My passion for this work comes from the long, winding road of coming to home after spending more than half my life 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 lifetime of 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 eventually decided that I needed to see for myself who I was unmedicated. Even if it was painful, the alternative of feeling numb and disconnected from myself was a worse fate. 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 debilitating birth injury, contributing to deep post-partum depression. I felt totally betrayed by my body, after all the progress I had made. This was a huge initiation period for me, and another even deeper spiritual awakening to my most authentic self. I leaned in for dear life, to my meditation practice, to immersion in nature, movement and yoga, and my art. These, I realized, were my most powerful medicines.
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. 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. My art has been my spiritual practice and one I come back to again and again. Art is a tool that allows me to tap into much deeper layers of body wisdom that we all can source for guidance on our unique journeys. I have completed courses in Art Therapy including Neuro-graphics. I teach art workshops using a method I developed for using art for spiritual process.
Postpartum, I began searching for alternatives to the mainstream birth control methods. I discovered Fertility Awareness, and was blown away by how powerful our cycles are as women and how absolutely life-changing 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 a continual student of my precious body. I have more love and respect than ever for her, for how strong she is, and for her deep wisdom in guiding me deeper into relationship with myself and my life's art. This is a journey that never ends. But it keeps getting better.
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 body has been my biggest teacher and has shaped my life path in profound ways. My search for healing is what led me down the path of holistic health, after becoming disillusioned with what the medical system could offer. I do believe there is an essential place for modern medicine. But for most who face chronic illness, and especially for women's health, mainstream health systems offer us an incomplete picture of true health.
My speciality is offering mentorship, guidance, and support for women on the threshold of initiation, 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.
Along my journey I have to come to realize that healing does not mean perfection. “Healing” does not always mean a symptom free or pain-free life for every person. Your body has it’s own map, and there are not always clear cut answers as to why it is one person’s dharma to carry out a certain physical experience.
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.
You get to decide what “healing” means to you.
My life, my work, my art, my spiritual practice has all been curated by the depth of my journey in this incredible body.
From toddlerhood, I experienced chronic and unexplained pain and loss of function in my body that no doctor seemed to understand. Multiple invasive surgeries, interventions, and medications before the age of 10, resulted in me feeling hopelessly broken and disassociated from my body by the time I reached adolescence. The religious and dogmatic culture I grew up left an equally indelible influence, 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. Through 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.
Over the course of 12 years I was treated for chronic depression, generalized anxiety disorder, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and EDS ... a lot of labels attached to symptoms that never fully went away with treatment. I often thought, if I have to live 50 more years in this body, I’m out. I would take any substance that would make me temporarily not feel myself.
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 carry a certain imprint of trauma.
Most women's bodies hold traumas we have accumulated from events and messaging over the course of our lives that we don't even consciously realize, not to mention specific events of violation that live on in the soma, "the living body". That is why somatic work is so powerful.
Somatic therapy is about liberating and giving voice to the parts of you that were silenced.
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.