The Path That Led Me to Energy Embodiment
Before the world shut down in early 2020, my life was full in every sense of the word.
I was a single mom raising two kids, running a thriving practice as a somatic sex educator, creating curriculum for the Institute for Erotic Intelligence, hosting woman’s groups, co-facilitating New School Sex Ed, cutting hair part time, and deeply involved in several creative and community projects. I had rich friendships and a calendar that was booked out months in advance.
From the outside, my life looked meaningful, successful, and vibrant.
In many ways, it was.
But underneath all of that activity, I was exhausted.
I had become what I now think of as a chronic over-doer. I worked long hours doing work I genuinely cared about. I showed up for people whenever they needed support. I meditated twice a day to keep my energy up and tried to balance it all with what I thought of as self-care.
Because I could do so much with relative grace, I assumed that meant I was well.
Looking back, I realize I had simply become very skilled at pushing through exhaustion..
I kept myself busy enough that I rarely slowed down long enough to notice how tired I actually was.
When the World Went Quiet
When the COVID shutdowns happened, the pace of life changed overnight.
Suddenly the constant motion stopped. The external structures that had kept me moving so quickly disappeared, and for the first time in a long while I had to sit with stillness.
At the same time, something else happened that shook me deeply.
I experienced an unexpected death in my family. The loss was sudden and shocking, and it rattled me to the core. When grief and stillness arrived at the same time, there was no way to keep outrunning what I was feeling.
That moment created a kind of opening.
It forced me to slow down and ask myself questions I had never fully allowed before.
Is this the life I want to be living?
What is actually driving the way I move through the world?
Without the constant doing, I began to see my life from a different vantage point. Many of the ideas I held about productivity, wellness, and success began to unravel.
My life had been full of beautiful things—my children, my community, my work, and my art—but I also began to recognize that I had been running on a deeper pattern of burnout and over-functioning.
When the world slowly began opening again, I knew something inside me had shifted.
I couldn’t return to living the way I had before.
Seeing the Pattern Beneath the Busyness
During this time I stepped away from work and gave myself the space to reflect more deeply.
I spent several months traveling—three months with my kids back home on Maui and later another three months in Bali. The distance from my normal routines allowed me to examine my life with a kind of honesty I hadn’t previously allowed myself.
As I began looking closely at my patterns, something important became clear.
I have always been a deeply caring and empathic person. Supporting others comes very naturally to me. But underneath my generosity was something more complicated.
I began to recognize a deep sense of inadequacy and invalidation that had quietly shaped many of my choices.
Somewhere along the way I had internalized the idea that I needed to prove my worth.
That belief became fuel.
It pushed me to work harder, go faster, take on more responsibility, and give more of myself to others. For a long time that drive looked like motivation. It helped me accomplish a great deal and build a life that appeared vibrant and full.
But there was a cost.
Because the feeling of inadequacy was uncomfortable, I stayed busy enough that I rarely had to face it directly.
Work, community projects, relationships, and responsibilities became ways of outrunning something I didn’t yet fully understand.
My attention was almost entirely directed outward.
At one point I realized something that startled me: when I was alone, I sometimes didn’t even know what I wanted to eat.
It sounds simple, but it revealed something deeper.
I had spent so much time orienting toward everyone else that my connection to myself had quietly faded.
Discovering Energy Regulation
By that point in my life, I had already spent many years immersed in healing work. I was guiding others through their healing while continuing my own process and studying with excellent teachers who helped deepen my understanding of embodiment and personal awareness.
During this time of reflection I realized something fundamental still needed to change, my framework for living.
I needed to understand not just my behaviors, but the deeper systems shaping them.
Around that time, I was introduced to the practice of energy healing, and it helped me begin connecting pieces that previously felt scattered.
Through that work I began to understand something important: my experience wasn’t unique.
Many highly empathic and sensitive people develop patterns of energy dysregulation. When we grow up learning to read emotional environments for safety—whether due to instability, conflict, or subtle emotional neglect—we often become extremely attuned to the feelings of others.
That sensitivity can be a gift and a curse.
Without learning how to stay connected to our own system, it creates imbalance.
We begin absorbing other people’s emotions. We feel responsible for fixing things. Our attention moves outward so consistently that our own needs become harder to recognize.
Over time this can lead to burnout, overwhelm, and a diffuse sense of identity.
Studying My Own System
As I continued exploring energy work, I became deeply curious about how these patterns functioned in my own system.
At the same time, I was studying developmental trauma, polyvagal theory, the nervous system, and the ways our early attachment experiences shape our emotional patterns and physiological responses.
I also began to understand more about my own neurodivergence and ADHD, and how that influenced the way my attention and energy moved through the world.
What fascinated me most was the intersection of all these pieces:
nervous system regulation
emotional processing
trauma patterns
energetic awareness
embodiment
I began experimenting with practices that helped regulate my nervous system, metabolize emotional energy, and reconnect me to my own internal signals.
The results were profound.
Over time, the burnout I had been living with lifted. I developed a much deeper capacity to regulate my energy and gained real choice over my internal experience.
I learned how to navigate the inner landscape of my emotions instead of being driven by them or running from them.. My relationships changed because I was no longer operating from a constant state of over-giving and depletion.
Everything in my life became richer and more sustainable as I began learning about boundaries.
Boundaries are still something I continue to practice and refine, but my orientation shifted. Instead of measuring my worth by how much I could give to others, I began living from a place of self-awareness and intentional choice.
Most importantly, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time:
a grounded sense of being connected to myself.
The Birth of Energy Embodiment
Over time, these explorations evolved into what I now call the Energy Embodiment Framework.
Energy Embodiment grew from the synthesis of my own lived experience, my professional background, and years of studying healing practices, trauma, nervous system regulation, and energetic awareness.
At its core, this work explores how our biology, emotions, attention, and energetic systems interact to shape our lived experience.
When we begin to understand these systems and learn how to work with them, something powerful happens.
We become less reactive to the world around us.
We reconnect with our internal signals.
And we begin to experience more choice in how we move through life.
If parts of this story resonate with you, you’re not alone.
Many people who find their way to this work are highly capable, deeply caring individuals who have spent years showing up for others while quietly losing connection with themselves.
Energy Embodiment is about restoring that connection.
Not by becoming someone new, but by learning how to inhabit your own life more fully.