THE STORY
I tried to think my way to freedom.
Then I stopped running.
THE LIFE
My father died when I was eight. My mother died when I was sixteen. By seventeen, I was in jail. I did not know how to grieve any of it. I knew how to move.
So I moved. Toward achievement. Reinvention. Anything fast enough to keep me from being still long enough to feel what was underneath. From the outside it could look like ambition. Much of the time, it was a more respectable way to run.
The hardest part was never the emptiness. It was the performance. Keeping the face on. Convincing everyone, myself included, that I had it handled.
When motion stopped working, I went looking for another way. Psychology. Meditation. Every framework that promised to explain what I was carrying. Each one opened something. But understanding was not the same as freedom.
“I could name every pattern and trace every wound, and still live inside them. The gap between understanding and freedom turned out to be the whole work.”
The turning point was not a new insight but a new willingness. To stop running from what I felt. To Sit With It. To find that what I had been avoiding was not the enemy I imagined.
That discovery became a practice. The practice became a method. The method became a life.
“What I was carrying had a deeper address than the mind could reach. It lived in the body.
That was where the real work finally began.”
THE PRACTICE
Years of returning to silence.
The body as the laboratory.
Meditation is the ground I stand on. More than a decade of intensive Vipassana practice, including more than twenty silent retreats, taught me to meet experience at the level of sensation. Alongside it, Jungian depth psychology gave me another language for what I was encountering: the shadow, the parts of ourselves we suppress, deny, or project onto others. The work I do grew from the meeting of those worlds.
“Presence is not the absence of intensity. It is intimacy with intensity.”
On retreat, watching sensation without reacting to it, I found that even pain had a shape. Edges. A center. Something that shifted moment by moment. The body was like weather moving across the water I grew up on. No two clouds the same. No storm lasting forever. Nothing holding one form, including the self I thought I was.
Three streams: Vipassana, Jungian depth, somatic embodiment. Together they became the Shadow Integration Technique. Not an intellectual framework. A body-first practice for meeting what you have been running from.
HOW I WORK
The work
moves through three stages.
Get present.
Come home to this moment and sit with what is here. Most of us live in the past or braced for what comes next. Presence begins in the body, not as an idea but as breath, sensation, the felt weight of being here. It is the ground everything else is built on.
Clear the past.
Meet the shadow and let what you buried finally move. What you exiled never left. It runs the show from underground. We turn toward it, without force, and what was frozen begins to flow.
Create the future.
Build a life from what is true, not from what you were running from. When the old fear stops driving, real choice comes back. You stop reacting to the past and begin to author what comes next.
THE WORK TODAY
Sit With It
This is where the whole story lives, and where the practice becomes yours. A memoir that teaches: the long way home, and the method waiting at the end of the running. If thinking alone has not set you free, it was written for you. Publishing January 1, 2027.
SITWITHIT.COMShadowLight Institute
Insight can carry you to the threshold. It cannot carry you across. What frees you is experience, the kind that lives in the body and changes you from the inside out. One-on-one work, small cohorts, and retreats I lead, for those ready to go deeper than reading. This is where understanding becomes wisdom.
SHADOWLIGHTINSTITUTE.COMTHE MAN
The depth is real.
So is the lightness.
I grew up on a small island off the coast of Florida. Banyan trees, white sand, tides that kept a steadier rhythm than anything waiting at home. The water raised me as much as anyone did.
Loss came early, and it came twice, and by sixteen it had shaped the whole architecture of me. I did not have words for it then. Only motion.
I became a professional dancer and teacher at nineteen. I thought the motion was the life. It took years to see my students were coming for something the steps could not name. Not choreography. Healing. I was walking people home to themselves long before I knew the way back to my own.
I still live by the water, in Sausalito. I hold the work with great seriousness and myself with almost none. I laugh easily.
WHERE TO BEGIN