Community Highlights: Meet Tameka Ruffin,LCSW of Center for Intuitive Healing

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tameka Ruffin,LCSW.

Hi Tameka, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My story begins with an inner voice. As a teenager living within deep family dysfunction, I became a runaway—not out of recklessness, but out of instinct. In the middle of the night, something within me said, leave now—you will be safe. I listened, and that voice protected me.

Years later, I encountered that same inner knowing in a very different moment: sitting in a child welfare office on Bergen street Brooklyn, NY, faced with the option to run again. This time, the voice gently urged me to stay. It told me this experience was something I needed to move through, not escape. I didn’t yet understand why—but I trusted it.

After multiple placements in residential care, a motivational speaker came to speak to the youth. Something awakened inside me that day. I felt long-held self-destructive patterns begin to dissolve, and for the first time in a long while, my desire to live fully came back online. Hope activated. Purpose stirred.

I went on to successfully complete residential treatment, return home, and graduate high school. I earned a bachelor’s degree in forensic psychology, followed by a master’s degree in social work. During my graduate placement, I discovered—almost unbelievably—that I was placed at the very organization where that same motivational speaker worked. It felt like a divine retracing of my steps, a full-circle moment I could never have planned.

My early professional work focused on youth and families involved in residential care, mirroring my own history. Over time, my lived experience with trauma and family dysfunction naturally guided me toward trauma-focused clinical work. I received advanced training in Prolonged Exposure and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and through this work, I began to see the limitations of talk therapy alone.

Trauma does not live only in the mind…it leaves an energetic blueprint on the body and soul. Pain, survival, and resilience are all held somatically and energetically. This understanding led me toward integrative and body-based healing modalities, where transformation could occur at a deeper level.

From this place, I founded the Center for Intuitive Healing as a way to pay homage to the inner voice that has always guided and protected me. The same voice that once told me when to run …and when to stay….now guides my work as a healer.

Today, I support gifted and highly sensitive individuals, mother–daughter wound repair, intergenerational healing, and trauma integration through sound and vibrational therapy, Reiki, yoga, and intuitive healing practices. I know now that my pain was never wasted. It was alchemized into wisdom.

My work is rooted in the belief that healing is a remembering…..a return to one’s inner voice, inner truth, and inner hope. I help others find their way back to that place within themselves, because I know what it means to be saved by listening.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
While my path has always been guided by intuition, it has also required navigating significant challenges. During my first year of college, shortly after graduating high school, I became pregnant. I continued my education and graduated on time—pregnant with my second son—learning early how to hold responsibility and vision simultaneously.
During my master’s program in social work, I was assigned to a group project on autism. This was not coincidence, but divine preparation. Soon after, my then 17-month-old son—who had been developmentally on track—experienced a sudden regression and was diagnosed with autism. In hindsight, I see clearly how I was being guided—positioned to understand, advocate, and lead before I even knew why.
I was called to navigate the world of therapies, systems of care, and advocacy with intention and urgency. Out of necessity, I became deeply knowledgeable about autism and neurological divergence. Listening closely to my intuition, I strategically placed myself in environments that would prepare both my son and me for what lay ahead. I volunteered with adults on the autism spectrum and worked on a crisis response team responding to families supporting loved ones with disabilities. Each experience revealed what was required to help my son move toward independence rather than a life defined by limitation.
Today, my son is thriving as a student at Life University in Clemson. I know without question that he would not be where he is had I not listened—again—to that inner guidance showing me how to prepare, where to stand, and when to act.
Alongside this, I carried significant responsibility, supporting my mother and adult brother while raising children, completing advanced education, and managing multiple businesses. My childhood wounds shaped me into what is often called a wounded healer—one whose wisdom was earned through lived experience.
Every obstacle—early motherhood, navigating autism, and intergenerational responsibility—became part of a larger spiritual unfolding. My pain was not something to escape, but something transmuted into wisdom. That wisdom now grounds my work and my devotion to helping others reconnect with their own inner voice, inner truth, and capacity to thrive.
Between 2014 and 2016, I endured workplace heartbreak and professional trauma. Environments that were meant to support healing instead mirrored many of the power dynamics and wounds I had spent years working to transform. It was destabilizing, but it also became a turning point. I was called to reclaim my voice, my integrity, and my sovereignty as a healer.
In 2016, I founded the Center for Intuitive Healing. It was born directly from that pain—a sacred response to the need for a space rooted in safety, ethical care, and true embodiment. It became both a boundary and a prayer: a commitment to practice in a way that honors the whole person, including the healer.
Through my practice, I work without restriction. No one governs or vendors my healing process. I trust the natural pull between healer and soul—I attract those meant to receive my wisdom. Each person who finds their way to me also arrives as a teacher, offering lessons that continually refine my healing, my presence, and my purpose.
My work now supports gifted and highly sensitive individuals, mother-daughter wound repair, intergenerational healing, and trauma integration through sound and vibrational therapy, Reiki, yoga, and intuitive healing practices. I know now that my pain was never wasted—it was transformed into wisdom.
My mission is to help others return to their inner voice, their inner truth, and their inner hope. Because I know what it means to be guided, protected, and ultimately healed by listening.

We’ve been impressed with Center for Intuitive Healing, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The Center for Intuitive Healing is a business that has transformed so many lives and thrived all these years on word of mouth referrals. We are trusted in the community. People leave changed, integrated, in better relationship with themselves, loved ones, their past and future.
What sets us apart is that all of the practitioners are gifted, called to this work. We integrate all systems, restoring the spirit and self trust. Our brand is rooted in the evolution of the human spirit. We believe in the power of change and the resilience of the human spirit.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Risk is a necessary part of healing and growth. We need to take risks to honor our calling and break patterns. I’ve been taking risks my entire lifefrom running away at 12, to expanding into group process, to adding holistic services four years ago. I take risks daily in my work: challenging clients, saying the hard things, holding up the mirror, and sharing my own walk and path with healing. In 2021, I took the biggest risk of all—I went full time and bet on myself.

Pricing:

• Therapy sessions range 85-120/session
• Reiki 40/half hour -150 for reiki with sound
• Sound therapy 35 community class-150 for individual sound sessions
• Yoga classes range from 20/session
• Guided pattern releasing 60-100/session

Contact Info:

• Website: https://centerforintuitivehealing.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/centerforintuitivehealing?igsh=NDNlcncxNXA4bWt5&utm_source=qr
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1823FzjSpg/?mibextid=wwXIfr
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@center4intuitivehealing?_r=1&_t=ZP-93ZvGGMwSVS

Image Credits
Heather Lashun photography