THE FOUNDER
I’m Anastasia Burns, a Board-Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, and a clinician whose expertise is matched only by my profound understanding of the human experience. With dual master's degrees as both an Adult Geriatric Nurse Practitioner and Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, I bring over 15 years of experience across the continuum of mental health care. My career spans acute inpatient settings, innovative case management, and pioneering specialized care programs for vulnerable populations through case management and partial hospitalization services.
In my private practice over the past four years, I have successfully guided hundreds of high-functioning adults through their journeys with depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorders, and ADHD. What sets me apart is my recognition that true expertise comes from both clinical mastery and lived experience—what I call holding a "postdoctorate in life". I intimately understand the weight of persistent sadness, the paralysis of unrelenting worry, and the exhaustion that comes from scattered focus. In my day-to-day practice, I help individuals reclaim their authentic strength, rediscover their voice beneath the noise of anxiety, and step into the resilient, remarkable person they've always been.
A Fellow Traveler
I come to you not as someone who has "arrived," but as a fellow traveler who knows the terrain of your struggle intimately.
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I've lived with the gnawing anxiety that wakes you at 3 AM. I've felt the weight of depression that makes even breathing feel like an effort. I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner who understands neurochemistry and a woman who's danced with her own darkness. I'm someone who's achieved external success while battling internal chaos—a mother, a Caribbean woman, a first-generation everything who learned that all the accomplishments in the world can't fill the void where self-love should live.
What changed everything wasn't another degree or achievement. It was the moment I stopped trying to fix myself and started coming home to who I already was.​
I offer this retreat with confidence, love, and the profound knowledge that transformation happens in community. I have traversed some of life's most challenging terrain, and what I've discovered is that deep connection to self creates alignment with purpose and authentic being.
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Here's what I know to be true:
You are not broken. You never were. You're just homesick for yourself—experiencing disconnection from the woman who's been waiting patiently beneath all the doing, all the achieving, all the endless becoming.
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What originally drew you to this work?
I was drowning in plain sight, and no one could see it—not even me.
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Picture this: I'm sitting in my gorgeous house, looking at my beautiful daughter, surrounded by every marker of success society promised would make me happy. Graduate degrees on the wall, money in the bank, a life that looked perfect from the outside. And yet, I couldn't breathe. There was this constant knot in my stomach, this voice that never stopped whispering,
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"You're not doing enough. You're not enough."
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I tried everything to make it stop. I bought the hobbies, attended the retreats, practiced the yoga—spending money like it was medicine for a wound I couldn't name. But nothing worked because I was trying to heal a broken nervous system with willpower alone. I didn't understand then how pain truly lives in the body, that some pains requires both scientific understanding and sacred healing.
The moment everything changed was when I finally got the right psychiatric care and my mind quieted for the first time in decades. Suddenly, I could actually feel the meditation instead of just going through the motions. I could sit without my thoughts racing to tomorrow's to-do list. And in that sacred stillness, I heard my soul whisper what she'd been trying to tell me all along:
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"You are enough. You have always been enough."
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But the deepest awakening came through heartbreak. When the love of my life called me and said, "I love you, but I can't be with you," I was shattered. How could love not be enough? Then I understood—I had been making him feel the way I felt as a child when I heard my mother's keys at the door. That hypervigilant anxiety, that walking-on-eggshells energy that said nothing was ever quite right. I was unconsciously recreating my childhood trauma in every relationship, passing on the very wound I was trying to heal.
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That's when I knew: this work isn't just about me. It's about breaking cycles that have been passed down for generations. It's about creating a different way for all of us to come home to ourselves.
How do you blend psychological understanding with spiritual wisdom in your practice?
Here's what I learned the hard way:
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You can't meditate away neurochemical imbalances or therapize your way to spiritual connection. True healing needs both—most approaches offer only half the solution.
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I've been in therapy where my soul's yearning was pathologized, and spiritual spaces where my depression was dismissed as "lack of faith." Both left me more lost. My approach honors the full spectrum—scientific and sacred, clinical and mystical.
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I start with your nervous system because trauma lives in your body. If you're in constant fight-or-flight, you can't access deeper wisdom. Once we create that neurological foundation, your spirit has space to speak and tell you what your life needs.
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What makes my work different: I see you as already whole. I'm not here to fix you—you were never broken. I help you remember who you were before the world taught you to doubt yourself, before trauma convinced you to earn love through performance, before you learned to abandon yourself for others' comfort.
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My intention is simple: create space where you can finally exhale, stop pretending everything's fine, and tell the truth about what's happening in your heart. Where you feel safe enough to drop your guard and discover who you've been hiding, even from yourself.
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