My passion for this work comes from the long, winding road of coming to home, after spending half a lifetime at war with my body.
I came to yoga and meditation around 2009 and they began to change my relationship with chronic pain and I started to heal the disconnect from my body. I learned about real nutrition, and for the first time in my life, how to eat to nourish myself. Slowly, I stopped punishing and hating my body. I started to relate to my body, not as a broken machine but as something precious, intelligent, and with wisdom to share.
It was a slow process but through a combination of changing my lifestyle, learning how to feed myself well, discovering holistic medicine, and doing the deep inner work of changing internal programmed beliefs, I began to create a sense of safety and trust in the communication of my body for the first time in my life. Over several years, I started taking radical responsibility for how I treated my body, what I knew it needed to thrive. In 2012 I began studying herbalism, homeopathy, and energy medicine and it opened up my mind to a new perspective on the body and life.
If our bodies are animated by intelligent, sentient, life force, if the very organizing force of the Universe lives in me, and if everything is nature organically evolves toward healing, why would I assume my body cannot do the same?
In 2013, I had a huge set-back with the birth of my son, which left me with a birth injury, and deep post-partum depression. I felt totally betrayed by my body, after all the progress I had made. This was a huge initiation period - another even deeper spiritual awakening. I grasped on for dear life, and fully immersed myself in my medicine practices: meditation, nature, and yoga, and my art.
I received my certification as a therapeutic yoga instructor from Integrative Yoga Therapy in 2015 and discovered the joy of helping others reconnect to and find safety in their bodies and freedom and joy in movement, as I rebuilt trust, strength, and joy again in mine. I have continued to explore somatic therapy and creative movement and have studied with teachers in the field of somatics and dance. Movement and making art have been the most potent and transformative medicines for me along my path. Art is a spiritual practice that allows me to tap into much deeper layers of the subconscious and the body's wisdom. I have completed courses in Art Therapy including Neuro-graphics. I now teach art workshops using the method I developed for using art as a spiritual process.
After having my son, I began searching for alternatives to the mainstream birth control methods. I discovered Fertility Awareness, and was astounded by how powerful our cycles are as women and how transformative it is to understand your fertility and the connection between your cycle and overall health. In 2019 I completed my training as a Holistic Reproductive Health Consultant & Educator from The Well School of Body Literacy. I began teaching the Fertility Awareness Method for conception and contraception (a method with a 99.99% success rate), as well cycle mapping for hormonal health and overall health and vitality, during the fertile years of a woman’s life and beyond. My goal is to provide support, education, and resources for a woman to make sovereign choices for her body and health.
I love helping connect women to their liberated, erotic, playful, and embodied self-expression.
You are your medicine.
You have art to make. You may just not know what it is yet.
Your medium is the raw materials of your life.
I am not symptom-free. What I realized is that I don't need to be symptom-free to know that I am healing. I am no longer trying to fix, control, or manage my body, but learning to listen. And I am being lead into deeper realms of wisdom than I could have ever accessed. I am learning to co-create, led from embodiment. I am a continual student of this precious body. I have more love and reverence for her than ever - for her capacity, strength, and for her wisdom in guiding me deeper into relationship with myself and my life's work. The truth is that this body has been the vehicle for the deepest and most profound growth, healing, and transformation in my life. It has been the catalyst for my true becoming. I am in constant process of discovery, of letting go, of finding new levels of freedom.
"Healing" doesn't come with an arrival point. Your healing comes when you choose your full embodiment and understand that your body is the most powerful tool you have been given to find your truest and highest expression.
My speciality is offering mentorship, guidance, and support for women who are ready to step into deeper personal sovereignty, take radical responsibility for their own healing, and meet the most vibrant, true, and embodied version of themselves.
MORE OF MY philosophy on healing...
There is no one size fits all approach to healing; it is a dynamic process, one that involves deep listening and cultivating a reverent relationship with the cycles and seasons of the body. Your body knows the way to healing. No healer or practitioner can give you more insight than learning to sit with the information held in your own tissues and bones.
