I grew up in a small town in New England. My soul was at home in the hardwood forests and in the arts, singing, dancing, playing music, sewing, drawing and painting. I moved to Chicago and trained in the visual arts at an amazing museum/school and for years had a tandem career as an exhibiting artist and an arts administrator. I also taught arts to kids and adults and children on the autism spectrum, back when autism was a very rare diagnosis. Then I left behind city life for good and established a new chapter of life in Montana, where I’ve lived for 30 years, and where for 22 years I was principal fundraiser for Montana Public Radio.
Like many of us who find ourselves drawn to holistic healing, I’ve had health challenges. In my mid-30s everything collapsed, energy, hormones, digestion. At first the only thing that helped me go on was restorative yoga, three times a day lying on my bolster, breathing with legs up the wall. My husband drove me 125 miles to the nearest health food store and we bought Amadea Morningstar’s “Ayurvedic Cookbook” and Michael Tierra’s “The Way of Herbs”. I learned the yoga of food and made my own marshmallow root capsules at the kitchen table. Along the way I found help from naturopathy and acupuncture, I became a teacher of Integrative Yoga Therapy and dreamed about acupuncture school.
While I never did enroll in acupuncture school, I have been studying and practicing Jin Shin Jyutsu, a gentle touch Japanese acupressure form with the word Art (Jyutsu) in its name. In fact the founder of this healing form emphasized that it is an art form, infused with all that the practitioner is and knows – a big circle for me. I enrolled in the East West School of Planetary Herbology in the fall of 2019, a few months before my 60th birthday. Learning the full framework of TCM diagnostics, the energetics and healing properties of the herbs of the world, crafting formulas, using magnets along the meridians, practicing Qi Gong, all has a great synergy with what I have learned from Jin Shin Jyutsu. My goal is to spend this mature phase of my life in the healing arts, using herbs and my hands and spirit to help others on their healing journeys.