Rising Stars: Meet Anita Mazkoori of Venice, California

Today we’d like to introduce you to Anita Mazkoori.

Hi Anita, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived seven different lives. So many chapters that feel nothing like the one before. I was born to Iranian refugees in a small rural farming town in southern Indiana, right along the Ohio River. With their proverbial two suitcases in hand, my parents left Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, carrying with them a language, a history, and a way of being that felt very different from the world outside our front door. Inside our home was Persian food, music, and culture. Outside was a White, Christian town where I often felt painfully out of place.

As a kid, I grew up feeling different in ways I couldn’t yet name, especially after 9/11. I learned early how to shape shift in order to belong. What saved me was music. Music became my safe, sacred space, my dearest friend. At sixteen, I saved up every dollar from my minimum wage job to buy my first guitar. I was completely obsessed. I’d come home after school and play for hours. My guitar was the place where I felt most connected to myself.

That relationship with music eventually carried me far beyond Indiana. Junior year at Indiana University, I studied abroad in Ghana, where I fell head over heels in love with West African music. I began learning the Kamale N’goni (a West African harp) from musicians from Burkina Faso, and coincidentally fell in love for the first time with one of them – a luthier. This began a twelve year on-again, off-again relationship that was beautiful, complex, and often painful. We were navigating different cultures, languages, financial realities, and life paths. The relationship taught me profound lessons, but not without inevitable heartbreak. Over those 12 years, I deepened my study of the Kamale N’goni – weaving it into my own music and healing work.

After graduating, I joined the Peace Corps, working with children impacted by HIV/AIDS in Namibia for two and a half years. While at the time, I believed my volunteer work was serving the greater good, I now hold more complexity about the long term impact of Western volunteer work abroad. I’ve learned it can have unintended harm on the very communities we intend to serve. Even so, those years shaped my understanding of culture, belonging, and what a life of service truly means to me.

Over the next decade, as it often does, practical life took over. An artist at heart, I spent over ten years in corporate sales, living in different parts of the country – South Carolina to Arizona to Wyoming – gathering a wide range of experiences while chasing what I thought success was supposed to look like. On the surface, my life appeared stable. Inside, I felt disconnected from the deeper, more aligned life I had experienced through music and service. I began questioning what kind of life I was building and who I was building it for.

In 2020, life brought me to Venice Beach. Still unsure of what the next chapter would hold, everything slowly began to realign. I met my husband, the love of my life, and together we began co-teaching yoga and live music classes, retreats, and community events centered on heart-centered connection. Around the same time, I also began deep personal work in therapy. My therapist and I moved through lifelong struggles with body image, identity, belonging, and childhood pain shaped by the stress of immigrant family life. Alongside that, couples therapy helped my husband and me heal early attachment wounds and learn how to meet each other with more honesty and care.

Before long, I found myself standing at a crossroads. I had the safety of a corporate career and a clearly laid path forward, but I also began to feel a steady call to serve others in the same way my therapists had walked beside me. I chose to listen to the deeper voice guiding me. I entered the Marriage and Family Therapy Master’s program at Alliant International University, and today I work as a therapist in training while continuing to make music and host healing community spaces with my husband.

Life once again feels rooted in the same three things that have always guided me: curiosity, service, and music.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Oh man. Like everyone, my life has been a messy, beautiful journey, and definitely not without bumps in the road. It’s been full of contrast, fear, courage, and learning how to make peace with the unknown.

Growing up as the child of Iranian immigrants in a rural Midwestern town meant navigating constant quiet questions of belonging. After 9/11, the sense of being different became much heavier. I’ll never forget one classmate who threatened me regularly. I was bullied for my cultural background, teased for my appearance, and called a terrorist more times than I can count. I had a unibrow, a mustache, strong features, and a name no one could pronounce. I also understand now that he was operating from a limited worldview shaped by very little access to other cultures. Still, experiences like that leave a mark. They taught me early what it feels like to be misunderstood for something you didn’t choose, and to carry a heritage others project fear onto.

As I grew older, the bumps in the road changed shape. In adulthood, the tension wasn’t so much about belonging in social spaces but about belonging to myself. I had built a life that looked successful from the outside, yet felt increasingly disconnected from the inside. I lived between external validation and internal truth. As any child of immigrants knows, the pressure to choose stability is real. Leaving a well-paying tech career to return to school for therapy felt terrifying. I worried about disappointing my parents. I worried about money. I worried about stepping off the path that was supposed to guarantee safety.

There were long stretches marked by anxiety and a quiet sadness I couldn’t fully articulate. The real work was learning to trust my inner knowing over external approval, and realizing that safety doesn’t only come from income or status. Sometimes safety comes from alignment with your own values.

The road has asked me to walk through uncertainty again and again. As the plant-medicine man I work with once told me, “Sometimes you have to get lost in order to be found.” And he’s right. Every time I chose truth over comfort, my world widened in ways I never could’ve predicted. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Currently, I’m a Marriage and Family Therapy in training at The Maple Counseling Center and a graduate student at Alliant International University. I work primarily with children and families who are navigating anxiety, identity questions, behavioral challenges, and relational transitions. My work is rooted in presence, safety, and helping people meet themselves with more compassion.

While I’m still early in my clinical path and don’t yet have a formal specialty, the through line of my life has always been centered around identity and belonging. I’ve been immersed in many cultures and lived many places, which has taught me how layered and contextual each person’s story truly is. I’m deeply curious by nature. I love learning the quiet details of people’s lives, the things they hesitate to say at first, the stories beneath the surface.

What I’m most proud of is witnessing the way my clients slowly begin to feel safer inside themselves. A child who deepens their self-awareness. A parent who carries less shame. A family that begins to speak with more honesty.

Alongside therapy, I’m also a lifelong musician. I play guitar and Kamale N’goni and offer live music during yoga classes and community events. My husband and I weave together movement, music, and guided conversation between strangers. These spaces are built on the belief that being witnessed in your truth can be transformative and healing. I often joke that the genre of music I play is “lullaby,” but in truth, that’s the peace I hope people feel through both therapy and sound.

What sets me apart is how I blend rhythm, deep listening, and emotional attunement into both therapy and music. The energy is the same in both spaces. Loving. Intentional. Curious.

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Unbeknownst to my mom at the time, when I was 19 I got a tattoo of her handwriting on my collarbone. The word “love” – written in Persian. Almost two decades later, it remains the one truth I return to again and again. To be love – in its most embodied form. Love, for love’s sake.

Much of my early life was shaped by longing. Longing to belong. Longing to be understood. Longing to feel at home in places where I often felt like an outsider. Over time, I learned how transformational it can be to be truly seen by another person.

It’s why I hold people’s stories with such reverence. No one arrives in the therapy room, or yoga studio, as a blank slate. Family systems, migration, culture, religion, class, history, trauma, and resilience all weave together to shape who someone becomes.

Whether I’m sitting with a child in session, holding space for a family, or playing music for a room full of strangers breathing together, my intention is always the same. That someone feels a little more permission to rest inside who they are. That they remember their worth is not something they need to earn. That all of us, at our core, are made of love.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/animaz88
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/anita-mazkoori
• Other: https://tcsppofficeofce.com/therapist-positionality-and-ethics-in-the-use-of-plant-medicine-for-trauma/