My search for healing is what led me down the path of holistic health, after becoming disillusioned with the medical system. I do believe there is an essential place for modern medicine. But for most who face chronic illness, and especially for women, mainstream health systems at best, offer us an incomplete picture of true well being. I have also found that most of the messaging in natural and holistic health is equally as disempowering, toxic, and further feeds the disembodiment of women.
That is why my work is about connecting you back to your own intuitive guidance, to your own medicine.
Your body has it's own map. You've just forgotten how to read it.
My work is to help you reconnect with your body's deep wisdom and make health choices from a place of sovereignty.
You get to decide what “healing” means to you.
To me, healing means the freedom to live your most authentic life.
To be the most authentic version of YOU, to be fully alive in the skin you are in.
The dance I’ve had with this body has taken me on a journey to meet myself in ways that I never would have accessed otherwise. The truth is, the body is here to teach you something. Opening to the gifts and wisdom it has to offer is the deeper healing - the courage to live fully embodied. There is a more full, abundant, and vibrant version of yourself and expression of your life waiting for you.
My life, my work, my art, my spiritual practice has all been curated by the depth of what my journey has been in this physical body.
From toddlerhood, I experienced chronic and unexplained pain and loss of function that no doctor seemed to understand. Multiple invasive surgeries, interventions, and medications before the age of 10, left me feeling hopelessly broken and disassociated from my body by the time I reached adolescence. By age 15 I was experiencing chronic pain every day, depressed, with prescription drugs to suppress symptoms as the only solution anyone could offer.
The religious and dogmatic culture I grew up left an equally indelible mark, with the view of women's bodies and sexuality as something dangerous and sinful. My teenage years were marked deep shame and self-loathing, and dark thoughts of wanting to escape my body. From my teen years into early adulthood, I had an extremely destructive relationship with food and exercise. I could not stand to look at my body or even touch it. It hurt to be in my skin. I had regular thoughts of harming myself.
Over the course of 12 years I was treated for multiple diagnoses and ended up with a lot of labels attached to symptoms that never fully went away even with with treatment. Those years were full of despair, and I often thought, if I have to live 50 more years in this body, I’ll find a way out sooner.
I went through my first big spiritual awakening at 27, and started questioning a lot of what I believed.
I had been on some combination of pharmaceuticals daily for over a decade. Did I even know who I really was, in my organic, unmedicated state? As I began to learn more about the mind-spirit-body connection,
I started examining the stories I had taken on about myself, as well as the diagnoses I had identified with.
Why is somatic work so important for women?
I spent most of my life in a violent and abusive relationship with my own body.
It is a reclamation of your birthright to thrive.
It is a radical commitment to your most authentic expression and your most authentic life. And that comes with breaking survival patterns and fear programs that live in the body.
Religious programming, chronic pain, and medical trauma, formed a self-image rooted in deep shame and self-loathing.
By virtue of being in a woman's body in this age and time, we all carry a certain imprint of trauma.
Most women's bodies hold accumulated events and messaging over the course of our lives that we don't even consciously realize, not to mention specific violations that live on in the soma, "the living body". This is why somatic work is essential.
Somatic therapy is about liberating and giving voice to the parts of you that were silenced. It is about completing and releasing what had to be held in the body to survive.
This healing work is about far more than learning to love the size of your thighs, developing better "self-care" practices, or making peace with your past. It is a reclamation of your birthright to thrive.
It is a radical commitment to your most authentic expression and your most authentic life.
Health is not the absence of pain, but coherence between body, mind, and spirit.
We live in a time of tremendous imbalance, and our bodies reflect the disconnect from the natural rhythms, cycles, and seasons of nature. We live an increasingly artificial and unnatural lifestyle, and most of us are overstimulated, undernourished, and deeply disembodied.
We are taught that we are separate from nature, that it something outside of us. But nature is what we are. We are taught that Spirit is something to externalize, something to seek. But Spirit is what we are.
You cannot "bio-hack" your way to healing.
You can't medicate, meditate, or analyze your way to the embodiment of your most true self.
Healing is remembering our innate wholeness.
It is a journey of discovery, of coming home to yourself, and falling in love along the way.
"The Truth Lies in the Body", mixed media. Prints available.
