My first movement practice was dance. I started when I was two years old at my sister's dance recital, romping through the aisles in the audience and mimicking the performers onstage. My parents, slightly embarrassed and probably hoping to avoid this scenario every year, enrolled me in dance lessons as soon as they could. I continued studying dance throughout my youth and eventually earned a BFA in Modern Dance from Texas Christian University. As an adult, I have continued performing and choreographing dance around the country. To say that I have always enjoyed and appreciated the pleasures of moving is a bit of an understatement; for me, dance is a spiritual experience.
However my spirit my have soared as a dancer, it turned out that my actual body was suffering from great misalignment. I was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten and told I would need a surgery that requires placing steel rods in the spine. Avoiding surgery was my initial inspiration for looking into the more detailed aspects of anatomy and movement. This led me to study Pilates and other forms of bodywork. I began practicing yoga and Pilates in 1994 and started teaching a year later. In 2000, I received my Pilates certification from The Pilates Center in Boulder, CO and went on to teach in New York City for three years, before moving to the Madison area in 2002.
During my time in New York, my spiritual practice began to merge with my physical practice as I discovered meditation. (Actually, I had invented meditation five years earlier, when I was particularly nervous during a dance performance. How the ancient mystics jumped forward 5000 years to steal my idea, I'll never know. I suppose thatfs why they call them mystics.) Growing up, my spiritual training was Christian. As a young adult, I studied Taoism, Buddhism, and (though it's not a formalized spirit path) artists' spirituality – creation and expression as a means of discovering essential truth. Once I began a meditation practice, I found more intuitive depths of spirit. I also studied yoga and the chakra system, and I added the modality of energy shifting to my healing practice. A few years later, I developed Resonance Healing as a way of expressing what I had learned in healing my own body.
My approach to teaching and healing puts great emphasis on the individual. We are all at different places in life and have different needs. In my life, I have sought awareness and alignment - awareness so that I might be able to know myself more clearly and from there, true alignment with my personal path. My goal as a teacher is to help others uncover those same things.