About Aimi

I know what it is to hold yourself together so well that you don't even realize you're doing it.

I lost both of my parents at twenty-five. I gathered myself, stayed strong for my younger brother and I, kept moving. I told myself there was no such thing as tragedy — that they were pure energy now, that they wouldn't want us to be sad for long. I believed it. And I carried on.

What I didn't know then was that unfelt grief doesn't disappear. It waits. And it can freeze or solidify underneath.

I spent seven years in Bali — exploring, learning, dancing, learning how to play guitar and sing, making many new friends, and also: resisting my life, seeking, slowly leaning into surrender and healing with sacred master plant teachers. It was one of the richest periods of my life. I was hungry for awakening and I went all in. The plant medicines became loving and intelligent teachers. I would cry and cry in ceremony, as the tip of something humongous in me began to melt. I fell into relationships that felt destined, believing that love could be the sacred vessel that finally transformed me. But I was more wounded in love than I knew — less able to give and receive it cleanly than I wanted to believe.

And what I didn't yet understand was that ceremony opens a door — but integration is where the real work happens. And that no teacher, no medicine, no partner could do for me what only I could do for myself. A wise teacher of mine once said: "Growing is really not a collection of peak experiences. There are no shortcuts to growing consciousness."

I kept searching. I worked on myself incessantly — giving everything, going everywhere, and still somehow arriving back at the same inner weather. I withheld self-compassion and believed I could think my way out of what I felt my way into.

"My life is not all hummingbirds and rainbows — I dance with the demons every day I rise."

There were years when my body took revenge on what I couldn't let myself feel. I have known an eating disorder and what it costs. I have known depression, chronic insomnia, the dark night of the soul, toxic shame. I reached out for help when I needed it most and I found my way through — slowly, imperfectly, with support.

I lost my brother at thirty-nine. The only person in the world I could not lose. The only other witness to my becoming. With him went my entire family of origin — my childhood, the shared history that only he and I held.

I let myself fall apart in a way I never had before. I wailed. I stayed in bed. I let the grief be as large as it actually was.

And something in that — something in finally not holding myself together — cracked me open to something the depth psychologist James Hillman has written: real maturity isn't about rising or transcending above life. It's about sinking more fully into it. Trees grow both ways. Height without depth is the first thing to fall.

I needed to descend willingly. That descent — not the ascent — is what finally set me free.

This is what I believe we came here for: to experience it all. To let it change us. To take joy in our own becoming.

Jung called it individuation — the lifelong project of becoming who you truly are. Not who you were told to be. Not who you thought you should be by now. Who you actually are, in all your beautiful complexity — shadow and light, wound and gift, question and answer.

I am still becoming. Every day.

My first name, Aimi, means love-beauty in Japanese. My last name, Nakauchi, means center-center. I chose the business name Living From the Center because it brought my birthname back into the fold. It felt integrative. Some things we do because the soul already knows.

These days I love slow mornings at my altar — a candle lit, tea, tending to whatever the night brought in dreams. I sing, I write, I'm teaching myself how to paint, I live in a precious mountain community near the Yuba River and let it reset me regularly. I practice Brazilian Zouk — partner dancing that has given me something I didn't know I was still looking for: safety in my own skin, the courage to show up fully, and the practice of real interconnection with another human being.

I am a certified Jungian coach trained through Jung Platform. My path has also taken me deep into indigenous and earth-based traditions — sitting with teachers from Bali, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil, and Peru — and I bring that reverence for ritual, ceremony, voice, movement, writing, and art into this work when they're called for. I work with dreams, shadow, story, image, and the wisdom of the body.

I believe the psyche — your soul — is always moving toward wholeness, even when it doesn't feel that way.

Especially when it doesn't feel that way.

I do this work because it's worth it. And because you are worth it.