WELCOME TO MY STORY...
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When I was a freshman in high school my parents divorced.
This marked the end of childhood, the end of my innocently-skewed views of the world. It could have been the start of an era of trauma and struggle, and in many ways it was, but in so many other ways, it was the start of everything. I filled my high school schedule with art and design classes. My dad bought property and decided to build his own house. He asked to me design it. |
At 16, I watched my hand-drawn house plans come off the blue-lined graph paper and turn into footings and foundations, beams, joists, and wall frames. I lifted walls, shimmed windows, attached electrical sockets. I chose the hardwood floors, ordered kitchen cabinetry, picked every paint color. Two years later it was done, and I was off to the Rhode Island School of Design. I pursued a degree in Interior Architecture and graduated with Honors in 2011.
But what does any of this have to do with where I am now?
Everything.
Everything.
RISD taught me how to draft floor plans, design interior spaces, and work in 3-dimensions, yes, but more than that, it taught me how to think. It taught me how to see potential in everything, how to question what something is and what it can be, to live creatively and find joy in the moments of beauty that arise spontaneously every day. It taught me to look with a discerning eye at myself and my own creative practice. Only by putting in the hard work of self-discovery can there be room to grow.
These days, I don’t design buildings – I design jewelry. But the same principles apply – the understanding of 3-dimensional space, the reality of constructing a structurally stable object, the interaction of the design, it’s environment and it’s human counterpart. It’s all architecture – just on a much smaller scale.
Eventually life as a designer led me to yoga. Chronic back and shoulder pain from spending so much time hunched over a design project plagued me all through college and followed me into the professional world. A few years out of college, I found my way into a yoga studio and never left. The chronic pain I had come to accept as the norm started to dissipate and the amazing increase in strength and flexibility were so satisfying on their own. But I soon came to realize that the immense physical benefits of yoga paled in comparison to what else the practice had to teach me.
I learned to release tensions I didn't even know I was holding on to, breathe through even the most difficult of challenges, and more than anything, to listen to the wisdom of my own body. Completing a teacher training continued to transform my own practice from one centered on conquering challenges and reaching goals into a practice in which I can savor the sweetness of moving slowly, in which I can challenge myself to stay and sit in sensation rather than move and conquer.
Yoga challenges me to really connect to something – to my body, to my breath, to my heart. Designing challenges me to connect myself to the world through my creative practice and the pieces I bring to life. These days I find that my yoga practice informs my creative practice and my creative practice informs my yoga. In the end, these things, this life, this practice of body, of soul, of creative spirit – they are everything.
Everything.
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