I know this story of stuck trauma intimately — because it's also my own.

Growing up around something that shouldn't be there

My interest in alternative health and bodywork started when I was diagnosed with a benign bone tumor in my left arm. As a pre-teen, I fought to stay out of the hospital and was terrified of getting surgery — until I couldn't ignore the impact of the tumor anymore.

Growing up with this "extra lump" shifted my posture, forced my muscles and tissue to contort around the extra mass, and left me with a lot of mental and emotional baggage about my body. I never moved much. I wasn't active or into sports. I was a shy and awkward kid who spent way too much time sitting instead of moving.

By nineteen the tumor was so large that the whole left side of my body — muscles, tendons — had compensated around it. I was ripe for injury and unable to exercise efficiently. Then I fell off a skateboard and broke my collarbone, when the tumor had nowhere else to go on the impact of my shoulder against the ground.

Little did I know that I had chronic compensation patterns restricting my movement and causing pain that I was completely unaware of.

The problem was removed. The pattern wasn't.

As I adjusted to the new sense of space where the tumor once was, I noticed how my body was still "stuck" where it had been shifted, even though the problem was supposedly gone. I was still living in the shadow of the patterns my body had maladapted to along the way.

Flashback to 2009, 2010. I was barely there — a ghost living a ghost life. Physically, I had no stamina or energy. Always in a state of freak-out and making no progress. Neurotic, depressed, anxious, and unable to do anything about it. If "self-care" was a word, I didn't know it. I could barely keep my life together, and my body was a total wreck. Totally unaware of what was buried within me — I hadn't even begun to unpack.

So like many people, I began to look into meditation, yoga, and other forms of healing work, cleaned up my diet, and started trying everything under the sun to make an impact on my health and well-being.

One breath, and everything changed

Five years later I met my bodywork mentor, Larch Hanson — a forty-year veteran of Structural Integration from the early days of Tom Myers' work — and received his life-changing work.

In a gasp of breath, I felt him melt through the tissue that was holding my shoulder locked in place. That breath, and that release, showed me that my arm and shoulder had been frozen up to my neck without my knowing it, and had likely been that way my entire life.

But it wasn't only physical. I cried, as every thought and feeling and judgment I carried about my body came up to the surface and was felt at once. And that is exactly how I experienced it — it wasn't until I fully chose to feel it all, the bad and the good, that the pattern was able to release and my body was returned to me from the cast of stone it had built to protect me.

To realize what kind of motion, sensation, and release of pain I was really capable of brought tears to my eyes. To this day, this is still one of the most profound healing experiences of my life.

Her tears were too real

The very first time I watched my first mentor and teacher work, the woman on his massage table erupted into what seemed like a full-on exorcism of screams and crying. My mind was in disbelief. I thought they were putting on a show to scam me out of $250 and a weekend of my time.

But the woman's testimonial was too authentic. Her tears were too real. On that massage table she went sixty years into the past — to a childhood memory of trying to describe her pain to her parents, only to be neglected and ignored. My teacher released it like it was nothing, completely unfazed by the intensity. Once I got over the shock, I was fascinated, intrigued, and maybe even obsessed with understanding how this was possible.

I got further confirmation when he worked on me a few weeks later. It wasn't just soft tissue manipulation I was feeling, but every feeling I ever had about my body image from the tumor — the way the pain limited my mobility and kept me from being embodied and confident in myself. It all came up to be felt, at which point the tissue release just occurred as if on its own.

And I cried, too.

From that moment on, I was hooked. I had to learn this. I had to help others experience this incredible transformation and freedom from limitation.

Years of practice before the paperwork

I started learning with Larch in 2012. That relationship offered no credits and no certifications — but it gave me years of practicing hands before I ever moved into the profession, and it set the stage for deep presence, stillness, and awareness. Frankly, the things that do not get taught in massage school.

I kept pursuing my own healing through those years, and was surprised by several more intense emotional release experiences — even recovering memories I had no conscious access to. One of my first flashbacks came during a craniosacral treatment: hitting my head in a sledding accident at four or five years old, and how that pain, fear, and anger was embedded in my neck and skull, like it was still screaming to itself to hold on.

In 2015 I made the decision to go to school and get licensed. I already knew what I was walking toward.

The Appalachia Guild of Healing Arts

I moved directly into private practice, using the momentum of those pre-school years to skip working at spas and clinics entirely — and founded the Appalachia Guild of Healing Arts in 2016.

