My story is my why. I founded NorCal Aerial Arts from a background in dance, tumbling, skateboarding, snowboarding, and cross-training during the off-season. I established a firm foundation in yoga by taking countless hours of workshops in all styles of yoga, with the highlight meeting Dharma Mittra. Yoga provided fluid and structural support while forming a delight in stretching and strengthening using mindful breathing. I started teaching yoga with barely enough yoga mats, eventually leading yoga workshops and paying particular attention to the needs of the students. I ultimately found a love of circus, specifically aerial fabric and contortion. The challenge of performing and the discipline to train started a new phase of physical learning. This led to performing and teaching all over Northern California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. In 2015 Norcal Aerial Arts started the aerial fabric program at California Dance Company. The students performing at various events all over Redding and occasionally the north coast.

After training, teaching, and performing, learning prehab and rehab to ensure the safety and health of my student-athletes, I became a certified  Personal Trainer and Corrective exercise specialist. This enhanced my yoga classes and warm-ups for my students as I started to redefine how to warm up, I applied these exercises in my yoga classes with great success. A new way of ground-based movement was forming somewhere between yoga, functional range movement, and physical therapy techniques to prevent repetitive injuries. Movement for the local gardener or my students. The season of yoga blocks, straps, Stahl bars and whatever tool to achieve the perfect lines came into practice.

Then, it all fell apart—my farm, my relationships, and my body. The relationship between stress and recovery is a dynamic balance that affects the body on many levels—hence why it is my focus now. In a matter of three years, I have had my shoulders rebuilt and both hips replaced. I moved and started nursing school, which is no joke.

I had to slow down and deal with constant pain while struggling through exams. All of this impressed upon me the relationship between recovery, stress, and inflammation. Primarily, true fitness or adaptability is essential. Fitness is the flexibility to adapt, the key to longevity and quality of life, and more than lifting weights in a gym or showing off flexibility for an audience. Inspired by a holistic approach to keeping the mind, body and spirit flexible and balanced by using techniques to ease pain, release sticky places, and gain a sense of overall balance through the chaos that is life. This is my why, to guide the best version of you moving that you can imagine.