team

LMFT Founder and Executive Director

My work as a novice psychotherapist with young women with eating disorders combined with a mastectomy for breast cancer at age 30 initiated my personal journey toward loving and enjoying living in my body, just as I am. With the launch of Alive and Well Women in 2015, I started something I wish existed 25 years ago when I began finding my own path toward being alive and well.

Although I never had a full-blown, clinically diagnosable eating disorder, I resonated with many of the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of my clients. I could relate to their “fears of fat,” their insecurities about body shape and size, and their feelings of not being good enough to measure up to who they thought they “should” be or how they thought they “should” look. As I heard similar storylines among friends and acquaintances, I recognized that eating and body image problems exist on a continuum. Most women I knew lived with some degree of disordered thoughts, feelings or behaviors related to their physicality. I knew very few women who actually seemed to love their bodies and feel proud of being a woman.

The more I learned about eating disorders, the more I recognized that when it came to women, food and our bodies, the difference between “mental illness” and “normal” female body discontent was a matter of degree. The very same diet that appeared to be health supportive for one woman activated obsession in another. What was a life-giving exercise routine for one was destructive for another. The common dynamic many of us shared was a pervasive, and mostly unconscious, mistrust of our own bodies. While diet gurus and fitness experts were busy selling us their products, plans and services by telling us how much they knew for sure about our bodies, we were left wondering if we knew anything at all about how to live well without their help.

Not much has changed in the 25 years I’ve worked in the field. The impact of cultural objectification of the female body is as pervasive as ever! The disempowering messages are not limited to our relationships with our bodies. As is widely researched and documented elsewhere, women and girls can’t be what we can’t see. A world dominated by male authority figures, unequal pay for equal work, and very few women in power-broker roles, limits our vision for becoming powerful forces for good in the world before we even get started.

My journey with hundreds of women in psychotherapy and health coaching work, coupled with startling statistics about the rate of body discontent and disordered eating in young girls, inspired me to create a community that offers better stories and empowers women to be role models and advocates for positive female identity development in our families, workplaces, communities and other spheres of influence.

Alive and Well is dedicated to those women who entrusted their precious stories to me and to the girls they love. I pray your daughters, nieces, students, clients and other loved ones will invest their energies in changing the world and not in trying to change their bodies.

Co-Founder and Board Chair

After a successful, but demanding, 25-year corporate career, I gleefully took early retirement in August 2013. Not long after my big send-off, I had a fateful lunch date, reconnecting with my old friend Cissy Brady-Rogers. I divulged my long-held aspiration of someday working with a nonprofit, and she divulged her long-held interest in someday starting one. Cissy shared her vision for this nonprofit, one that supported self-care for women, and with that, a beautiful God-filled partnership was born! We spent the next year researching nonprofits and laying the groundwork, and in January 2015 we held our first Board meeting, with me serving as Board Chair.

I was immediately drawn to Cissy’s vision of Alive and Well Women, especially the focus on empowerment of women. I have predominately lived and worked in male-dominated worlds. I was the only daughter in my family (with two brothers), I graduated from law school at a time when women comprised less than 30% of the student body, I worked in a male-dominated field, married a man and raised only sons. In the process, I discovered how vital my female support system is to my wellbeing. I also found that, after much trial and error, I had intuitively embraced many of the core principles of Alive and Well Women and found my own self-care path, but I wish I’d been exposed to the Alive and Well Women model sooner!

Since that pre-destined lunch with Cissy in 2013, it has been heartening to see the receptivity and support for Alive and Well Women. I look forward to bringing our programs, workshops and small groups, teaching on women’s self-care, and identify development, and, ultimately the empowering message of God’s love, to as many women as possible.

