About me

An intuitive scientist

I have been fascinated by three things my entire life – medicine, spirituality, and the confluence of the two, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it that easily when I was a child growing up on a dairy farm in Colorado. I skewed hard toward the medical, professing my intent from a young age to enroll at Colorado State University as a pre-vet major. After two years, disenchanted in my studies and feeling unmoored, I floundered around and finally settled on a B.S. degree in Animal Science. In the meantime, I’d met and married the love of my life.

After a short stint at The Ranch, exploring the idea of joining my brother in the dairy business, we moved to the city, where I focused my energy on raising our firstborn. A decade and two more kids later, despite the support and love surrounding me, I was clinically depressed and suicidal, though I was very good at hiding it from the outside world.

Alone in our church chapel, keeping the Maundy Thursday candlelight vigil, I sobbed my heart out to God, pleading for help. What ensued was one of the most mystical experiences of my life. It touched me so deeply I was able to take the first, tiny, step away from the pain and negativity. That step led to another, and then another. It wasn’t a straight line from desperation to inspiration, because healing is never linear, but it was my first experience learning to trust the process.

For the next chapter, I continued to center family amid other part-time endeavours while following my husband, first to Boston, then to London, then Switzerland, and finally back to Boston. Over the years I played with going back to school but could never decide whether to resurrect the veterinarian dream or focus on humans. If I turned to humans, would I choose to be an M.D, a nurse, a physician’s assistant or maybe an osteopath? My time in Switzerland, where natural and complementary medicine stood side-by-side with western medical practices, had broadened my views. My old desires bubbled up and broke the surface as our oldest began their search for colleges, the children’s future departures imminent.

As I mulled over my options, I recalled how enthralled I’d been back in Colorado when my dear friend Sally regaled me with stories of her work using Healing Touch at the pain clinic in Boulder. I remembered her degree was in Occupational Therapy, a far cry, I thought, from my own training. I decided to ask her advice.

“If I want to do what you do, how do I start?”, I asked.

“The first step, I think, is to get licensed in a modality that allows you to touch people”.

She went on to list the possibilities, including nursing, physical therapy, and massage. Ding, ding, ding. A bell went off in my head as a shiver traversed my spine. I had always been able to find the places people hurt and relieve them with my hands. I searched, and found a massage school in Salem, the next town over. Convenient. I still had a husband who traveled for work and two kids at home. Jeff and I toured Palmer Massage School together, and I decided to dip my toe in, signing up for the introductory course starting in January. After just a few classes I knew I had found my place.

In class, my knowledge of animal anatomy, physiology and pathology were transcribed onto the human body. As a scientist at heart and in training, I could easily understand why releasing tight muscles could benefit the body. However, more was surfacing as I exchanged work with other students. I couldn’t deny there was a depth and power to massage that I wanted to plumb. The shifts I was noticing in myself went beyond the physical. My practice clients were reporting wider effects as well, churning up more questions inside me about what was then termed alternative medicine.

All Palmer students were required to take an energy modality class to graduate; I chose Polarity Therapy. Although changes were percolating in the background, I clung to my scientific worldview and entered my first day of class not only skeptical, but angry I had to waste my time and money taking a class in “voodoo medicine.” After about six weeks, I began to see the deep healing that was taking place, for myself and for the other students. This was not just healing on a physical level, but on every level; emotional, mental, physical and spiritual. One day, in the midst of class, I had an epiphany. Physics. Energy work, through frequency, wavelength and vibration, is simply science in action.

This revelation burst through the protective shield I’d erected around the weird, intuitive child I’d been but pushed away in my desire to fit in in middle school. My fellow massage school students shared some capacity to feel or see in non-traditional ways, so living into the new way of being at school was safe. It was the start of marrying my two seemingly disparate sides.

I graduated from massage school in the spring of 2007, and then spent a year doing a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, or chaplaincy training. The years since have been filled with private client sessions, co-facilitating retreats, my own healing journey and experiences, as well as continuing education opportunities. In 2013, I walked the Camino Frances, from St. Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago, Spain. When I returned, dear colleagues and I began the work of creating Au Soleil Healing, manifesting my dream of a spiritually focused, multi disciplinary holistic healing center. I had found the care of my own diverse support team so evolutionary over the years that I wanted to offer the same opportunity to others.

Alas, time marches on, and, due to changes in mine and my colleague’s lives, the physical entity of Au Soleil Healing ceased to exist on Dec. 15, 2022. However, the Spirit of it continues, both in my life and work philosophy.