Who Is Doc Rain?
PsyD · JD · MDiv · MA
If you are tired of being tired. If you have been searching for something true in all the places you were told to look and have not found it yet, you are not lost. You are almost home.
WHERE IT BEGAN
My family hails from a small, luminous, complicated place in the Caribbean. The kind of place that colonization threw many peoples into together and that somehow, impossibly, became something whole. Garifuna and Mennonite, Indian and Jamaican and Creole, every shade of survival and resilience woven into one. That is the blood. That is the first inheritance.
The second inheritance was the household I grew up in. Angela Davis on the walls. The women’s movement alive in the living room, brilliant single mothers passing around Our Bodies, Ourselves. Finding their voices together, building community out of nothing but love and necessity. Liberation was not something I was taught. It was the air. And before I was old enough to understand any of it, I was initiated into transcendental meditation, which meant that from my earliest years I already knew, in my body.... before my mind, that the most essential things are found in the quiet.
My mother used to tell me a story. Often. But mostly when I forgot who I was.
I was young, in daycare, and a fire drill had come. But no one could leave. One little girl refused to move without her coat, and so the whole building waited. The adults tried everything. She did not budge. I remember the look on her face, not stubbornness but something closer to devotion, a faithfulness to something that mattered, to someone she loved. And I remember looking at the adults around me and feeling a quiet confusion at how they could not see what seemed so plain to me.
I walked up to her. I held out my hand. And I said:
“Your mother can get another coat. She cannot get another you.”
She took my hand. And we went outside together.
Months later, sitting in my mother’s philosophy class, a professor asked the room how anyone could claim to know that the sacred exists. I raised my hand and said simply:
“I just know. The same way I know I am sitting here, and the same way I know that all of you are sitting here too. I just know.”
My mother said the professor paused and named what I had described as a recognized philosophical principle. I did not know any of that. I just knew what I knew.
I still do. And everything I have done since has been the long, beautiful, sometimes devastating, always grace-filled work of learning how to offer that knowing to other people.
THE BEAT, THE WORD, THE LAW
When the first beat dropped, I never knew it would become hip-hop. I just remember being there. The DJ scratching. Breakers breaking. Something forming in real time that none of us had a name for yet, something that felt like breathing for the first time after holding your breath for years.
We were invisible before that. Not quiet, not absent, just invisible in the way that whole communities can be invisible when the world has decided their voices are not worth the air. And then suddenly, without warning, the world turned its head. Maybe they thought it was art. We knew it was freedom. The first time our truth was being received rather than managed.
Rhymes happened because words happened. Pen to paper. Expressing what I was feeling, what we were all feeling, in the only language that felt big enough to hold it. I stayed in that world because I loved it with everything I had.
But I was watching. As the years passed the music was changing. Corporations were moving in. Artists were signing away their power and their futures to people who treated their gifts like inventory. I did not want to leave. I wanted to protect. Maybe I would not always be part of the wordsmith community, but I could stand beside it, armor it, fight for it. So I went to law school.
As an entertainment attorney I sat across negotiating tables and in studios with musicians, writers, athletes, executives navigating the particular poison that fame is. Because fame is a drug. Power is a high. And the people living inside them are often the loneliest people in any room, because everyone around them has decided their success is proof they are fine.
They are rarely fine. And the emptiness they carry, the one that no amount of applause or authority can fill, that emptiness has always been my invitation. Not to fix. Just to sit with it honestly, and to help them find the person who was there long before the world decided who they should be.
I do not always know the way back. But I know how to be present. I know how to see and be seen, hear and be heard. I know how to walk closely with someone in the dark. Because I care for people, deeply and without condition. That has always been enough to begin.
THE QUESTION UNDERNEATH THE QUESTION
Maybe you have been there. Sitting inside a faith that you love, that you chose, that you have given your whole heart to, and feeling, quietly, underneath all the ritual and the language and the familiar comfort of it, that something is still untouched. That the healing you were promised has not quite arrived. That you are doing everything right and still waking up hollow.
