My name is Joanna Simundic.  

First of all, I am loving mother to a beautiful daughter, a dedicated partner to my beloved, a supportive friend to my dear life companions and a meaningful contributor to my community.  

I am the sole founder, owner, and psychotherapist at Embracing Change Therapy, a private psychotherapy practice I started in 2013.  I support individuals in processing traumatic material using a variety of techniques such as: Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, Jungian Depth Psychology, Mindfulness, Internal Family Systems, Ego State Therapy, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and various somatic therapy approaches.  I am registered as a Clinical Social Worker and Clinical Counsellor in the province of British Columbia.

I graduated from York University in Toronto, ON in 2006 with an Honor's Undergraduate Degree in Psychology.  I also completed my Masters of Social Work at Wilfrid University in Kitchener, ON in 2012.  I have been in the helping profession serving various populations since 2006.  

My main passion is working with trauma survivors as I have also overcome extensive traumatic experiences in my own life.  Trauma healing work is my passion and calling in life as I support individuals in healing traumatic imprints, reclaiming sovereignty and finding new meaning in life.

I am also trained as a psychedelic psychotherapist.  I graduated from my training with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in 2018.  I was honored to be invited into the Vancouver MAPS team in early 2016 as one of the MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Clinical Trial Research Study in Vancouver, BC.  I have since contributed to Phase II and III in helping MDMA become a legal therapeutic medicine in Canada.   I have supported the MDMA Therapy Training Program as an Educator and Supervisor since 2020 in teaching new psychedelic psychotherapists.

I possess a wide array of experience working with trauma from my project Virtual Dialogue in Medellin, Columbia working with marginalized youth, working with First Nations communities in Northern British Columbia, and also supporting at-risk youth in Newfoundland and Toronto.  

Throughout my career as a helper, I have supported individuals and families in overcoming difficulties such as: developmental trauma, birth trauma and pregnancy loss, abuse and neglect, sexual trauma, first responders’ exposure to traumatic events on the job, domestic violence, adult children of caregivers abusing alcohol and drugs and various others exposures to difficult life events.

Since 2019, I have been involved in working with an Indigenous group in the state of Acre, Brazil named the Yawanawá people, who live on a large territory of the Amazon Rainforest. The Yawanawá have been the stewards of upholding Indigenous traditional wisdom and protecting the preservation and use of medicinal plants of the Amazon. 

In collaboration with the Yawanawá family, a Canadian non-profit organization called the Amazonia Yurahu Alliance was born in 2019. One of our main missions of the organization was to support the Nipei Garden of the Medicines Project, which worked to help preserve the transmission of the ancestral knowledge of the use of medicinal plants onto future generations.  The project came to a close in 2025 after fundraising over $10,000 for the project.  

I developed a new scope of practice working with the transpersonal and metaphysical after my encounter with the Yawanawá family in the Amazonian village of Mutum in Acre, Brazil in the summer of 2019.  Since then I have been a devoted student of their wisdom tradition lineage and cosmology, participating in various diets and teachings for the last 7 years.  

I have also studied various forms of shamanism of the Q’ero people of the Andes through a local teacher, Sandra Ingerman’s shamanic journeying, as well as various spiritual traditions that involve ritual, ceremony, symbolism, dream work, ancestral healing and alchemy studies.  

Through my study with the Yawanawá, I have learned how to access my own inner power, open my voice and trust the Infinite power of nature and life to guide me on my path.  I have also come in touch with my ancient ancestry of healing practices, use of herbs and plants and fungi, the use of sound and vibration and ways of journeying inside and accessing deeper realms within.  

The vision of a new scope of practice came to life in January 2026 when I founded Transformational Pathways to reflect the new practices of healing that go beyond the professional scope of social work and counselling.