SO LA exists for the moments when the places we expected to help us no longer know how to hold what we’re carrying.

What began as a space dedicated to sexual abuse advocacy has grown into an ecosystem where neuroscience, symbolism, sensory experience, art, research, and stories come together to help us better understand ourselves.

Healing rarely speaks in just one language.

Some of the most significant experiences that change us reach our bodies before they reach language. And different parts of us are reached through many different languages.

That’s why this space was built with many different doorways. Whether you arrive through a candle, a crystal, tarot, neuroscience, a story, or a piece of art, each doorway offers a different way of understanding yourself and returning to self trust so you can heal safely on your terms.

Every path leads back to the same place: the courageous work of understanding yourself with greater honesty, compassion, and hope.

Every offering gives back to organizations aligned with the stories they represent. We also welcome suggestions and feedback for the organizations you personally love and recommend!

🗺️

  • Olfactory Healing Candles

    📍The body experiences.

    🌫️ Heavy Fog

    🗺️ Four of Swords


    Sometimes safety begins before language does. Long before we can explain why, a scent can take us to different places and return us to ourselves. Olfactory healing candles for embodiment were created around one remarkable feature of the human brain: smell has a uniquely direct relationship with memory, emotion, and the nervous system, reaching them differently than our other senses. Each candle scent is intentionally developed as a sensory doorway, pairing neuroscience, symbolism, and ritual to offer your nervous system a place to finally exhale and rest. 

    Our curated linesThe Hand You’re Dealt and Below Deck explore the ways scent can reconnect us with our senses and who we are, while each candle also supports a nonprofit aligned with its story.

    Enter the Candle Collection Studio🔥 

  • Crystals

    📍The hands hold

    🌧️ Rain on dry earth

    🗺️ Page of Cups


    When systems collapse, the mind fragments, but the hands can still ground themselves in what’s real. Crystals are one of many symbolic languages that can remind us of how to recognize ourselves through sensation, ritual, and personal meaning. People have used them to create comfort, connection, spatial harmony, and find healing for centuries.

    They are another doorway into our sensory world here, where objects become companions for clarity, guidance, reflection and healing. Not because crystals can heal us on their own, but because the relationships we build with them sometimes help us recognize and heal parts of ourselves.

    Enter the Crystal Collection 💎 

  • The Tui Tarot

    📍The mind recognizes patterns.

    💨Shifting Winds

    🗺️ Eight of Swords


    You are not crazy for feeling the pressure and weight of hidden truths before you can explain them. The Tui Tarot is an original deck created as a symbolic language for personal pattern recognition, reflection, and meaning-making. It was created in honor of the beautiful country of New Zealand, named after their native Tui bird. It’s the place I traveled to honor my truth, trust my inner compass fully for the first time and where I met my now husband.

    When you are trying to make sense of what you are experiencing amidst shifting influences, this deck was made to help people look at their reflected reality clearly. Here, you can explore the cards, the symbolism, the spreads we pull as personalized roadmaps, and the many ways they connect throughout our ecosystem to offer guiding support and reveal the present patterns of your own survival and emergence.

    Enter the Tarot Studio 🗺️ 

  • Brain Health

    📍Science explains what happened.

    ⚡️Lightning

    🗺️ Page of Swords


    Sometimes, the collapses and heartbreaking experiences people too often blame themselves for aren’t personal failures, flaws, or defects at all. It’s a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do to protect.

    Neuroscience offers another beautiful language for understanding trauma, memory, healing, and why and how your body’s been carrying it all. Exploring the science behind how our brains function isn't about studying an abstract textbook, it’s about finding clarity, separating the true self from survival response, and understanding yourself more deeply as a tool and guide in personal development, health, growth and healing.

    Explore the Science Behind Understanding Our Brains to Understand Ourselves 🧠 

  • Support Through Many Doorways

    📍Many paths are available.

    🌡️Rising Thermal Currents

    🗺️ Three of Wands


    Whether you’re looking for understanding, regulation, connection, community, creativity, or personalized deeper support, no two healing journeys look the same or always need the same things at the same times. There is no official guidebook for navigating traumatic experience the right way, nor the cost of truth exposure in the many systems that cannot hold us safely, which is why every offering here begins in the exact same place: meeting you wherever you are on your path.

    The resources, research, experiences, art, sensory tools, and guidance found through these different doorways are designed to support you during all the unexpected stages and fluid phases of your healing.

    Find Your Starting Place📍 

  • Charms to Carry

    📍The body carries the reminder.

    ⛈️The Structural Storm

    🗺️The Lovers


    Objects have always helped us to carry what words cannot. While collecting charms to honor life’s milestones is common, my husband purchased charms for me to remind me who I was amidst the chaos I was facing and witnessing. I can’t tell you how much they helped me just by physically looking at them every single day. I loved the idea for others to be able to have the same experience.

    Ballast Charms were born from that exact experience. They’re symbolic pieces created to mark what has been witnessed, survived, and remembered. Each pendant is a physical reminder of a truth we can hold and wear, that remains steady even when life around it doesn’t.

    The inaugural collection, Paper Vows, is a line that shows where fractured sacred symbols became lasting witnesses to the difference between appearances and truth. These are the pieces that did not break. ⚓️

    Enter Ballast Charm Studio 📿 

The Origin Story

📍The origin of the ecosystem

🌀The Eye of the Hurricane

🗺️ The Hermit


Every ecosystem has an origin. 

