Melissa Deeken, LMHCA
Namai Therapy, PLLC
Regional Director
Tacoma, WA

“There’s no pain on earth that doesn’t long for a benevolent witness” ~Sue Monk Kidd

Water has been a grief tender for me throughout my life, like a kind witness to my pains and losses that rise and fall like her waves.  I’ve learned that grief can not be compared or measured, solved or hurried.  It is visitor that comes in the night to tell us that our pain is “praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses” (Martín Prechtel)

I am a therapist on the lands of the Duwamish people in what is known today as Seattle where I walk alongside teens and adults in the journeys of their own healing and liberation. I believe that we are the ultimate knowers of our lives but as communal beings, find our way back home to ourselves through the witness of others and the earth. 

Through Waves of Grief, I combine my love for water and movement to offer breathwork, cold plunging, embodied movement and ritual as ways to invite our bodies to grieve what we have loved and long for.  In my spare time I love to dance, be whimsy, and do advocacy work for the pains of injustice.