The first half was dominated by a hero’s journey, where I thought I had to dismantle all of the external cages that were keeping me trapped and find my wildness somewhere out there. I thought I would know it by how it looked. 

In the following years, I changed my whole life. I left that long-term relationship and soon thereafter met the man who would become my husband. I enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, changed the way that I ate, stopped drinking so much, and started doing yoga. I read book after book about other people’s stories of awakening and feminine reclamation.

I quit my job to pursue health coaching full time. I decided to leap and pray that the net would appear.

In 2015, my husband and I relocated from Los Angeles to Austin, the city that had been calling to me for years. 

In five years, I changed everything, all  in the name of wanting to find this life drenched in wildness, freedom, and meaning.

You can imagine my frustration and disappointment, when after living in Austin for a little while it finally dawned on me: I still didn’t feel free or particularly wild. Even though my life may have looked that way on the outside, it didn’t feel that way on the inside. 

It didn’t matter where I lived or what I was doing or who I was with, the cage remained. Dismantling that inner cage became the heroine’s journey of a lifetime. 

It wouldn’t have been possible without a guide. My long-time coach and mentor, Lianne Raymond, with whom I worked every other week for three years, helped me to see and name many of the energetic patterns that kept me trapped. Basking in the soft, warm glow of her feminine wisdom and by pointing me back to what I already felt and knew, I began to remember that I too carried that wise and wild woman within me. 

From an eating disorder in high school to binge drinking in college, I had used my poor, sweet body as a punching bag to help me manage or drown out uncomfortable feelings. But I didn’t know how to simply exist within my body. 

I knew that getting back into my body was key to reclaiming my wise and wild woman, but I had no idea how. I had tried yoga, but because I was unable to listen to what my body was telling me, I injured myself quite severely. I tried pole dancing to unleash my wild feminine. Though it gave my mostly-repressed rebellious side some expression, too often it still just felt as if I was putting on a show (while playing a different character). 

When I moved to Austin, I found Qoya. It’s a mix of dance, yoga, and feminine movement (everything that I loved), but  the point wasn’t to nail a certain pose or perform in any way. Instead, the point was to focus on how the movement felt to me. Inside my own body. It wasn’t about how it looked at all. Reclaiming that relationship with my body through attending weekly Qoya classes was so deeply nourishing, healing, restorative, and downright fun. (Because who said that healing has to be so darn serious all the time?)

To step away from “trying” to grow my coaching practice (which had changed shape several times from when I first started health coaching) and instead reconnect with the pure love of what I was doing. I went back to working a full-time job and took all of 2020 off from externally growing my business at all. With the world shutting down and life feeling so unpredictable, it was the perfect year to go within, contemplate, and reconnect with my inner why. 

I spent the year going super slow. Slow in a way that I had never allowed myself before. Digesting the journey that I had been on and beginning to weave together the threads of my experience into the work that I do now. I needed that time to contemplate, to exist behind the scenes, and create the framework of the inner cage that I work with now (the dynamic of the Good Girl, the Rebel and the Tyrant King).

Yes, it is still a process and sometimes my inner Tyrant King takes over and drowns out the intuitive voice of my Wise & Wild Woman, but that happens less frequently and I notice it faster. Every day, I am learning to listen to that quiet soul voice, and every day I am finding greater trust in what I hear. Helping women to do the same is what lights my soul on fire.

I have a furry soulmate in the form of my pit bull Sophie. One day, I will write a book about her and our relationship. She is truly a magical creature. 

I love trees. Like a lot. 

I am a recovering perfectionist and straight A student. My journey now is more about softening into who I truly am, rather than trying to achieve some external benchmark of success or “bettering” myself. 

My ideal temperature is 82 degrees. 

I love to roll down all the windows in the car, blast the music, and drive with the wind whipping through my hair. 

I used to dress up like Gwen Stefani and perform No Doubt’s whole Tragic Kingdom concert in my parent’s living room. 

I hate to run, but love to dance and swim. 

I love wild places and wild creatures and yards that don’t look super manicured.

I want to experience the breadth and the depth of life, and believe that we are here to feel it all and feel it deeply. The joy and the grief, the love and the heartache, the anger and the exuberance.