We’ve all heard the saying, “a jack of all trades; a master of none.” Well, I happen to believe I’m a “master of being a jack of all trades.” Currently, I’m an independent consultant web site designer and developer, the owner of Wild Dingo. While I enjoy my job, I make it very clear that my education is not in engineering, programming or even graphic design. Still, I have more than enough clients who pay me to design and program their web sites. Yet, I shake my head and wonder, “how in the world did I get here?”
Let me start at the beginning. I discovered the mind-body connection very early in life. As a pre-teen, I was a ballet dancer and immersed in everything about the moving body. It became clear to me that my good school grades coincided with regular ballet practice. At that early age, I made the connection of moving meditation to good mental health. The simple act of counting eight counts for each plie or tendue over a 90-minute class several times per week made all the difference in the world to my general happiness and cognitive focus in school.
In the mid 1980’s when I went to college, I majored in Psychology, fascinated with human behavior and wellness, and minored, of course, in dance. During that those years, I took up running and taught aerobics. The fitness revolution had begun and I was at the heart of its inception. For “fun,” I soaked up everything about nutrition and exercise and their impact on mental well-being. One year, I was voted the dorm “health nut.” (That paper award never made it to my wall of fame and has since mysteriously disappeard.) Although my internships were in children’s hospitals and working with the mentally or physically disabled, it was clear that my specific passion was in mind-body wellness.
After senior year, I wasn’t ready to face the real world, so I continued on in graduate school and found a program in Psychology that focused mainly on wellness and stress management. I sure loved being a student. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the mind-body connection, the autonomic nervous system and the adrenal stress response in relation to the effect on human psychosis and neurosis. I remember one day coming home excited because I learned why a runner’s high and a heroin high were so similar (because of their similar effects on the opiate receptor). During graduate school, I was lucky enough to complete an internship under an Aetna Life & Casualty’s Employee Health Promotion department, working with the psychologist there to implement stress management educational programs. To keep my creative and physical side alive, I studied ballroom dance for the two years I was in graduate school.
I graduated in 1992 with an M.A. in Psychology/Stress Management but had no idea how to use my education. Early on, I found marketing jobs at advertising and public relations agencies that handled health accounts. I had a natural talent for writing, so marketing was always a good fit. Later, my career took me to a non-profit whose mission was “healthier communities by educating insurance and healthcare providers (hospitals and medical groups)” which disappointingly seemed to be a veil for “helping to keep your companies profitable.” My last ditch at the healthcare industry ended in a political mess, working in the marketing department of a hospital and medical group on the verge of an un-amicable merger. Needless to say, I was personally either hated or loved by my internal clients simply by my affiliation with the departments handling the merger. At that point, I grew weary of the U.S. healthcare organizations’ concern for profits over individual wellness. I was jaded and took my marketing skills to the technology industry hoping to increase my own financial well-being while having some fun, since I liked technology.
Over the next six years, I did just that, developing consumer and business-to-business marketing and advertising materials. My creative skills blossomed and my writing skills took off. It didn’t take long for the Dot Com revolution to run me weary and in 2001, the year I got married, I accidentally fell into marketing consulting. Over time, my clients wanted me to manage their web sites and I naturally just learned HTML and other programming languages and improved my already decent skills in design software.
In 2002, I found myself as an independent web designer and developer. But something was missing.
In these years as my career had been changing, I had taken to practicing vinyasa yoga lightly at a local gym. It was the perfect form of fitness to round out my unexciting jogs. It fit very well into my need for moving meditation and creative movement with the body – a perfect replacement for dance. When I met my husband in 1999, I had discovered and fell in love with bike riding and racing for fitness. Around that time, a few bike racers had warned me that yoga would be bad for bike racing and instead, I needed to take up weight lifting. After about a year of weight lifting, I had an injured back and was no faster on the bike. In 2002, I looked for a yoga studio and found a Bikram studio (YogaSource Los Gatos). The Bikram yoga practice transformed my bike racing experience. The back pain went away. Over the years, I grew faster on the bike and my body felt amazing. I was convinced, that for my body, almost any form of hatha yoga, was the best form of strengthening. I experimented with Ashtanga yoga, but when the studio brought in Power (a supped up version of Vinyasa), I knew I’d be hooked and continued with a regular practice in both Bikram or Power. In 2006 I had a racing accident that sent my endocrine system in complete chaos. My yoga practice was my saving grace and to this day, still is. (You can read more about that in my upcoming story “From Well to Hell and Back Again.”)
And so here I am, at the end of a four-month yoga teacher training program, hoping to obtain a Registered Yoga Teacher training certification and build this site around yoga in the form of moving meditation for wellness. I no longer feel that something is missing. I’m merging years of experience in design, programming and writing with two topics that are so dear to me, wellness and yoga. I hope that I am able to bring content that enlightens and engages the reader to take an active role in his or her wellness.
(No, I don’t have any pictures of me in a yoga pose. Who thinks of taking a camera to a yoga studio anyway?)
Qualifications:
M.A. Psychology/Stress Management
University of Hartford, Hartford, CT 1992
B.A. Psychology/Dance
Saint Joseph College, West Hartford, CT 1990
Yoga Instructor, 2008
200-hour Power Yoga Teacher Training Program: January - April 2008
Yoga Practitioner Since 1995
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