I am Sarah Ford Thompson.  I began my love affair with plants and plant medicines as a young child.  I spent my first few years on a self-sustaining farm in Kentucky with my family.  We grew our own food and raised goats for milk.  We traded goat milk and homemade goat cheese with the nearest neighbors for eggs.  My mother is a naturalist and science enthusiast.  She can call birds and they fly to her and respond.  She can identify many plants and taught me the names and uses of all the plants that grew in the woods surrounding our home.  We lived, every day, in and with the nature that surrounded us.

From nature, I moved into my body.  After a few years, we moved to town and I began training for what would become a career in professional dance.  I danced professionally with both ballet and African-based modern dance companies.  I had my own dance company in Chicago and acted as the head of the Dance Department at The Chicago High School for the Arts.  I performed, toured internationally, taught, choreographed, coached, and directed.  A career in professional dance and education taught me discipline, fortitude, focus, passion, and that each individual voice is distinct and important artistically and energetically.  I loved seeing budding artistic voices bloom into powerful and connected performers and activists.

During this busy time I also yearned for a deeper connection with spirit, similar to what I had when I was younger.  I missed my connection with Mother Earth and nature as it was harder to have these experiences when living in the center of a large and bustling city.  It was at this time that I began to move from body into spirit.  I began to study Kundalini yoga and became a certified teacher through KRI and a member of the Yoga Alliance.  It was around this time that I also began studying at East West School of Planetary Herbology.  I had never lost my interest in plants and natural healing.  After reading a couple of Michael’s books, I was delighted to find that he had a program that allowed you to participate regardless of where you lived, if you were willing to commit to your studies.

After a great first seminar, I became pregnant with my first child.  Another soon followed and I found my time consumed by young children and running several dance programs and outreach programs simultaneously.  Just over a year ago, my family and I moved to Ohio.  This move has allowed me to recommit to my studies in herbal medicine and deepen my practice as a Kundalini yogi.  These two disciplines combine beautifully, each being able to have targeted effects on the body, mind and spirit of those who engage them.  I have created a breath-based dance and movement class designed to release held tension in the physical body and subtle body.  I hope to create a practice here in my new city that will allow me to serve individuals and groups in finding joy, health, power, flow, and unity in their physical, spiritual, mental bodies as well as in their connection to nature and community.