It grew into a five-star boutique bodywork clinic: over fifteen therapists, four treatment rooms, offering many kinds of touch-based healing arts. I learned what it takes to be successful professionally as a small business owner and not just a therapist — and that gave me the thing I actually wanted: the freedom to practice the way I was called to, rather than get boxed into a service menu or the expectations of a spa chain.

Then Covid forced us to shut the doors in 2020 — right as we were breaking into our success moment.

Presence for everyone but myself

Through all of it, I was still avoiding the deeper traumas that had begun to surface — the ones I don't speak about publicly. I used the studio as an excuse to overwork: developing my presence in service of others, and never going deep into myself.

The sledding accident was just the cork popping out of the bottle. What came after took a lot of integration — and because it was big, old, and terrifying, it took me time to stop avoiding it and extend the same presence and skill I was developing in my craft toward myself.

The house of cards, and the grass

The break finally gave me the chance to unpack everything that had come up between 2015 and 2020 — by receiving the work rather than only giving it. 2021 and 2022 became a period of integration, the post-Covid time that disappeared like a dream while the world paused.

I laid in the grass. I sat in the sun. I finally surrendered. I finally stopped trying, doing, compensating, avoiding — and just let it all unravel and exhaust itself. (The work is never really over; new layers always present themselves. But this was the threshold I had conveniently avoided.)

I used my business and marketing skills to make ends meet in those years. And I lost the studio, the Guild, a relationship, a home — the whole house of cards came down in that period.

But it was built on a foundation of a false self — not my true self, not the person I was becoming, who existed on the other side of the uncrossed threshold. So it was right that it fell apart. It was the correct thing to allow to happen.

The return — and the training weights came off

By 2022 I had finally created enough space within myself to melt the resistance about coming back to serving through touch. I re-opened my studio — just me, my table, and my clients. No team, no overhead. Just the work. For a while it operated under the name Main Street Bodywork, on Main Street in downtown Weaverville.

What I noticed on returning was this: having addressed my own physical dysfunction, my pain, and the nervous system dysregulation and trauma underneath it — my sensitivity was enhanced. For all those prior years I had developed my listening through my own pain. Now the training weights were off. I no longer had to listen for subtle communication through the five-alarm fire of my own traumatized awareness.

I had always had a footing in somatic emotional release work, but now I was taking clients there deeper, more often, faster. And people I would never have expected to be open to those experiences — people who came in for routine manual therapy — were describing to me how they were being activated into deeper states of self-awareness.

Two lenses, one framework

The modalities I had trained in — myofascial and craniosacral — started to weave together. I began to feel the intersection: the unraveling of tissue patterns from the outside in, that myofascial unwinding, meeting the inside-out transformation of the craniosacral work opening pockets within the core, dissolving barriers from within.

A total framework emerged, where sensation and awareness override manual force and mechanism.

Totality

I had witnessed the total eclipse years before. It was amazing. But the name didn't come from standing under it:

"To think that our moon, so small in comparison to the earth and sun, could cast a shadow so large. So perfectly aligned that it appears as big as the sun itself — totality changes everything."
Vickie Burick

I saw this poem on a photograph of the 2017 eclipse, hanging downstairs in All Good coffee shop, and knew it was the perfect metaphor for what I had discovered in my practice — and so Totality Healing Arts got its name.

It perfectly represented these two frameworks, two lenses, sliding into unison for that perfect moment of timing.

And it is just as apt for the inner and outer world of a person in the moment of treatment: the sensory information of the practitioner, fully meeting the openness and willingness of the individual to meet it from within — no matter what the sensations stir up. That is when the equation balances, and the pattern dissolves as if it were never really there.

Where the work has arrived

Today the practice lives in three rooms. The treatment room in Weaverville, where local clients come through the body or through the nervous system — and usually both. The five-day intensives, where someone travels here and we go all the way in; the truest expression of what I do. And the training room, where I teach practitioners across the country to hold this depth for their own clients.

I've realized this level of work is not for everyone. People still come into bodywork expecting a massage for physical symptoms — like I did, when I first started my journey. Some feel the first signs of emotional release and want more; others reach the barrier of their discomfort and aren't yet ready to feel what they've set aside. And that's OK.

But for those who are ready, I am being called to this: to do the highest-level work I am capable of, for the maximum transformation of the people I work with.

More than anything else, I want you to know that it is possible to overcome your limitations. I've dedicated my entire life to demonstrating it, facilitating it, and learning to speak it — this amazing mystery of the mind-body connection, and release through the power of therapeutic touch.