Education and TRAINING

I found yoga at many times in my life, and continue to come back to the practice again and again relearning, unlearning, and achieving a deeper understanding with each new year. My focus has become grief work, working with movement and breath to connect and understand loss and how it shows up in the body and human experience. The recent loss of my brother in 2022 has unraveled a new chapter and outlook on how the world understands and works with loss. My focus is to create safe spaces to converse about grief and the emotions that may come along with loss with out judgment and allowing the permission to be as you are through out the healing process. I found yoga for the first time at a time in my life when I was not sure how to cope with numerous traumatic events and its continued to shape me and hold me through many hardships since.

At the age of 16, I lost my partner and first love to a dirt bike accident and was introduced to and became well acquainted with grief and serious loss, as I watched family members move through emotion a new life chapter was brought forth: slowly healing from grief and starting to learn how to cope with loss became the next adventure that just continued to unfold into a greater understanding of self, grief, and how yogic practices can help towards wellness through this crazy life story. 

 Community membership and self-love were and continue to be at the forefront of my journey.

I went on to complete high school in a social context wherein drugs and alcohol were people’s main coping mechanisms, and soon found myself in the grips of a party life style. I lacked a full appreciation of the realities of such ways of life, I did not know how to maintain my mental wellness or any practices of healing through movement or other means for that matter. In my home town, or even online at that time, there was very little access to mental wellness resources or information on how best to heal or move through emotions.

Tragic loss in my home town was not an uncommon experience:  when I was 19-years old a subsequent partner and dear friend decided to leave this realm on his own terms, only saying goodbye in his farewell letter. This led to another dance with grief and the process of mourning yet another lost loved one, taken too young while trying to make sense of fraught emotions and other peoples’ suffering.  I struggled a long time to let go of self-shame and blame for having not done more, for having not known more, and for having not been more.  I continued to use substances to numb my emotional pain, but did not realize this was what I was doing in the midst of all the “fun” I was having.  These experiences now motivate me to educate people about suicide awareness and prevention, as well as the need to maintain mental health and avoid misusing substances as forms of self-medication.   

I have since drawn from these pivotal life experiences to drive my study of many healing practices, including Yoga Therapy, Reiki, Thai Massage, and Sound Healing. I meld these practices to create a healing platform for mental health and well being.  I began my yoga journey in 2017, undertaking a 250-hour Yoga Teacher Training program which led shortly thereafter to a 300-hour Yoga Therapy Foundation course.  Finishing a 500-hour Advanced Yoga Therapy certification at the Vancouver School of Healing Arts, and now hold a Diploma as a Yoga Therapist and is Certified through the International Association of Yoga Therapists.  

A trauma-informed approach incorporates the therapeutic benefits of breathing, moving the body, meditating, and other yogic practices to help process grief, anger, etc. and encourage overall wellness brought forth through the strength and understanding of the practitioner them selves.  I am is cognizant of the body/mind connection, and work intentionally to share this healing information with others who may be struggling to find hope and value through tough times.  In my emphatic work as a Yoga Therapist, I aim to create a space of community and compassion in order to bring forth empowerment in others to embrace self-compassion and forge new meaning out of life‘s hardest lessons.  I actively fosters hopeful desire while moving towards a future full of acceptance and understanding for all human beings.