Hi there. I’m so happy you’re here.

Here is a (kinda long) story about me and how I came to this work…

I have been practicing massage for 26 years…

…and all the way back in massage school, what I was passionately moved by was how people carry emotions in their body. For me, it was so easy to tap in to. It was the most obvious element…I did of course study anatomy and pathology, but what I felt most attuned to was how our histories live on in our tissues.

How the pain of our lives accumulates in our muscles…how betrayal and fear can be held in the jaw…how rage can show up as lower back pain…

In all of the strands of my life, I find myself exploring what it is to be human…how we express ourselves and what that reveals about what is underneath. Whatever it is I am studying, I always want to go deeper, to find what’s hidden…and to to help..

Professionally, I actually started off as a stage actor (emotions! big ones!), performing throughout my teens in the Midwest. It may seem like a leap to move from acting to therapy, but for me they connect through the lens of embodied self-expression and voiced emotion. Active imagination is one of the central tenants of most Jungian analysis and my experience acting made this part of therapy easily alive for me.

I then spent a year with AmeriCorps in St Louis, where I taught music to middle schoolers, which grant allowed me to attend the Utah College of Massage Therapy from 1997-1998. I grew up in a family of chiropractors. My uncles, who were all chiropractors, regularly used to sit themselves down in front of me, pointedly placing their shoulders under my hands for a rub. I was 7 years old. It was only a matter of time :)

I returned to college in 1999 and graduated with honors, receiving my Masters degree in English and American Literature from the University of Utah in 2006. I went on to teach at Salt Lake Community College, the University of Utah and Skagit Valley College in Washington, finally leaving academia in 2013. I love the pursuit of the mind. I love questioning what makes us human. I do not love institutions.

In 2006, I also became a nationally certified yoga instructor, after 10 years of study and a one year, in-depth training with Erin Geesaman Rabke and Peter Francyk. I have continued studying Feldenkrais and Embodied meditation with Erin for more than two decades. These studies profoundly changed, and continue to change, the way I inhabit my body and the ways in which I work with myself.

Studying yoga led me to the study of Yoga Nidra and MBSR (in which I just received certification). My Yoga Nidra study was influenced by my dear friend, Scott Moore, who’s work continues to inspire me. The most important teacher for my practice (and my whole life really) has been Pema Chodron. Her repeated mantra of “just as you are”, offered in her warm and friendly voice, continues to sooth the sometimes hard voices that I use on myself. Both Yoga Nidra and MBSR have been crucial practices in helping me manage profound chronic illness which has totally turned my life upside-down over the last decade.

After leaving academia in 2013, I moved to a desert town of 200 people and worked on an organic farm. A year of that and I was looking for a way to weave together the disparate threads of my life and find a new direction. On my therapist’s recommendation, I attended a weekend workshop in celebration of Marion Woodman’s work at the Pacifica Graduate Institute and was consequently introduced to BodySoul Rhythms, Authentic Movement and the work of Tina Stromsted. This introduction began a relationship that has shaped and defined my life ever since.

In the Summer of 2015, I attended my first intensive workshop with Marian Dunlea, the co-founder of BodySoul Europe, and the creator of BodyDreaming. In the intervening 9 years, I have continued training with Marian, attending workshops with her in Ireland and Greece and once covid hit, shifting to training on Zoom. During this time, I began weaving my past and present lives together by facilitating writing and movement workshops as part of Cliffnotes Writers Conference, and hosting Women’s embodied retreats both in person and online.

My passion for BodySoul and BodyDreaming led me to participate in a 3-year certification with Marian Dunlea in her somatic psychotherapeutic technique, BodyDreaming. The full training will be complete, and I will be certified in June of 2024. During the course of my training, I started seeing clients one-on-one, first as part of the coursework and now as an extension of my massage practice. I opened my Embodied Emotional Processing practice as an EEP Coach in July of 2023.

I am so grateful to now have the opportunity to share all of this work with you and your body.

and just in case you are interested…

I am also a professional jazz vocalist, an artist, a gardener, I love water and trees and flowers, making beautiful food and above all, my dog Verbena. You can visit my gallery @ www.boulderbirds.com. To see lots of pictures of flowers and my dog, follow me on Instagram @