My Story

I didn’t grow up athletic. I didn’t grow up very aware of my body at all. In fact, I stayed pretty dissociated from my body for several years throughout a highly physical career. Until my body forced me to stop and pay true attention to it.

Now my body has become both my biggest teacher and my best friend.

It all began shortly after college, when after an un-athletic childhood, I became obsessed with the goal of learning aerial silks and rope. Before I began training aerial, I became a certified personal trainer so that I could be well prepared with an intellectual understanding of how bodies work before I tried something so ambitious as aerial rope and silks.

My aerial training was incredibly challenging, but within a few years I began working professionally performing and teaching aerial arts. I continued coaching education and built a rich artistic career. It was a dream come true.

Flash forward a decade later, when, after over-working through burnout, I began experiencing debilitating chronic pain, fear of movement, and intense uncontrollable emotional swings. Exercise and training, once my biggest sources of comfort and joy, became a primary source of dysregulation for my nervous system. It was heartbreaking. I felt like my body was betraying me, and I didn’t know how to earn her trust back.

Then I realized: throughout my aerial career, I neglected to honor my 2 scoliosis curves, hypermobile tissue, neurodivergence, and history of difficulty feeling what other coaches would cue me to feel. I just did what my upbringing amidst capitalism and patriarchy taught me to do: don’t worry about your feelings, just push forward.

Then I began understanding that my early approach to skill-based training and traditional fitness training re-enforced those deeply backwards and unhealthy values.

Focusing on the performance of skills and exercise rather than the experience of them had left me with a missing link:

the skill of attending to my own experience in a way that empowered me to negotiate the goals of a coach or teacher with the preferences and needs of my unique body.

This skill, and strategies to support yourself in applying it, are what I can to offer you.

Since 2018, I have been in an ongoing study and practice of the transformational blend of applied neuroscience for motor learning and somatic communication (a full list of my education is below).

In 2022 I went back to graduate school and received an MFA in Theatre, where my thesis explored the how approaches like transdisciplinarity and disability studies expand both aesthetics and refine cultural values in aerial arts. During that time, I also returned to dance classes where I was in class with fellow students half my age. It was the ultimate test of MML: I had to keep attending to my system and develop a learning strategy that worked for me in order to participate in these classes three days a week for two years without re-activating pain patterns.

And I did!

I now invite you to join me in a movement approach that meets YOU where YOU are and enables you to build a more joyful and loving relationship with your unique body.

This is Movement Missing Links: