I learned to be “good,” to hold everything in, to override my needs, to translate vulnerability into anger or compliance in order to belong. These adaptations were intelligent. They kept me alive. And over time, they also became the template for disconnection, addiction, self-harm, and harmful relationships.

After immigrating to New York at age five, frequent school changes, bullying, and cultural displacement deepened that sense of not belonging. Emotions weren’t spoken about in my home, so my body carried what had nowhere else to go. By my teens and early twenties, I was living in survival mode without knowing it. My life became a cycle of intensity, numbness, chaos, longing, and escape. At 23, I hit rock bottom and became homeless.

What followed was not a straight line, but a spiral of healing.

I spent years in recovery spaces, therapy, and addiction treatment, doing profound cognitive and emotional work. It helped me understand myself, but it didn’t yet help my body feel safe. When I relapsed years later, it was my body that ultimately led me home. Yoga, breath, movement, and somatic awareness slowly reintroduced me to sensation, presence, and choice. For the first time, I began to feel grounded and alive.

Then I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

That diagnosis cracked something open. It forced me to slow down, listen more deeply, and tend to my body with care rather than force. I began meditating, changed my relationship to food and rest, set boundaries, ended toxic relationships, and recommitted to sobriety. I learned that many of the parts of me I had judged or tried to eliminate were actually protectors shaped by survival.

This was when I truly understood that I was never broken. I had a nervous system that learned to survive.

Healing, I discovered, is not linear. It moves in spirals, layers, and seasons. When my body finally felt safe enough, I experienced a profound sense of belonging, self-acceptance, and connection to something larger than myself. When I was declared in remission, I knew my life’s work would live at the intersection of healing, embodiment, spirituality, and nervous system wisdom.

I completed my first yoga teacher training in 2018. For a time, I practiced and taught Ashtanga, until I recognized that I was repeating the same patterns I’d learned in trauma: force, self-punishment, perfectionism. During the pandemic, discovering I had been navigating my life with complex trauma and started to get the appropriate care that wasn’t just fixated on my past trauma and mind, but on the body where trauma lives.

I immersed myself in somatic education, attachment theory, the neurobiology of stress + trauma, trauma-informed care, and embodied healing- everything started to click. Trauma was not a flaw. It was adaptation. Protection. Intelligence.

I left environments that reinforced harm and began cultivating a gentler, more compassionate, body-led approach.  In 2023, I became a Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Facilitator (TCTSY-F) and a certified somatic coach.

Today, my work is devoted to creating safe enough, relational spaces, particularly for women and femme-bodied people, to reconnect with their bodies, reclaim agency, and remember their intrinsic wisdom. I know from lived experience and from all the beautiful nervous systems that I have been honoured to guide that no matter how stuck, disconnected, or overwhelmed we feel, transformation and healing is possible. At our own pace.

Outside of my professional work, embodiment continues to be my practice. Pole dancing has been a powerful part of shedding internalized misogny and toxic shame and reclaiming my birthright of  body trust and sensuality, being fully alive in the present moment.. I’m deeply nourished by nature, creative expression, travel, and community care. I’m an artist, a forest walker, a beach lover, and a long-time volunteer with animal shelters.

This work is not something I do.

It’s something I live.