A Bit of My Story
Born and raised in Los Angeles, the wanderer in me has found her home in a number of places, from California to Montana to Morocco to Greece and finally to Portugal.
In order to make my way on the material plane, I’ve put my energy into various endeavours. After my last year of college, I was invited to do some wrangling and waitressing on a dude ranch outside of White Sulphur Springs, Montana. A family I met there invited me to go live with them as a full time nanny for their toddler and his teenage brother, on their vineyards in the beautiful Napa Valley of Northern California. Feeling ready to move on after a few years, out of the blue I received an invitation to teach at a primary school in a city across the bay from San Francisco. This later translated into being invited to do the same but in a completely different cultural context, across the ocean in Casablanca.
From there, it wasn’t too far of a hop to spend a couple of months living in Crete, getting certified to teach English as a foreign language. The head of the project there invited me to bring those skills on a long car ride from Greece to Porto in the north of Portugal to a language school he partnered with. So I packed everything up yet again and went to live as an English teacher there for a number of years. While doing that, some friends from a tap dancing class invited me to introduce American swing dances into the country, with them as my first students. That pulled me on a new adventure of running a dance school and event production company for the next 14 years, as well as choreographing, performing and teaching, both in Portugal and around Europe.
These are the activities society wants to know about – the ones you would put on a resumé or speak about in an interview, I suppose. However, over the last decade my energy has been focused more and more on the highly personal adventure that is embodiment: settling into being consciousness in a unique form.
The body pulled me into this exploration in a shocking way with a pulmonary embolism in 2014, initiating me on a journey that has led me step by step back to myself.
The body has that power. Finding your true self and your unique dance in this life is through the magic that resides within the body.
Some years after surviving the pulmonary embolism and being jarred into the realization that you cannot ignore the demands of the body, I went through a long process of healing chronic hip and back pain which had reached the point of making everyday life a real challenge.
Pain is a great teacher. It’s taught my mind to begin observing the body on a new level, allowing the body to determine what this life’s dance will be. It’s called surrender.
Along this inner exploration of embodiment, I picked up courses and certifications in Pilates, Gyrokinesis, Massage, Cranial Sacral Therapy, Manual Lymphatic Drainage, and Myofascial Release.
Life also brought the surprise of a delightful invitation into an intimate dance with three transformative systems: Human Design, Germanische Heilkunde (Germanic New Medicine), and Anatomy in Motion (AiM).
My personal dance with these bodies of knowledge has led me to deeper levels of trust in the body’s inherent intelligence and wisdom. Putting all to the test and witnessing the beautiful truths revealed about the life of the body, played out in real time through my own, has been fundamental in my journey of embodiment.
It’s the awareness that is growing in me through living and breathing this knowledge which I feel to be the most essential perspective I have to share with whoever invites me to be a witness to their dance.
The body is the life.
When the mind surrenders to that essential truth of embodiment, it can begin learning to take up its proper role in the dance – as an observer of a unique life, danced in its own peculiar style and rhythm.
