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While acquiring my B.F.A. in dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts from 1993-1996, I was introduced to Pilates and studied with Kathy Grant, one of Joseph Pilates’ direct disciples. With Kathy, I started to understand how imagery and language helped me learn how to move differently and access specific and deeper muscle groups that helped support my skeleton.
While sustaining a foot and knee injury at NYU, the doctors I was seeing were unable to help me. Forced to look for alternatives, a friend referred me to the Feldenkrais Method®, and, with no other prospects for relief in sight, I reluctantly gave it a shot. After only a few weeks of practicing Feldenkrais, I remember putting on my ballet slippers and feeling as if they were someone else’s shoes. My spine and the way I was standing and bearing weight through my feet felt different. My arches felt lifted and my leg felt more like a spring than it had ever felt before. My turns and jumps were effortless, a feat that years of training never gave me. I remember that day so clearly because it opened my mind to the capacity the human body has for change and the power within it.
In 1997, while I studied ballet in San Francisco with Augusta Moore, a Feldenkrais practitioner and former San Francisco Ballet dancer, I began to understand not only how to fuse Feldenkrais with the movements of ballet but also with more common movements like walking and sitting. Additionally, I spent several months at a time in Italy training to become a Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner with Ruthy Alon, one of Moshe Feldenkrais’s original 13 students. I completed my training and became fully certified in 2004 with Yvan Joly.
The Gyrotonic method was introduced to me by a fellow Feldenkrais practitioner as a way to maintain my dance conditioning. I was fascinated by the agility and fluidity I could attain so quickly from these movements that felt almost effortless and harmonious. There was nothing jarring rather these movements felt so supportive and intelligently designed. In 1996, I began studying and working at San Francisco Gyrotonic, formerly White Cloud West and, in 2000, I received my Level 2 certification.
In late 2000, I moved to Los Angeles and began working in various pilates and Gyrotonic studios, and chiropractic and physical therapy offices. I refined my knowledge of pilates with Josette Lamotte of The Method Pilates and through certification courses at the The Physical Mind Institute. It was at this time that I started to combine the three methods. I learned to decipher how to structure a session with a goal in mind and figure out the shortest and easiest path to get there. Depending on how each client was on a particular day, I started to make choices as to how to approach the session. |
