The moment my best friend Kelly died, the world stopped.

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I wasn't just grieving her. I was grieving every moment I let slip away because I was numbing myself instead of truly living. I spent years drinking, partying, and staying busy so I didn't have to feel. Didn’t have to hear what my body was trying to tell me.

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That loss cracked something open in me.

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At first, I only knew I had to change something. I started with my relationship to drinking, and eventually found my way to fascia classes from my favorite yoga teacher. Working with my fascia helped me ease chronic sciatic pain I'd had off and on since my teens.

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These classes got me so interested in yoga that I wanted to learn more. Right before I started yoga teacher training, I was still struggling with anxiety and looking for ways to manage it. When I asked a nurse about increasing my anxiety medication, she told me absolutely not and instead recommended Jon Kabat-Zinn's "Full Catastrophe Living."

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That book changed everything. I realized my whole understanding of meditation (that you were supposed to sit down and have no thoughts) was completely wrong. I learned that the idea wasn’t to stop thinking, but to simply observe your thoughts without reacting to them, just watching them pass by.

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From there, I dove into yoga teacher training, deepened my meditation practice, learned about Vipassana meditation, quit my corporate job, completed a 10-day Vipassana retreat, and taught my first yoga class. In under five months, my entire life had transformed.

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I taught yoga for over a year, feeling like I'd found my path. But in April 2023, everything started to click into place on an even deeper level.

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A friend from yoga teacher training sent me a flyer for a Fascial Maneuvers workshop, knowing I was fascinated by fascia. I almost didn't go because it was later than I usually stayed out, but something pulled me there.

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During the workshop, I thought, "Oh yeah, that feels good, whatever." It wasn't until I was walking my dog later that night that I noticed something different. My ankles felt less restricted. The next day in meditation, my whole body felt different. Softer. Smoother. More connected.

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From there, I dove completely into fascial maneuvers, completing every Human Garage program available. And suddenly, everything made sense. This was why I'd learned to teach. So I could share this work with others.

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What makes fascial maneuvers so powerful isn't just that it's effective. It's that it puts the power back in your hands. It reminds you that you have the ability to heal your own body. You've always had it.

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Through this work, I've watched my lifelong fear of heights dissolve. I've begun to release my severe tongue-tie. I've learned to feel the intricate connections in my body: how tension in one area affects something seemingly unrelated somewhere else.

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Over the years, I've come to understand how much I was avoiding, not just physical sensation, but the deeper truths my body was trying to tell me.

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More than anything, I'm remembering how to listen.

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Now I weave together fascial maneuvers, yoga, meditation, and sound healing at Terra Cor Sanctuary (Saint Paul, Minnesota) to guide others back to that same remembering. Not because I have the answers, but because I know what it feels like to walk this path and how much it helps to not walk it alone.