ABOUT LEDA
I’ve produced everything from feature documentaries, TV shows, and commercials to video games, websites, festivals, art installations, immersive experiences, experimental films, interactive media, social media campaigns, podcasts, and impact-driven marketing. I love spreadsheets, and I’m good with budgets. My career as a creative, line, and executive producer has been long, exciting, and successful. I’ve run my own production company, led a communications agency, and helped manage production-related businesses.
But I’ve always had a deeper calling—to help people heal. My grandmother was a psychiatrist, and I admired how she transformed lives. While I majored in film, I also studied Buddhist psychology, critical theory, and quantum mechanics. I was a doula at SF General Hospital and worked as a medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic. I’ve completed two yoga teacher trainings (Yoga Works and It’s Yoga), attended 10-day vipassana retreats, and produced large-scale art events for the LA County Department of Mental Health, focused on reducing stigma. I’ve also worked with The California Endowment, producing healing art activations, designed to uplift the voices of young people of color across California.
But what I believe qualifies me most to walk beside you is that I’ve climbed my own inner mountains made of attachment issues, codependency, heartbreak, CPTSD from relational trauma, and burnout. Through talk therapy, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, deep friendships, and many other modalities, I’ve found healing. I know firsthand how vital support is in overcoming life’s challenges, there have been many guides who have held my hand along the way and now, I want to pay it forward.
In 2019, I completed the UCLA Social Emotional Arts and Healing Certification and am almost done with a Master’s in Psychology. I’m excited to put everything I’ve learned into practice to help others find their way.
HOW TO HEAL
The process of healing is a strange and powerful thing. It’s hard to explain why it works, but when it does, you feel it. There are a thousand different ways to approach it, but at its core, this process is about healing relational wounds—with others, yes, but most importantly, with yourself.
Most people seek help because their relationships aren’t working the way they want them to. Maybe they keep choosing the wrong partners, or they feel unseen and unheard by the people they love. Maybe they’re constantly at war with themselves—self-doubt, self-criticism, self-abandonment. And often, these struggles aren’t random—they trace back to the earliest relationships that shaped us. The way we were loved (or not) as kids, the ways we learned to survive in our families, the ghosts of past relationships that still whisper in our ears.
Research shows that lack of attunement in early childhood impacts our emotional development. When there’s a lack of attunement it can impact our ability to regulate emotions and form secure relationships. Many of us think our childhoods were happy but each of us is born with unique needs. If our caregivers were not attuned to those unique needs we can spend a lifetime trying to get those met in maladaptive ways.
My aim is to attune with you and guide you toward attuning with yourself on many levels.
Hurt People Hurt People. Healed People Heal People. There’s so much hurt in the world. It moves like a current, passing from one person to the next—someone gets hurt, and they hurt someone else in return. The only way to stop it is to choose, again and again, to break the cycle. To say, “This ends with me. I will not pass this pain forward.” That choice takes patience. Becoming aware of the instant your mind starts going down old familiar neuropathways requires a high level of awareness, and then remembering to choose another path takes an even higher level. We need others to remind us of what we already know, over and over, until the new neuropathways are stronger than the old.
Be patient and over-the-top kind to yourself. That patience and kindness toward self is one of the first, most radical acts of love you can offer yourself.
Sympathetic Magic
I’m developing a series of installations and objects that serve as symbolic metaphors for the process of change or healing. I think of it as sympathetic magic. These objects are designed to make the experience of growth more concrete. To find out more about this work go to LedaLeda.com
