About Me

My interest in this work began when I was in high school and had started to study Tai Chi. It was my first experience learning about the relationship between the body and the mind. The study led me to become very interested in working with subtle energy.

While I attended the University of Pennsylvania (class of 1999), I also began working with an energetic healing school based out of New York. The program lasted three years and was the first experience I had working with people, engaged in a process of moving towards a new place of well-being.

While I never practiced that healing art, it was an important aspect of my education.

It helps me to know the value of subtle work. SI tends to have a bad rap - it hurts and is very heavy handed. I let my awareness of the more subtle inform me while working. Sometimes the work is more subtle and sometimes, not. The process is informed by our interaction.

While in college, I began studying Iyengar Yoga with Joan White. Her classes inspired me, and I took up a seriously exciting task of entering the world of Yoga. Yoga has become the foundation of my approach I use when working with the body. In many ways the goals of SI and yoga are the same. SI hopes to create a body wherein the bones “float” in a sea of soft tissue. This body is able to respond and adapt to the reality of living in a material world. This body also tends to have a mind that is open and responsive, capable of meeting the demands of the world. Yoga has same intention - a tool in a process for changing your life and your world.

Exploring this connection inspires my practice, both personal and professional.

Somewhere along the line in there, between finishing college and studying SI. I taught yoga to both adults and children. I enjoy using my knowledge of yoga to help refine my client's process. While there is no need to have a yoga practice while going through the sessions, it is a tool I bring to the table and freely use its gifts to enhance your process.

In 1999 I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a double major: Folklore and Environmental Studies.

In 2001 I began training at the Institute for Core Energetics. This is a four year training program designed to explore a model of body psychotherapy created by John Pierrakos. Pierrakos and Alexander Lowen were both students of Wilhelm Reich and this trinity are the pioneers in this field. While I do not practice body-psychotherapy as a profession, the training, and my own personal process, absolutely inform the sessions I do. It is my intention to create a safe, positive, and challenging environment within which my client's intentions can emerge. Reich held that the environment for healing came about through the context of the relationship that existed between the client and the therapist. I agree, and to that end, use the tools of Core Energetics to create such a container. In the Spring of 2005 I graduated from Core and continue to be involved in this incredibly nourishing community.

As my yoga practice deepened I was beginning to become accustomed to waking up in the morning after a deep backbend practice with intense back pain. Soon my practice became more and more about pain management so that I could do the backbends that I wanted- because backbends feel so great! I had heard about SI from my uncle years ago. It helped him tremendously being someone who ran for 30+ years. I decided to go for it. The work inspired me, challenged me, and became the answer to a long standing question which was emerging more and more insistently. How to bring all the information I had studied and had affected my life so deeply into the world in a viable way. I decided to give the training a try and voila!

I completed my training at the Guild for Structural Integration in early 2005 under the guidance and mastery of Peter Melchior and David Davis. I continue my practice of ever deepening and exploring this art, and consider it the art of being a human being. My Structural Integration practice engages every level of my being. I am constantly challenged and am constantly learning. It makes my work very exciting and very fulfilling. Being a guide in the process of Structural Integration is sacred pact and it is a supreme pleasure for me to work in this field.