I saw that everywhere I looked. Faithful people. Devoted people. People who prayed and showed up and believed with everything they had, who were still in pain, sometimes more pain than the people who had never believed at all.
People said faith could heal them. What I witnessed was very little healing and a great deal of confusion. I needed to understand why.
I did not plan to go to seminary. But the question would not leave me alone, so seminary found me. And what I began to understand there was that many people had been handed a deity rooted not in love but in systems of power, in colonization and capitalism dressed in sacred language, and they were trying to find the divine inside a framework that was never designed to actually free them. That is not a failure of faith. That is a wound. And wounds need tending, not more doctrine.
Think of the lotus flower. The most luminous, breathtaking flower I know. And the more beautiful it is, the more it is a testament to the murky, complicated, funky depths it grew through. That is the human journey. Our light is inseparable from our soil. You cannot have one without the other and I would not want you to.
This led me to this, which led me to this. What I kept finding, in sanctuaries and studios and eventually in hospital rooms, was that the spiritual wound and the psychological wound were the same wound wearing different clothes. I was not willing to keep treating them separately.
THE ROOMS THAT FORMED ME
Everything that shaped me happened in a room with another human being. Not in a classroom. Not in a book. In a room, with a person, in a moment that asked everything of me.
The first room was addiction chaplaincy. My first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education was spent entirely inside the world of addiction, sitting with people in the middle of the most honest and terrifying work a human being can do, which is choosing to come back to themselves. That first room taught me that the substance was never really the story. Underneath every addiction there is a person who found something that made the pain quiet for a little while. I learned to look for that person first.
After that formation I stepped into the role of behavioral health specialist in inpatient residential treatment. I was not a clinician yet. I was someone who had sat inside that world spiritually and wanted to understand it more fully. Those rooms deepened me in ways I am still discovering.
Then came the hospital residency. Three units of CPE across the Emergency Room, the Medical Intensive Care Unit, the Surgical ICU, and an elected rotation in palliative care. The residency was supposed to be four units. I will simply say that racism is real, and leave it there, because this page is not about that. What I carry from those years is not bitterness. It is everything I was given in spite of what was taken.
Palliative care chose me as much as I chose it. I have had the gift of sitting in the corridor between living and dying, with people who had arrived at a clarity that the healthy and the busy almost never reach. People who had stopped performing and started being, because they no longer had a choice. What they taught me about love and time and what actually matters, I will spend the rest of my life trying to pass on.
“I also became a tissue requester. The person who sits with a family in the sharpest moment of their grief and asks them to consider giving their loved one’s organs. There are no words for what that asks of you as a human being. What I will say is that it cracked me open in the best possible way. It showed me that the heart, when it is truly present, has no ceiling.”
Later, while studying clinical psychology at the doctoral level, I worked in an intensive outpatient program in women’s recovery. Women’s pathways through addiction are their own particular landscape, shaped by trauma and silence and a world that has rarely made room for their full complexity. Being present in that landscape changed something in me permanently.
And after I became a licensed professional counselor, I returned to inpatient residential treatment, facilitating four groups per week and designing curriculum from the ground up around attachment, self-worth, the way we speak to ourselves and to each other, the children we once were, the parents we are trying to become. That curriculum came from every room I had ever sat in, distilled into something that could be handed to a person who was just beginning to find their way back.
All of that formation lives in me now. Not as a list of services. As a quality of presence. As the capacity to meet you, wherever you actually are, without flinching.
THE WHOLE OF IT
I am a doctoral-level clinician, slowly and lovingly preparing for the EPPP. I still do attorney work because creative people still need protection and I still believe in that fight. I am still ordained because I was probably born that way. I am a certified spiritual director, though if I am honest, most of the direction is happening in my own life, which is exactly how it should be.
