About Me

I’m a Ceremonialist and certified Celebrant based in Ottawa.

With a creative and credentialed background in the arts and education coupled with a desire to serve my community, my work involves co-creating with clients, personalized and meaningful ceremonies that support their growth and well-being.

My Journey

I've arrived at being a Ceremonialist, having tried many different things in my life. Through these earlier experiences, I've honed many of the ceremonial tools I now use, and having sought answers about how I'm meant to be living for many years now, I've arrived at being a ceremonialist as a way to most be of service.

I grew up on a dairy farm south of Ottawa. I began to develop an interest in singing when I was 12, and when I was 18, I moved to London, Ontario to study vocal music at the University of Western Ontario.

My interest in voice led me to train and perform as a classical singer for many years, learning to sing in many different styles and languages, and I got a Masters Degree in Vocal Music Performance from McGill University in Montreal in my early 20's. I found the stage – during live performance – to be a sacred space. I sang ceremonial music and sang for ceremonies like graduations, weddings, and funerals.

While living in Montreal, my interest in language study grew, and I trained and worked as an English as a Second Language teacher to adults, working in Montreal, Ottawa, Thunder Bay and abroad, in Mexico and South Korea.

In Mexico, I was exposed to ceremony in new ways, and especially appreciated the celebration of the Day of the Dead, witnessing how communities participated in this, with elaborately decorated altars and cemeteries, where the tradition was to honour the relationship with those family members who had died.

Back in Canada, I decided to broaden my employability in education and moved to Thunder Bay, Ontario to do a Bachelor of Education degree at Lakehead University. After my degree, I taught ESL at the college there and developed further skills in the arts – this time in dance. I studied dance styles including bellydance, Bollywood, flamenco, and more. At the same time, I got more involved with the local food and active transportation movements in the city, working at the farmers market and teaching safe cycling.

In South Korea teaching ESL in my early 30s, I became more focussed on personal development. I knew I had personal work to do and decided to move first to a yoga and meditation centre in British Columbia and then back to the farm I grew up on in Ontario.

Once I'd moved back to the Ottawa area, I sought out ways to work with dance further and came across dance again in the form of Sacred Circle Dance. I'd begun meeting with a shamanic healer, clinical herbalist and ceremonialist named Kathleen Leeson, R.H. She introduced me to a group of practitioners in Ottawa who had been working with this particular form for many years, and some had practiced and developed ways to effectively use Sacred Circle Dance in and as Ceremony.

And so I find myself now, through a variety of life experiences, having honed many useful tools for ceremony – like music, dance, language, and teaching, and not having known that ceremony would become their most refined and service-oriented use to date.

The steps in my own life that have brought me to being a Ceremonialist, would not have led me all the way to this work if it hadn't been sustainable. Fortunately, more and more people are recognizing and valuing the use of effective ceremony in living healthier, more enriching, and more purposeful lives.