Miles has been claimed by human-centered work since 2012, when he first began working with the unhoused population of East Los Angeles. This formative experience set the groundwork for his later years spent working with similar populations in Portland via p:ear and New Avenues for Youth, where he recently managed a transitional housing program for young adults aging out of foster care. Miles additionally spent several years working in wilderness therapy as both a wilderness guide and manager, where he first became interested in the reclamation of place-based identity and cultivated a praxis in ecopsychology. Miles holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and behavioral neuroscience from the University of Portland and is presently finishing his master’s degree in Marriage, Couple and Family Therapy with Lewis & Clark College. In a brief hiatus in his undergraduate trajectory, he moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland to undergo a political immersion program that focused on conflict resolution within systems of terrorism and urban violence. As a student intern, Miles is keenly interested in bringing an ecological lens to Existential Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Emotion Focused Therapy, and Experiential modalities. He is interested in increasing his specialization in working with trauma, grief & loss, sexuality and somatic experiencing while professionally integrating rites of passage, ancestral ways of being, and expanding our conscious relational networks to non-human beings. Miles believes that the project of being a human is deeply centered on the question of belonging and how we make meaning out of the stories of our lives. He is currently involved in conducting research with Dr. Pilar Hernandez-Wolfe that explores the phenomenon of ‘vicarious resilience’ and the reciprocal nature of tending to land. Outside of his professional life, Miles enjoys practicing permaculture, writing music, rock climbing, surfing, cooking elaborate meals, and reading poetry, anthropology, or political theory.