Soma Research
Practice is where the inquiry begins.
My research emerges from embodied practice, developmental psychology, and years of observing how movement, attention, relationship, and environment shape human development.
Current Questions
The Work
I study how movement, relationship, attention, and environment shape human development. My inquiry grows from more than thirty years of embodied practice and is informed by developmental psychology, sustained observation, and teaching.
I am not a researcher who also does somatic work.
I am a practitioner whose years of observation generated the research questions.
Ballet Lab
Sites of Practice · Curriculum · Inquiry
The ballets I make are not illustrations of a finished theory. They are sites of sustained observation: environments in which developmental questions are explored through embodied, collaborative, and symbolic practice. Each production makes something visible that theory alone cannot reveal.
Ballet Lab
Year-round movement curriculum for children — embodied learning through dance, story, and imaginative practice. The primary teaching site where developmental questions are explored in real time.
Embodied Threads ↗Soma Flow
Year-round movement teaching for adults — movement intelligence, somatic awareness, and embodied practice. The adult counterpart to the children's curriculum.
Soma Flow →Wildwood Curriculum
Embodied, place-based curriculum development at Wildwood Acres Farm and Forest School — RDT applied to nature-based education, West Brookfield MA.
Wildwood Acres ↗The Magical Divide
A children's book emerging from the original ballet — the first creative work in which the developmental theory began to name itself through story and image.
Read More →Research
Interest Areas · In Development
Somatic Arousal and Motor Completion
The relationship between proprioceptive input, nervous-system regulation, and the separation of arousal from action in increasingly sedentary environments.
Embodied Cognition in Development
How movement, sensation, and physical resistance support developmental metabolism: the process through which experience becomes internally usable capacity.
Participatory Knowing
The role of first-person embodied observation in generating developmental insight and research questions.
Performative Compliance
The distinction between visible conformity and genuine internal capacity — and what educational environments organized around measurable output may fail to perceive.
Imaginative Practice as Developmental Literacy
How sustained engagement with myth, symbol, and embodied story may develop capacities for self-regulation, perspective-taking, meaning-making, and agency.
Nature-Based Learning and Ecological Participation
The developmental significance of reciprocal relationship with living systems, including experiences of care, consequence, interdependence, and contribution.
Formal research is currently in development. Essays, conceptual frameworks, and works in progress will be added as they become available.
About
I have worked with children and adults through movement, dance, and story for more than thirty years. What began as practice became observation. Observation became inquiry. Inquiry became a framework.
For much of that time, the primary sites of my practice and observation were dance studios, rehearsal rooms, classrooms, nature-based learning environments, and everyday life. I watched children struggle to enter learning not because they lacked intelligence, but because they lacked access to the embodied conditions that make learning possible. I watched adults carry patterns they could not name because those patterns had formed before language. I watched myth, music, movement, seasonal rhythm, and responsive human presence reorganize experiences that argument and instruction could not reach.
Regenerative Developmental Theory emerged as an attempt to name these observations before I possessed a formal scholarly vocabulary for them. Graduate study in developmental psychology is the current phase of that translation: bringing practitioner knowledge into conversation with established research, identifying where the observations align with existing theory, where they may extend it, and where they generate questions that require further study.
The questions arise from what decades of practice made visible. That is not evidence that the answers are already known. It is the epistemological foundation from which the research begins.
From Embodied Threads · Essay
EEF — Excess Energy and Frustration
A first-person account of what unmetabolized somatic experience actually feels like — and what it reveals about how screens, stillness, and the decoupling of arousal from motor completion may be shaping the nervous systems of children and adults alike.
Read the Essay →Want to work together?
Everything on this page is part of how I work — there’s no separate booking for it. We begin with an Orientation: ninety minutes, by video or in person, where we talk about what’s bringing you here and decide together whether there’s a useful way to continue.
Book an OrientationI’ll send a short note beforehand asking what you’re hoping for, so we can use the time well.