Finding My Professional Path

A knee injury I sustained in performance as a young dancer taught me intimately about the body’s amazing ability to heal itself from trauma, lessons only serious illness or injury can teach. It also awakened the life-changing question: “Why did this happen?” This insatiable inquiry led me to a desire to deeply study anatomy and the body’s ability to self-heal. I went to massage school right out of high school, launching myself into a career and on a path of professional somatic studies with amazing pioneers. This life-long path allows me to be deeply interdisciplinary and helps me integrate my intellectual passions and professional movement artist pursuits in an evolving form I now call Somanautiko.

I learn constantly by doing, by trying and not succeeding. I learn by being in a healthful relationship with my clients and students who always show me what tools I need to gather next to better support them on their journeys.

I am supported by an amazing web of colleagues and artists who come from all of the many educational paths I have taken and we cross-pollinate each other in our shared pursuit of embodied learning and growth.

My greatest teachers, however, are my two children. They show me everyday what my strengths are, where I can move easily with adept power into the world, and what my growing edges are–just how much I still have to learn and work hard to do better at. They help me live by the four rules offered by anthropologist Angeles Arrien:

• Show Up
• Pay Attention
• Tell the Truth
• Don’t Get Attached to the Results

For me, these are the best guidelines for “good-enough parenting,” something that I practice at home with my family, with myself and my own “inner child”. It is a gift I offer to those I work with in my office or in my classes. In my experience, to become your own best parent is truly the mark of achieving health in adulthood.

Photo by David Gilbert.