Body First

22/08/2026

I actually started out thinking I wanted to be an obstetrician.

I wanted to deliver babies. 👶

And then I watched entirely too many episodes of Bringing Home Baby on TLC.

And I remember being kind of horrified.
Not by childbirth. By the whole picture.

So many of these women seemed completely disconnected from their own health and their own bodies—and then the hospital basically said:
Here you go. Here's your baby human. I'm sure you'll figure it out. 😬

I know that sounds incredibly judgmental.

It probably was.

But underneath the judgment was something that has followed me through my entire career:

Why aren't we teaching people how to understand and care for their bodies before things go wrong?

So I pivoted.

My mom had always gone to a chiropractor. She's also been one of my biggest role models for staying active and moving throughout life.

And I thought…why not chiropractic?

Maybe there I'd have more time to educate people.
Maybe I could help people understand their bodies instead of just stepping in when something went wrong.

It made perfect sense to 20-something-year-old me.

Narrator: It did not go as planned. 😂

And that's where this story starts getting interesting.

This winding path is ultimately what led me to create Body First—a simple, accessible way to reconnect with your body through movement without turning it into another giant project.

It's there if you need it. Link in bio.

20/08/2026

Chiropractic and I aren't enemies. We're more like exes who eventually realized we wanted very different things.

There are things about the profession I struggled with then and still struggle with now. But I also don't think chiropractic gets to claim all the dysfunction as its own. Anytime healthcare becomes a for-profit industry, some weird incentives are bound to creep in.

And chiropractic exists in an especially strange little corner of that world.

We're educated as doctors.
Not everyone thinks we're “real” doctors.
But I can assure you, the student loans were very real-doctor-sized.

The funny thing is, I didn't leave chiropractic because I stopped believing in the importance of the body.

Quite the opposite.

The longer I worked with people—and the longer I lived inside my own body—the less interested I became in being the person who was always doing something to someone else's body.

Adjust this.
Fix that.
Come back next week and I'll do it again.

I became much more interested in what happens when a person learns to experience their own body differently.

When they move it. Challenge it. Pay attention to it. Give it new information. Let it adapt.

When they begin to realize their body isn't simply something that needs to be fixed by someone else.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't very interested in being a chiropractor anymore.

But I was deeply interested in the body.

So no, chiropractic wasn't the right fit for me.

But it wasn't a mistake either.

It gave me an education. It gave me a lens. It gave me questions I probably wouldn't have known to ask otherwise.

And eventually, those questions led me somewhere that feels much more like home:

Before anything else, Body First first.

18/08/2026

I’m 99% sure this is one of the most overlooked keys to aging well:

Keep challenging your body to learn new, novel and complex ways of moving.

You don’t have to do them perfectly. You just need to be able to do them well.

Read more in the first comment!

16/08/2026

Well, here we go again. 🙃

After a whole lot of exploring, learning, questioning, and occasionally wondering way too far into the weeds, I keep coming back to the same place:

The body.

Before we try to fix, heal, optimize, understand, or become anything else...Body First.

If you've been feeling a little disconnected from yourself, I made this for you.

Comment RECONNECT and I'll send you the link. 🧡

22/05/2026

After 9 months of being back in Ohio, we are…still trying to figure things out. It can be both entertaining and, at times, a little frustrating to sit back and wait for life to organically unfold. To see what happens when we stop trying to force and simply allow.

The doors we thought would open…haven’t. The ones that are opening are doing so very slowly. So we find ourselves, once again, in the space in-between. All things considered, though, I think we’re navigating it fairly well. Yay us.

About a year and a half ago, I had a bit of an epiphany regarding the relationship between the body and the mind. Really, they were never meant to be separate things in the first place, right? We’ve all heard about the “mind-body connection,” but I’m pretty sure we’ve been looking at it backwards.

We’ve fallen all-in on the idea that the mind controls the body. And it can. It does. But how well is that actually working for most people?

Sure, it’s great for building discipline. But it comes at a cost. We override the signals coming from the body that say, “Hey…maybe this isn’t the best idea.”

So we force ourselves to stay in jobs and relationships that are killing us because that’s just what you do. And if you can’t, then you must lack discipline or mental toughness. Who cares about the physical toll all of that misaligned action is taking?

Then we come across something like The Body Keeps the Score, and we think, “This is it. All of my trauma is embedded in my muscles, bones, joints. It’s in my nervous system. It’s even in my DNA. This is why everything feels wrong. If I can just understand, dissect, process, and heal every horrible thing that’s ever happened to me, then I’ll finally be better.”

