In 1995 Mary Ann lived in Kenya, Africa while writing and researching Swahili poetry and music. After experiencing a traumatic and near death experience she began to work with teachers and guides that pointed her to the inner work of healing while sitting, facing, and holding the fear instead of running from it. This requires slowing down and feeling what needs to be felt, seeing what needs to be seen, and hearing what needs to be heard. It is the invitation to stay present and not turn away from the pain and hurt in each moment. Learning how to witness our suffering without shutting down or pushing away. When we face what feels broken with honesty, integrity, open to reality as it is, we can embrace our full humanity with care and tenderness without the need to fix everything or try to make our life perfect. With this understanding, we allow the pain to show us where healing is most needed.

Mary Ann danced professionally for 25 years and for the last 2 decades has developed a daily practice in somatic awareness, meditation, photography, and writing. Today she continues to bridge the art of these practices with the art of healing while holding space for the patient that recognizes their vulnerability as a strength and way to feel connected to all species and life on earth.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

~James Baldwin

The hour is striking so close above me, so clear and sharp, that all my senses ring with it. I feel it now: there’s a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things and they come towards me, to meet and be met.

~Rainer Maria Rilke