Services
Ayurveda
$150 initial consult (80-minutes)
$108 follow-ups (50-min)
$300 Ignite Package: three sessions (consult and two follow-ups)
Sliding scale is available
Ayurveda (aye-yoor-VAY-deh) is a 5000-year-old natural medicine, teaching us how to live in harmony with our own nature (microcosm) and the world around us (macrocosm).
Ayurveda is a comprehensive health system, defining health as a balanced state of physical health, senses, mind, and spirit and using the tools of herbal medicines, foods, meditation, body treatments, yoga, and exercise.
Ayurveda ignites the body’s self-healing capacity by stoking the body’s digestive fire, increasing the body’s access to nutrition, enhancing its ability to assimilate nutrients, and releasing it of a burdensome toxic load. I offer practices to calm and strengthen the mind and regulate lifestyle choices to reflect your unique constitution.
Ayurveda is not a spa treatment; it is a widely practiced form of traditional medicine. Ayurvedic texts from thousands of years ago identify causes and treatments for various chronic and acute conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, infertility, and allergies.
Ayurveda is not a luxury item; it is one of the most utilized forms of medicine on the planet as recognized by the World Health Organization.
Ayurveda requires your participation. Lasting health is not the result of a monetary exchange for a bottle of herbs or a weekend retreat. Ayurvedic medicine is a partnership between the client and practitioner, knowledge and medicines; it will require active cooperation, participation and attention. I will counsel you about how to alter your food choices and lifestyle for optimum health; you are ultimately responsible for implementing these choices, with the support of your practitioner and community.
PRINCIPLES OF AYURVEDA
Ayurveda is based on a tri-dosha system, describing three elemental “building blocks” upon which the human body (and the larger cosmos) are based. These three doshas, or bioenergetic principles, are combinations of the Five Great Elements and associated elemental functions (motility, metabolism, and cohesion) and are responsible for both the anatomical structure and the physiological functioning of the body.
Everything in our inner and outer environment – food, lifestyle, thoughts, relationships, habits – are infused with these same characteristics. Our digestion is not separate from our anxiety is not separate from our sleeping patterns is not separate from our relationship to our jobs and our families. We are part of a natural living system, in which the subtle states of our thoughts affect the physical foundations for our tissues. Yet this should not be a reason for overwhelm; it merely shows how many doorways we may enter to embrace our own true, healthy self.
It is in understanding the nature of health that we come to understand the nature of disease: Ayurveda offers us a roadmap to living a healthy life, defined by its originators as a balanced state of physical functioning, metabolism, balanced state of mind, senses, and an exuberance and purpose.
Massage
$90 50-minute massage
$125 75-minute massage
Ayurveda treatments (for Ayurveda clients)
$125 Abhyanga: traditional faster-paced Ayurvedic massage with warm, medicated oils
$108 Shirodhara: warm, medicated oil poured onto the forehead (currently at Walnut creek location)
$50 Shiroabhyanga: traditional Indian head massage with specialized herbal oils
Gift certificates available
I offer Swedish-style, deep-tissue massage with Ayurvedic oils. I believe in listening to the body, because it is our ultimate truth-telling machine. I will wait for the tissues of your body to welcome my elbows, because massage should be a conversation, not a lecture.
Education
I began formally studying massage as an apprentice to Darlene Cohen in 2000 and continued to study massage and movement therapy with her teacher Meir Schneider in 2002. I was working in a residential hospice at the time, and most of my work experience involved
McKinnon School of Massage, sports and deep tissue
Esalen
Carol Osborne, pregnancy massage
Taught "Massage for Elderly & Terminally Ill"
Masters Degree, Holistic Health Education
Ayurveda Clinical Medicine & Public Health, 5-year study