About Me
I am a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach with 20 plus years of experience working as a Health Coach, Wellness Expert, Certified Massage Therapist and Advanced Bodyworker.
Beyond which, I have earned a stack of certificates including Certified Yoga Instructor, Trained Herbalist and Nutrition Advisor, layered on top of a 20 year career as a Certified Montessori Early Childhood Educator.
As a Board Certified Health Coach, I integrate all of my professional expertise and grounded intuition to guide and empower clients to reach a new level of wellness and state of vitality I call Vibrance.
Who I Am and Why You Can Trust Me As Your Health Coach
For as long as I can remember, I was really into health and wellness way before health coaching was even a thing.
At age 12 I intuitively knew that if you ate well and exercised, it would impact how your body looked and felt. So I used to order those ‘How To’ booklets from 17 Magazine for shiny hair and glowing skin, while I did leg lifts on the pink shag carpet of my childhood bedroom.
Later, in high school, while most teens were living on Pizza, Marlboros and Tab, my diet was mostly tofu, veggies and brown rice. I started practicing yoga at 16 with the over-60 crowd at the local Senior Center, the only place to offer it back then. I taught myself meditation from a used meditation book and …and I successfully treated my own minor ailments with herbal medicine from Jethro Klosse’s Back To Eden.
Although I come from a family of self-employed medical professionals, my parents still thought my vegetarian-yoga-meditating lifestyle was nuts since it was definitely very unusual behavior for a Jewish Girl from Long Island back then.
In those days, since Holistic Health was not a clear career path, I followed another passion: education. I became an educator at a top Montessori School in Berkeley, CA for 20 years. My deeper calling at this time, though, was motherhood. Giving birth to my son and then my daughter was a profound game changer. From then on, above all, I was a dedicated mama, working full time, with a home in beautiful Berkeley, and part of an amazing community— everything I’d ever dreamed of.
As a conscious eater, already deeply immersed in health and nutrition for my own wellbeing and the wellbeing of my family, I had researched and tried countless approaches to eating to see what gave me the most energy, balance, and vibrance. I tried every trend and experimented with many healing modalities.
Yet…I was far from vibrant. I was exhausted, depleted, cranky, stressed, and my body hurt. Then it hit—a series of crises that knocked the wind out of me. Health Issues. Marital issues. Money issues. Career issues. Worst of all, my little boy suffered asthma attacks and we spent too many sleepless nights in the emergency room. His prognosis? A lifetime on meds. I believed there had to be another way so I followed my intuition, worked with a Chinese herbalist, and made some key diet and lifestyle changes to help him recover. After a year of holistic treatments, he fully regained his health. Yet, all of this trauma left me completely unraveled.
So what did I do? Following my instincts, I went back to my love of yoga and meditation. Delving deeply for three years, I healed some very deep emotional patterns that led me to retire from my career as a Montessori educator and get back on the path of the healing arts—this time as a practitioner. In 2004 I started my first business, Massage For Moms, after I discovered that I have a freaky talent for massage. Who knew? I started out by setting up my massage table in the kitchen and practicing on all my mom friends while the kids played in the other room. And over the years, I built up a following of mothers who are writers, artists, athletes, doctors, attorneys, professors, etc…even a New York Times best-selling author and a Ted Talk speaker
But massage was never the endgame for me so I enrolled in herb school to become a Medical Herbalist.
In my clinical year of herb school, I was required to treat clients with serious health conditions in such a way that felt out of integrity and unethical.
Instead of supporting them to change their diet and lifestyle, we were simply providing herbal remedies that we had only moments to prepare, which inspired very little patient compliance.
So I left herb school to join a team of vibrant, entrepreneurial, abundance-minded, health experts in the field of nutritional science where I gained key information about how to support the body with cellular nutrition and lifestyle medicine. I learned fundamental concepts of cellular nutrition, systemic inflammation, low glycemic eating, gut health, and other key nutritional principles, and how they impacted one’s overall health. Using my newly acquired information, I finally started to understand what my body needed and how to provide it for myself in a holistic way. I also worked with clients individually and in groups teaching these principles and helping clients develop healthy habits, eliminate sugar, and do reset cleanses.
I then earned a Wellness Coach Certificate followed by an Integrative Health Coaching Certificate to broaden and deepen my knowledge of health and nutrition as I continued working with clients.
Now, as a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC), I’ve got the training and expertise in evidence-based practices that are proven to support long-term sustainable lifestyle changes.
At close to 60, I’m living the embodied version of my definition of Vibrance.
As an NBC-HWC, I help you get clear on your own personal vision of Vibrance, identify goals that support your vision and together we take the journey so you can feel fully alive and Vibrant too.
