About Jaye
Hello and welcome. I am an educator, somatic practitioner, holistic bodyworker and martial artist. I currently offer classes in my home Dojo in Santa Fe and consult privately with groups, organizations and businesses offering somatic programs in person and online. I specialize in Thai Bodywork, therapeutic massage and also offer one-on-one Qi Diagnostic sessions. My practices and outlook are deeply informed by living and traveling outside of the US. I spent significant years in Ghana, West Africa, China, Thailand, Central Asia, and England, studying and attuning to how other cultures express movement and approach their day to day lifestyle. In China and Thailand I began extensive study in healing and martial arts, and how the intertwining of the two branches originates from the same root. I became fascinated with lineage based practices and knowledge that travels tacitly through transmission and embodied nuance.
Growing up with two educators for parents I was tilted towards absorption and awe regarding many areas of life, my wheelhouse specifically, the magnificent complexity of the human body. As a collegiate athlete I spent hours alone in basketball gyms from the age of 12 onward, only in hindsight did I realize I was enveloped in a state of moving meditation. When I began to study Yoga, Martial Arts and Qigong I was enthralled with my first experiences of inner relationship to breath, body, and touch and the philosophical approaches that afford context to these pathways. Continued study in London working on a Masters in Complementary Medicine allowed me to formalize those dialogues.
My passion and excitement is in teaching, not a particular form or modality, not so much a way of doing, but a way of being. For that has been my life's journey and intimate field of discovery. I approach movement as embodied artistry, and we are all artists. The craft of understanding the connections between how we move and how movement informs consciousness is an endless canvas to play on. Vitality consistently rises, vitality looks for expression, exploration and engagement, we just have to open, allow and surrender to the truth and myriad shades of our nature.
In addition to engrossing myself (because that's kind've what I do) in the study of Jujutsu, Aikido, Iaido, Taiji, Qigong and Gongfu; Yoga and Contact Dance Improvisation rounded my movement pallet towards beautifully Somatic approaches. My bodywork study began in Thailand where I apprenticed with Pichest Boonthume, a master instructor of bodywork, humanness and Dharma. Learning an Eastern modality while immersed in the culture from which it originated allowed me to travel deeply into the cultural, medicinal, and historical roots of the practice.
Here in Santa Fe I studied intensively for four years within the Post-Daoist & Mythopoetic frame of the philosophical & somatic teachings of Zhenevere Sophia Dao, the development gained from these years along with the myriad of study prior formulates my current offerings and perspective. I have had the pleasure and honor to work with a long list of phenomenal teachers, guides, peers and friends who greatly inform how I hold space and the deep care I have for the process of learning, living and empowering others through radical self acceptance and connection to their own innate generative resources.
