SHAPED BY LIFE

I came to guiding work as much through facing my own initiations and life-altering thresholds as through study.

As a young woman, after graduating with a business degree from HEC Montréal, I pursued the dream of representing my country at the Olympic Games as a solo sailor. For years, discipline, strategy, resilience, ambition and an almost relentless capacity to push myself shaped the way I lived.

Until my body stopped me.

Three weeks before the Olympic trials, I found myself suddenly unable to move. Beneath the force of my will, something had been asking for my attention for a long time.

I was done.

Done with a regimented life organized around a dream that had quietly lost contact with something essential in me. I had become remarkably skilled at overriding the subtler signals of my body and emotional life, and at armoring a deeply sensitive nature in order to keep going.

That rupture opened an inquiry that has never really ended:

What does it mean to live a life that is actually true?

Beyond the identities we have built. Beyond what we thought we wanted. Beyond the ambitions, attachments and futures we have projected ahead of us.

The pilgrimage that began there still guides me today.

My intimate life became another school. Marriage, relationship, years of studying sacred intimacy and Tantra, and time immersed in the intentional community of Tamera in Portugal brought me into a sustained inquiry around love: how we attach, how fear enters relationship, how truth changes intimacy, how rupture can become repair, and how we might meet another with an open heart without abandoning ourselves.

Motherhood rearranged me in ways no training could have.

It has asked for surrender alongside fierce responsibility. It continues to bring me into contact with the limits of control, the depths of love, the messy beauty of ordinary life, and the tenderness of accompanying a young soul whose essence and path are entirely his own.

Then came another initiation, through the body.

Years of intense chronic illness brought me into the intelligence and vulnerability of a highly sensitive system. I learned that I could neither effort my way toward healing nor hand my body entirely over to expertise.

I had to learn another way of listening. To become intimate with my nervous system. To notice what my body was communicating before it had to shout. To live with uncertainty. To discern among many forms of knowing. To meet what was happening with greater patience, humility and grace.

This ongoing journey has been one of the most demanding initiations of my life, and it has profoundly shaped the way I understand healing and accompany others through the unknown.

For more than twenty years, contemplative practice, meditation, dance, ceremony and sacred plant traditions have also been part of my exploration of consciousness. They have deepened my respect for what can become available when our ordinary ways of perceiving ourselves loosen, when shadow becomes more visible, and when mystery is allowed into the conversation.

Over time, I began organizing my life less around certainty and more around listening. I learned to follow what felt quietly alive before I knew where it would lead. A vision. A relationship. A place. A calling. One step revealing the next.

From that way of living came work and a life I could not have planned, including founding Dancing Without Borders, facilitating rites of passage, building communities, and becoming a steward of homes, sanctuaries and land in California and Costa Rica.

These experiences have deepened my relationship with belonging, beauty, responsibility and place. They have also taught me something I now carry deeply: What we tend also shapes us.

Across these seasons and initiations, I have known achievement and disappointment, creation and dissolution, belonging and uncertainty, the desire to move forward and the necessity of staying with what cannot yet be resolved.

I don't hold these experiences as credentials. They have shaped the person who meets you in the room. Alongside more than twenty years of professional practice, they have taught me how to stay close when familiar ground begins to give way. How to listen beneath what is immediately visible. How to recognize that not everything difficult needs to be fixed. And how to accompany another without needing to know too quickly where their passage is taking them.

This is the ground from which I guide:

a deep respect for the passages and initiations that change us from the inside, often before we have language for who we are becoming.