Natural Movement has been the key theme in my life since childhood. I was raised at the end of a dirt road surrounded by forest; it was in those woods where I found solace from the stresses of school as a child with ADHD and Dyslexia.
At 6 years old, I started studying martial arts, including Tang Soo Do, Aikido, and Kung Fu, followed by KickBoxing and BJJ in my childhood and teens, and Muay Thai, more BJJ, Capoeira, and Systema as an adult.
When I was 8 years old, a mentor came into my life and took on my education. He saw in me a fierce need for movement and gave me room to express it. He roughhoused with me daily and allowed me to roam the woods for hours every day, which allowed me to overcome my disabilities so that by the time I turned 9, I was reading The Illiad and The Odyssey to myself. By 13, I was actively studying anthropology and evolutionary biology, which I would go on to study in college.
At 15, I began studying gymnastics, and at 23 I discovered Parkour, becoming one the first Parkour teachers in North America and co-founding Parkour Visions, one of the most highly respected parkour teaching institutions in the world.
The discovery of Parkour for me immediately led to a bigger question. Parkour for me was like taking a layer off gymnastics and finding something deeper, more primal, something more heroic. But it felt like there was still something missing.
Almost from the moment I encountered Parkour, I dreamed of creating a method that covered the full spectrum of primal human movements. The skills of the heroes of old. The capacity for movement that I read about in tribal peoples all around the world in my ethnographic readings. I started to ask the question what did it mean to move like a human—
To be truly competent to move as humans evolved to move!
