From Pro Surfer to Surf Therapy Intern

I grew up as the oldest of five sisters in a coastal upper middle class neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Despite a lot of privilege, my childhood and adolescence weren’t easy. Once I found the ocean though, I had a place I could go to feel at home. Regardless of what was going on for me at home, I noticed that I always felt better after playing in the ocean. The only issue was that in the mid 90s as I was learning to surf, surf culture wasn’t always a welcoming place for young girls. My mom had warned me that “surfing is for boys, you shouldn’t be out there competing with them.”

By age 15, I had overcome the initial barriers, bought myself a surfboard and wetsuit, started competing, and a few years later achieved my dream of becoming a professional surfer. For almost ten years I traveled the world with my surfboard, competing, modeling, and eventually producing my own content in a time before social media made that a common thing to do. Throughout my journey though, I always had the underlying feelings of not fitting in, of having to change or at least hide who I was in order to be accepted. As I got closer to 30, I got tired of playing that game. The constant travel started to wear on me. I longed for the stability of a consistent relationship, time to nurture a garden, the companion of a dog.

In 2010 I dropped out of the scene and ran off to Central America. It was there, on a remote beach in Nicaragua with a smoking volcano in the distance and hollow beach break waves pounding me into the sand on the daily, that I could be whoever I wanted to be. Barefoot always, running down the beach before sunrise with my surfboard and a pack of dogs at my heels, I lived in a tiny house without power or running water and was the happiest i’d ever been.

I’d earned an MBA while on tour and used those skills to found a women’s surf and yoga retreat business focused on giving women the knowledge, support, and community that I had been lacking when I was trying to learn to surf. It was also a way to import rad female surfing friends to continue having adventures and sustain myself in my dream of living in Nicaragua.

Another ten years passed and with two kids entering school, plus a variety of other reasons, I decided to give in to what seemed like a pull back to California. I’m still running Surf With Amigas from afar and will pop down for retreats a few times a year. I love learning and challenging myself with new projects.

As a master’s of counseling student i’ve learned so much about myself and the people around me. I’ve learned a new dimension of surf coaching that goes beyond just body positioning and wave knowledge. It’s been really exciting to make deeper connections between the experiences we’ve had earlier in life and note how those impact our way of interacting with the world and the people in it, and then notice how all that plays out in our surfing practice. From there, learning tools to approach the ocean from a healthy mindful place those tools can also be applied to other parts of life. That’s the foundation of holistic surf coaching.