Where I’ve come from…
There are so many things in our life which shape us and form our way of interacting with the world. It’s hard to know how to sum up all the various incarnations of me in this lifetime, and I’ve only reached my midlife!
The Los Angeles area is where I grew up until I finished college at 20 years old. I was born into a family of 8 – myself, 3 brothers and 2 sisters and my parents. So it was a rather full house with a lot going on!
I was the only Projector (see my Human Design below) in a family of Generators. These two types have very different ways of being in the world. They are here for very different purposes. Projectors are not an energy type, and yet I believed I should be able to do do do as much as everyone else. And so the comparison with others and societal homogenized standards began. It was very stressful to try to keep up and almost impossible to find my place. This led me to side with the world against myself for a very long time.
At university, I couldn’t nail down what to focus on. I am in love with studying in general, understanding everything about life and how it works and what moves people and societies. I’m also not built for focus or strategy or goals, but simply for beingness. And in that beingness to have passion for life, soaking everything up and becoming a well from which others can draw. But how does that fit into homogenized expectations of the path a life should go?
So eventually I took a degree in something that allowed for study in many different areas, with a leaning towards nutrition. Upon graduating, not knowing what work I actually wanted to do, I simply grabbed an opportunity that bumped into me out of the blue. I went to live and work on a dude ranch in Montana for a summer!
One thing led to another: a nanny in Napa valley; a primary school teacher first in the Bay Area of California and then in Casablanca, Morocco; studying TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) on the island of Crete; then a road trip from Crete to Porto, Portugal where I came to teach English.
I started the swing dancing community in Portugal out of a desperate desire to have someone to dance with, and later created Swing Station, a dance school and production company, and I taught dance, performed and organized dance events for about 14 years.
However, living completely out of sync with my natural Projector rhythm of no consistent energy, for so many years, led to major health problems, forcing me to get quiet and connected to myself. I began to cut back my business and work little by little, to be able to live sustainably with it. Then I finally closed Swing Station in 2021.
Now I feel the energy flowing in a new direction yet again . . .
Where I am now…
I believe firmly in Walt Whitman’s words: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”. I am multitudinous and am learning to accept all the many facets of who I am and not contain them, but rather allow my complex essence to simply just be in the world. as I believe that each of us has an immense interiority to be explored and given space.
I’m in a new incarnation of myself, as I have already had various incarnations within this same lifespan. There is a maturation of new ideas and a new way of being in the world taking place inside me and slowly pushing out to take form.
My interests are vast and they like to find their common thread in my heretical mind, where I enjoy being on the edge of what society accepts. It’s never been interesting to me to live the prescribed respectable life that is expected.
In fact, I’ve never had much of a life strategy and when I’ve tried to do so, according to well-meant advice, my body has exploded with health issues, reminding me all the more that I’m a passive and receptive being meant to live in the here and now and not create focused strategies for anything. My life is about waiting to feel into where energy is moving and be moved along with it by my unique instinct and inner vision.
The last 7 years of my life have brought me major crises around health and well-being, which pulled me back into my body, and in connecting to my body, I’ve been rediscovering my nature little by little, step by step. Hearing once again the voice of the child within me that retains her essence, I began awakening to myself – my true self. The voice of who I came into this world to be, relentlessly bringing me back, though I’ve been so sidetracked trying to live someone else’s life.
I’m relearning to follow my instinctual taste for life one step a time with absolutely no clue where I am going. I know that is exactly how I’m built to live. I’ve been so cut off from that truth of my deepest self, that it has taken and continues to take time and a lot of chiseling away at conditioned belief and behavior to get me back where I belong – my own perfect and unique geometry in life.
And now? Here I am. That’s all I know at the moment. I’m here, living in the flow. Here to serve and guide others in their paths – those who resonate with my frequency and invite me.
I’m motivated by hope, and specifically the hope that I can share my stories and journeys and creations with others who are on my fractal in this life, in order to help empower them in connecting to their own body wisdom, and in that way live who they truly are.
I never believed I was an artist – even all these years dancing and creating projects around dance. Now I know I am an artist, an artist of life. My own unique life. One creative act at a time, all in the flow.
