Lineages of Learning
I am so grateful to those who have held and who continue to hold me in my growing, in my learning and un-learning, which I am in continual practice of. The words and practices that move through me are an integration of my teachers, the teachings they carry, and the ways they each light up my true nature. Most of these people I am so blessed to learn from directly. Some of these people I am naming in for the educational works they have offered to the world, which I have been with in my own learning container and which have shaped me.
Barbara K. Foust
& Sylvia Tavares
Direct Teachers: Usui Shiki Ryoho
1996-1999
Polarity Realization Institute/Spa Tech Institute
Direct Teachers: Polarity Therapy
2008-2009
Frans Stiene
International House of Reiki
Direct Teacher: Usui Reiki Ryoho
2015 - Present
200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training
2016
Amanda Franz & Abbi Jaffe
The Everything Space
Direct Teachers: Social Justice Oriented Somatics, Trauma-Informed Practitionership, Contact Improv
Amanda Franz: ReEmbodiment Training, Community Garden Organizing
2018 - Present
Elizabeth, Jess & Lauren
The Portland Yoga Project
Colleagues, Friends,
Cherished Community
2018 - Present
Raine Crowe
Village Mystery School
Direct teacher: Longing to Belong:
An Unsettling Journey & Trauma
Aware Conflict Transformation
2019
(through the container of working his My Grandmother’s Hands book together with others) 2020 - present
Marika Hamahata Clymer
Direct Teacher: Complete Reiki & Continuing Education & Community
2021 - Present
One of my Fairy Godmothers & my Mother.
For giving me my first language of Reiki.
The container, I’ve unlearned, but the connection to center,
to Light and Void and Mystery, is at my core.
To my teachers, Tracy, Patrice, John, Jerry, Karl, Peggy and Kim: I am deeply grateful for all of your time, talent, energy and passion. To Cailin, thank you for truly learning with me. To Jerry, I owe so much of my love and language of anatomy to you.
[I share endless gratitude for my individual teachers who gave their time and care to this program, while also naming that I do not endorse this institution's Polarity curriculum or their related published works.]
For your rigorous commitment to truth and to the way of the heart, for your love of the System of Reiki, for handing me the roots to the flower I carry, and teaching me the practices to tend them.
For reasons of my own healing, the person who trained me in my 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training will remain unnamed. This choice is offered in the spirit of Ahimsa.
For your heart-centered carrying of practices of lineage with integrity and great care. You were the first person to pronounce Ida, Pingala and Yoga Nidra with authenticity in a room you were holding, and that small act of loving resistance to cultural appropriation in the western yoga world was an instructive seed for me.
For inspiring reverence in me of the healing potential of the stillness at the center of our inward-turning, and of coming into harmony with our inherent rhythms.
For holding me to integrity: in my practitionership, in my body, its ancestry & its positionality; for giving me the language of the nervous system & how to use it for healing through accountability and informed space-holding.
To Amanda, for teaching me how to move with intuition and trust. For showing me the seed of my body, and teaching me how to plant it.
For your commitment to yoga, to striving to create authentically safer and more socially just spaces and practices, and for the ways you put your values into action in service of community. Thank you for every way you have supported me; in my callings to be of service and in finding safety in my experience of yoga, as a student and as a teacher. I am endlessly grateful for you.
For holding space for direct witnessing and reckoning with the longing in my European ancestry and the legacy of separation from intact lineage that is at the root of “whiteness”. For the love, skill, and integrity of holding magical container.
For holding essential conversations that encourage me to deepen into authentic practice in service to the core of Yoga.
For so much of what’s here - for the knowing that I heal so that I can be a more resourced nervous system and body to show up to the bigger Work of racial healing, intergenerational healing, of being accountable to the harms caused by my ancestors, the harms I have caused, and the systems I still benefit from, and of the responsibility to heal the hole in my own ancestral traditions so that I can hold practices of spirit without grasping.
For teaching me the language of Positionality and the healing practice of crafting positionality statements. For the aligning force of your passion and perception. For river talks and for being together in all of life that happens over rows of onions.
For holding me, with such care and skill, in the Unlearning, in the Unmaking, in the essential Emptiness that is the space for authenticity to emerge. For tending that true light in me in sacred container. For your integrity in being a healing voice for Reiki, and for all of the voices that came before the system of Reiki. For taking the floor out from under my practice and returning me, with joy, to the disorientation and liberation of Mystery.
The Land, my Ancestors, my family, my friends, my community in recovery and the many communities I am woven with, who also hold me to all of the spiritual and ethical practices of my lineages through the joy, challenge, and transformation of heart-centered relationships.
You.
This practice will be emergent; my intention is to learn together as we go.