My Definition of Integrity
My breath caught as my body hit the floor.
I had never moved like this before.
My hips swayed and the ugly movement emerged, like my insides were trying to slough off a railroad track of tears long held. I gagged and gulped a breath as my arms moved in new directions and my body began to awaken.
I grunted and began to cry.
I had never moved like this before.
I have been teaching yoga for a very long time. As I write this to you now, it’s been almost 10 years since I became “certified” to lead bodies through a series of predetermined shapes.
Over the last decade, there have been many evolutions of my teaching.
Initially, I was terrified to even take the seat — a kind of imposter’s syndrome. Then once I actually started taking the seat and teaching regularly, the imposter’s syndrome still caught up to me. There would be times when I would convince myself so powerfully that someone else could teach a class better than me. I would make myself sick. I would then call for a sub and drown myself in some flavor of self-pity, and often, experience a lot of relief.
Once I began to get the hang of it, I started to understand the importance of being afraid to teach every week. It pulled me out of my shell. It catapulted me out of my comfort zone. And it really made me look within myself at why I was doing what I was doing as a teacher. Not only what I was going to speak about in class each week, but my message as a teacher; the unique flavor of medicine I was called to share with the world outside my own inner landscape, and why it was so important that it was shared by me.
About five years into teaching publicly something woke up in me. Hindsight has shown me it was my womb that was awakening and healing lifetimes of generational feminine wounding (more on that later). At the time, however, I felt completely out of control. A wise place within me knew everything was about to change, forever.
My yoga practice had gone from being in the studio five days a week, chanting with my fellow Jivamukti yogis: hitting all the 12 points, dotting every line, crossing every tee to simply sitting in stillness and quiet reflection. When I actually did move on my yoga mat, it was 10-20 minutes of nonlinear movement followed by 10 to 20 minutes of sitting on my mat and crying; sobbing from the depth of my feminine being.
I can still feel the emotion now as I write this to you. And although it was entirely foreign territory, it was the most I had ever felt like myself to date. It went on like this for months, like a continuous shedding. I knew there was a truth waking up in me, and at the same time it required a new level of surrender. I had to let go. I had to let go of what I knew in order to be available for what I was learning. It was a kind of un-becoming. After a few months of this experience, I decided to pull away from public teaching and be present with the part of myself that was waking up.
You see, I couldn’t be in integrity with myself anymore. I couldn’t teach someone else’s method, with someone else’s rules, and in someone else’s studio. I had to be with my own body’s wisdom as she expressed herself; a voice so loud, I could no longer ignore it.
At the time, I also had no idea how to share or teach the practice that was emerging from within me. To walk into a studio and teach one method, and go home and practice something completely opposite, just didn’t feel true or authentic in my heart.
I eventually emerged again with a signature class called Full Body Gratitude. It was a love child of massage therapy, restorative yoga, and meditation. Like a massage therapy session that each student did on themselves.
Earlier the next year I started teaching intuitive movement and emotional regulation on a retreat I lovingly named La Luna Laguna.
I began to explore teaching to the part of a person's soul who didn’t need to be told what to do, and simultaneously holding space to reconnect them to this part of themselves. I began to hold the container for humans like me to experience the awakening that I initiated myself through, and for them to not be alone while they did it, like I was.
I also began teaching a special kind of chakra tuning — despite the efforts of my most significant yoga teacher, who discouraged me from teaching such a class, convinced of my inexperience. It was an act of rebellion, a special kind of “eff you”, while also being a love letter to myself and my own capabilities. I don’t blame my teacher for not understanding how capable I was. It wasn’t for them to discover. And it also wasn’t even until this year, 2022, that I truly understood it for myself.
As I sit here writing this to you, I am in the same kind of space I was in five years ago, while also feeling more vulnerable than I was 10 years ago when I was afraid to teach yoga for the very first time.
Like New: My first experience with somatic movement
My breath caught as my body hit the floor.
I had never moved like this before.
My hips swayed and the ugly movement emerged, like my insides were trying to slough off a railroad track of tears long held. I gagged and gulped a breath as my arms moved in new directions and my body began to awaken.
I grunted and began to cry.
I had never moved like this before.
The next song began to slowly fade and I felt my body become heavier with gravity. I melted to the floor as gracefully as a child with brand new legs: plunky and inevitable. I didn't care, for maybe the first time ever. The floor felt like home in a way I'd never known. I sat and cried for nearly 30 minutes straight, feeling a new light enter me as an old life exited like a sticky sludge, oozing from my insides.
I had moved for myself. And for the first time.
Although I had no idea what I was doing and I was quite scared, I was also tasting a new flavor of freedom. There was an aliveness awakening inside me. An ancient energy trapped for what felt like centuries was beginning to unravel. I was both terrified and relieved.
Over the next four months I would move this way, by myself, in my living room each day. I would roll out my mat, play a song that touched my soul, and begin to move my body in a shapeless confusion, unwinding nearly two decades of training around where and how to move her in the correct way.
Each day I stepped into the unknown and moved my body in expressive, nonlinear ways for 10 to 20 minutes. Then I planted myself and cried, surrendering to the floor. Sometimes for hours.
I didn’t know at the time that I was waking up from a very long sleep. I had no idea this movement would change my relationship with myself, my body, my business, my relationships, and with my sense of authority. Honestly, I thought I was going a bit mad… but I also cannot even begin to describe to you the relief that washed over me throughout this process each day.
I felt like myself in a way I cannot explain in words. I was moving into trust, into self honoring, and into my medicine. I was also moving into unknown territory.
This is where I found somatics. In my body, exploring the unknown, and moving into trust. Questioning nearly everything with my mind while my body confidently led the way. All the while, establishing a secure relationship with my mind, body, and soul that continues to serve me to this day in indescribable and infinite, priceless ways.
Since that spring day in 2016 I’ve led hundreds of bodies into exploring the same experience of intuitive movement and somatics, watching new aspects in each of them awaken in the process. Watching them explore new depths of trust and self honoring.
Throughout my own journey, I discovered a way to teach a person’s soul. I discovered this not through knowing how, but through leaning into trust and following the same cues my soul once led me through inside my own body.
And it’s time I share it with more of you.
Introducing: Soul Hydration
Somatic tools for living in an unprecedented world dynamic