I graduated from college in Northern California with a bachelors degree in Civil Engineering and landed my first job at a large consulting firm. The culture was competitive. Work long hours.  Prove you’re worthy of a bonus, a raise, a promotion. All while knowing your co-workers were doing the same. 

While I learned a lot in that job and got to work on some interesting projects, I also learned that when you’re in a constant state of stress for too long, something eventually gives. Within a few years, when I was in my mid-20’s, I began regularly getting bronchitis and pneumonia. I was surprised, as I thought I was pretty healthy. It made me realize this kind of job was not sustainable. After another couple years, I moved to a job with a better life-work balance.

And then, at age 30, I had another breast cancer scare. I found a second lump, this time in the other breast. And the diagnosis wasn’t “benign”, it was “pre-cancerous”. That was frightening, but I was still relieved that it wasn’t the dreaded “C” word. It reinforced what I had always believed: that staying healthy was something I had to work at relentlessly.

At the same time, I was playing ultimate frisbee competitively, and felt I was getting injured too easily for as young as I was. A teammate suggested I try yoga as a great cross-training activity, so in the fall of 2005, I did. 

That first class changed my life. Here I was, just expecting a good stretch, and in fact felt like my whole body, mind and spirit were being disassembled so that they could be put back together in a way that was more supportive to my overall health. Within 6 months, I attended my first teacher training course, and began casually teaching yoga to friends in parks in Sacramento. 

Orrin and I found each other through ultimate frisbee and eventually got married in Hawaii in January of 2007, just before moving to Nanaimo, BC. 

When we moved, I continued working as an engineer part-time, taking weekly yoga classes and I also enrolled in a course to become a holistic nutritionist when I wasn’t working the day job. I loved all that I was learning, and began incorporating what I learned into what we ate. We grew our first small garden at our home in town.

Our son was born in June 2009 and a year later we moved to Nova Scotia. We dreamed of growing a large garden that could sustain us and raising animals for meat in the healthiest way possible. We had been reading books by Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin, and they convinced us it could be done.

I believed that if I did everything right, I could avoid what had happened to my mother.