You experienced a reawakening in 2018, which led you on the path to being trained as a meditation teacher. What recommendations do you have for people that feel stuck in their lives and yearn for a similar reawakening?

A bit of a back story may help here. My work over the past eight years has not been hard work—but heart work. Eight years ago, my mother died, and since I didn’t want to feel the grief from losing a parent, I chose to over-busy myself with the Nantucket blACKbook, an online marketing business I had created in 2012. By 2018, I found out that the time had come for me to have open heart surgery. During the months to follow, I had to stop and disconnect from social media and the world outside, and I realized I had two broken hearts...one from a connective tissue disorder and the other from the loss of my mother. I then asked myself life’s two biggest heart opening questions: Who am I? And why am I here? Since I couldn’t Google the answers, I began to meditate on them. It brought me off the internet and back in to what I call the innernet. So if you’re feeling stuck and feel like you’ve been sleepwalking through your life, heart surgery may be a bit extreme, but asking those two questions and sitting in the void after is a great place to begin again.

Many people are intimidated by meditation. What’s the easiest point of entry?

Nothing beautiful ever comes easy, and yet, I think the real issue is not that meditation is intimidating, but that meditation is the highest form of self-love. I feel that people are having a really hard time remembering how to love themselves. So where do you begin? Sit on the earth (or in a chair with both feet firmly placed on the ground), have your backbone straight, your eyes closed, your hands placed over your heart space and breathe slowly in through the nose and out through the mouth. That beat beneath your palm is a reminder that you are not alone—for alone means “all one.”

For those that struggle with sitting still, how does one develop a meditation practice?

While meditation is a seriously solo process, the accountability that comes from meditating in a group setting is a game changer and a great way to develop your practice. This is how I began after my heart surgery while on a healing journey in Bali. It was there that I met my teacher while I sat among a group of eighty meditators, holding hands and breathing in and out of the nose only. They call this meditation Ananda Mandala, which translates to “bliss circle.” I’ve been hooked ever since.

What is a particular practice or meditative experience that you specialize in?

I have been trained in active consciousness meditation. I specialize in small group breathwork sessions and heart-opening chakra meditations.

We hear these terms thrown around all the time, but what do we mean by mindfulness? How does one develop a mindfulness practice?

I believe mindfulness is just another word for meditation. So, to me, a mindfulness practice is a meditation practice. It starts with the seed of self-awareness, which flowers from the practice of self-love sustained by a deep understanding of how to use your breath to connect to a higher consciousness.

From your own experience or what you’ve witnessed with others, how can meditation and mindfulness treat pain and trauma?

If you want to fly high, you got to dive deep. I feel that if you want to release pain and trauma, you must meditate on another one of life’s biggest questions: How is my relationship with my parents? This was the biggest heart opener that I had to meditate through. I found that when you heal the primal relationships with your parents, you begin to heal all the relationships in your life. Breathwork, journaling and chakra meditations have been my go-to for healing from the past and turning that harm into my own type of harmony.