I came to this work the long way.
For most of my twenties I was very good at being capable. I held things together for everyone — my family, my work, the parts of my own life I had not figured out yet. From the outside it looked like I was thriving. From inside, I had been somewhere else for a long time.
What brought me back was, at first, just sound. A friend invited me to a sound bath in a small studio in Bed-Stuy. I lay down expecting nothing. Halfway through I started crying — not the kind of crying that has language attached, the older kind. The kind the body does when it has been waiting.
I did not understand what had happened. I only knew that for the first time in years I had actually been there — inside my own body, listening.
That was 2013. I started training the next year — first in sound healing with my first teacher in Brooklyn, then in conscious connected breathwork, then in somatic experiencing. I went home to Bahia for a long visit and found that the practices I was learning in New York studios had been part of my grandmother's daily life all along. The lineage was waiting for me.
— What I do now
I hold one-on-one sessions, small group circles, and a six-week container called The Return. Most of the women I work with come to me at a threshold — burnout, grief, the slow undoing of a self that no longer fits. Most have done other healing work. They come to me when they want something slower, and quieter, and more rooted in the body.
The work is not dramatic. There is no breakthrough I am chasing for you. We move at the speed your nervous system can actually integrate, which is much slower than the culture would like.
— What I believe
That the body knows. That ancestry is not a metaphor. That rest is not a reward you earn after you finish your to-do list, it is the ground from which any real work becomes possible. That joy and grief are not opposites — they live in the same room and they take turns.
And that you have not been broken. You have been waiting.