Emotion Alchemist: Blending Western & Eastern Wisdom

I spent most of my life trying to not feel my emotions.

I grew in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in a chaotic and intense environment that left me prioritizing other people's emotional experiences out of survival.

I stuffed down my own feelings and values and beliefs about how to be in the world, and lived in layers of people pleasing and codependency that caused body pain and chronic hormonal issues from a young age.

I started my healing journey around the age of 16 when my hormones were getting more and more out of balance. I had an absent period for 3 years, terrible breakouts and huge mood swings that left me feeling miserable, numb and defeated.

I distracted myself from feeling by always staying busy, and pushed my body to the extreme through high intensity workouts and eating minimally. I started to develop an eating disorder, had bouts of depression and felt alone, disempowered and misunderstood.

I started to get regular massages, went to a naturopath and received acupuncture and started to unwind through yoga. I turned to eastern modalities to cope with the high stress and expectations I put on myself and my screaming body that wanted an alternative to western birth control and toxic skin creams.

I traveled for six months to Peru and Guatemala and explored the healing world in a bigger way. I trained in yoga and sound healing, and explored a variety of plant medicines.

A significant peak moment was when I moved to California to study Ayurveda and live in an off-grid rental community. I participated in a silent retreat on the property with my land mates.

I was sitting quietly meditating when all of a sudden, this huge surge of energy ripped through my body and began shaking my whole body uncontrollably. I became completely disoriented, felt this interconnectedness with all of life and immediately started sobbing once the shaking ended.

My sensitivity to energy was forever changed after this experience, and it began the biggest unwinding of who I was, and my fascination with the body and experiencing the Divine through the life force coursing through our veins. It was the direct experience of God moving through me, and not just this theorized God that I had learned about in Sunday school that shook me to my core and my beliefs about a higher power being outside of us.

This also revealed to me how much trauma and emotion the body holds and that when I could no longer control my body in this moment, I had to surrender into the process and allow it all to come out and unwind.

I spent years in what I call my monk phase, detoxifying and purifying my system so that this life force energy could run smoothly through my system. I experienced deeper states of inner peace, bliss and contentment.

The Dark Night of The Soul

I got to the point in 2020 when I needed additional support and entered a dark night of the soul as most did at that time. I went the psycho-somatic route with a therapist and was mentored by a skilled energy worker. I began studying Focusing and that gave me the tools I needed to begin to unmerge myself from the intense feelings of self-betrayal and hatred from years of self-sacrifice and bottling up my emotions.

This was the start of my journey of truly feeling and staying in my body with an expanded awareness of myself in relationship with others.

I began to learn what boundaries I needed, and what energies and feelings that I felt that weren't mine. I gave myself permission to not take these feelings on. I gave myself space to feel and be seen and share my experience with people who could hold it.

Through movement, meditation, and inter-relational tools, I began to come back to life and feel a sense of who I was through holistic healing in community and tending to all the layers of myself.

Fast-forward a few years, I began to practice abdominal massage on friends then decided to follow a whisper from my intuition when I was miserable in my marketing career and wanted a change.

I went to massage school in Hawaii and this was when I began to develop my gift of feeling people's emotions in their tissues. I would get intuitive hits about what people were going through. I would move stuck energies and emotions naturally. This was an accumulation of the years of work I did on myself and the sensitivities that I developed along the way.


My Purpose

My purpose in this lifetime is to be an emotion alchemist. To feel the full spectrum of the human experience through the body and heal not only myself, but to give others permission to feel and heal in their own lives.

I do this through the bodywork I do. I have turned my survival mechanisms of attuning to others into my superpower to listen to my clients' bodies and what they need in the moment.

I also do this through my art of spoken word, writing and my music. I turn emotion into felt experiences and stories that take people on a journey of inner exploration and healing.


My Mission

My mission is to make every person that I touch feel at home in their bodies so they can be fully expressed, empowered and in tune with self.

My Professional Life: Formal (and not so Traditional) Education

I have blended Western and Eastern approaches for a holistic perspective on holding all the layers of you - emotional, mental and physical in our sessions together.

I studied my undergrad in Kinesiology with a minor in Psychology at the University of Windsor.

I went on to complete a 200 hr Yoga Teacher Training in Peru, a 100 hr Sound Ceremony Certification, and an Abdominal Massage Course in Guatemala. In California, I then studied six months at the California College of Ayurveda to become an Ayurveda Educator and an online course for 1.5 years of Inter-relational Focusing. I also studied Kriya meditation through Ananda Village.

Once in Hawaii, I studied massage at the Maui Academy of Healing Arts that included modalities like Lomi Lomi (the lineage of Mana Lomi), Ashiatsu, Thai, Swedish and Sports massage.

I continue my education in bodywork in Florida with courses focused on Myofascial work (John Barnes) and visceral manipulation (Inside out Paradigm with Dale Alexander) to create lasting change to the tissues and heal the root cause of health ailments.

The energetic roots live in the tissues, and when those are released in a masterful, compassionate and loving way, emotions are released and bodies are left healed and changed.