These knowings I aspire to live by:

All life is sacred. The words we speak are spells. Thoughts are energy. Energy expresses through the body. Feelings carry wisdom but not the truth. Actions have consequences. To those consequences we are bound.

This is the ground we stand upon.

I descend from fairly recent European settlers who came from the mountains, forests and shorelines of Bohemia, Bavaria, Jämtland, Sweden and England. They worked with their hands as farmers, dress makers, railroad builders, midwives, loggers, herbalists, hunters, trappers, street car conductors and home makers.

Dance and somatics have been a path of survival and transformation for me. Through various modalities I support people to live in the embodied present. Living on a small Gulf island, where I built a tiny home, grew and gathered food and enjoyed community and solitude, was my apprenticeship in witchy ways. For a decade I was taught directly by the elements, the moon and the more-than-human world.

Two decades of practice in the Ordinary Mind Zen School at the Bay Zen Center with my teacher, Diane Eshin Rizzetto, both saved and destroyed my life, which of course, Zen practice is likely to do. My Zen training helped me understand ceremony and ritual as deeply human impulses and that the divine is present in everything from changing diapers to chanting to deities. For eight years I was the director of our Dharma School for children. My adult life has been dedicated to community-based, culturally-generative, earth-honoring education. I founded a home-schooling center in the woods, taught in pre-school cooperatives, was a parent facilitator at my daughter’s forest school and support the leadership at my daughter’s current school.

My education, both formal and informal is eclectic and oriented around a passion for intimacy with life. By far my deepest learning has been in the threshing grounds of marriage and motherhood. These relationships call me again and again to meet myself when I wish to run, to get curious about my beliefs, habits and longings and to savor sweetness in simple, relational blessings. My ancestral grandparents guide me to be courageous and take leaps that fly in the face of convention to support my daughter’s spirit. They encourage me to lead and listen, to wake up when I fall asleep and choose love over and over again in my marriage. These relationships are the forge that molds me. They help me bring open-hearted curiosity to my work as a practitioner of ancestral lineage healing.

I currently live in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, ancestral homelands of the Timpanogots Ute and Northwestern Shoshone people, with my husband, daughter and a happy yellow labrador.