Let's get to know each other

My mission is to support women in coming home to their body's innate wisdom, creativity and health by cultivating womb-wellness, hormonal health, and deeper embodiment, while feeling worthy of it all!  I support women at every stage of life with the ancient medicine of Ayurveda. This wisdom helps us inhabit our body, and nurture and nourish ourselves, especially after huge shifts like childbirth, the journey of motherhood, and the natural transitions of peri-menopause and menopause.  

My passion is fostering multigenerational communities of women to come together and share their wisdom, support true health and authentic wellness through each natural stage of life, thereby collectively healing ourselves and the planet. 

My background with Ayurveda, Yoga, Embodiment, and Women's Health

I'd like to offer you both the shorter version of my experience and education in Ayurveda, yoga and somatic movement, as well as the longer, more personal version. My hope is that this gives you a little taste of who I am, and how I can connect with you on your own unique path with Ayurveda and embodied living.

After studying yoga for over twenty years, teaching for ten years, and exploring Ayurveda throughout, I decided to formalize my studies in Ayurveda  as a Practitioner with the Wise Earth Ayurveda School founded by the world renowned Ayurvedic Healer and Teacher Mother Maya Tiwari. I have continued to study and stayed connected with Wise Earth Ayurveda through Mother Mayas Womb Shakti Medicine program. I have also studied hormonal health with Dr. Claudia Welch an mentored with Mary Thompson.

I chose to study go deeper into Ayurveda and Women's Health after having my first baby.  I felt such a lack of awareness, understanding and care during the postpartum phase that I knew I had to look beyond the Western mainstream model of postpartum care and women's health more broadly. 

Through Ayurveda I discovered a deep well of ancient wisdom that spoke to my soul and helped my body, mind and spirit heal and regenerate. The wisdom of Ayurveda is also in alignment with my background in somatic movement and of course some aspects of more feminine form of yoga--pre/postnatal yoga, and yoga that honors the cycles and seasons of women's bodies  that I teach

I also have an M.A. from UCLA in international studies with an emphasis in Education.  

Before becoming an Ayurvedic Educator & Consultant,  I worked in Community Health Education  and activism for many years. I traveled as a Health Educator and Researcher to many countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, Portugal, Armenia and Spain. I also had the pleasure of working in Health Education here in California with diverse populations from various parts of Latina America and other parts of the world.  

I teach a Movement Arts program in various schools serving Pre-K through 12th grade. I bring somatic movement, embodiment practices and meditation to these schools and have supported hundreds of students of all ages in experiencing fuller embodiment through movement and mindfulness. I am a member of The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), which is a collaborative of professionals, students, individuals and organizations dedicated to the field of Somatic Movement Education and Therapy. 

I love coming together with women across the generations and from different walks of life to support women's health and foster communities of inspiration and women's wisdom 

"The health of the entire Earth lies in honoring the female energy and its interconnection to nature's rhythms" ~Maya Tiwari

The longer, more personal version  of my background  

My own health journey has definitely been a combination of learning the hard way and re-learning to trust that innate inner wisdom. It’s taken many detours, painful losses and challenges to realize what I've already known deep down~ that we are all part of the magic that is mother earth and we all carry her intelligence within.  

I've always had a deep love for Mother nature; it was where I go to find myself and to find peace and inspiration. I've also always been drawn to the inherent wisdom and magic of women. Even though my mother, my grandmother and great-grandmother carried pain, turmoil and suffered from mental illness,  there was also a mysterious strength, fierce love, tenderness, and resilience that I saw in them.  And I see these qualities in so many other women I've met throughout my life. I've also discovered them in myself. But this discovery has taken some soul searching, commitment and life experience to fully realize. 

When I look back on much of my early adult life, I see I didn't treat my body or my soul with very much kindness, compassion, or love. Even as a Yoga Practioner for twenty plus years and a life-long dancer, I was still living in a disembodied, fragmented, and at times a toxic and unconscious way. LIke so many of us, much of what I learned about my body from my culture and my family of origin was very disempowering and misguided

In some ways I was just going along with the larger cultural forces that rely on and reinforce the mind body split and devalue the feminine energies alive in all of us and in the Earth. Certainly the larger culture of patriarchy and the modern medical paradigm devalues women's bodies, the earth and the receptive, nurturing, intuitive, sensual and sensory based feminine energies that we all carry within (both men and women). 

When I began to examine what was causing me to lose touch with my wholeness, my essence, and my inner healing capacity, I also had to go deeper into my own personal history as well as my cultural conditioning. I had to begin to explore the imprint of my early experiences on my health and my lifestyle. I started to explore how my mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and ancestors are also living in my cellular memory, along with their wounds and gifts.  But it took a brush with death to truly set me on that journey.

