About Me
Welcome!
I’ve been offering breathwork, healing, and coaching work all over the world for the past 10 years. My clients have included everyone from multi-national CEOs to teens grappling with anxiety and panic. The common thread that weaves us all together is a deep curiosity about the inner and outer worlds, openness to exploration and change, and a deep call towards greater alignment, wholeness and connection.
. . .and sometimes, we just want to feel better.
My training includes Breathwork Certification with David Elliott , a coaching certification through the International Coaching Federation, Four Directions Training with Rites of Passage, Reiki Master Teacher Certification, BodyTalk Fundamentals, Advanced MindScape, Trauma Informed HeartMath Certification, Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy through the Embody Lab, 6 years of study with Deena Metzger, and ongoing exploration with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and The Power Path.
Also, lots of time in the woods learning from trees.
If you’d like more of a story. . .scroll on!
Once upon a time. . .
As a kid, I loved magic.
I was lucky to have parents who read to me (with voices and everything), immersing my young imagination into worlds where trees spoke, energy flowed through everything, and the right word spoken at the right time could reweave the fabric of reality.
The first movie I ever saw was Star Wars. My first word, I’m told, was Yoda. For awhile, everything and everyone was Yoda.
(In retrospect. . .it feels a little on the nose.)
As a kid, I felt magic all around me.
In the tickle of the waves against my feet during my family’s occasional off-season trips to the Maryland shore.
And the flickering of a fire warming the bone-cold feet of a bunch of third graders who had gotten caught in a downpour.
And in those moments just before sleep took me, my eyelids filled with shifting colors and my mind merging with a formless ocean.
I suspected that magic was real. That there really was a force that flows through everything.*
I KNEW it was real.
. . .and then I forgot.
At the age of 35, I sat on a therapist’s couch as she regarded me with concern.
I’d just let her know that I was having trouble sleeping. And eating. Getting off the couch. That a few friends had taken it upon themselves to clean my apartment and make sure that I ate something.
‘You know you’re depressed right?’ she asked.
It honestly hadn’t occurred to me.
I had a pretty great life. In addition to having the basic privilege of being born white in America, my parents loved and supported me. I got a first rate education, fantastic grades, was able to support myself, had friends. I’d acted on stages in Chicago and Los Angeles, some pretty fancy ones. I had built a reputation as a compelling storyteller at events like The Moth even as I pursued a career in nonprofit management; real save the world kind of stuff.
On the outside, it all looked fantastic.
Inside was different.
For 25 years, I’d found myself caught in a tension between following my curiosity, creativity, and innate wisdom and following the well trodden path cleared by my parents, family, and schools.
Again and again, I chose that path. . .
An internship with a research institute instead of performing in a musical when I was 15.
A ‘real job’ with a museum instead of teaching Shakespeare to kids part time.
Constantly telling self-deprecating stories to delight audiences in the hopes that if I made fun of myself, they wouldn’t have to.
That kid who loved and believed in magic had, one choice at a time, been relegated to a small, hidden corner of my being.
The belief in magic and simple joy of playing in the forest replaced by a belief that my life was destined to be mediocre at best. I felt like a misshapen slug. Unworthy of fulfillment. Unworthy of the life I had built around me. Unworthy of love.
That, I guess, was what depression looked like for me.
something needed to change
Not long after that moment on the therapist’s couch, I found myself stumbling into the ballet studio of a local community center for a ‘breathwork’ class.
The invitation had landed in my email promising
Miraculous healing and transformation.
Access to the secrets of existence.
Relief from anxiety and even depression!
It sounded like absolute horseshit. . .and at that point, I was open to anything.
Putting misgivings aside, I dragged myself up the stairs to the studio, walked through the door and instantly regretted my decision.
Everyone smelled like patchouli. The facilitator was a white dude dressed all in white with dreadlocks. People were hugging each other and giving each other deep, soulful gazes.
This was not my scene.
. . .but I was there, so I stayed. The facilitator taught us a simple breathing technique, told us that we might experience everything from waves of strong emotion to tingling to a sense of oneness with the Universe.
Then we breathed.
And it was hard.
I’d had no idea how much not breathing I’d been doing.
After about five minutes, I was drenched in sweat. No emotions. No tingling or sense of oneness. Just effort.
All around me, I heard people crying or laughing. Bodies moving, presumably filled with ‘energy.’
Finally, after some time, I felt something shift. Nothing dramatic, but. . .
for as long as I could remember, a boulder had lived in the pit of my stomach
it was heavy and dark and invisible and always there
whispering all sorts of cruddy things to me
I’d come to regard it as part of myself
It would never move.
It moved. Barely perceptible. But it moved.
When the practice ended, people shared about their experience. One person had felt the presence of their grandmother who had recently passed. Another experienced the resolution of an old wound. I stayed silent, but my mind was racing.
If that boulder could shift, maybe it wasn’t me.
If the impossible had happened, what else might be possible?
When you’ve lived in a world that seems fixed, without possibility, even the possibility of possibility is a healing.
Yoda yoda. yoda yoda yoda. yoda!
. . .after that, a lot happened.
I quit my job and traveled in South America working with Indigenous healers. Those experiences formed the backbone of what became an award winning storytelling show that I performed all over the country for four years.
I got really curious about breathwork and pursued certification. Through a series of events that could have only been choreographed by Spirit, I ended up facilitating group sessions in the same ballet studio that had hosted my first experience. Between 2013 and 2019, hundreds of people joined us to breathe. No patchouli necessary!
I fasted in the Wilderness and cried out for a vision. To which Spirit replied: ‘Buy a new couch.’ So I did.
Saying ‘yes’ in improbable situations led me to speaking about Ethical Storytelling in Dubai, sharing breathwork and other modalities with international CEOs, and working with men experiencing incarceration to help them connect with their inner worlds.
It’s not that all of this unfolded without friction, doubt, or uncertainty. Far from it. But that boulder
the one that would never move
was gone. Replaced by a steadily growing trust that I was being woven—storied—back into a much larger narrative that holds us all.
As these stories have unfolded, I’ve had the opportunity to spend lots of time with that kid who believed in magic and talked to trees. I’ve learned from him and, time and time again, traveled back to those moments in his life, in my life, where the magic flickered. I’ve shared with him and let him know in a gentle whisper that I can feel reweaving the fabric of memory:
You’re onto something.
Because the only possible explanation I can come up with for how it’s all unfolding is that
Spirit is real.
Magic is real.
Trees are teachers.
Oceans speak to each other.
Children carry the wisdom of elders.
And it’s never been more important that we remember so that we can change our lives
to live in greater harmony with Nature and our own Hearts
So that we may become the wise ancestors of
a beautiful future for all Beings.
Yoda.
(and if you’ve read this far, we should probably connect)
*This idea of a force flowing through everything, by the way, was just observed by western scientists after 15 years of research.