This year I am celebrating

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✨ 25 years as an Esalen® Massage practitioner
✨ 20 years of teaching Esalen® Massage
✨ and my recent ordination as a Diamond Approach® teacher

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Reflections on the Journey

While I am celebrating 25 years as an Esalen Massage Practitioner, I am looking back at how it all began long before I ever thought of it as a career path. 

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I discovered my love for massage when I was maybe 6–8 years old. I saw my dad receive a massage and from then on I loved giving massage to family and friends. At 14, my mum took me to a Reiki class, and what I was taught felt strangely familiar and known.

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Fast forward to 1998. I was a make-up artist living in London, working in Fashion, Advertising, and the Music industry. I was far away from the path of being a healer or spiritual guide. However, I was approaching my first Saturn return, and I found myself restless with the sense that I was on the wrong path.

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One day, while browsing in a little bookstore in Covent Garden, a book caught my attention. While I did not buy it that day, I couldn’t get it out of my mind — it kept calling me back. Eventually I bought it. It was The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, my first introduction to Inquiry and the inner critic.

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Around that time, I was asked to do the make-up for Brandon Bays, the author of the book "The Journey". While I was doing her make-up, she shared that her book was about her healing journey from a football-sized tumor in her uterus. She invited me to come to one of her workshops where she shared the process she had developed to help people heal.

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Completing the steps in "The Artist’s Way" and meeting Brandon Bays helped me realize that I regretted not training as a dancer and that I was longing to work with people in a deeper way. While I enjoyed my work as a make-up artist, I always felt a bit out of place. I struggled with the fact that I participated in creating standards of beauty that were unrealistic and caused suffering for many who compared themselves with these unattainable images.

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I was longing for that which is not to be found on the surface, butin the connection to our inner being.

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Through a friend I learned about Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. At the time I didn’t know anything about Esalen other then it being the place my friend recommended for learning massage.

 

 My healing journey began when I arrived at Esalen to take part in a month-long program of “spiritual massage” a Brazilian healing art form. Practicing “spiritual massage,” 5 nights a week and dancing 5 Rhythms, engaging in yoga practice, and receiving many, many Esalen massages opened me up to sensing the grief I had carried since my father had passed away unexpectedly 13 years prior.

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Grateful for the gift of healing I had received I only had one wish- to pay it forward. So in 2000 I participated in a month long Esalen Massage Certification program and became a practitioner.

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Eventually I found myself living and working at Esalen which afforded me the great fortune of meeting, assisting and learning from many, many teachers exploring the human potential in many ways.

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Gestalt Awareness Practice, Yoga, Dance, Advanced Esalen Massage, as well as other forms of bodywork such as Feldenkrais, Energy Work, Cranio Sacral, Deep Bodywork, Thai massage, Process Acupressure, Trigger Point Release, Somatic Experiencing..... .

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While I was at Esalen, it became clear that I had an intuitive capacity for holding space for others, and the gift of my own healing only deepened my wish to pay it forward. In that way, my own exploration, healing, growth, and learning have always also been in service of others.

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My exploration, training an learning eventually expanded beyond Esalen to studying pre-natal and birth therapy with Ray Castllino and movement based arts therapy at the Tamalpa Institute and becoming a student of the Diamond Approach for self realization.

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Now I look back on 25 years of serving others through the art of touching with presence, compassion, curiosity, and listening hands — and 20 years of passing on what I love to those who want to learn.

There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

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Esalen Massage for me is so much more than a way to alleviate discomfort in the body; it really can be a portal to our depth, a portal to deeply sensing the body and connecting through the body with our deeper nature.

 

It offers a way to come into the the body while softening the barriers that have kept us from feeling the pain from times when we did not have the inner or outer resources and supports to be able to stay present with our hurts and where we got cut off from aspects of our essential nature.

 

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A New Chapter​

Esalen Massage was my introduction into a practice of presence and embodyment.

A practice of listening and honoring the body as a doorway into wholeness.

 

Over these years, I’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of clients, trusting me with their body and hearts. Teaching me so much about resilience and our capacity to heal.

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At the same time, my studies of the Diamond Approach have deepened my understanding of the inner world — of the patterns and conditioning that shape us, and the freedom that comes from meeting ourselves in the immediacy of our in the moment lived experience  with curiosity, openness and compassion.

 

“Each session is a reminder of the power of

presence, love and compassion.”

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Looking Ahead

As I celebrate these anniversaries and the ordination to being a Diamond Approach teacher, I feel both humbled and inspired — grateful for the journey so far and curious about what is yet to unfold. 

Now that my 13 year teacher training has come to an end I feel a surge of energy and inspiration. With more time on my hands I look forward to growing my practice, creating more offerings and continuing to be of service through bodywork as well as the teachings of the Diamond Approach.

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With Deep Gratitude

I am grateful for the many teachers and mentors who have guided me along the way:

• The lineage of Esalen massage practitioners who created this beautiful boy of work.

• The massage practitioners who supported me in reconnecting with myself and open to the grief I was holding. Jessica Fagan, Tom Case, Vicky Top and above all Ray Swartly.

• My first Esalen® Massage Teachers Vicky Top and Ray Swartly.

• All my teachers in the Diamond Approach® who's dedication, steady presence, curiosity, openness and love for the truth have been my steady guides on the path.

• And  all my clients and students. I have been deeply touched by your trust and your journeys of healing and becoming.

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Thank you!