When I returned home from Australia I knew I’d be a hypocrite if I did not train in this body of work that helped me so much.

I began my Feldenkrais Practitioner Teacher Training under the mentorship of Jeff Haller who studied under Dr. Feldenkrais in the early 80s. By the time I finished my Feldenkrais training it was 2007 and I went straight into private practice with ease and enthusiasm.

But in 2008, when I started to realize, via trial and error in my private practice, that while many clients were having benefits similar to mine, roughly 50% of them were not.

It was clear that the Feldenkraisian principles didn’t provide ALL the pieces needed to help folks heal at the deepest level possible and this is when I (thankfully!) came across Peter Levine and his body of work, Somatic Experiencing (SE).

And similar to my ‘seize the day’ ways of going into my Feldenkrais studies by gut feel, I did the same with SE and before I knew it I had enrolled in a 3-year Somatic Experiencing program.

The years between 2008 and 2010 humbled me even further and rocked my world once more. I still remember to this day learning from my main SE mentor, Steven Hoskinson, that pretty much ALL chronic and mental illness can be connected to dysregulation of the nervous system and unresolved traumatic stress. To this day, that moment is still seared in my memory – I remember where I was, who was there, and thinking to myself, “why the f*ck is this not mainstream!?!” I guess you could say that single moment was the spark that has put me here.

And now, nearly 10 years later, I still have that fire in my belly to ensure as many people as possible get to understand what I did that day.

But much more happened after that moment…

I went to the next level and began my studies with Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell, learning what is best described as touch therapy for healing deep developmental and early traumatic wounds.

It was during these trainings that I discovered that I was living with something called Fluid Trauma (also called, chemical trauma), which (we think) was due to extreme exposure to chemicals throughout my childhood, adolescents, in utero, and intergenerationally.

As an aside, how this had been showing up for me was in very rare and almost 3rd degree-like burns that covered my body and there wasn’t anything definitive as to the cause until this moment…

I will never forget the moment my teacher Kathy started lecturing on this topic, warning us that if we have fluid trauma, that the moment she starts to talk about it, those in the room who have unresolved fluid trauma will feel like running out of the room, throwing up, passing out, or all of the above.

I thought she was joking thinking, “nah – that would never happen to me!!” But it wasn’t until, not even a split second later, that I looked at my husband with eyes of “what the heck is happening to me, I’m about to puke, and I need to lie down!” My entire system was ready to shutdown, it was shutting down, by mere suggestion of fluid/chemical trauma!

While this level of cellular trauma was a tough thing to uncover, I am forever grateful for following my gut instinct and moving towards this level of education that offered me, when I least expected it, a solution for something that no one has been able to figure out (I had suffered from extreme and non-treatable ‘rashes’ for a large chunk of my life).