Who Are We?
We are a collaborative of women who came together with an idea: That by honoring our truest form of self-expression and joy, we can invite others to do the same and make a lasting, positive difference in the world.
❀Sarah Burkle, Co-Founder
Sarah began her own journey back to wholeness about 10 years ago when she began studying to become a mental health therapist, and she recognized the wounded filter that she saw the world and life through. A filter that helped her survive, yet one that was based solely on the past, created from survival instincts in response to perceived hurts and threats that no longer existed. Years of personal therapy eventually gave way to psychedelic-assisted therapy, breathwork, sound healing, acupuncture, energy work and all kinds of various forms that provided access to profound transformations.
She wanted to create Moon Blossom Collective to offer expanded accessibility to services, education, and resources based on a holistic model encompassing the whole person and the whole system in which they are a part. From her perspective, Moon Blossom Collective is her gift back to the community that has been an integral part in her own healing journey. It is her small contribution within her larger vision to change the world into a place of love and peace.
Sarah earned a master's degree in counseling with a specialization in marriage and family therapy from Saint Mary's College of California in 2013. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist (88866) and certified in MDMA-assisted therapy with MAPS, Integrative Somatic Trauma-Therapy, Emotional Freedom Technique, Reiki (master level), and a certified breathwork coach. She has also trained extensively in the areas of somatic-based approaches, trauma-informed care, ancient spiritual traditions, and energy healing practices.
Her experience has included work with posttraumatic stress and complex trauma, anxiety, depressive, and eating disorders, domestic violence and sexual assault survivors, homelessness, end-of-life care, gender dysphoria, and cognitive/developmental disorders. Sarah also owns and operates Non-Ordinary Therapies, a private-practice dedicated to providing quality mental, emotional, and spiritual support to assist people in accessing their deepest levels of self and a richer connection with the world.
Sarah works at the intersection of science and spirituality, helping to bring about non-ordinary states of consciousness which have been shown to provide a fundamental environment for deep healing to occur. These states are just outside our normal everyday experiences that expand beyond our mind’s perceived limitations. By intentionally accessing these non-ordinary states, Sarah supports people to awaken their own potential to heal wounding and create an entirely new narrative and way of being in the world.
❀Katrina Stuart, Co-Founder
Katrina is holistic nutritional coach and lightworker who continuously seeks truth to help others heal and live life to its full potential. She holds a core belief that anyone can grow in a positive direction when embracing the proper tools and remaining open-minded.
Her journey of exploring holistic practices began about a decade ago, after she survived a terrible car accident in which she almost lost her life. The experience shook her to her core and served as a powerful catalyst for change. Afterward her perspective towards life fundamentally shifted. Not only was she thankful to simply be alive, but she also decided she needed to make the most of this life and find ways towards mending.
For years prior to the accident, she’d been living a life of partying hard and knew deep down she needed to pump the brakes—consuming way too much inflammatory foods, alcohol, and other harmful substances to escape and self-medicate. Alongside all this, she’d been suffering from depression, anxiety, insomnia, gut issues, and acne, for which she’d relied on pharmaceutical medication to manage. Yet the medication was only acting as a band aid, not dealing with the root cause.
The change in her post-accident life naturally began with nutrition and cooking because she’d always enjoyed learning about these subjects so much. It was then that she came across a book titled The 10-Day Green Smoothie Cleanse by JJ Smith, and decided to give the cleanse a try. It was the first one she ever dedicated herself to, and she saw encouraging results. So she continued on this path of nutrition.
A few years later she was introduced to The Medical Medium protocol by her best friend, Ricardo, who she remains forever grateful to. Some of her biggest takeaways were: clearly being able to identify nourishing foods and herbs, understanding the impact of proper hydration and sun, and the deep medicine available through simple practices of movement, compassion, and LOVE. This set her up for an even deeper dive into her healing journey. She became more engaged in meditation, sound healing, reiki, medicine journeys, and shadow work.
It was with this background that she co-conceived Moon Blossom Collective, which she envisions as a safe space to honor all the knowledge gained through her own experiences by proving insights and tools to others who are seeking a holistic approach to better their lives.
❀Dawn Bratton, Co-Founder
Dawn lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has found a quiet corner to write poetry and prose that orbits the image of eyes and theme of perception as the gateway to the universe of experience.
Her creative story begins in earnest fifteen years ago, when she found herself heading down a consuming professional path as a CPA that left her with an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction. Driven by a desire for a fuller experience of life, she stepped back from her nascent career and took a hard look.
Like Frost’s two roads diverging in a yellow wood, two possibilities laid themselves out before her. One led to a secure but unfulfilling life. The other, though brimming with the unknown, offered a life of deep exploration and personal growth.
So began a ten-year odyssey as an autodidact fueled by an insatiable curiosity, during which she embarked on a literary and intellectual voyage, traveling the seas of time, immersing herself in the most influential works spanning the centuries—from antiquity to present—with the aim of understanding the development of human thought over time.
During this same time-period, creative writing wove its way into the core of her life, like a golden thread, connecting the most essential moments, as so many pearls. Always motivating her work was the impulse to illuminate experience through the creative act; and in so doing, she sought to expand the field of perception and to reconcile the contradictions within that area of illumination.
Along with creative writing, she also nurtures a meditative and therapeutic relationship with art, which she uses as a method of reaching that inner space where she goes quiet and just is. Mostly she collects items headed for the trash heap and breathes new life into them by transforming them into pieces of Art.
From 2021 - 2023 she served as secretary, and then vice president, for WordSwell Literary Journal, based out of Oakland, CA; and her own poetic work has appeared in journals like Oracle, Matter, The Opiate, Modern Literature, The Metaworker, Global Poemic, and Disquiet Arts, among other literary journals.
It was this personal journey that led her to co-found Moon Blossom Collective, which she perceives as a medium for offering support and guidance to others embarking on their own journeys of growth and discovery.
You can visit her at dawnbratton.com.
❀Veronica Hernandez, Co-Creator
Veronica works in the fields of spiritual counseling, shamanic healing, and the arts. Her practice draws on the Shipibo and wider Andean traditions of Peruvian shamanism, Jungian theory and eco-therapy practices.
The traditions she works with define health as a state of balance between spirit, soul, and body, where the sacred, the psyche, and the physical dimensions of the individual are harmonized through consciously engaging in practices that can help connect to the natural world in a way that evokes its sacredness.
Veronica received her degree and license in clinical psychology in Peru and received her clinical training at the Institute of Rational-Emotive Therapy, New York, under the supervision of Dr. Albert Ellis. She was assistant professor at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and research assistant at the Hospital Psiquiátrico Noguchi de Lima (Peru). In the United States, she worked as a Social Services Clinician at John Muir Health Hospital’s Inpatient Psychiatric Adolescent Unit, California before opening her own practice as a holistic healer and guide.
She earned her doctoral degree at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, where she carried out research on the healing and transformative benefits of entheogens, especially Ayahuasca.
Find out more at conscioustransformationwithveronica.com .
