Hera. Hedra. Hedera: Ivy.
Ivy grows around ruins. She arrives quietly in dead places and restores life through the slow reweaving of relationship.
She protects exposed soil from erosion. Holds moisture inside depleted ground. Creates shelter for birds, insects, fungal networks. Softens stone.
Patiently, almost invisibly, She begins rebuilding the conditions that allow life to return.
Internal Family Systems
A gentle way of listening inward. Meeting the many parts of you with presence, curiosity and care – until what was forgotten begins to relate again.
Mother-Centered & Aware Parenting
Herbalism & Plant Spirit Healing
The green world – they are not resources. They are kin. We learn to listen to their medicine – as substance, as spirit, as memory of the land.
Animism & Earth Reconnection
The world is alive, and in relationship with us. Reclaiming belonging through direct contact with place, cycles and the alchemical forces that shape our life.
This work is an invitation to return.
Here, we remember the life-organizing intelligence that allows bodies, relationships, projects, children, and communities to rebuild connection to life itself.
We remember softness, safety and repair. We remember delight.
Wilderness returning to the body. A body that holds nothing back from Life.
Being full of our own wonder and enchantment.
Until stone remembers it belongs to the forest.
what is ifs therapy?
“We rarely hear the inward music, but we’re all dancing to it nonetheless”
Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi
Internal Family Systems is the practice of hearing your inner music more clearly.
For within every person there exists not one singular voice, but many living currents. They do not always agree with one another. Yet almost every part we struggle against has been trying, however imperfectly, to help us.
IFS understands symptoms not as brokenness or pathology, not as enemies to overpower, but as intelligent adaptations: parts of ourselves forced underground, hardened around old injuries, or pushed into survival.
Healing begins when those parts are met not with force, conquest or domination, but with relationship – with curiosity, tenderness and enough safety for life to return on its own.
But life does not return quietly. Ivy does not simply restore abandoned places. Ivy is not polite.
She swallows castles. Softens stone. Pulls forgotten walls back into the forest. She is not interested in restoration alone, but in participation – in rebuilding the relationships through which life expresses itself again.
IFS is much the same.
It is not the practice of observing yourself from a distance. It is the practice of participating in your own life.
We’re not trying to control our mindset in order to become more peaceful. We’re healing in order to become more available for existence.
As the inner system comes back into relationship, something remarkable begins to happen.
People laugh harder. Love harder. Write books. Build gardens. Create businesses. Raise wild children. Sing. Dance. Cry. Risk.
Become increasingly impossible to domesticate.
What once felt fragmented begins to recover coherence. Nothing inside has to remain exiled any longer.
Healing is less a transformation into someone new than a return to the life-organizing intelligence that has always lived within you.
The intelligence that knows how to grow forests through ruins.
The end of suffering is only the beginning. IFS is the recovery of our capacity to participate wholeheartedly in life. Not merely to survive it. To delight in it. To become gloriously alive.
Hi there, I am Ana.
MEDICAL DOCTOR | IFS THERAPIST | AWARE PARENTING INSTRUCTOR | WOMEN’S CIRCLE FACILITATOR
I am a woman, mother of three and steward of sacred land in central Portugal. I trained as a medical doctor and Internal Medicine resident, and a I am also a certified Internal Family Systems Level 3 therapist, with extensive training in integrative medicine, clinical herbalism, and trauma-informed care. My work is rooted in both science and relationship – to the body, to the nervous system, to the land, to ancestry, and to the wider web of life.
There is room here for complexity. For personal grief and collective grief. For the many voices that live inside us. For healing that is both deeply intimate and inseparable from the world we belong to.
I work with individuals, couples, and families online, worldwide.
What my clients say
BOOK AN APPOINTMENT
If something in you recognizes this, all of you is welcome here.
My consultations offer a safe, ethical and compassionate space where you can explore your inner story with presence and depth. I use the approach of the IFS model, combined with clinical experience, somatic practices and an animistic relationship with all of life – on a path of reconnection with yourself, your rhythms and the wider web.
Blogs & Resources
Reflections and resources to help you meet your inner world with curiosity and compassion.
The House of Hera
Rewilding Hera is not “women reclaiming themselves.” It’s not about feminine empowerment. It’s about how civilizations organized around the exiling of vulnerability produce relational extraction, emotional fragmentation, ecological destruction, and disconnection from life. How it all comes from the same psychic split: the inability to remain in reverent relationship with dependency.
What Do You Mean, “Turn Inward”? There’s Nothing There
For many people, the beginning of IFS is not difficult because they are broken, blocked, or incapable of inner work. It is difficult because they were never taught what it actually means to turn inward.
How Internal Family Systems helped me prepare for Birth
I moved through birth the way you move through a storm you’re trying to survive. Bracing. Enduring. Praying for it to have mercy on me. Birth, as I understood it then, was something to get through. Something to manage. Something to survive. I didn’t question it.
Nothing inside you needs conquering or control.
This is a holy journey home to your Self.
Remembering Life delights in expressing itself through you.