Here we are, at the crossroads - this moment of great uncertainty and fresh possibility. Let me tell you a bit about myself.

I carry a dream in my heart; it guides my work and life. I dream that we remember the wonder and poetry of being alive. That my people find our way back home to our bodies and learn to live in kinship with all Life.

I spent over a decade engaged in research and art-activism focused on environmental and social change, and it brought me a firm realization: A liveable future depends urgently on rekindling conscious and embodied connections to the living earth!

The winding path that got me here…

While this dream grew out a life-long concern for justice and the ecological crisis, I was mostly guided by a humbling and powerful teacher - chronic illness. Ecosomatics started as a personal path of remembering, opening me to the healing intelligence of my body and the power of the living world. As I learned to listen, I became more intimate with the grief, pain, and possibilities of disability. Eventually, this transformed into a vocation, as I felt the call, like many of us, to participate in the Great Turning.

Before that, I spent eight years as a research scientist studying social, ecological, and health impacts of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. This inter-disciplinary work was rooted in complex systems thinking and the participation of local communities - earning me a PhD and a post-doctoral appointment. Later, I consulted on international climate adaptation and social development programs. I was both excited and challenged by working within these institutions, but ultimately they didn’t fill me with the meaning I longed for. Eventually, illness laid out a new path.

Soil to Sky began to take form as my healing journey entwined with learning that was embodied and more connected to story and heart. I made a conscious choice to seek knowledge outside of university institutions, while carrying the importance of critical reflection, rigour and ethics that my PhD taught me. I am a life-long student, and ecosomatics continues to challenge, surprise, and open me.

My positionality, my gratitude

As a practitioner, I owe much of my growth and learning to groups I am part of with queer/trans, disabled/chronically ill, and spiritual affinities. I am shaped by my experience as a middle-class, white-bodied, formally-educated person. I was diagnosed as neurodivergent in my youth and spent decades confronting mental health conditions.

I am an artist, and a co-founder of the long-standing artist collective and community non-profit, Earthbound Futures. I am a child, sibling, devoted friend, and community organizer. I caretake two elder cats and a jungle of plants at my home-studio in Tio:tia’ke (Montréal).

My ecosomatic work emerges from various living lineages, and I have had the privilege of learning from many wise teachers who I name in my training and lineages. There are also countless unnamed people who have inspired and guided me, and who themselves are keeping this work alive and responsive to our times.

Weaving through these lifeworlds, I learn about inter-being, solidarity, radical imagination, and the slow, messy work of embodied transformation for our collective futures. I learn about visioning, dreaming, and dancing with Life. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who have helped me on this path. Without you, I would not be who I am today..