I came to the study of Pilates and Jin Shin Jyutsu after many years of other physical modalities. My first experience was of climbing trees and towers when I was a child. As a college student in art school I studied Judo, dance and mime. From there I found two stars from the Moscow State Circus who had immigrated to the US. They trained me in balancing and trapeze.

I joined The Big Apple Circus in its first two years, and afterwards my partner and I worked on a traveling three-ring circus on the west coast. We had a double trapeze act where I was the catcher and a rolling globe/balancing act. On returning to NYC I went to the Swedish Institute and got my NY State massage license. Concurrent with that I studied Filipino stick fighting, and later Chinese internal martial arts (Xing-I) and Chi Gong. For ten years I ran a martial arts school with a partner while developing a private massage practice. I traveled to China to study Chinese massage (Tui-Na). While I was pregnant I did yoga.

After using the basics of Pilates all these years I came to the study and practice of it as a way to fine tune my body in order to coach circus arts. Having studied many of the things that Pilates, himself, studied the system made beautiful sense to me. It didn’t bore me the way other machine-based systems did. It was based on observed and experienced physical arts from the more simplistic to the very subtle. But it was designed to be usable by someone who hadn’t done any of these as well as a professional athlete. And it produces a strong, lengthened body. It makes you look good. It makes you aware of how you move and it feels good. Like a cat, like a dancer.

I began my study of Jin Shin Jyutsu by having sessions. It was a time of deep stress for me and the Jin Shin Jyutsu was the first thing to relieve it and show me a way to work through it. After that I began working on myself, my son and friends. I then began to seriously study the art and became a certified practitioner. I have found it to be a limitless system that I will be studying the rest of my life. It also combines wonderfully with Pilates. Often I will work with a client on the reformer first and then they will get a Jin Shin Jyutsu session. This way I have a very good sense of what is happening with their body, and their attitudes, and we can work with both.