Healing Childhood Trauma
My journey and exploration with somatic work really began when I was a young teenager. I struggled with my own relationship to my body and this showed up in various self destructive ways, grappling with my relationship to alcohol, my body image, but ultimately with myself.
I often forget and for a long time discounted this part of my story but it is through the depths of healing this part of my story, that birthed my deep love and passion for the body, as the most magnificent instrument we have in terms of our own guidance, health, freedom and self-actualization.
It is through my own healing that I fell in love with our bodies ability to speak to us in intricate and nuanced ways. Along my journey the concept that “a healthy relationship with ourselves and our body is the foundation for everything”, became a truth for me.
In university I did a masters degree in global health, where I focused my graduate work on understanding girls relationships with their bodies prior to the onset of menstruation. My findings were astounding in the sense that for the majority of young women there was a complete disconnect from their bodies, extensive lack of knowledge and by and large negative connotations, and even shame when it came to ones own body and reproductive health. These discoveries fueled my passion for working with women and their relationship to self via the body. Since that time, my work has taken me throughout the United States, Haiti, South Africa and Mexico, working primarily in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and the empowerment of women and girls through the avenues of education, as a hands on birth worker and then as a somatic practitioner.
Having worked for a renowned medical surgeon early on in my career, I was consistently amazed by how patients would time and time again, relinquish over their body sovereignty into the hands of another for a quick fix (but most of the time not sustainable solution without any self responsibility and willingness to change), rather than than tap into their own sense of power and inner agency to transform their health situation. This further spurred my fierce passion for educating others around their own ability to connect with their own body agency. This combined with my passion for birth inspired me to go on to become a trained DONA birth doula, and a prenatal yoga teacher, which allowed me to support women in accessing their own health autonomy and body sovereignty in the field of reproductive health.
This work has been deeply satisfying and led me to working in women´s health and empowerment in Haiti where I worked as the country director of an organization working with adolescent girls in these areas. During this time I had the opportunity to become involved in trauma informed mind body yoga (TIMBO) and this was my first introduction to working with trauma and understanding some of the ways that trauma on a physiological level can block individuals from fully accessing their our own power and inner authority.
Since that time in 2011 I have gone on to do many trainings in the fields of somatics, sensuality, trauma awareness and resolution. Today my work is a reflection of my many experiences as well as trainings and knowledge in these fields. My work is deeply influenced by and informed by the work of people such as Blaire Lindsey, Peter Levine PhD, David Bedrick, Stephen Porges, Sue Jones among many others. Today my work encompasses guiding individuals to access their own inner sense of agency and sovereignty, through the peeling off of layers of shame so that what is true and authentic can shine through.
I continue to be truly amazed by the wisdom and guidance our bodies offer us to live our best lives. As one of my teachers always says, it is the most finely tuned biofeedback machine we have. I am also deeply aware of all the impeding narratives, traumas, paradigms and stimuli that work against this connection.
The medical, health and coaching industries today tend to have an externalized prescriptive approach when working with individuals. Although it can be tempting to grab onto answers and formulaic thinking that may temporarily pacify our sense of agency in the world, I believe that only by first coming back into our own knowing can we then start to harness and decipher the knowledge and information outside of ourselves with any sense of clarity.
I am dedicated and in service to supporting individuals to coming into deeper relationship and alignment with their bodies and with their own source connection so that they can experience a deeper sense of aliveness and more intuitively and confidently navigate their own life as a sovereign individual.
“Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.”
— Ken Wilbur