MY APPROACH TO PRESENCE

Vibrantly relaxed and able to focus on what matters

Basic Approach
Rather than pursuing a predetermined path, we’ll work together to clarify your needs and discover what’s really useful for you.

Potential Focus Areas

Confidence, Charisma, and Expression

• Develop Your Charisma: discover what enhances (and inhibits) your charisma.

• Increase Your Confidence: learn to feel safer and better when you communicate.

• Revitalize Your Capacity to Play: experience how play and pleasure can unlock your expressivity.

Stress Relief and Nervous System Regulation

• Regulate Your Nervous System: transform the habit of staying in fight/flight/freeze into a more grounded, responsive, well-regulated nervous system.

• Relieve Stress: discover ways to reduce overwhelm and use aspects of stress in helpful ways.

Breath, Mindfulness, and Embodiment

• Free Your Breathing: make sense of how breathing habits affect your inner experience and how others perceive you.

• Explore Mindfulness: learn what helps you be more fluidly present and able to focus on what matters in the moment.

• Refine Self-Care: explore practices that help you feel better and perform better in sustainable ways.

My Influences

• Certified teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework®--which offers a wealth of perspective and exercises on presence.

• Completed three-year Somatic Experiencing® training program focused on stress relief and trauma resolution.

• Graduated from the three-year Castellino Foundation Training Program that focuses on reframing early life experiences in helpful ways.

• Years of experience in performance—both scripted and improvisation—as an actor, and as a coach specifically focused on presence.

• Years of training in mindfulness and somatic practices from a wide variety of artistic, healing, and contemplative traditions. Depending on your needs, I may also draw from a variety of other approaches. 

Which Aspects of Presence?
For some of us, it may be valuable to give attention to our interior being—learning to open to specific aspects of our experience in graceful and grounded ways. For some, the external dynamic is more relevant—learning to open to and engage with our environment and the people in it in helpful ways.

As a presence coach, I offer a deep curiosity and commitment to discovering with you what really helps.

Why Breathing?
Breathing is fundamental—not only to being alive, but also to the quality of our experience, to our voice, to communication, to how others perceive us… Breathing is also the literal nexus between the voluntary and involuntary parts of our experience. Because of this, working with breathing skillfully and with care can bring about surprisingly powerful transformation.

Depending on your needs, our focus on breathing can vary tremendously, but one thing is certain: there is no one correct way to breathe all of the time. Breathing is both responsive to our experience in the moment and influences our experience of the moment. Therefore, a combination of structure and fluidity of approach can be useful.

Exploring breathing can be a deeply fascinating, nuanced, and entirely practical process. As a Los Angeles based teacher of breathing and breathwork, I coach all kinds of individuals looking for help with their breathing and to understand how it could better support them.

Approaches to Learning
The work is conceptual, experiential and practical, and the emphasis changes as needed. 

• Why Conceptual? Because how you understand something affects how you do it. Many people, even after study, have narrow, inaccurate, and unhelpful ideas about breathing.

• Why Experiential? Because it’s not enough just to understand something. In order to learn something deeply, you also need to be able to experience it directly.

• Why Practical? Because it’s important for our work to be useful outside of the studio.

A Los Angeles Studio for Cultivating Presence (with Remote Options)
You have the opportunity to work in person on developing your presence at my studio in Los Angeles. If you live outside of Los Angeles, it’s possible to work remotely, and if you prefer to work in person, I can also travel to you.

If you want to develop your presence, I hope you’ll reach out to discover what’s possible.