Origin Story
As a child, I lived back and forth between the Mojave Desert & the end of a dirt road in Northern Michigan. This diverse terra firma-- and my folks-- taught my sisters and I resilience & the art of homesteading from a young age (gardening, canning, stacking wood, tending animals, etc.) and fostered a deep love of wide open spaces where we could explore the mystery of things. I recall clearly eating juicy desert tendrils from a neighbors front yard after school, as well as gathering morels, fiddleheads and wild berries with my dad here in the woods, where he would try to teach me the names of every tree. My paternal grandmother was a plant whisperer, and from her I learned to listen to their sacred language.
When I became a mama, I drew from this deep well of practical & reverent living which I wholeheartedly embraced while strengthening those roots in the fertile soil of my innate curiosity of wildness. My earliest explorations in liberation began with herbs because herbalism was the most accessible to me; available in my back yard, books free to borrow from the library, living amongst Wise Women roaming freely & sharing intently. I continue this tradition with deep gratitude for my lineage of wise elders.
In 2001, as s a young, single mama, I enrolled in massage therapy school to quench a thirst I had to serve my community in the ways that aligned with my instinctual approach to natural health & healing. A few years later I became a Master Bodyworker and a few years after that I continued my education in Holistic Health Counseling to deepen my capacity to help my clients sift through all the information available & to make informed choices in caring for themselves & their families.
When I lost my only child in 2014, I mourned. I wailed. I keened. For years. And then I looked for myself in the wreckage, pulled her out, and began to build a new life, one sturdy enough to carry the weight of this, forever, yet soft enough that I do not close myself off from life, from love. Generative. It is from this awareness that I have discovered Somatics and Breathwork and it has changed me. It has changed everything.
An eternal student, I till the soil of embodiment & (w)holiness for myself & all beings, without exception, through devotion & reverence for Gaia, Pachamama, Mother Earth, Home Base, The Mother Ship. Sometimes my work has been in classrooms, books, or online, sometimes in forests & meadows, always with women & children's bodies on my massage table, and just as frequently, my labor has been tenuously toiled in the landscape of my own Beingness. In my body, when I drop the stories and become present with what is. Right now. And right now. And again, now. Recognizing that healing is not linear NOR IS IT MY PURPOSE, I cultivate radical acceptance, love, presence, honor & reclamation of my own sovereignty. I accept full responsibility for actualizing my souls mission, revealing a profound sense of urgency to support women on their path to liberation with heart & body centered offerings aimed at zooming out from self care to the intersections of community care-- so as to elevate our experience as women in a world that cries out for our sacred way of showing up, standing up and rising up. We have been socialized to accept false narratives & epically limiting beliefs about ourselves, our potential and each other. Let us all unlearn, together, in solidarity for these times!
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