around here, healing isn’t joyless.
We are Lauren (she/her) and Fern (she/her), therapists and co-founders of candlemine psychotherapy. We’re also kindred spirits and forever friends who share a genuine love of eating. When we aren’t working, we love spending time together – creating delicious meals, bathing in the shade of the trees or just existing.
our shared moments gave us the idea for candlemine.
We saw what was missing from the care settings we worked in, and wanted to create something different.
Care that brought curiosity to how people relate to their bodies and eating, and placed healing those relationships at the center of what we do.
We love creating spaces where people can explore, unlearn, and reconnect with themselves. Candlemine is where we bring all of that together: quality care, curiosity, joy, and the radical idea that you are allowed to feel good in your body and at the table.
We recognize how vulnerable it is to talk about who we are as eaters and how we feel about our bodies. We do this work alongside you. Our own body stories involve plenty of hurt (and healing!). This business of having a body is HARD. We also believe it can be magical.
It’s ok if you’re not there. You don’t have to be all in to start this work. You are welcome here as you are.
Choosing candlemine as the name of our practice reflections our intention to reimagine the mislabeling of bodies as wrong or defective. We want to support the reclaiming of what the dominant culture has used to harm and disempower bodies by centering trust, curiosity and freedom.
candlemine (noun)
1. A reference to a person’s own storehouse of fat, or belly, from a time when candles were made of tallow (rendered beef fat) rather than wax. Used as an insult in Shakespeare’s Henry IV to refer to a person of a larger body size.
2. Where digestion and metabolism of food occurs in the body. A place of fire and transformation.
3. Our guidance. A field of light that exists inside each of us and represents our innate drive to return to the elemental self. A force that captures our intuition, wisdom and deep knowing.
