I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, hiking, climbing, and enjoying the outdoors with my family. Later I spent several years in Europe as a street musician, and travelled and lived in India, Nepal, and South America. In between these things, though, as a teenager I also spent a couple of years living in the streets in France and Spain, experiencing various forms of abuse, violence, and traumatic loss… which eventually fueled a strong desire to work towards changing the kinds of conditions that lead to trauma for people, and a desire to support people in healing from trauma.
In my early thirties I was able to study printmaking and mural painting with Malaquias Montoya, a Chicano muralist, and earned an MEd with a focus on community education approaches to racial justice. Later I lived in the mountains of Oaxaca Mexico with my African American partner and two young children. Over the years I helped with educational research and did storytelling projects with Mixtec, African American, Latinx, Hmong, and low income white children and families.
In 2002 I began, very reluctantly, to try some yoga, and was surprised to find that it helped me a lot in dealing with the complex PTSD that I had been carrying for a long time.
So in 2007 I trained to be a Hatha yoga teacher, and followed that with other yoga teacher trainings and certifications over time: Yin Yoga with Paul Grilley, an eight month training in therapeutic Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) with David Emerson, Adaptive Yoga with Mathew Sanford, Yoga for Arthritis with Steffany Moonaz, and training in the non-yoga approach to body-centered trauma resilience, the Community Resiliency Model (CRM), with Elaine Miller Karas.
In early August 2026 I’ll finish my two year training as a yoga therapist through the International SomaYoga Institute (ISYI) in Duluth, with a focus on helping people use the tools of yoga and Ayurveda to alleviate physical pain of many kinds, including chronic pain and symptoms of chronic illness.
Through all of this I’ve been offering yoga as mental health and trauma support for people of all ages, including veterans, survivors of domestic violence and abuse, and other people healing from illness, violence, and loss.. For a few years I worked with the UW Madison El Salvador Mental Health Project, offering trauma-informed TCTSY with people who had survived the civil war in El Salvador, in person and then later online. These days my primary work is sharing TCTSY and CRM for relief of trauma and anxiety, and SomaYoga for relief of physical pain, through the Dane County Comprehensive Community Services Program (CCS) with people on Medicaid.
Other stuff: I have three adult children whom I adore, four great cats (more than i ever intended), and a food forest in my yard. I like to play music, make art, and be with people in working for justice, peace, and a more livable world.
