It was 20 years ago in NYC. I was a professional dancer and my toe was broken. I had a downstairs neighbor, still one of my closest friends, who had been studying with Dolores Kreiger, who is the creator of Therapeutic Touch. TT uses the hands just outside of the physical body to heal. It works with the aura, or energy field. These days we have modalities like Reiki, and a much fuller scientifically understood function of the energy field. Back then, people just didn’t do this stuff. I was, like most dancers I knew back then, stubborn and disrespectful to injuries. I just wanted it to go away! I was willing to try anything. She moved her hands around the perimeter of my foot not touching it and my life changed in an instant

I felt something. It was visceral and not visceral. The non visceral part was possibly a sense that I had wandered into an aspect of reality and truth that I did not realize I had been deeply longing for – a quiet shock of being nudged and woken up as if from a dream. Viscerally there was tingling, heat, and movement in the area she was contacting, which was weird. How can something that isn’t there move or be felt? But it did – it moved and to be able to feel it changed my whole perspective on what a body is and what we are as Being/Presence.

Yes – like a realization that I was not who I thought I was. It was the beginning of my spiritual journey to the present – 20 plus years later.

I quit dance! To the amazement of my family and friends – who thought I’d lost my mind for sure.  I knew I needed to deepen this understanding and so from that point on, devoted my life to inner transformation and healing, both of myself and others.

Shortly after the toe incident, In the middle of 1989 – I got badly injured. I had a herniated lumbar disc. It was a turning point. When it injured, I saw several surgeons for treatment recommendations.  But I recognized that I didn’t want to get cut open. The directors of the dance company were frantic. They wanted me quickly fixed and back on stage. I was at a crossroads. Finally I found a doctor that said, you can heal it, but you have to lie down for 6 months. I intuitively knew that I needed that.

Yes. It’s unbelievable. But I personally found it necessary in order for me to move more directly towards what ultimately was a calling.  6 months is a short time for such a journey. I got Physical Therapy and began personal Therapy during that time. I also began to work with Oh Shinnah Fastwolf, a Native American healer who was in cahoots with Dee Kreiger. She was probably a big reason I got up and began a new life. She did a healing on my back. I will never forget it. A month later I had quit the dance company and my back was healed.

It sort of unfolded without much fanfare - I was obeying something within that could not be ignored. My own injury was a doorway to that. Injuries can be deep teachers.

Massage is actually a beautiful art-form! It has inherent in it such a musical intuitive flow. I love that part of massage. And I love that massage offers me a viable forum to apply all that I have integrated and learned myself about energy, spirit, body, heart, wounds and healing. A big satisfaction is the activity of working with muscles (kneading, softening, melting, releasing) with my hands. My hands feel able to both express and intuitively sense what is needed, where and why. When I begin a session, each time there is something that arises in me that becomes bigger than my own small self. It is as if “I” just get out of the way. The session becomes a shared moving meditation. A space is entered, that is silent and wise. And empty. The experience is quite meaningful. It is a way Be who I truly am and share that and support my client to Be herself, too.

This aspect of just being who we are - it’s a quality where there is only love, compassion, true caring, and some kind of innate ability to help; to serve. There is a sense of an inner guidance that has intelligence and wisdom about what is true. It seems to be a place of great transformation that melts whatever is in its way, depending on that person’s personal awareness and whatever it is that the person is ready to heal from and grow into. Each tension pattern, chronic holding place, locked body part, or emotional influence has a noble intention to defend and protect the person from further “harm”. The whole body gets in on this. Soon we can forget who we are. We forget the Being part. When I work, I am, in a way, talking to those noble parts and gently loving them to remember. I get inspired and full when I work. I am a stream of consciousness that is reality and that is what probably impacts me the most. It continually inspires me.