together: What images stay with you? What feelings did they bring? What might your psyche be trying to show you? Dreams are a bridge between your conscious life and the wisdom living in your depths

  • Tarot therapy merges the timeless wisdom of tarot with the thoughtful care of contemporary therapy. Each card, a canvas of symbols, opens a window into the unseen landscapes of the mind and heart.

    By reflecting on the imagery and meanings within the cards, clarity emerges, patterns untangle, choices illuminate, all offering a steady hand amid life’s complexities.

  • Relational therapy is a space where intimacy and trust are cultivated through the therapeutic relationship . With care and guidance, we build connection and mend the distrust and distress that sprouted in unsafe or unavailable relationships of the past that may be impacting your current well being.

  • Your pain doesn't exist in isolation; it's woven into larger stories of power, oppression, and survival. Liberation Psychology invites us to look beyond individual symptoms and ask: What systems, what histories, what collective wounds are alive in your body and your life?

    This approach centers the ways that colonization, racism, and intergenerational trauma shape our inner worlds. Together, we make space to see what was never yours to carry alone and to remember that your struggles are not personal failures, but human responses to inhuman conditions.

Areas of Exploration:

◈ depression & anxiety
◈ grief, loss, mourning cultivating & strengthening intuition ◈ recovering from narcissistic abuse ◈ “rewilding”: connecting to the instinctual life ◈ inner child work, attachment trauma ◈ creative blocks, self-judgement, perfectionism ◈ healing connections to the non-human world
◈ ancestral patterns, generational trauma
◈ codependency, setting healthy boundaries
◈ unconscious belief systems that limit healing ◈ confidence, worthiness, self-esteem ◈ overwhelm & emotional self-regulation ◈ thresholds, endings/beginnings, life transitions ◈ isolation, belonging, estrangement

Schedule a free Consultation

“THE DOORS TO THE WORLD OF THE WILD SELF ARE FEW BUT PRECIOUS. IF YOU HAVE A DEEP SCAR, THAT IS A DOOR. IF YOU HAVE AN OLD, OLD STORY, THAT IS A DOOR. IF YOU LOVE THE SKY AND THE WATER SO MUCH YOU ALMOST CANNOT BEAR IT, THAT IS A DOOR. IF YOU YEARN FOR A DEEPER LIFE, A FULL LIFE, A SANE LIFE, THAT IS A DOOR.”

- Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Zena Carlota

The seeds of my work as a psychotherapist are rooted in my life as an artist, musician, storyteller, gardener and devotee to Life’s Great Mysteries. My offerings are woven from the threads of Afro-Indigenous wisdom traditions in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as Jungian and depth psychology.

I specialize in using intuitive, earth and arts-based approaches to guide clients throughs experiences of anxiety, depression, individual & generational trauma, codependency, developing intuition & discernment, healing from narcissistic abuse, reparenting & inner child development, spiritual awakenings, artistic blocks, life transitions, grief & loss, self-regulation and self-esteem, while using creative rituals to help give shape to feelings not easily expressed in words.

Work with me

Intention

In traditional Greek, the word psychotherapy (“psyche” meaning “Soul” and “therapeia”, translated as “Healing”) has always been held throughout time as a sacred journey to mend what feels wounded. Together, we trace the root of your individual and collective pain to its original sources. Conjuring the healing balm of intuition and imagination, we are strengthened to reach back through time and memory to reclaim what has been lost, stolen or broken.

“I feel therefore I can be free”
— Audre Lorde

Vision

My practice was born from a dream to integrate earth based healing traditions and expressive arts into clinical practice and honor them as the true source of what we consider modern psychotherapy. Calling on the collective memory of ritual, art making, storytelling & myth, movement & dance, dreamwork & relationship to land as potent forms of medicine and allies in anti-oppression. Working with the threads of these practices, we also focus on how we as humans embody generational patterns of our ancestral family line and explore how they manifest in our bodies, relationships, and daily life.

In an age where Black, Brown, Indigenous and Queer peoples have been so brutalized by the mental health system in the West, we are in dire need of medicines for our Spirits, families and communities that do not replicate the harm so many of us are seeking refuge from.

My practice offers a container that honors non-linear ways of knowing, allows room to rest, dream, imagine, and creates space to slow down long enough to listen for what medicine is needed.

    • M.A. Counseling psychology & expressive arts therapy, California Institute of Integral Studies

    • Certificate, Black psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies

    • Practicum, Community mental health, Art Therapy Institute of North Carolina

    • B.A. Environmental Studies, Antioch University

    • Tarot for the Wild Soul, Lindsay Mack

    • Finding ourselves in fairytales: A narrative psychological approach, Dr. Sharon Blackie, Pacifica Graduate Institute

    • Tending the Hearth: Pre-colonial European folk magic traditions, Sister Spinster

    • Eco-Therapy: Conceptualization, Frame and Liability: Axis Mundi Center for Mental Health

    • Connecting with Nature Indoors and on Zoom, The Earthbody Institute

    • "Reclaiming the Mythical Feminine: Jungian & post-Jungian dreamwork & Goddess mythology, Anima Mundi School

    • The 4 I’s of Oppression: Axis Mundi Center for Mental Health

    • Unnameable losses: The unmetabolized ambiguous grief of adult children of refugees, Collectively Rooted

    • Working with Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Clients, Axis Mundi Center for Mental Health

    • “Medicinal Plants of the Gulf South”, Rowan & Sage

    • Alchemical Herbalism, School of Evolutionary Herbalism

    • Mujeres de Barro: Clay and Cacao with Mariana Mae

    • Emotionally Focused Therapy Intensive: Attachment Based Interventions for Couples in Crisis, Sue Johnson, PESI

    • Play Therapy with African American Children Exposed to Adverse Childhood Experiences, Association of Play Therapy

    • Indigenous Healing Practices: Story Teaches – Art Heals, Collectively Rooted

    • Healing: I believe that you have the capacity to heal yourself. I am here as an ally, guide and witness for the transformation you are initiating.

    • Humility: I believe listening and humility are the soil in which understanding flourishes. I don’t presume to know better than you what is right for your life.

    • Community: I believe that we do not heal in isolation. Our unique knowing combines to create solutions.

    • Belonging: I believe that all parts of you are welcome here.

    • Body wisdom: Listening to the joy, discomfort, pain and desires of the body helps to create connection and integration in our lives.