This is the story of why supporting the supporters became the whole reason The Infinity Container exists.
When I was earning my doctorate in the early 2000s, I felt inspired by the incredible minds I collaborated with — but also constrained by a rigid mold I couldn't quite fit into. While publishing research and seeing breakthroughs in challenging populations, I was equally drawn to exploring the consciousness of my organs & attending indie rock shows in the LES of NYC. I was deep in my yoga practice (RIP to Yoga High & deep appreciation to Mel Russo), meditating (thank you Maria Cutrona), playing with sound without a sound bath in sight, and studying somatic practices long before they became mainstream. It felt lonely and difficult to relate to my community. I had few spaces to reinforce the expansions that were taking place.
Despite the intellectual stimulation of academic conferences, my soul felt untouched. Behavioral science felt flat and our conferences felt corporate — a world that reinforced repetition, conformity, and fixed systems rather than creativity and expansion. The schools of the special education classrooms I was teaching in would barely provide pencils to our data driven classrooms. How could systems designed to foster learning lack inspiration in their aesthetics and approach?
A Shift Toward Integration
Meeting my mentor, Dr. Joyce (aka Nana Joysee – join us for her series, StoryTime with Nana Joysee) changed everything. She encouraged me to exist outside the box — to merge behavioral science with creativity. She showed me how to be both a scientist and an artist, blending research with music, painting, indigenous wisdom & conscious exploration. This holistic approach opened my mind and methodologies. Her way of existing, consisted of merging more with quantum than the "walk-a-day" as she describes our Newtonian world.
The first time she introduced me to quantum I didn't know how to leave her office safely. How do we walk down 6th Ave in NYC in such an expanded state? Won't I get mugged? She instructed me to use that expansion as a forcefield of protection. I could be softer and stronger when integrated with a different realm of my physicality.
Creating The Infinity Container
I founded The Infinity Container to break away from the limiting structures of academia and traditional mental health & professional development spaces. It's a place for creators, healers, and researchers — those expanding human potential through art, science, and spirit. A space where mistakes spark inspiration, where personal growth and professional identity can coexist.
I didn't want to make a space just for therapists. I wanted to make a space where more of us got tuned in and turned on to pitching into a greater sense of self. A space where people can practice inter-connection & intraconnection (Shout out to Dr Dan Siegel), feel held in possibility, and feel intrinsically stimulated to take initiative to help others, make things that help others and feel joy in helping others. A space where integration occurs within and between us. This is why it's so important that there is a diverse group of practitioners and space holders in The Infinity Container.
Artists are Spaceholders Too
I wanted to create spaces where supporters and helpers feel held, resourced, and inspired.
When I asked myself how I typically receive support, I realized that it's not just from my loved ones, my mentors, peer-reviewed research, the plant medicines, but most often I'd say I am supported by the artists. When I'm needing something to help move me, I first turn to music. When I need to shift and be held in between therapy sessions, I'll look up at the paintings in my office and their colors and shapes draw me into a different state of being, while connecting me to the heart of the artist. I'll open up a book of poetry and let the words dance with what was once stuck and confused and create an integration that allows organization to connect with the more chaotic emotional sensations. In addition to pulling tarot cards and awakening my intuition, I turn to the ocean and the forest, in appreciation of the beauty created by the most incredible artist of them all, Mother Earth.
This resulted in The Infinity Container being a space where artists can receive support, inspiration, work through creative processes & feel celebrated for being practitioners and space holders for the masses — supporting the supporters, in every discipline, not just the clinical ones.
We're Supporting the Supporters
The Infinity Container is supporting the supporters and for me that includes the artists, the "healers," and the researchers, as we have many different forms of medicine here on Earth. Why not learn from many to stimulate possibilities that cannot exist when we only read from one section of the library?
While we're much more globally connected than ever before our world is becoming more fragmented and polarized. When the pandemic hit I was slammed with more work than ever, as people were feeling collectively open to therapy. People were panicking. First responders were overwhelmed. Our support systems were all overwhelmed.
The net sum of that experience was a) people, even therapists, don't know how to integrate that which feels so chaotically fragmented and b) the supporters need support too. We need inspiration. We need measures to prevent burnout. We need spaces to be messy. We need networked mentorship.
I wanted to offer us a space to learn about all of the different integrative tools we have to work with.
Healing isn't linear after all. It certainly doesn't happen in a box filled with shoulds. But it does happen in The Infinity Container, where the plane of possibility is amplified in sharing, where supporters feel nourished and supported…
Supporting the supporters was never a tagline. It's the design principle behind every part of this container.
Where integration is the way.