I started my career as a Somatic Movement Therapist and a GYROTONIC® Master Trainer. My expertise was focused on helping my clients connect to their bodies and to move in a way that eased their aches and pains, prevented injury, and helped them to feel good in their bodies on a daily basis. My primary tools were body awareness and integrative movement exercises and I used to teach my clients how to move with more alignment, awareness, and ease. Most of my clients had tried a lot of other options by the time they came to work with me, like physical therapy, personal training, or chiropractic. They had gotten some results from these modalities but they were looking for a long-term sustainable solution to feel their best in their bodies for a lifetime.

I focused my practice on how to help my clients transition into this space of self-responsibility for their bodies and their healing for over ten years until I started to hit a wall with my own body, and my inspiration for movement, and my client results.

I was helping them to physically move their bodies, and as they moved their bodies holistically they experienced some change on the mental, emotional, spiritual level. But taking responsibility for using their connection to their bodies to shift their experience on these other levels was not a conscious part of my work.

I returned to my original love of movement and embodiment work came from my own experience of transformation and healing through movement, dance, and asking philosophical questions. I knew I needed to reconnect with my original inspiration for my work. And I knew that I needed new tools and a new approach to asking powerful questions that would catalyze my client’s ability to uses their experience of body movement to create movement on a soul level. I want to help them use their connection to their bodies as a pathway to a deep connection to themselves, to their desires, and their power to create meaning and change in their lives.

In my search for new tools, I found coaching and I started shifting from a training approach that focused on moving the physical body to an embodiment coaching approach that focused on tuning into how we experience “being in and through our bodies”. This was a mindset and model shift from focusing on the body as something objective that we use or move in different ways to a focus on the body as an instrument through which we experience our lives and express ourselves.

“That called Body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses“- William Blake

When I made this shift I moved from movement training to “Body, Soul & Strategy Coaching”, I shifted my goals and outcomes for my clients. I used the expertise I already had and added a new level of the coaching mindset to uplevel the transformation I offered my clients. Suddenly clients that were coming to me to work on back pain were discovering the hidden roots of their body pain, making improvements in their relationships, or finding a new level of purpose in their life. As they moved their bodies, they developed confidence in themselves and their ability to shift deep patterns in their lives that had held them back from pursuing their goals and receiving the happiness they desired.

As I reflect on this transition that I made, I think that body training and embodiment coaching models served different ends, goals, and needs in my business and my own development of my work. But what I learned in the transition is that, as transformational professionals, we need to keep diving deeper into our own work, our own journey, and evolving our methods as we go. That is the nature of transformation after all…it is a spiral and an unending journey.