I'm Fathima (She/They)— a therapy goer and therapist-in-training committed to honouring the lived experiences and innate wisdom that each person brings. I see myself as a companion rather than a healer, walking alongside you as we co-tend to the parts of you that carry disenfranchised emotions, stories, and voices.

I believe healing occurs through connection—to all that is within us, around us, and one with us. In relationships built on trust and resonance, we create space for organically felt safeness that nurtures genuine curiosity, authentic choice, and expansive love. My work centres on creating a compassionate, attuned space where these feelings can be acknowledged, witnessed, held, and supported, allowing them to find release, movement, or transformation toward personal evolution, collective care, and social change.

I think of “tending" as an approach that emphasizes compassionate, continuous care for your emotional, physical, and relational needs, rather than focusing solely on "fixing" or problem-solving. You are invited to engage deeply with your experiences, addressing wounds and discomforts as one might tend to a garden—with patience, presence, and respect for the natural pace of healing. With genuine curiosity and without judgment, we work toward reconnecting with parts of you that may have been silenced or disowned, cultivating a deeper understanding of their stories, emotions, and the ways you notice them in your body, so you can build a renewed relationship with your embodied self.

I say I "co-tend" because healing is a shared, collaborative process rather than something done to you. Each of us brings our own strengths, wisdom, and lived experiences into the therapeutic space, partnering to create a supportive environment for exploration, learning, digesting, growth, expansion, action, healing, and liberation. In this way, we honour the sovereignty of both myself and yourself, allowing us to actively engage with the work as partners in your healing journey. As I co-tend and bear witness to your evolution, I, too, naturally evolve alongside you. If you feel called to explore this journey with me, I would be honoured to be your companion.

Sessions generally begin with a brief check-in to see how you're arriving in the space—whether there’s something immediate that needs attention or a continuation from previous sessions. You might share how your week has been, a particular challenge, or a recurring theme that’s come up. From there, we explore what’s happening in the present moment, often starting with your physical and emotional state—how you're feeling in your body and any emotions that are coming up.

I might ask you to notice sensations in your body, helping you connect more deeply with what’s surfacing. This could lead us to somatic work, where we explore how your body holds tension, trauma, or emotions. You might discover areas that feel heavy, tight, or numb, and we'll explore those with curiosity rather than judgment.

As we dive deeper, our conversation may shift to exploring the roots of these feelings, which might involve looking at past experiences, intergenerational patterns, or socio-cultural influences as well as current circumstances, your environment, relationships, and socio-political context. For example, we might explore how family dynamics, cultural expectations, systemic oppression, or ancestral trauma play a role in what you’re experiencing today. I use a gentle, non-linear approach, allowing you to follow the threads that feel important in the moment. Throughout this process, your sovereignty is prioritized. You are the expert of your own life, and I honour your autonomy by supporting you in navigating your own insights, decisions, and sensemaking process.

We can work to bring contextualized awareness to your identity conflicts, lived experiences, self-worth, trust, guilt, and shame, exploring how various aspects of your life influence your mental health and well-being. We will examine not only what has happened to you, but also what happened before you and what occurs around you.

We often bring in metaphors, imagination, and symbolic imagery along with somatic awareness to help you gain insight into your inner world. You might describe a feeling as an ocean, a river, a heavy boulder, or shapeless blob of a particular colour and/or texture, and together we explore what that represents—whether it’s family pressure, unresolved trauma, or something else. These tools help us make sense of what’s hard to express in words alone.

As we near the end of the session, we typically work on integrating what came up. This could be through somatic embodiment practices, visualization, or simply summarizing the insights you’ve gained. I often invite you to consider how to carry the work we did into your daily life—whether it’s through small actions, reflections, or noticing how you respond to situations between sessions.

The flow is always client-centred, meaning the pace and direction are guided by where you feel safe enough going. Trust, safety, and your sovereignty are paramount in our therapeutic relationship. Some sessions may focus more on exploring deep-rooted emotional wounds or identity conflicts, while others might centre on immediate challenges you're facing in the present. Each session is flexible and intended to meet you where you are.

Our work may also involve identifying your Routes of Safety, pod mapping, strengthening support systems, building resilience, and relieving stress—recognizing that self-care alone is often not enough to anchor stability, especially amid the polycrisis we face. I engage in, and encourage, practices that extend beyond individual therapy, such as connecting with community, sharing resources, participating in support networks, and advocating for social justice. I welcome bringing your experiences of grief, rage, and resistance into our work, should you choose.