Tiny Heart Pieces is the story that made this work impossible to walk away from… a literary memoir and living work of art that gave rise to everything else you see here. What began as one person’s search to understand the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse became a larger, universal question:

Where are people supposed to go when their lived experience and need for support isn’t adequately held by family, institutions, mental health systems, or the law?

This book is a doorway into that question.

Whether or not your story looks like this one, I hope you find something here that helps you trust what you’ve known, understand what you’ve lived, and feel less alone.

📖
II. The Motherland

II. The Motherland

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II. The Motherland

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$44.00 USD
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I. The Black Rock

I. The Black Rock

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I. The Black Rock

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$44.00 USD
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IV. In The Raw

IV. In The Raw

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IV. In The Raw

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$44.00 USD
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The Foundation

SO LA began as a blog and advocacy site dedicated to sexual abuse awareness and the often-overlooked aftermath survivors are left to navigate. Through this platform, I recognized the suffering stored in the body and life altering, lingering effects trauma has on the mind, body, brain and nervous system. 

While the bones of the site began in sexual abuse trauma, the patterns extended far beyond a single kind of trauma. Realized developmental trauma impacts all of us, and has a long line of history before its' wake deep in our DNA.

As the community and site continued to grow, I saw where many forms of trauma shared remarkably similar patterns in their aftermath. That realization gradually expanded my mission to become more supportive of all walks of life.

Tools, teachers and practices to take care of your mental health and brain function deserve full accessibility, but this sadly isn't always or even often the case. SO LA continues to exist, in part, to help close that gap by making meaningful resources and healing modalities easier to discover and understand.

In shared aftermath effects, the site offers support toward all of your unique paths toward self-trust, purpose and meaning. It also acknowledges the tremendous self compassion needed on the journey to self acceptance and safety in your body and mind. Taking care of your mental health, uncovering who you really are, and understanding what you're meant to give back is a courageous journey. The vulnerability it takes to trust and open yourself up in this way after enduring traumatic pain and suffering is not for the faint of the heart, yet the feeling of belonging is so important for survivors at the same time. 

Support doesn’t always have to come with a hefty price tag. Sometimes it arrives through a conversation with a stranger, a book you didn’t intend to pull off the shelf, a song, a film you didn’t expect to recognize so much of your self and story in, a poem, a visual symbol that strikes a chord, a painting, or learning to create, write, narrate, or paint, yourself. There are many unexpected moments where we recognize ourselves in other forms of language, and while signs and symbols may not have appeared in your syllabus, they have helped human beings make meaning and see themselves more fully and deeply for thousands of years.

I built SO LA to offer an array of products and tools to promote safety in embodiment, self trust and belonging, so people can tap in on their own terms, and give back to carefully selected, relevant causes at the same time. I wanted this site to offer a community of growing and accessible support in this way, helping other supportive foundations and communities to grow too. 

SO LA Safe Space is now so much more, it’s become an ecosystem of belonging and in every room you find here, support is always available in whatever language speaks to you. 

🌱

The Foundation

SO LA began as a blog and advocacy site dedicated to sexual abuse awareness and the often-overlooked aftermath survivors are left to navigate. Through this platform, I recognized the suffering stored in the body and life altering, lingering effects trauma has on the mind, body, brain and nervous system. 

While the bones of the site began in sexual abuse trauma, the patterns extended far beyond a single kind of trauma. Realized developmental trauma impacts all of us, and has a long line of history before its' wake deep in our DNA.

As the community and site continued to grow, I saw where many forms of trauma shared remarkably similar patterns in their aftermath. That realization gradually expanded my mission to become more supportive of all walks of life.

Tools, teachers and practices to take care of your mental health and brain function deserve full accessibility, but this sadly isn't always or even often the case. SO LA continues to exist, in part, to help close that gap by making meaningful resources and healing modalities easier to discover and understand.

In shared aftermath effects, the site offers support toward all of your unique paths toward self-trust, purpose and meaning. It also acknowledges the tremendous self compassion needed on the journey to self acceptance and safety in your body and mind. Taking care of your mental health, uncovering who you really are, and understanding what you're meant to give back is a courageous journey. The vulnerability it takes to trust and open yourself up in this way after enduring traumatic pain and suffering is not for the faint of the heart, yet the feeling of belonging is so important for survivors at the same time. 

Support doesn’t always have to come with a hefty price tag. Sometimes it arrives through a conversation with a stranger, a book you didn’t intend to pull off the shelf, a song, a film you didn’t expect to recognize so much of your self and story in, a poem, a visual symbol that strikes a chord, a painting, or learning to create, write, narrate, or paint, yourself. There are many unexpected moments where we recognize ourselves in other forms of language, and while signs and symbols may not have appeared in your syllabus, they have helped human beings make meaning and see themselves more fully and deeply for thousands of years.

I built SO LA to offer an array of products and tools to promote safety in embodiment, self trust and belonging, so people can tap in on their own terms, and give back to carefully selected, relevant causes at the same time. I wanted this site to offer a community of growing and accessible support in this way, helping other supportive foundations and communities to grow too. 

SO LA Safe Space is now so much more, it’s become an ecosystem of belonging and in every room you find here, support is always available in whatever language speaks to you. 

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