Erin Doerwald
I advocate for the person receiving care with the people who are near and dear to them. Ensuring that everyone is seen, heard, and valued during this powerful, and sometimes powerfully challenging, season of life.
I am passionate, friendly, kind, goofy, earnest-meets-irreverent, thoughtful, compassionate, fun and endlessly curious.
I grew up inside of a large, extended family that was at once incredibly fun and loving while at the same time mystifyingly hard on each other. My father was the adored, youngest child of four siblings and as the family story goes, he held a lot of promise, and much was expected of him. In his adult life, he battled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder. It took him outside of his predicted narrative and turned him and our nuclear family into outcasts in many ways. My family of origin story was profoundly impacted by living with a loved one with a chronic mental health condition. It shaped my sense of belonging (and not belonging) inside of the larger family system and in the world at large. At an early age, I was offered a master class in unpredictability, chaos, and what it means to experience both privilege and poverty. I became incredibly curious about mental health, how it is affected by family and societal systems, and how we might influence those outcomes differently with wellbeing practices.
For twenty years, I’ve been a committed practitioner of yoga and meditation. For nearly ten of those years I have been working as a clinical social worker helping families, couples and individuals find their way to wellness in both a non-profit and private practice capacity. I am a proud alumni of the Facundo Valdez School of Social Work of New Mexico Highlands University and have served as an adjunct professor for the MSW Program. As the Program Director of The Sky Center of the New Mexico Suicide Intervention Project, I developed the agency’s Toolkit for Wellbeing Workshops, offering systemic resiliency practices to local, national and international audiences. I am a certified mindfulness teacher with the International Mindfulness Teachers Association and an Affiliated Mindful Awareness Practices (MAPs) Teacher for UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC). I also serve as a mentor for students receiving training in the Long Distance Intensive Practice Program at UCLA’s MARC.
