A life laid down in strata, like the earth.
I like to think a series of coincidences brought me here. Looking deeper, I don’t believe it was coincidence at all. This is exactly where I’m supposed to be — down this lane, not left or right.
I am a living, breathing archetype of the wounded healer. As Jung wrote, a person’s ability to heal others is derived from their own deep wounds. When I look back, I see that I turned my own wounds into a thriving practice — touching people in the deep, nurturing way I had missed, listening the way I had longed to be listened to.
My path in teaching began in 1989. For twelve years I assisted on craniosacral trainings, traveling the country and the world. I studied with Michael Shea across three continents, then followed his suggestion to a manor house in Devon, England, for a year of biodynamic craniosacral training with Franklyn Sills. I was scared the entire way — and I did it anyway. That, I’ve learned, is what courage actually is.
I never planned to open a school. It took a cease-and-desist letter from the state and two years of paperwork to build a curriculum I’d never thought to write down. In 2016, the Ankrum Institute was born — named, in the end, by a friend from across a swimming pool in Costa Rica.
For twenty-six years I ran all over the world gathering knowledge. Then, in 2012, something inside me said stop. So I stopped. I let everything I had learned settle, and in the stillness a deeper way of working came in. That is an embryological principle, and a life principle: when stillness happens, something new can arrive.
Principles, not just techniques.
Listening to the body, not applying formulas.
Empowering, not fixing.
A path, laid down over four decades.
I taught my first class — body mobilization for twenty-five practitioners in Tulsa. I sweat right through my shirt. An auspicious beginning.
I traveled and assisted on craniosacral trainings across the US, Canada, Jamaica, and Switzerland, and taught alone in Italy.
I completed biodynamic craniosacral training at the Karuna Institute in Devon, England — a year of commuting from Chicago, one week a month.
I moved to Tulsa to share a friend's house for two years. Twenty-six years later, I'm still here.
I entered the Canadian College of Osteopathy — a five-year program in Vancouver — and learned that the treatment plan is in the body.
After twenty-six years of gathering knowledge, something said stop. So I stopped. In the stillness, the next level arrived.
The Ankrum Institute was licensed — a school with its own heartbeat, born of a cease-and-desist letter and two years of paperwork.
I'm winding down my private practice to teach the many — through a book, an online body of work, and a final in-person cohort in January 2027.
Educated by the deepest traditions in the field.
My curriculum is built on everything I’ve studied — the neuromuscular referral trainings, the organizing principles of structural integration, a lifetime of craniosacral work, and the osteopathic tradition’s insight that many systems can hold the root of a single problem.
CNMT
Certified Neuromuscular Therapist
CCST
Certified Craniosacral Therapist
- Canadian College of Osteopathy — five-year program
- Guild for Structural Integration (Rolfing / fascial)
- Shea Educational Group — craniosacral, myofascial, visceral manipulation
- Karuna Institute — biodynamic craniosacral therapy (England)
- Vodder — lymphatic drainage training
- Hakomi Institute — sensorimotor psychotherapy
- Concussion Resolution Training
- Embryology, pediatrics, neuromuscular therapy & neuroanatomical dissection