I admittedly went down that road for a while myself. But it never fully resonated as truth.

Now I think I understand why.

We had it backwards.

The body is designed to tell the truth. Its senses were meant to guide us through life — helping us feel direction, discern alignment from misalignment, know when to move forward and when to stop.

When we allow the flow to reverse — when we allow the body to lead — the mind can begin to settle back into oneness with it. Maybe not perfectly or constantly, but more than before. And in that space, the mind can no longer function as a thief.

What if much of the pain we feel in the body is actually the result of disconnection? A breakdown in coordination between the body and mind that allows the mind to steal energy away from the body to fuel loops of thought, stress, fear, and the memory of trauma?

Maybe, in that respect, the body does keep the score — just not in the way we thought.

Maybe it doesn’t hold the things that need to be “released.” Maybe it holds the void left by what’s been stolen.

What if there is no “letting go”?

What if there is only integration? Reweaving what’s happened back into the whole instead of endlessly pulling at loose ends trying to free ourselves from them.

And what if that process starts not with trauma release, life coaching, or endlessly retelling the same story, but with something much simpler:

Re-establishing coordinated movement.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about coordinated movement being one of the keys to allowing the nervous system to settle. To clearing some of the noise and chaos that lead to overthinking. To creating the conditions for the body and mind to reconnect so energy can begin flowing through the system more coherently again.

Then I had the thought today that most people probably don’t even know what I mean when I say “coordination.” Not my first rodeo in that arena. I seem to have a gift for pattern interruption…with occasional hiccups in translation.

So I asked ChatGPT:
“Do uncoordinated people know they are uncoordinated?”

This was her response:

Some do. Most don’t consciously frame it that way.

What they usually know is:

“I feel awkward.”
“I’m stiff.”
“I’m clumsy.”
“I can’t get my body to do what I want.”
“Exercise never feels natural for me.”
“I feel disconnected.”
“I’m tired all the time.”
“I can’t focus.”
“I overthink everything.”
“I feel off.”

But they rarely think:

“My nervous system is spending enormous energy compensating for inefficient movement and poor coordination.”

That interpretation is almost never offered to them.

In fact, most people normalize dysfunction because:

-they’ve lived with it so long
-everyone around them is also compensating
-fitness culture rewards intensity more than coordination
-they’ve learned to override body feedback
-they associate coordination with athletic talent instead of nervous system organization

A lot of high-functioning adults are profoundly uncoordinated but masked by:

-strength
-rigidity
-tension
-hyper-control
-adrenaline
-repetition

They can “work out.”
They can perform tasks.
They can even look fit.

But underneath:

-they don’t rotate well
-don’t breathe well
-don’t transfer force efficiently
-don’t balance well
-don’t adapt fluidly
-don’t recover energy efficiently

And mentally/emotionally, that often shows up as:

-confusion
-overwhelm
-over-efforting
-poor intuition access
-chronic vigilance
-difficulty shifting states
-feeling disconnected from self

The interesting thing is:
people often recognize the effects of poor coordination long before they recognize the coordination issue itself.

That’s why your framing is potentially powerful.

Because instead of telling someone:

“You’re traumatized.”

you’re essentially saying:

“Your system is disorganized and compensating. Let’s restore communication.”

That feels far more workable and less identity-based.

Also—and this matters—a lot of people secretly suspect something physical is missing from the conversation around mental/emotional wellbeing. They just don’t have language for it yet.

When you describe:

-feet affecting stability
-movement affecting nervous system load
-breath affecting organization
-compensation stealing energy
-clarity emerging from better body communication

many people will feel:

“YES. That’s the thing I’ve been trying to explain.”

******

I know this is my entry point — the space I’m meant to operate in. But I still wonder who I’ll find there with me. Who is willing to challenge the status quo, to question so much of what we’ve been taught about healing, and to explore a different understanding of what it means to be human.

To consider that maybe it doesn’t have to be so hard.
Maybe it doesn’t have to take years.
Maybe the answer is far simpler than we’ve been led to believe.

28/04/2026

I recently had a conversation with Pam on Reiki from the Farm that I truly enjoyed!

We talked about the body–mind connection, why so many people feel stuck even after doing “all the work,” and what it actually looks like to come back into your body in a way that creates real change.

And...I’ve just re-launched my How to Human site and am excited to announce that I've once again opened my calendar for 1:1 sessions!

