It all started one Pennsylvania summer when I was six…
I was in the backyard on my swing set, everything green around me, sun setting, thousands of crickets chirping, and out of nowhere a firefly flew into my mouth and I accidentally ate it.
(I tried to throw it back up. It tasted horrible, but apparently the universe had other plans.)
That's how I got my superpower: lighting people up.
OK, I'm not exactly sure that's true, because I spent most of my childhood feeling miserable.
Being an adopted only child might sound like a dream for some, but I spent a lot of time feeling homeless in my heart. I didn't know how to play well with others, struggled with my mental health, and thought my worth was tied up in being in a relationship. By the time I graduated high school, anxiety and depression were my oldest and dearest friends.
By my sophomore year of college, I'd had enough.
Aside from counseling, my bio mom had given me her old yoga VHS tape featuring some lady in a green unitard. I did the routine daily, sometimes twice a day. I started to feel better and decided yoga wasn't as lame as I originally thought.
That summer I went to a festival and saw people having way more fun than me with big hula hoops.
I thought they were ridiculous, yet beautiful, and that was strangely appealing to me. Rather than try it there (yep, I was insecure AF), I waited until I got home to DIY a big, heavy bruiser of a hoop to practice in my basement by myself.
I did it for exercise at first, and when I learned a few tricks, I started dancing with the hoop. I became festival girl with hoop, and the best part was that it kept the creepers at a distance so I didn't have to learn how to have boundaries!
Is this the part where I tell you that hooping changed my life? Yeah, that didn't happen…
But it was the first step toward really embracing my weirdness.
And so I kept going.
By the time I was done with college, I felt more passionate about hooping and yoga than I did about having an art degree in drawing. I considered yoga teacher training, but decided I wanted to do something different, so I trained to be a Hoop Mentor with Anah, aka Hoopalicious.
People thought I was ridiculous, which hurt a little until I realized I thought it was ridiculous at first, too (I was still learning how not to take other people's opinions so seriously).
On the final evening of hoop training, we had a fire circle…
I had the opportunity to try a fire hoop. I was humbled by the intensity of the flames and immediately forgot everything I knew about hooping.
What you can't hear in this picture is me shrieking in fear and delight. I was scared shitless, but I kept going until the flames died, and I was ALIVE.
The obsession to tame the flame was born.
A month later, I had the privilege of joining a yoga teacher training. Deepening my understanding and practice of yoga brought me closer to feeling at home in my body and at peace in my mind, and it was then that I got bitten by the training bug.
A whole lot has happened since then.
I've spent the years since then studying bodies, movement, and touch, while somehow also making a living playing music and lighting things on fire.
These days you might find me in a treatment room, behind DJ decks, playing with fire, or on stilts in an outfit that seemed like a good idea at the time. I still love teaching yoga. And I still find it fascinating how much can change when someone has room to move, rest, laugh, or just be a little weird.
