About Me, Extended Version
There are so many different components that converged to lead me down my current path in movement coaching, and the path wasn’t linear. Here is one version of a bigger story.
Childhood:
From childhood, my parents prioritized physical activity for themselves, and by default, for my sister and myself. The activities were less revolved around organized sports (although I did try just about every sport) and more about just being outdoors doing something active. I spent many mornings walking with my mom trying to keep up with her power walking pace, and afternoons weeding in her vegetable garden. She was practicing yoga and tai chi way before those disciplines were mainstream, chanting Ommm’s in the living room while the rest of us exchanged glances. My love of running comes from my dad who has diligently adhered to a weekly running and cycling schedule since I can remember. A less direct, but possibly stronger influence is that my dad is a doctor and my mom is a biochemist-turned-self-educated-naturopath. For 30 years, I had zero interest in science related education, yet here I am. I can only shrug and say that, in the end, no matter what we do, we are a product of our parents.
Yoga:
At 24, I started practicing yoga to alleviate my lower back pain. My movement at that time had been limited to either standing on my feet in a food service job or running. My body began to tell me I needed something different. Six years later in 2012, after moving to New York and experiencing a more hectic and stressful life, I started practicing yoga more regularly. While I found improvement in my body awareness, focus, and meditative practice, I plateaued in my physical practice. I was very inflexible, and so many of the yoga poses were challenging for me, if not impossible. The lack of progress was frustrating so I decided to take my practice to the next level and attend a yoga teacher training in 2015. I learned two things from the training. One: I loved to teach. Two: more yoga didn’t actually make me better at yoga like I had hoped. In search for answers as to why I was still one of the most inflexible yoga teachers I knew despite so much practice, I continued my education with an incredible educator, Leslie Kaminoff. Leslie taught me the power of curiosity, the importance of adapting movements to each individual, and the role anatomy and breathing play in how we move. I began to find space in my body while moving through yoga postures I had never found before.
Strength and Mobility Training:
Two other things converged right around the same year that had a powerful effect on my teaching. My now husband encouraged me to work with a personal trainer, and I simultaneously delved into the world of mobility training. Strength and mobility training completely transformed my body and what I could do with it, which in turn transformed my yoga practice, and transformed my teaching. I experienced the incredible power of adaption in the body and shared my experience by teaching yoga in a way that was accessible to people who weren’t naturally flexible. I also added a mindful strength component to my classes in a way that I believed made the practice more sustainable and more applicable to daily life. Slowly, my classes filled with people who had injuries but felt safe in my class, or who were just curious and wanted to learn.
Big Influencers:
During my second year teaching, I discovered two people who continued to pave my path in a big way. Jules Mitchell is a biomechanics educator and applies biomechanics research and the physiology of tissue injury and healing to teaching yoga. Learning from Jules is where I truly understood the potential for adaptation of the human body and gained an interest in applying science to my teaching. I discovered that using science to guide one’s teaching actually means we’re giving in to knowing very little, flirting between blurred lines rather than standing confidently on either side of a clearly constructed fence. As a professional working in the fitness industry, it feels impossible not to talk in absolutes, offering up diagnoses that we don’t actually have enough information for. “[X position] is good for you and [X position] is not”. “Never do [X movement] if you want to protect [X body part]. Always do [X stretch] if you want to get rid of [X pain].” We actually rarely ever have enough information to make any of those claims. While it was terrifying to have no hard fast rules, with time, I learned to allow it to liberate my teaching and liberate the student experience.
Jenn Pilotti is a personal trainer/movement coach who taught me that the empress of all movement is not our muscles or our bones. It’s our brain. Understanding the role of our nervous system and the basics of motor learning was transformative, to say the least. Jenn taught me how we learn new movements, how we can change patterns of movement, and most importantly, that helping someone cultivate awareness during their movements is neuromuscularly critical for change. Working with Jenn trained my eyes as I learned to see movement differently, trained my cueing, and introduced me to injury rehabilitation work. I saw how remarkably fast adaption could happen when you focus on retraining someone from the top down (brain to body) rather than only from the bottom up (body to brain).
At this point, students in my classes started asking me if I was a physical therapist, or what style of yoga I was teaching. That’s when I realized I was onto something. I didn’t just want to help people feel better with the instant gratification of long held maximal stretches and self proclaimed spiritual guidance. I wanted to help them move better inside and outside of class. I found there were three ways to do it. First, I taught what instructional cues actually meant. Most people have no idea what it means to “pull the front ribs down”. Second, I stopped teaching the poses as the end all be all, and I started teaching concepts using the poses as tools. Third, I never fear mongered—my word choices became ever more intentional to convey the robustness and adaptative potential of the human body, rather than fragility. All of this required students to be present while having the freedom to individualize their practice for their bodies.
Pain Science:
By my third year of teaching, I began working with more one-on-one clients who tended to have pain and mobility limitations. During this time, I discovered Lorimer Moseley, one of the leading pain neuroscientists and educators in the world. Once I realized that pain works in a completely different way than what we’ve been taught (because science is always evolving and neuroscience has exploded in the last 30 years), I became hooked. At this point, I knew I wanted to work with people in pain. The concepts behind the bio-psycho-social model of pain have the power to completely change people’s lives and I wanted to incorporate this incredible ammo into my work. I learned immense amounts from Todd Hargrove, a movement therapist and educator, and Greg Lehman, a physical therapist, researcher, and educator, who taught me the importance of movement variability, active versus passive healing modalities, and pain.
It was from all of those incredible teachers that I have fully adopted my threefold ethos: the human body is inherently strong, remarkably adaptive, and has a high capacity for healing.
Completing the Transition:
By the end of 2019, I was totally disillusioned with yoga. There were many reasons. Sexual abuse scandals within the industry were rampant, and navigating “responsible teaching” amidst a world of political correctness and cultural appropriation felt impossible. I also felt like a misfit within a community of mass produced, cookie cutter teachers selling new age spirituality and excessive stretching as the way to a better life.
Covid granted me the complete transition I was looking for. I took the best of what my personal yoga practice and group teaching taught me and funneled it into more one-on-one work. I really valued spending time getting to know the person in front of me, helping them feel and move better according to their needs. I continued to focus my education on working with people with pain and mobility limitations.
The rest is history. Looking back, there truly wasn’t a singular moment that routed me to where I am now. Everything leading up to this point was a product of me seeking out something more than standard industry answers.
Personal Pain Story:
Even though I did deal with chronic pain issues in my wrist, the personal chronic pain story that has subconsciously drawn me to this work is actually my mom’s. I’ve watched my mom suffer from chronic pain almost my whole life. While she is unbelievably resilient, her pain story has marked my life in a way that has left me with wanting to fix it. Witnessing her experiences with easily a hundred various health professionals, from surgeons to shamanic healers and everything in between, I’ve been shocked and pained at how often those professionals she sought help from told her she was broken, making it up, crazy, or just shrugged their shoulders and told her there’s nothing they can do. She was left to care for herself and inspiringly perseveres every day to continue doing things in life that she wants, such as walking, hiking, gardening, pottery, and relentlessly caring for us, her family.
My Hope:
Every person deserves to have their emotional and pain feelings validated, to be educated in how pain works, and to be supported in making decisions that lead to empowered living rather than medical dependence with quick fixes. I uphold myself and all other health and wellness professionals to those standards in the hopes that a more supportive and successful health and wellness industry will emerge to diminish our chronic pain epidemic.
keep moving.