I hold a Master of Divinity, a Master of Arts in clinical psychology, a Juris Doctor, and a PsyD. I am a Reiki Master, Ho’oponopono certified, an NLP Master Practitioner, an AVP certified communicator, and a former adjunct communications professor. I have become a master life coach more than once, because I find genuine joy in discovering how different people understand what it means to help someone grow.
Most people get impressed by all of that. And then wonder why nothing changes. The letters are not the point. They never were. The curiosity is the point. The deep, unshakeable fascination with what it means to be a human being.
If I can see myself, know myself, love myself in all my beauty and imperfection, then maybe I can do the same for someone else. That is the whole philosophy. Everything else is just practice.
Can I walk with other human beings through what they are carrying? You never really know until you get there. But I want to believe the answer is yes. Not because of the education or the letters or the years or the rooms. Because I have been fully present in every single one of them. And presence, I have come to understand, is the most powerful thing one human being can offer another.
This is not therapy. What happens here is something older and wilder and more tender than that. It is life creation. It is doula work. It is sitting with someone in the truth of who they are until they can bear to look at it themselves and find it beautiful.
FORMATION
DOCTORATE Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)
LAW Juris Doctor (JD)
DIVINITY Master of Divinity (MDiv)
ARTS Master of Arts, Clinical Psychology (MA)
SPIRITUAL DIRECTION Shalem Institute Graduate
CHAPLAINCY 4 CPE Units, ACPE · Addictions · ER · MICU · Palliative Care
COUPLES Prepare and Enrich Certified
COMMUNICATION NLP Master Practitioner · AVP Certified · Adjunct Communications Professor
HEALING ARTS Reiki Master · Ho’oponopono Certified
COACHING Master Life Coach, 20+ Years
LICENSED Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC)
PIONEER Hip-Hop Culture Founder · Early Vlogger · Recording Artist · Published Author
WHO I WALK WITH
01 Artists, Creatives, and Culture Makers
My beginning is artist and creator. I am born again daily because I get to create. I know what it costs to put your truth into the world and I know the particular grief of stopping. This is my first language. You will not have to translate yourself for me.
02 The Powerful, The Visible, The Quietly Hollow
Let us sit with it, the loneliness that lives inside power and fame, honestly and without shame. There is no value in a success that breaks you from its weight. Come. Let us find the person you were before the world decided who you should be.
03 People Navigating Recovery
The substance is only part of the story. Underneath it is someone who found the one thing that made the pain quiet for a little while. We honor that. And then, gently, together, we begin the returning to the beauty that was always there, before the wound, before the medication, before any of it.
04 People Facing Death, Grief, and the Unknown
I am not sure if I chose palliative care or palliative care chose me. What I know is that the corridor between living and dying is full of the deepest wisdom I have ever encountered. There is no fear here. Only presence. Only the profound and transforming truth of what it means to be alive.
05 Couples, Families, and Communities
Relationship is the primary healing container. It always has been. When we navigate this space together, something opens. We find our way back to each other, and in doing so, we find our way back to ourselves.
06 Anyone Who Is Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired
You have tried the things you were supposed to try. You have prayed the prayers and done the work and still something in you is waiting. That waiting is not failure. That waiting is a doorway. And you do not have to walk through it alone.
ALL MY RELATIONS
You are not broken. You never were.
You are a lotus, every single one of you, rising from the complicated and beautiful and sometimes devastating soil of your own particular life, reaching toward a light that is not separate from you but is, in fact, the most essential thing about you.
The indigenous teachers say all my relations as a cosmology, as a way of knowing that we are already in relationship with everything that lives. There are no strangers here. There is only the sacred, ordinary, irreplaceable fact of one human being reaching toward another.
That is what I offer. Not a program. A presence. Not a method. A relationship. One in which you are believed in, completely and without condition, until you can begin to believe in yourself the same way.
Every word here was written for you. Every doorway opens toward you. From me to you, and you to me.