I came to be a compassion-focused health and life coach via a "long and winding" road.

 

My first career was in academia, teaching and studying history, gender studies, and policy at the University of Pennsylvania and then Temple University here in Philadelphia.

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Twelve years ago, in my mid-40s, a health crisis brought that chapter of my life to an abrupt end. I'd lived with chronic pain my whole adult life, but I had treated the pain - and my body - as things to be mastered, ignored, overridden, pushed through. That was inherently unsustainable, and, inevitably, I crashed, hard. In the aftermath, as I struggled to heal, I learned that I needed to befriend, listen to, and work WITH my body, rather than against it. It was trying to tell me something and it had taken a break-down for it to get my attention. I wanted to support other people dealing with pain and illness so that, hopefully, they could learn that lesson before their lives fell apart.

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When I started coaching, my focus was integrative and functional medicine, including nutrition, lifestyle, herbs. After a few years in that world I began to understand that stress - physical, mental, emotional and environmental stress - was at the center of healing. All the fancy remedies in the world didn't seem to help people unless they also addressed the myriad stressors that were impacting their physiology.

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I went on to immerse myself in mind-body healing with a focus on the autonomic nervous system. I've trained in the physiology of stress as well as trauma and its impacts on the mind-body. I'd been practicing and studying Buddhist-based mindfulness, loving-kindness, and compassion since 2005. I began to integrate that into my coaching approach as well.

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I also practice and coach clients in Intuitive Eating, Health at Every Size, recognizing the power of structural fat-phobia and weight bias in health care. Our relationships with food and body image are an essential part of our health and well-being. They are inseparable from the ways that our culture prizes certain types of bodies while stigmatizing and punishing others. With my background in history and gender studies, I view diet culture and thin privilege as inseparable from other systems of oppression including white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and the oppression of LGBTQ people.

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I've trained in Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal Theory, and Internal Family Systems. I'm now pursuing certification in Compassionate Inquiry, created by Gabor Maté. Maté's book When the Body Says No has had a huge influence on me since I read it over a decade ago. Maté's understanding of childhood trauma, human behavior, and physical and mental health is brilliant - it pulls together all I have learned and experienced. It makes everything, finally, makes sense. I am excited and proud to be part of the growing international community of CI practitioners.