A touch of new life  & a brush with death

At the age of thirty-five I fell in love. About six months into our very new relationship I got pregnant. It wasn’t something we planned since we were just getting to know each other.  We were a little overwhelmed by the reality of starting a family together, but we decided to embrace it wholeheartedly.

A couple of months later I went to visit my mom and help her through some very intense issues. Soon after I arrived to her house I began to feel some pain in my womb. Several hours later I found myself passed out from internal bleeding due to a ruptured fallopian tube. It was an ectopic pregnancy and for a variety of reasons I wasn’t able to get to the hospital in time to detect it before it ruptured. I lost consciousness and literally felt my body dying. It was a very close call, but thankfully I made it in time for surgery. 

During the healing process I found myself experiencing so many mixed feelings. I was overwhelmed with immense gratitude that I was alive, yet I also felt a lot of resentment arising that I couldn’t quite explain. My hormones were wreaking havoc on me (if you’ve had a sudden loss of a pregnancy, you can probably relate). The trauma of the whole experience also left me with consistent nightmares and I had so much anxiety. 

Still, something inside of me was telling me that my confusing and overwhelming emotions were also coming from a place much deeper than the immediate trauma and hormonal imbalances. I knew it was time to muster up the courage to set out on some soul searching. On my soul searching journey I slowly became more more aware of how I had been mistreating my body for much of my adult life. 

I started to get honest with myself about how my lifestyle and certain choices weren't serving me or honoring my body, my womb, and my soul. I came to realize that these choices and behaviors were being driven by unconscious beliefs about what I felt I deserved and didn’t deserve. I was making choices based on past wounds, trauma, ancestral and familial imprints, and  cultural conditioning.  

For so much of my adolescent and adult life, I pretended to have a tough exterior because I was deeply afraid of my feelings of vulnerability. I tried to prove to myself and to others that I could handle anything, including the abuse I allowed into my body and that I myself inflicted on my own body. I thought if I was tough enough to handle that than I would never need to be held, understood, or to have to say what I truly needed. At a certain point I didn't even know what I needed or how to identify my own feelings. I had numbed myself for so long because the alternative was to uncomfortable and painful I didn't want to touch it.  

Between my own early family imprints and the larger cultural and societal influences at play, I had developed unconscious habits stemming from a belief that I wasn't entirely worthy of love or health. Until I almost died. Until I had a taste of creating a being out of love and then losing that being. Until I began to discover that its natural to want to be held and cared for. More importantly, I realized I needed to learn how to hold and care for myself in more authentic, compassionate and healthy ways. Of course, in some ways I'm still learning how.  

I also began to see the connections between the scars in my womb that led to the ectopic pregnancy, and the pain I was carrying from my mother’s womb, and my grandmother’s womb and my great-grandmothers… and on down the line….It was through this soul searching journey that I truly began to reconnect with my womb and with the loving pulse of the universe, None of this was not an immediate awakening. In fact, it has been a circular, unfolding process and is still very much a committed path of self-love. 

Motherhood, Miscarriage & the Mystery of it All

After loosing a pregnancy and nearly loosing my own life, then the experience of birthing a child, then loosing another pregnancy, and yet again birthing another child, there was no way around developing a much deeper, more profound connection with my body and surrendering to its wisdom. I now have two young children and it's  been a hormonal roller-coaster ride, and a beautiful, amazing, chaotic, exhausting, wild journey!

Motherhood has broken me open and revealed to me some of the wounds inside that still needed healing as well as some of the limitations and lack of understanding and support in our society when it comes to motherhood and to women's bodies and health in general. 

It has helped me discover a strength inside that is truly unbreakable and the aspects of. life where I need a lot more support.--where most of us need more support. It has also reminded me that there’s strength and vulnerability in just being with our true nature, and remaining present through all the natural changes we go through.  When we know how to cultivate self0love, self-compassion, presence and deeper understanding of our bodies, I believe we can feel the power within us to heal, regenerate, renew, and thrive in abundant ways just as Mother Nature does.    

Ayurveda gives us tools and guidance on how to attune to this fluid life force within us and live our lives in authentic alignment with our hearts. The essence of the teaching is that the clearer our minds are, and the more present and embodied we are, the more we're able to share our unique gifts with the world. And we need each other to do this. We can't do it alone. That's not what Mother Nature intended for us. That's why I'm so committed to connecting with other women and supporting women with the gifts of Ayurveda & embodiment. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope it has given you a small window into who I am. Perhaps we've shared some similar experiences and insights in our lives. 

With love,

~Eden