noor means “light” in farsi/person, arabic, and other languages. while at noor we work with all the dark and difficult things, the more we do this work, the more we also believe in the truth, the potency, and the healing power of light. light refers to love, to the body and spirit’s natural capacity for healing, to resilience through softness, to connection and belonging. when we can sit with the dark winters of our psyches and our lives, we can savor the feeling of the warmth of the sun on our skin that much more.

in armenian, “noor” means pomegranate. beyond being pauline the founder’s favorite fruit, it is also a national symbol for fertility, life, and abundance. armenian lore holds that a perfectly mature pomegranate is 365 kernels, one for each day of the year. the idea of many parts within one whole speaks to us as diverse humans and therapists who acknowledge and honor that we are all made of different parts. recognizing and returning to our wholeness while honoring the many parts of the overall mosaic that makes each of us unique as well as universally human is what we love most about the transformation process.

cut, prepared plates of food are a certain universal language and experience of love shared by children of immigrants. The image of an immigrant parent hunched over a bowl carefully preparing little kernels of pomegranates can feel like a familiar scene. Whether your parents literally did this or not matters less than what it symbolizes - the love that may have been present from our immigrant parents even if it wasn’t always in the form we wanted or needed. It reminds us that we can be both deeply loved and deeply hurt by the same people and calls on us to carefully prepare for ourselves, through the work of reparenting, what would be most nourishing for ourselves. That is the work many of us have done, are doing, and are supporting you in doing too.