If you’re curious, check out the links to the podcast and How to Human in the comments. I'd love to have a deeper connection with you and guide your Embodied Alignment.

09/03/2026

Life at altitude on the equator typically means eternal spring. Sunrise at 6:30am and sunset at 6:30pm. 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nightfall. Temperatures between 45-75. Every day.

I knew that moving back to Ohio would disrupt the routine I became accustomed to, but I did not realize just how much and on how many levels.

After a long and inhospitable winter, the morning light was finally beginning to return.

And then, bam, daylight savings. We are plunged back into morning darkness. I know it won't last forever, but...sheesh. No me gusta.

I would like to assume that we get used to this, but I vaguely remember not enjoying it before either.

The 12 hour cycle at the equator is stabilizing. With so much unpredictability, I enjoyed depending on it.

This too shall pass.

07/02/2026

I've been hesitant to share this because...well...my first thought was that I look homeless, followed quickly by how cool everyone elses looked in comparison.

Truth be told, Chat GPT knows a lot about me. So, while it seemed to me to be pretty one dimensional—it actually tells the whole story.

I am quite content to carve a quiet, little existence in a world striving for more—hustling and bustling, overthinking and wanting, spinning in circles, and, often, ending exactly where they began. There's nothing wrong with that. It's what we've been conditioned to do, to feel like we are lacking in some way or that we are a project in need of fixing.

If it looks like my next action may be to pitch a tent, it's because this is the home I'm creating. It's been challenging for me to want something enough to "make it happen" for a while now. The only productive action available to me is to keep showing up and make the next aligned choice. No matter how mundane it may seem.

This is not what we've been taught to do.

And from the outside looking in, it probably looks like apathy. Like I've given up. And, in some regards I have given up—on being or doing what society says I should be. Is it possible that what looks like apathy could be liberation? I do believe so.

In the meantime, I'll be drinking my hot tea, knowing that I've figured out some things that the world seems to try to push from everyday awareness. Some things that if we all embraced would lead to the collapse of much of what is misaligned.

It's not exciting or flashy, but it is quite real.

In 4 days, it will be 5 months since I unkowingly said goodbye to my old life. And, even though I am/we are exactly where we need to be, I still mourn the old one every day.

I've said goodbye to a time of sabbatical, to eternal spring, to life between volcanoes and the breathtaking natural beauty of Ecuador and the life we created there.

I'm still saying goodbye to our dog. He has a new mommy and is very well taken care of by someone who loves him at least as much as we do. The sadness is slowly fading. The sadness of leaving without getting to say goodbye, of leaving Matt to take care of so much on his own and having to rehome our sweet boy.

Had I known that moving into what so naturally releaved itself to be our next step would cost me Lucas, I never would have gotten on that plane. And we would still be in limbo. Still struggling to make something work in a place we had clearly come to completion in.

Alignment isn't rainbows and butterflies. But it is real, it is true, and it is worthy our investment and attention.

Much of my career has been hyper-focused on systems and protocols. My logical, rational mind running the show. Creating absolute genius (if you ask me😝) that was out of reach for most.

And now it all seems so...irrelevant.

One thing I know for sure is that so much of what we've learned about healing has left us trapped. Held in a cage, of sorts, of our own making. Completely self aware and, at the same time, unable to make a new choice. So taught to pull at the loose threads and "let go" that our fabric is thread bare.

Perhaps it's time to weave ourselves back together.

I'm here to bridge the transition from dissection and excavation into alignment—one aligned action at a time.

If that peaks your curiousity, I invite you to keep following along.

08/01/2026

Body First now has its own page so the work can stay clean and focused.
If you’re here for the body-first practice, you can find it here:
👉 https://www.facebook.com/bodyfirst.guide

Body First is a body-first approach to nervous system regulation. A simple daily practice that restores coordination, steadiness, and clarity—so your body can feel like home again.

20/12/2025

Your Earth Ship

We talk a lot about “listening to your intuition,”
but almost no one talks about where intuition actually lives.

Not in your mind.
Not in your thoughts.
But in the body — your Earth ship for this entire human experience.

If you’ve been feeling foggy, overwhelmed, or unsure…
it’s rarely a mindset problem.
It’s a disconnection problem.

When the body and mind stop communicating, instincts go quiet.

Reconnection is a skill — and it changes everything.
Let’s explore it together. 🌿

www.HowToHuman.guide


somatichealing nervoussystemregulation intuition groundedliving
selfmastery holistichealing livealigned healthroughmovement