If you have ever...
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wanted to have a better, more loving relationship with your body
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dreamt about dancing but struggle to give yourself permission to be free in the way you know you can be
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felt deep inside that there is a version of you led by love and wonder but can’t readily access and share that part of you.
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craved a deeper sense and knowing of intimacy in your relationships with friends, family, and partners
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struggled with anxious thoughts, feelings of hopelessness or being trapped
I offer 1-on-1 and group somatic coaching to people who want to use dance and movement to create a life oriented towards empowered agency, loving relationships, and expansive possibility.
Why?
The body tells our story and it becomes our story. If we practice to become attuned to our embodied experience, we can bring the patterns and movements that make us into our consciousness. In this way, we have the wisdom to create the world we want to be in. This embodied awareness of choice and change, in relationship to the people and circumstances around us, is the motor of my work. From awareness, we cultivate clarity at the horizons of our deepest wants and desires. What holds us back, what makes us light up, what choices can we make with our bodies and our movements to create life-living that nourishes and excites us?
How?
My work is a top-down (spoken reflection) and bottom up (mindful movement) cognitive approach. Essentially, we talk about a client’s life and move through those ideas. The movement we do depends on the particularities of the client. I pull most from my experiences as a teacher in yoga, lineages of dance, trauma-informed somatic therapy, and contact improvisation (moving with and through touch).
My coaching is a container to be curious about the embodied landscape of joy, suffering, trust, care, intimacy, pleasure, discomfort, and fear. It is a container to feel into our inner world so that we can make peace with the fundamental experience of living in our bodies. From there, we learn to let go and we open ourselves towards compassion, belonging, mutuality, fulfillment, and wonder. I am a friend and partner in this process, to reflect back to you pertinent embodied knowledges and to be a moving and caring body alongside you. This last piece is crucial – we learn how to love (ourselves and others) in relation! As a coach, I’m devoted to being in right relationship with myself so I can be a partner that provides uncontaminated, unconditional care. My coaching work centers queer and BIPOC histories, narratives, and possibilities.
My coaching is offered online (via zoom) and in-person in Philadelphia.
My Background
I am professor and MFA candidate in the school of dance at University of the Arts, where I teach dance and somatics research in the undergraduate curriculum. I was an undergraduate dance therapy teacher and researcher at Brown University, where I received my BA in Human Biology working primarily with the Dance for Parkinson’s and the Aging Population program. I am a scholarship awardee for Peter Levine’s 3 year trauma-informed somatic experiencing practitioner program. I am also a certified yoga and pilates mat teacher. I have been dancing for 18 years; the creative possibilities of my coaching practices are interdependent with my living artistic practices. I’ve toured over 50 cities internationally, dancing for singer Melanie Martinez and Dana Foglia Dance. My dance film “Princess” has screened at festivals in the UK, Canada, New York, LA, New Orleans, and is now streaming globally on Nowness Asia.
