Depending on when we met, you might know me as a dancer and choreographer, a coach, an entrepreneur, a beekeeper, or through my work with leaders and organizations.
For a long time, these looked like different chapters of my life.
More and more, I see them as expressions of the same inquiry.
Looking back, that inquiry as a child: I was fascinated by nature, could spend hours observing insects in the fields or our pond that my brother and I had created in the middle of the winter, cutting through frozen dirt to build an environment where we could observe animals, and wanted to become an explorer. That impulse to look beneath the surface and understand how things actually work has followed me ever since.
It first found a home in the body.
I spent more than a decade in dance, movement, performance, and somatic practice, as a performer, choreographer, and teacher, while also exploring disciplines ranging from martial arts and parkour to bodywork and climbing.
I became fascinated by what allowed a human being to move with greater freedom, skill, and expression, and by the different states I entered while performing.
At 25, I went through a deep crisis of meaning and purpose.
Multiple smaller injuries had left me in pain. I had become disillusioned with parts of the arts scene I was in, and several things in my personal life were changing at the same time.
I started asking myself:
Who am I outside of being a dancer?
What does it mean to be a human being?
What am I actually spending my life doing?
What does it mean to die one day?
That process led me to question almost everything about my own existence.
In the midst of feeling deeply disillusioned with life, I had an insight that changed how I understood my experience.
I saw how much my thoughts, interpretations, and ways of thinking were shaping my experience of the world, and that I was participating in creating that experience.
The crisis ended in a moment that may have lasted only a second, but it profoundly changed my outlook on life. I saw how much my own thoughts and beliefs about who I was had shaped my experience of life, determined what life was for me, creating or closing possibilities.
I started meditating and looking deeply into my own experience. I became fascinated by observing the processes happening within me and understanding their impact on how I lived, how I experienced life, and how effectively I could interact with it.
Around that time, I met a coach and became fascinated by the craft.
I began coaching, built a business, and spent thousands of hours in coaching, tarining and the domain of ontology, while becoming an avid learner and student of entrepreneurship, systems thinking, consciousness, meditation, language, organizational development, neuroscience, and other fields concerned with how human beings function and change.
Through all of this, I've learned through observation, experimentation, and application.
I want to know whether an idea actually holds up in experience.
What changes when we apply it?
What doesn’t?
What creates understanding but no new capability?
What allows someone to do something they previously couldn’t?
What remains when the initial insight or excitement is gone?
Over the years, this inquiry has taken me into very practical work. I have now worked with people in learning and development contexts for around 16 years and coached professionally for eight, working with individuals, entrepreneurs, leaders, groups, and organizations.
Dance. Coaching. Meditation. Consciousness. Ontology. Business. Entrepreneurship. Leadership. Systems.
What once looked like many different interests is increasingly becoming one inquiry:
How do human beings perceive, experience, and participate in reality, and what allows us to develop greater awareness, freedom, and capability in how we live and act?
This year, that inquiry has taken me into some new environments.
I now spend one day a week in a school, observing and participating in children's learning process and learning tons from them.
I have been developing new corporate training formats.
I started a research project investigating human development and the conditions that contribute to meaningful, sustainable change.
And I am developing a methodology for individual and organizational development through the lenses of Language, Body, and Systems - exploring how we can become more capable observers and authors of our own development.
My life’s work is to explore what it means to be human and how we participate in reality, and to create forms through which what I discover can be experienced, understood, and used in service of our development.
My greatest joy is to explore, discover, test, create, and share what proves useful - so that others can use it in service of what is meaningful to them.
Here, I’ll continue sharing what I’m discovering through the research, my work with people and organizations, the development of Language, Body, and Systems, and my wider inquiry into what allows us to live and act with greater awareness, joy, and capability.
If those questions interest you too, I’m glad you’re here.
Stay curious. Life is magical.