In 2020, I became a Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Method® practitioner – a form of movement-centered education. I started the four-year practitioner training to improve my quality of life. I was in my mid-forties, fed-up as a social activist and exhausted with the everyday trials and tribulations of being human. I was in a lot of pain – emotionally, physically, spiritually. While I didn’t know exactly how to get out of the struggling and suffering, I did know I needed to change something internally.

Fast forward. I have a refreshed and now embodied commitment to working actively with individuals, groups, and organizations to uphold the principles of love, dignity, respect and well-being within all our communities. I am driven by a vision of a world in which all humans are well-resourced to move out of the prison of pain and suffering towards the freedom to flourish.

Since the first year of my Feldenkrais training, I’ve been integrating the Method with decades of experience as a social activist, years of cultivating my listening skills as a practicing mediator, certification as an adult educator and in embodied social justice, training as a theatrical and humanitarian clown and ten years living in intentional community. The result is one-to-one sessions and a class-based teaching practice of deep learning and care, rooted in presence, tenderness and playfulness. One intention underpinning my Feldenkrais practice is to support individuals to work within themselves through gentle physical movements as a portal into greater self-awareness, reconfiguration, comfort and freedom. The other intention is to integrate this individual somatic practice to inform what we are doing collectively – in our various communities, groups and organizations – to cultivate well-being for all.

I entered into my fourth decade burned out from twenty years of promoting human rights in public policy. increasingly feeling the legacy of three concussions, a spinal fusion to repair a broken back and struggling with chronic anxiety and depression. In my early forties, I moved half-way around the world to be closer to family. However, burn-out, chronic physical pain, psychological and spiritual imbalances and confusion negatively impacted on my ability to work, to practice self-care and to take up fully her share of responsibility in caring for elderly parents. The summer I turned forty-five, I suffered with sciatica and chronic nerve pain in both legs. I struggled to carry a bag of groceries from the store to the car. Chopping vegetables at the kitchen counter left me sore and tired. Driving was literally a pain.

Now in my fifties, I am is embarking on a radically different kind of life. Working with the Feldenkrais Method has a played a huge role in this shift. I consider myself relatively pain free and no longer struggle with anxiety. I enjoy cooking. At fifty-one, I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back to the top, camping out for two nights. I comfortably did the six-hour drive to get to my Canyon hiking buddy in Flagstaff, AZ from Santa Fe, NM.

I am able – crucial to my spiritual practice, as well as my physical and emotional well-being – to sense myself and expand self-awareness.

I have begun in-depth studies into my familial spiritual lineage of Vedanta and the teachings set out in the Bhagavad Gita. I am able to sit comfortably for forty-five minutes on the floor to practice a breathwork technique which helps me be focused throughout the day (no small feat, as someone diagnosed a year ago with complex ADHD).

After decades of continually struggling and feeling increasingly pummeled, I now feel at home and supported in myself. I know what it is to have a settled nervous system. I can do stillness. I feel more open and available to infinite creative possibility and to joy.