Retired, UCLA and People Assisting The Homeless

As I lived in different places and held a variety of jobs, I became very aware that people are often not in touch with their bodies. They don’t ever think about being in alignment. I have friends and colleagues who have terrible ailments and disabilities. But they’re not “listening” to what their bodies are telling them.  They are only living in their heads, and they  don’t know how to work with their bodies to help themselves feel better.  My father was an osteopath, so I knew from an early age that being in alignment, having your bones aligned was very important. He taught us that when your body is in alignment, it can heal itself. That whole lifestyle, including being outdoors, walking a lot, not only taking care of the body but being sensitive to the environment, the mountains and appreciating life in the small Colorado town I grew up in, nurtured a holistic view of life. I didn’t know there was anything else.  Alive and Well helps women do that! We help women learn to help ourselves be in alignment. It’s an attitude of consciously taking care of your own body. Nobody is going to do it for you. So if you don’t know how to do, we can help you learn to help your body be well.  That’s why I’m delighted to serve on the Alive and Well Women board. I want others to know that it is possible to take care of yourself, stay mobile and enjoy life’s goodness for a long time.

Co-Founder and Board Chair

After a successful, but demanding, 25-year corporate career, I gleefully took early retirement in August 2013. Not long after my big send-off, I had a fateful lunch date, reconnecting with my old friend Cissy Brady-Rogers. I divulged my long-held aspiration of someday working with a nonprofit, and she divulged her long-held interest in someday starting one. Cissy shared her vision for this nonprofit, one that supported self-care for women, and with that, a beautiful God-filled partnership was born! We spent the next year researching nonprofits and laying the groundwork, and in January 2015 we held our first Board meeting, with me serving as Board Chair.

I was immediately drawn to Cissy’s vision of Alive and Well Women, especially the focus on empowerment of women. I have predominately lived and worked in male-dominated worlds. I was the only daughter in my family (with two brothers), I graduated from law school at a time when women comprised less than 30% of the student body, I worked in a male-dominated field, married a man and raised only sons. In the process, I discovered how vital my female support system is to my wellbeing. I also found that, after much trial and error, I had intuitively embraced many of the core principles of Alive and Well Women and found my own self-care path, but I wish I’d been exposed to the Alive and Well Women model sooner!

Since that pre-destined lunch with Cissy in 2013, it has been heartening to see the receptivity and support for Alive and Well Women. I look forward to bringing our programs, workshops and small groups, teaching on women’s self-care, and identify development, and, ultimately the empowering message of God’s love, to as many women as possible.

Teacher, South Pasadena Middle School

Alive and Well Women’s focus on embodied practices, holistic approach to health, and empowerment of women to find our own inner authority are all reasons I am excited to have joined this amazing team of women as a board member.

In 2007, I took my very first yoga class, and had this epiphany: “I am a body!” It may sound silly, but before that I didn’t really pay any attention to the wisdom of my body. My body was simply a vessel to carry me around. Discovering the power of embodied practice through yoga, helped me to deepen my sense of self and find other ways to live more fully into my own embodiment.

As a teacher and a creative contemplative, I have a passion for the vision of Alive and Well Women to foster community, wellness, and love in women’s lives through a deep listening to our own stories, our communities, our planet, and the Spirit who moves through all.

National Director, Reasons Eating Disorder Center

As a psychotherapist and director of Reasons Eating Disorder Center, my professional passion for developing experiential programming and creating healing space for people struggling with eating disorders feels synergistic with Alive and Well Women. There is something about having our experiences witnessed by a community of women outside of the clinical setting that is a powerful part of healing. It honors our stories in a different way than therapy. Alive and Well provides those kind of empowering encounters without the stigma people often associate with psychotherapy.

Self-care, authenticity and embodiment are not just therapeutic issues. They are also social and political issues. We live in a strange culture where it’s the norm that every woman struggles with these things and where micro-aggressions against women, just because of our bodies and appearance, occur on a regular basis.  It doesn’t have to be that way. But it is. I believe we need to address the broader realm of socialization and how that impacts the onset of food and body problems. We need social change as much as we need individual and community support.

My personal experience of being female in our culture has taken me on a labyrinth journey to find my core, my essence, and recover the power of attending to my intuition.

I am honored to be a part of an organization whose mission is to create events that help women listen to their bodies, extend love and care toward other women, and provide space to normalize the labyrinth journey of spiritual growth that we share.