My Story

I am an orphan of white Slavic immigrant parents who died when I a toddler, and I grew up as a foster child. The family I grew up with grappled with mental illness, addiction and violence, and kept the truth of my original family a secret.  I became an social justice facilitator centred on health, education, intercultural collaboration and community development, and culture. Now I’m blessed with chosen family – my kin – around the world. I’ve been privileged to be highly educated, travel extensively, and make art.

I garden, hike in the forest, kayak, dance, and read a lot, and bring a lifelong love of somatics, mythology, sacred art, movement, ritual and story to play in my coaching and facilitation practice. As we look for greater meaning and guideposts in this period of great change, tapping on our embodiment of these gifts grounds us in the movement of our time.

I’m autistic – neurodiverse – and queer. My neurodiversity equips me with long-reaching systems and psychological insight, and high awareness of our moving and sensory worlds. Like many auts and orphans, I’m a bit outside the regular paths, and this difference means amazing outcomes for my clients and collaborators. This is also part of my story. I’ve been systemically aware from a very young age.

At the age of 7 I asked,

‘What kind of society treats its people so badly that they act like this, so destructive and angry and violent? These authorities are so horrific to the original people of this land, who lived here in peace for ever. How do they have any right to do that?”

And then I asked, “What kind of 7 year old asks questions like this?”  I knew that the seed came from my original parents. And I knew that that one day I would know who they were.

At age 14, during the 1980’s years of protest against South African apartheid, I knew and vowed that I would be part of ending Canada’s apartheid against Indigenous peoples.  Until very recently, most Canadians denied such a thing as apartheid existed on these lands.

Now in my 50s, my activist and social change path has taken me deep into Indigenous-ally collaboration, Non-Violence and Peacebuilding, Facilitating and Coaching with incredible social change leaders and makers, and decades of study and practice into my autistic capacities with Somatic Experiencing in Embodied Anatomy, and art as a catalyst for community coherence.

Embodied, Inherited Wisdom

I found my family a few years ago. Through a series of right person and time synchronicities, I’ve pieced together that my mysterious original family were deep-in labour and civil rights activists in the US South in the 1960s. They died there – mother, father and sister – in a car accident. They worked with the Industrial Workers of the World, collaborating with African American civil rights organizers and the American Indian Movement. They were human rights organizers who loved jazz and art.

They are in my bones. When I found their story, I finally made sense. I belonged to this history. And I choose this path as my own every day, as self in collective, fulfilling my gifts.

Enter Embodiment: Renewing Meaningful Leadership

My autistic high sensory awareness and deep felt sense of the sentient, moving world moves my lifelong explorations of embodiment, trauma healing, dance, art, archetype, spirituality and rituals that anchor our stories, our collective meanings, and ignite my fires for what is possible.

Coaching and Facilitating with ground-breaking leaders and social creators, I see that they are reaching for these deeper levels of consciousness. Now I coach with them to bring deep consciousness out of the shadow, and work with it.

I have been blessed to be mentored by Indigenous, spiritual and creative leaders to facilitate and co-create numerous rituals of passage, international healing circles, transformative relationship interventions through embodied engagement with our deeper wants for connection, meaning, and purpose.

Deep work is a joy for me. Joy is collective, humble and energizing.  On the few days that I don’t touch joy, I know that whatever discomfort I’m sitting in will open to a new aspect of myself in the collective world that is constantly changing.

“Another way is coming,” Ahrundahti Roy notes, and “if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing…”

Inhale. Exhale.

Onwards!