ABOUT ME:

Like many streams connecting and converging to form an ever changing river, all of my journeys, formed from the spilling out and releasing from a source that is continually learning to flow, are always leading me back to center. Each time I return to my center, each moment I recognize myself alive in the present moment, I bring the loving spaciousness I get from everyone I get the privilege to connect with through this counseling and teaching journey.

The Book Learning:

In 2000 I graduated with a Masters Degree in Counseling and set forth to find the perfect job. At the time I held the intellectual mastery of the mechanics of counseling techniques and imagined client scenarios. I could draw from books about how to lead a person a person to the right sources for mental health. But at that time I was still living in my mind and attempting to help people from a perspective of sharing ideas and thoughts which I now understand to be a practice (though worthy in its intention and statistically legitimate in a functional sense) that is not sustainable in true healing.

The Shift:

After getting my graduate degree and working in corporate America for some time I met someone who asked if I wanted to join her at her meditation group one night. Not having any idea what I was getting into I decided to go and as soon as I sat down down and our meditation guide began to invite us to close our eyes and listen to our breath, I felt a shift. I had been living in La Jolla California a few blocks from the beach, in a relationship with a good man, in a job that paid well, but I was disconnected. There was a numbness inside me that nothing could penetrate, I had been going through the motions of life without a sense of joy, wonder and certainly no sense of authentic self. This meditation practice began the opening in me to the understanding that the keys to opening up to living were within me and within this practice of soft inner listening.

YOGA:

he word Yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root Yuji, meaning “to join” or “to yoke” or “unite”. Once I started having babies, as mothers do, I let my meditation practice and self care fall away and began that all too common mothering affliction of fully sacrificing all of myself and more to the care of the babies. I was suffering from undiagnosed postpartum depression, parenting a toddler on the autism spectrum and a newborn and sinking further into a state of functioning without joy. But I felt that meditation seed. I knew I still had that power to come home to myself to water that seed, I just didn’t know how. This is when I went to my first yoga class. The gift of yoga was the joining or “yoking” of my intellect, my emotions and my spiritual self and land fully in my body, integrated. My diet began to also change automatically, my health shifted in every way, false friendships began to fall away and I I began to slowly unite with my full authentic self. Through practicing and healing I knew that this wholistic piece was what was missing in my work as Counselor.