Background
My own experience with healing and embodiment has traveled through various cycles of worthiness, lack, anger, addiction/numbing, body dysmorphia, and disordered eating (to name a few). I feel like I’ve died a thousand deaths and each rebirth continues to reveal and awaken unconditional self-love, kindness, gratitude, abundance, acceptance and peace, which in itself is a beautiful practice of being.
We are so fortunate in these times to have a wide variety of healing modalities for our trauma, anxiety, and dis-ease. Now, there is a common understanding that wholistic healing must include embodiment and somatic support. For me, utilizing the joy of dance, intentional release through movement, along with connecting to spirit, indeed encompasses the whole-istic approach that continually informs my healing.
Soulpower Living is sharing the way of loving ourselves through emotive, cathartic, and transformational offerings inviting embodiment, joy, and self healing. My training as a licensed Occupational Therapist specializing in sensory integration, a certified Death Doula, and in nature-based spirituality cultivated my unique style of teaching and empowering others. In addition, I now offer group and individual Spiritual Embodiment coaching for consciously living (dying and rebirthing) a Soul-empowered life.
I began my college career at Vanderbilt University as an electrical engineering major and in the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC). THAT didn’t fit me very well. I eventually transferred to the University of Florida graduating Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Occupational Therapy.
I was a pediatric Occupational Therapist (OT) for 12 years having worked at United Cerebral Palsy of Central Florida, Florida Hospital in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), then in a private practice specializing in sensory integration for children and adults. I also worked in charter schools. I eventually left the profession to focus on my family and children, including homeschooling/unschooling my children for 3 years.
Dance Heals
In 2012, by the time I found the dance classes called Soulsweat in Boulder, CO, I had already spent 15 years in recovery through individual therapy, group therapy, outpatient therapy, and countless Alcoholics and Overeaters Anonymous meetings to heal and dismantle my programming. Outside of the AA/OA meetings, all were in traditional, cognitive -behavioral therapies, which worked to a manageable and healthy degree.
With that said, I didn’t realize what I was missing until I found it. I had forgotten how much I loved to dance. Dance created a full circle connection aligning everything I understood about somatics in my OT work with children, to my own personal healing with my spirit, mind and body. Through the permission to be emotive and express myself in ways beyond words and through the simultaneous expansion I was feeling through my spiritual work, I found myself unraveling one belief system after another. Embodied healing was happening without revisiting once again old trauma. Instead, through joy, aliveness, play and permission, and through the awakening connection to the divine, my relationship with my body and all the stories it carried for me were starting to release. And for the first time in years, I felt freedom in my body.
I danced 3x’s a week, then became an instructor in 2015. After moving to Asheville in 2018, I decided to create Soulpower Dance as a reflection of my evolution of healing resulting from the interplay and integration between spiritual awakening and conscious, embodied movement and dance.
Death Doula
In 2016, following the death of my grandmother, I answered the call to become a Certified Death Doula through the Conscious Dying Institute in Boulder, CO. I launched the website Death Doula Collective, began a meetup group and held monthly meetings called Courageous Conversations to discuss conscious living and dying. My work as a death doula included offering ritual and ceremony for families and their dying loved ones, one-on-one support for people on their transitional journey, holding space in active dying vigils, and companionship, respite care, vigil for hospices in the Boulder County area. For hospice, I held grief support group facilitation and grief support for residents in long term care facilities. Currently, I am a member of the Center for Conscious Living and Dying in Asheville and serve as one of the Fire Keeper’s holding fire during active dying vigils. I am currently on hiatus as an active death doula, focusing on Soulpower Living ❤️🥰.