Our lives are influenced by factors beyond our immediate experiences, and both our personal and communal healing are intrinsically linked to our collective liberation. We heal and care not only for ourselves, but for each other and the natural world, as we are all part of a larger whole—body, mind, spirit, and nature.

In our sessions, we can explore a range of topics and concerns. As a therapy seeker myself, I have often noticed the limitations in specialty areas and reasons for therapy listed on most therapist directories. It has been rare to find listings that reflect the experiences and concerns that have brought myself and some clients I work with to seek therapy, making it difficult to feel confident that a provider would be a good fit for those needs. Too often, we’ve taken leaps of faith, hoping our experiences weren’t “too much” to address.

My hope is to transform the process of finding a therapist from leaps of faith into gentle steps. With this intention, I have created a non-exhaustive list of topics that go beyond typical “reasons for therapy” options found in directories. I hope this list serves therapy seekers who are often marginalized, offering them a sense of being seen, acknowledged, and provided with hope.

Some Areas We Can Explore Together:

• Identity, Self, and Evolving Culture Exploration

• Life Transitions
(e.g., career changes, marriage, divorce, relocation)

• Self-Esteem & Self-Worth

• Somatic Parts Work

• Asexuality-Affirming Therapy

• Relationship Issues
(Romantic, Platonic, Friendships, Peers, Community)

• Family Conflict

• Eldest Daughter Syndrome

• First-Generation or Child of Immigrants Challenges

• Immigrant Experiences
(Stress Related to Assimilation, Acculturation, Family Dynamics, Expectations, Undocumented)

• Navigating Multiple Cultural Identities
(Balancing Cultural Heritage and Personal Evolution)

• Brahmanical Patriarchy

• Intergenerational Patterns and Trauma Decontextualized as Culture

• Cultural Isolation and Loneliness

• Cultural Guilt, Shame, and Obligations
(e.g., Leaving Family Behind, Unmet Expectations)

• Pressure to Succeed / Model Minority Myth

• Guilt and Shame Around Identity, Life Choices, or Cycle Breaking

• Gender-Based Expectations in Cultural or Religious Contexts

• Impact of Racism, Discrimination, and Systemic Oppression

• Stress Related to Racism, Islamophobia, and/or Xenophobia

• Navigating Interracial or Intercultural Relationships

• Workplace Stress or Discrimination

• Displacement

• Trauma of Colonialism

• Collective Grief and Trauma

• Activist Burnout

• Disenfranchised Grief and/or Rage,
(Including in the Context of Ongoing Genocides: Palestine, Kashmir, Sudan, Congo, etc.)

• Disillusionment with "Business as Usual"
(Including in the Context of Polycrisis)

This list includes topics that have brought myself as well as some of the clients I've worked with to therapy. If you would like to add to this list or share your own experiences, please feel free to contact me. I would be more than happy to include them here.

● A Note on The Role of Therapy ●

Therapy can play an integral role in navigating the complexities of these experiences and concerns, offering a space to be seen, heard, supported, and gently challenged. It can facilitate reflection, healing, sense-making, growth, and expansion. Therapy can help you develop a deeper understanding of yourself and your experiences, cultivate resilience, and explore your relationship with the world around you. However, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. While it provides valuable support, it may not always be sufficient on its own.

In many cases, therapy is one of several tools available to you on your journey toward healing and liberation. My practice emphasizes contextualizing individual experiences within broader social, cultural, and systemic frameworks. Personal healing is often interdependent with collective struggles for justice and equity, and this interconnected approach is central to our work together.

As we tend to the nuances of your experiences, my work includes supporting you in identifying resources that align with your needs. The path to healing is multifaceted and may also include community support, activism, and other forms of self- and communal-care.

The connection we cultivate—often referred to as the therapeutic relationship—is where the most benefit often arises. In this relationship, we co-create a safer, supportive space for you to explore your inner world, lived experiences, and relational dynamics without judgment.

I believe each person holds profound wisdom within themselves. In our work together, my hope is to help you reconnect with that wisdom, so that you feel more at home in yourself, your community, and the world around you. We can work to co-create a space where your story is fully seen and honoured, and where healing unfolds at your own pace.