about me

I came to this work the long way round.

My first love was dance – classical, then contemporary – and I spent many years as a dancer, movement teacher, and choreographer. I also studied and taught literature and worked as a journalist, editor, and translator. For over a decade I dedicated myself to the practice of Zen Buddhism. I loved these disciplines. But something was off. I wasn’t well within myself. I was behaving in ways that made me unhappy. And I couldn’t find my way out.

A friend suggested I try a session with a Grinberg Method practitioner. That session was a revelation. It made me realize that in spite of years of dancing and meditating and yoga, I was not truly attentive to my body. I wasn’t listening to what it wanted, what it needed, what it was trying to tell me. My loyalty to the disciplines I loved left important parts of me behind. That first session – and the ones that followed – gave those parts back to me. They returned energy I had been blocking, revealed patterns I had been repeating, and relieved symptoms – migraines, ulcers, acid reflux – by teaching me that I had been creating them, and showing me how to stop.

One day, my practitioner asked: “Do you think you’d like to do what I do?” I said yes without hesitating. To me, the work was magic – not because it was easy, but because it took the base metal of flesh and blood, muscle and bone, fear and pain, and showed me how to find the gold in it. I trained to be a Grinberg Method  practitioner, and have been working with clients since 2009.

A practice, like a good soup, becomes more subtle and flavorful with time. The distinct ingredients of my past – movement, stillness, language, metaphor – have combined into something I could not have planned and did not expect. I draw on all of them, along with my intuition, in every session and writing workshop I give. My aim is to help people become more alive, more honest with themselves, more at home in their own experience, more open to wonder.

Nearly twenty years in, the work still touches me. There are times when I witness a big shift in a person’s perspective – like a tectonic plate moving, or clouds parting to reveal a bright round moon. It can happen in a writing workshop, when putting words to experience makes something click; or in a somatic process, when the work that’s been invested sinks in and makes change possible.

There are other moments, smaller but no less potent: when I have my hand on a tense arm or a held leg, and the person lets go, and I feel it happen beneath my fingers. They breathe more fully. A pattern they have been recreating for decades stops. We exist for a moment in a window where that old state no longer binds them. My intention is to teach them to access that window themselves. But in the beginning, I am there with them when it opens.

It is an astonishing place to be.