My Story

I was also a dancer.

Classical ballet from the age of three — taught by professionals who had worked on Broadway and in films like A Chorus Line. My father was a celebrated singer in the late 1960s, and headlining nightclubs throughout New York and New Jersey in the 70’s and 80’s. I grew up getting dressed up on Friday nights to watch him perform. There are photographs of me as an infant being held on stage while he spoke to the crowd.

Performing was in my blood. My dream was the silver screen.

By eighteen I was a certified personal trainer and fitness instructor. I was also fully immersed in the New York nightlife and deep in addiction. The kind that nearly killed me. At the lowest point I prayed, genuinely, desperately prayed… and made a covenant with God that if I woke up I would never go back.

I woke up.

I kept that covenant.

But what followed wasn't immediate peace. It was college, a double dance major, surrounded by the gym world with its performance drugs and the dance world with its body dysmorphia and food denial. I drank. I was angry. I was miserable in a way I couldn't fully articulate. Life felt like a performance with no real substance underneath it and I couldn't understand why nobody else seemed to notice or care.

I hated the church because of the pressure and the contradictions I had witnessed growing up. But I couldn't stop talking to God. Something in me knew there was more.

I just hadn't found the language for it yet.

After college I moved to New York City full time and worked at some of the top restaurants in the country helping open establishments by Danny Meyer and Steve Hansen, working alongside world famous chefs. All while chasing the dream of acting and dancing on screen. On my breaks I read. Self-help. Spirituality. Truth-seeking in Barnes & Noble between dinner service.

I was looking for something… I didn't yet know what.

Living in New York City, still drinking, still searching.

One night I survived a violent sexual assault.

What followed was not what most people might expect.

I was terrified, yes. I understood trauma — I had studied mind sciences, psychology, sociology — and I knew that the fear was real and that it would pass. I breathed through it. I chose, consciously and deliberately, not to let it pull me into hatred or darkness. Not because what happened was acceptable. But because I knew with a certainty that surprised even me, that I was not worth destroying, no one is.

I saw three therapists to talk about what had happened. I fired all of them.

The last one I looked straight in the eyes and said: I already know all of this. My question to you is, why aren't you asking me why I was drunk and alone in the middle of the night?

I wasn't assigning blame to myself. I was going to the root.

Because the surface was never where the healing lived, and I had always known that, even when I didn't have the words for it.

That search led me to NLP. To the study of human behavior, pattern recognition, and the architecture of the mind. And it led me to ask the question I had been avoiding:

Why was I still drinking?

One night, walking home through the streets of New York City, I caught myself stopped in front of a liquor store window speaking to a vodka bottle.

Not literally out loud. But in my mind, with a familiarity and intimacy that stopped me cold.

I was relating to an inanimate object — a bottle of alcohol — as though it were a living, breathing companion who had been with me through everything. My oldest friend. My most reliable comfort.

And in that moment, just like the steroid inhaler, just like the prayer in the dark, something in me said no.

That is a lie. And I am done living inside it.

I didn't know exactly how I would get free. But I knew, with the same cellular certainty I had felt at seven years old in a dance studio, that I could.

That moment was a beginning of sobriety. Real, permanent, chosen sobriety, not white knuckling, not programs that didn't resonate, but a genuine decision rooted in the same question that had followed me my entire life:

Do you choose love or destruction? God or darkness? Truth or the comfortable lie?

Every time, even at my lowest, even when I loathed myself more than I can fully describe, I chose love.

Even when I didn't yet know how to receive it.

Before the book. Before the raw food kitchen. Before any of it.

There was Crumpet.

Crumpet was my cat for seventeen years, nearly my entire childhood. When he died of stomach cancer I was devastated. And then I was furious.

How does a cat get stomach cancer?

That question cracked something open in me that has never fully closed.

A few months after Crumpet passed, my boyfriend and I were walking through New York City when I noticed a man standing on the street holding a handwritten sign about a cat in need of a home. I felt pulled, the way you feel pulled toward things that are meant to find you.

Her name was Hannan. Her owners had a new baby with severe allergies and after trying everything, heartbroken, they had decided to find Hannan a new home. I remember standing in their beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side as they told me how they fed Hannan natural food and then they handed me a book.

The Natural Cat.

I read it feverishly.

And I understood, for the first time, how Crumpet had died.

Poison. Fed with love, but poison nonetheless. The pet food industry, the lack of standards, the complete disconnect between what we were feeding our animals and what their biology actually required.

I started buying ground chicken and meat, adding green powders and bone meal and organs, formulating real food for my cats decades before raw pet food was available commercially. Every cat since Crumpet has eaten this way.

But here is what I didn't fully understand until much later:

The cat taught me before I taught myself.

The question I asked about Crumpet, ‘how does a living being get this sick when someone who loves them is feeding them every day?’ was the same question I would eventually ask about myself.

And the answer was exactly the same.

It was on a break from restaurant work.

I walked into Barnes & Noble and saw a book cover that stopped me cold, three naked men sitting in an avocado tree. I stood there thinking what on earth is this? and opened it anyway.

Within the first paragraph I slammed it shut.

Not because it was wrong. Because it was so right it was almost unbearable. A profound, cellular recognition that this — whatever this was — was what I had been looking for.

The book was Nature's First Law: The Raw Food Diet.

Overnight I became a raw vegan.

Within six months I was the sous chef at the only gourmet raw food delivery service on the East Coast, serving the entire tri-state area, delivering handcrafted organic living food to health food stores and people's homes at a time when nothing like it existed.

Within a year I was the assistant to David Avocado Wolfe, who became a mentor, a colleague, and a dear friend.

And then I found the Landmark Forum. And the final pieces of the architecture of the mind that I had been building since I fired that last therapist clicked into place.

My allergies began to clear. My digestion transformed. The constipation that had defined my childhood, all gone. The anger that had driven me into nightclubs and bottles and the numbing comfort of substances began to lift.

Not because the food fixed my psychology. But because when I finally gave my body what it had always been asking for, real, living, intelligent nourishment, I had the clarity, the energy, and the cellular coherence to do the deeper work.

The food was the door.

What walked through it was a woman who had finally decided she was worth saving.

What I Know Now

To read about the work that grew from this foundation → The Foundation of the Work

To experience this work for yourself → Work With Me