Pain and I have been old acquaintances since childhood, when it regularly settled in my back and neck. The first time I experienced significant relief came in the 1970s, during my early twenties, by way of Lilias Folan's PBS yoga program. There in my parents' living room, awkwardly contorting myself into positions that felt foreign to my body, I experienced a shift from the tension that had been lodged deep inside of me for as long as I could remember. I would be in my mid-30s before I learned of the scoliotic curvature in my thoracic spine.

After our third child arrived in the family, I became both a certified yoga teacher and massage therapist. I also became a dedicated student of Vipassana meditation, attending retreats whenever I could manage it. By then, we were living on the Big Island of Hawai`i, which was gradually becoming a nexus for yoga and meditation teachers who regularly came through offering workshops at the retreat centers that were growing in number around the island. 

Despite all this, I experienced new areas of pain. Many times, I would find myself on the floor in the middle of the night doing "hip opening" stretches while my family slept, hoping for enough relief so I would be able to get back to sleep.

Everything changed in the mid-1990s when I discovered Jean Couch, whose California-based teaching of alignment principles she had learned from Noelle Perez of Paris,  transformed my understanding of my body. After traveling from Hawai`i to meet Jean for the first time, I experienced almost immediate relief from all those years of persistent discomfort.

Over the next few years, I studied with Jean whenever possible, as I attempted to weave these revolutionary concepts into my yoga classes—carefully, so as not to alienate or drive away my students. Eventually, I decided to leave yoga (and stretching) altogether, focusing instead on embodying this "new" way of inhabiting my body while teaching classes I couldn't quite name yet—classes that would eventually evolve into the natural skeletal alignment approach I've been sharing since.

I began to "see" people as the skeleton that lived inside of them. I could see where the relationship of primary boney structures and weight-bearing joints were off kilter. This revelation ignited a passion that has defined my life's direction since. The insight was deceptively simple yet profound: when I allowed my skeleton—not my straining muscles (including fascia, tendons and ligaments, all equally affected by structural misalignment)—to provide me with an aligned framework of support, the pain vanished as if by magic. My muscles were freed from struggling to compensate for my misaligned bones and stopped their incessant complaining as they returned to their natural state of elasticity. This elasticity, I believe, is our muscles' optimal state of balance between strength and flexibility, without effort. What was especially exciting, was that this worked for other people, as well.

By 2003, my life took another turn. Now divorced and in a state of personal upheaval triggered by all three of my children grown up and out on their own, I embarked on a solo journey, hoping to make sense of what to do with myself. During the first two months of my travels, I sat (and walked) in silence at the Panditarama forest monastery in Myanmar (Burma). For sixty-two consecutive days, from 4:30 am until 9:30 pm, I sat and walked in meditation, observing my breath and the subtle nuances of my body's alignment. Even now, it's not easy to find words to describe this experience.

My other mission was to seek out those people I had only seen in photographs, who carry heavy loads on their heads with inexplicable ease. I found many such remarkable people, but what surprised me the most were the many elders in their 80s and 90s I encountered, who moved with fluid mobility while actively engaging in all aspects of community life. This was a startling contrast to the shuttered-away experience of aging so prevalent in the U.S.

Having departed westward, I returned home nearly a year later from the east, having completed a full circle around our planet. Since then, I've dedicated myself to a singular mission: making these alignment principles accessible to anyone, anywhere, seeking this knowledge, while cobbling together a path for me to support myself in this endeavor.

This path led me to teach workshops, author books, create illustrations, and produce instructional videos—all skills I had to teach myself along the way. Everything you see online—my courses, videos, even this website—I've created on my own. (This explains the "kitchen table production" style of my video projects). While this work can be demanding and sometimes exhausting, it brings profound satisfaction and genuine joy.

For over thirty years now, I've been immersed in this work. What I share isn't a branded "method" or named "technique," a distinction that matters. While I deeply respect all approaches promoting these and similar principles, I've decided to focus on the fundamental alignment concepts, presenting them as independent information that describe how humans evolved to function and move with ease, the way all other vertebrate species do. I hope that by doing so, these principles might someday be seriously researched and thus integrated into medical education. Medical schools cannot adopt branded methods, regardless of their effectiveness, so I call this Natural Alignment or Natural Posture—without trademarks or proprietary claims. This knowledge belongs to all of us. It's our innate human design. 

I'm driven to make this information accessible to anyone who grasps its significance and wants to reclaim their natural movement. I also feel a sense of urgency to share these principles with forward-thinking health professionals and a sometimes over-zealous fitness community before those still-living examples of natural alignment disappear from this Earth altogether. These individuals—mostly from traditional cultures outside the Western world—have no idea their bodies carry profound insights into an innate connection between natural alignment and vibrant health that is rapidly disappearing from our world, as digital screens and cellphones are making their way into the lives of even the  most remote villagers everywhere.