Emily draws on 20 plus years of interdisciplinary practice, training and private consultation in yoga, the science of trauma, traumatic stress and post traumatic growth. She incorporates a wide range of healing disciplines in her work; the modern neuroscience of connection, resilience, and somatic body work with ancient practices and wisdom drawn from yoga, earth centric traditions, and energy healing to co-create a path back to each individual's truest, sacred, and sovereign self.

As a 500 hour certified yoga teacher, she started out as a vinyasa teacher, but soon focused on yin yoga due to its particular capacity for healing.  She has created and led yin yoga teacher trainings as well as taught mindfulness, yin yoga, and trauma informed practices in teacher trainings.   Emily’s approach to teaching embraces the power of somatic-based healing and creates the space for feeling, intuiting, reconnecting and transforming. She seeks to create conditions and spaces  for supporting her students in embracing awareness of the present moment and tolerating emotional discomfort so that it can be transmuted.

 Emily discovered yoga's healing impact; as an elite competitive athlete, she turned to yoga to manage chronic pain in the mid 1990’s. What she found, however, was a space to embody, heal, and thrive.  Yoga, meditation, Reiki, and dance have been integral to her recovery from an eating disorder, depression and suicidality, drug-use and trauma.  Ultimately, Emily realized she could support others on their healing journey because of — not in spite of —all she had gone through.  She has devoted much of her life to supporting others and creating spaces for reconnecting to self, our innate wisdom, each other, the Source of All Life, and Mother Earth.

Emily is anAccess Consciousness Bars Practitioner™ Facilitator, a Usui/Holy Fire III™ Karuna ™ Reiki Practitioner and Master as well as a Mandela Yoga Project thought partner since its inception as a concept in 2018. During her tenure with MYP, she has collaborated on the development of the MYP model and has led the creation of the intervention that is designed to retune the nervous system and address stress, racial trauma, and chronic health conditions in people of color.  She spearheaded development of MYP peer facilitator training, including the drafting of initial training materials.  Emily also co-created various somatic anti-racism workshops developed for people who identify as white and are committed to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchal/dominant cultural oppression.    

Prior to joining MYP, she was  the lead trainer and facilitator for TIMBo, a body-based trauma and stress resolution program which uses a proprietary system of accessible, trauma-informed yoga developed by marginalized women for women. 

In her role with TIMBo, Emily has traveled to Haiti, Kenya, and Rwanda to train local facilitators at organizations focused on trauma-recovery and mental health and has been an integral part in the creation of the onsite trainings and materials.  She has led facilitator trainings, numerous TIMBo groups and private sessions, mentored facilitators, and organized and co-facilitated the first and only all genders TIMBo group.  

 Emily a thesis-shy of Masters in Government with a focus on peace- studies and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Applied Psychology from University of Illinois, Chicago.  In her  first job post graduation, Emily managed group homes for both women with mental illness and adolescent boys in state custody.   She also taught English in Mexico for two years. 

Realizing it will take a lifetime, perhaps several, Emily continues to learn about her own internalized racism.   She is committed to working diligently to uncover and dismantle the white supremacy and patriarchal/dominant cultural oppression that lives in her body.  She strives to use her place in the system to help disrupt it.