Beginnings

That curiosity led me deeper into somatic practice, yoga, and eventually TRE^®. I became a yoga teacher in 2005, and later a TRE^® Provider and Trainer, spending years studying and teaching about the nervous system and the body's innate capacity to respond to and recover from stress and trauma. In 2011, I co-created Neurogenic Yoga™ with Maria Alfaro, with the support of TRE^® founder Dr. David Berceli, bringing together the therapeutic tremoring mechanism of TRE with yoga and other embodied practices. What began as an exploration of how these practices could work together grew into a body of work I have continued to teach, refine, and learn from ever since.

The nervous system remains at the center of how I understand this work because it is so fundamental to how we experience being alive. It shapes how we respond to the world around us, how we connect, how available we are to ourselves and others, and how much of our experience we are able to take in and stay present for.

What has changed over the years is the breadth of the context in which I understand it. A nervous system does not exist in a vacuum. It belongs to a body and a human life. We are shaped by our histories, the people we love, the families and communities we come from, the places we inhabit, the conditions in which we live, and the living world of which we are a part.

As my work deepened, another question began sitting alongside the question of how we heal from what has happened to us:

What are we healing for?

My work and study expanded more deeply into embodiment, sexuality, intimacy, movement, and relationship. I became interested not only in recovery, but in what becomes possible as we have more room within ourselves. Can we recognize what we want and what we don't? Can we remain connected to ourselves when things get difficult? Can we follow sensation and impulse with curiosity rather than immediately trying to control where they lead? Can we experience more of what moves through us without needing to shut it down, explain it, or make it go away?

In other words, can greater capacity in the nervous system give us greater capacity for life?

The natural world has always been part of how I understand these questions. Long before I had professional language for nervous systems or embodiment, I learned by paying attention to the world around me. Nature has continually taught me about adaptation and change, death and renewal, interdependence, timing, and the fact that very little in a living system happens in isolation. We are not separate from the environments we inhabit. The living world is not simply the backdrop to human experience; we are part of it.

This is where my work lives now: with the nervous system at the center, but never separate from the whole ecology of a human life.

I am not particularly interested in helping people become exceptionally good at managing themselves. I am interested in how this work can help us become more available for our lives: for connection, feeling, play, challenge, rest, creativity, change, beauty, awe, and all of the ordinary experiences that make a life feel like our own.