Get to know roxy

I had been teaching yoga since 2015 and returned to LA teaching at One Down Dog. I had a ton of experience working with children both administratively and in the classroom so I immediately started teaching the kids yoga classes, baby and me classes and toddler and me classes. Through teaching baby and me, a yoga class for postnatal bodies to bring their newborns in with them to practice, I recognize how much of my own birth and infancy I had to acknowledge. I began this process by training as a prenatal yoga instructor with ODD in February 2020. I continued to take their trauma informed yoga training and finished these courses a week before our 2020 COVID lock down.

Throughout my childhood I experienced physical trauma. As I got older I started to feel the ways this trauma had manifested itself into my muscles and into my body. I had spent so much time focusing on the intellectual side of my experiences. I had been in talk therapy for years. But I wanted to start to heal the physical trauma, I wanted to tell my body that I was safe. I started to see a massage therapist regularly and we were able to work through some serious physical pain through consistent massage. I also started to notice how my life outside of massage began to feel more centered and grounded. After about a year of this work I realized that massage was the next logical step for me. I wanted to bring yoga and massage into this birth space that I had been cultivating. I saw how much of our experiences in life are guided by touch. Some of our most traumatic ones and our most healing ones could be remembered by the way we were touched or not touched. I saw massage as a way to both further my practice as a healing facilitator and bring even more safe and positive touch into the world especially at such a vulnerable and important time like birth.

In 2019 I lost my mom suddenly to a random heart attack. I had been working and living in New York studying and creating dance and performance in the experimental dance world. Through this tragic and sudden loss I found myself craving a completely different type of work, one in which I could help support others in their own trauma. Throughout my own life I was able to recognize how all my trauma lived in my body. I saw my anxiety, depression and fear express itself through pain and tension in my body. When I lost my mom this all came to a head and I was unable to distinguish between my emotional pain and physical pain. I moved back to Los Angeles and began my own journey of healing.

I am a twin, I have a fraternal twin sister. We are both products of surrogacy, IVF and egg donor ship. We were some of the first kids successful born through IVF and surrogacy. Our mother struggled to have children and spent over a decade trying to conceive. She experience an immense amount of birth trauma and lived through a time that had even less resources for understanding, navigating and processing this type of trauma.

As I began to process my own experiences as the daughter of someone who didn’t receive the type of emotional care that she should have, I recognized my own desire to provide that type of care. I became a doula.