I practiced yoga daily for 10 years before I ever considered teaching it.  The same afternoon I considered teaching yoga, I found IAYT and decided to become a yoga therapist. From my first training I knew that pain was my field. Immediately I offered a yoga for chronic pain class with a local adult learning center, teaching a mindfulness approach to pain. After 15 years and hundreds of students in various environments I am still teaching mind/body skills to manage pain. The lineage of yoga is the foundation from which I have built what is now my unique multi-modal programming. Through decades of study, trainings, but mostly experience, I am proud to facilitate hope and healing to people who suffer from pain.    

With passion came opportunities. During and after completing my yoga therapy certification, I brought my private practice into an integrative healing collective. Each practitioner housed their practice in the center and collaborated with one another’s complementary modalities for the individual.  The team mentality has always been integral in my approach, in fact it needs to be because pain is multifactorial with many considerations to understand what is necessarily an individualized journey.  I continue to find myself as part of a multimodal healing team through Boomerang Health Care (previously Integrative Pain Management) Functional Restoration Programs (FRP). I am now currently working in the Bay Area at their San Francisco, Walnut Creek and San Leandro locations.

 It has been a great privilege to work with the chronic pain population, since 2010. The complex nature of pain has kept me laser focussed on deepening my understanding of pain processes, and as a result I have built my programming into authentic healing protocols through these past 15 years of experience. Having worked with multiple pain conditions and populations, I have learned to tailor teachings to the needs of the the individual.

What began as a passion for neuroscience became a calling to serve people who suffer with chronic pain beyond yoga. Pain education is but one of the complementary modalities I utilize to serve my patients. Much like consistent mindful movement will improve a pain condition and ignite neuroplastic change, so do incremental behavior changes, anti-inflammatory diets, pain science, and other mind/body practices to manage stress. There is a technology behind the coaching I can offer, and I have found it can be a profound complement to one’s healing process. Currently I teach wellness: functional nutrition, stress management, lifestyle medicine, mindfulness with Boomerang Health Care in person and online. Through my years of this work I have developed a series of online courses, both for pain clinics Mind/Body Skills Building, and those I offer independently beginning with Empowered Movement for Pain.

I love what I do. As far as I know, there is nothing more compelling than pain. Over and over, year after year, I am humbled by the grace and courage of my students. Rising to the reality of persistent pain takes a giant, a form of personal character so developed in ways no one would ask for. When I am able to meet such precious souls in their painful places, and find them open and hopeful to what I may have to offer them, magic can happen. Make no mistake, the magic is all theirs, once they begin the process of tapping into their power over their pain.