The origin story

It started with the Russian Ballet

As a child I was convinced - fully, completely convinced - that I was destined to become a prima ballerina. There was one small problem: I was born with a congenital defect that turned my right leg dramatically inward. Not exactly regulation ballet turnout.

That detail was not going to stop me. Leg braces. Unending hours at the barre. The kind of stubborn, devoted work that a child does when they love something enough to suffer for it. I passed. I performed. I had a brief career on stage - and I left it with a profoundly messed up right knee and, eventually, a shattered heel that would take decades and hardware to understand.

Years later, I found Pilates. And then I understood what my body had been asking for all along: not correction, not compensation - a practice precise enough to actually listen.

I've been teaching movement for over 20 years. The Pilates foundation shaped everything: the attention to load, the respect for the spine, the understanding that how you move between positions matters as much as the positions themselves. When yoga entered the picture, it wasn't a departure. It was the natural expansion of a conversation I'd been in my whole life.

The fall that changed everything

What I know about recovery, I know from the inside

I live on a houseboat in Sausalito. During low tide, there's about a six-foot drop from my front stoop to the dock ramp. One morning, rushing to teach, I apparently believed I'd simply float across.

I didn't. I took a dead drop onto my left heel and shattered it. The impact compressed several discs in my lumbar spine. The pain was extraordinary. The recovery took two years.

What got me through it - what allowed me to titrate off pain medication far faster than anyone expected, what rewired my nervous system's relationship to pain - was my practice. Not discipline. Not willpower. A body that had been trained, for years, to find its way back to itself.

I teach from that knowledge now. Not theoretically. From the inside out.

Where I am now

Learning to practice all over again

Here is something I share with my students that surprises them: after 20+ years of teaching movement, and a lifetime of committed practice - ballet, Pilates, yoga, running, hiking, paddleboarding - I am learning how to practice all over again.

Slower. Closer to home. In quiet collaboration with a few wise, four-legged teachers who seem to have skipped the overthinking part entirely.

This is what I mean when I say I'm developing this practice alongside my students - not handing down a finished system, but workshopping a living one. The flow we build together is one I'm also building for myself. That's not a limitation. It is the most honest thing I can offer.

Grace is not something you were born with or quietly missed. It is something you train. One morning at a time, one wave at a time, one slow and deliberate return to earth.

The life force doesn't leave. It waits. And this practice is how you call it back.

Philosophy

Aging bodies hold extraordinary potential

There is a conversation happening in every body that has been active for decades - between what it has always been able to do and what it is discovering it can still do. This practice joins that conversation.

The body changes. Connective tissue remodels more slowly. Bone density responds to load. Balance depends on training the stabilizing systems, not just the prime movers. Recovery asks for more attention and more respect. None of this is decline - it is the terrain of a body that has been used, and that wants to keep going.

The values underneath everything I teach: compassion, respect, love, boundaries, connection, and community. Not aspirational words. The architecture of every session, every cue, every exchange.