About Me

I was inspired to promote social health by my North Carolina-born African-American parents who met in Baltimore, Maryland and married in 1950. They were pioneers in Baltimore-area charity work, financing small businesses and home owners, promoting community responsibility, creating community centers serving Baltimore and Washington D.C., and starting their own businesses. It was their lifelong crusade to help others that inspired me to find my own way of being of service to community life.

I earned a Master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1977, and began working in community and land-use planning for various Baltimore-Washington area municipalities over the next 24 years. I initially believed that infra-structure and community service development would engender greater health and happiness. My planning interest led me to enroll for several summers in an interesting experimental urban project known as Arcosanti, located in Arizona's high desert. This project was and continues to be operated by the Cosanti Foundation which was exploring exciting alternatives to urban design.

Concurrently, I developed an interest in holistic health as a part-time hobby. This hobby eventually rivaled my city planning career, as I became increasingly interested in studying macrobiotic diet and philosophy, traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy, Shiatsu massage, yoga, Tai Chi and Qi Gong, and the use of essential oils.  This involved signifigant time spent in various seminars and workshops offered in the Baltimore-Washington area.

My interest in basic therapeutic massage began in 2005, when I became increasingly frustrated with what I felt were the limited benefits from community and land-use planning. It did not seem, after decades in my chosen profession, that redeveloping communities was improving the health and well-being of people to the extent that I had hoped. Eventually, my friends helped me realize that my priorities were reversed.  What I perceived as my hobbies were actually my true calling, and that planning would best serve me as a hobby. It was at this point that I chose to change my life focus.

And what a change it was! From a tightly-regulated, intellectual, white-collar world, I threw myself into a professional community half my age, a pot-pourri of emotions, lifestyles, and perceptions. In comparison to the regularly-scheduled,  world I had left, oriented in family life, property management, and community activities, the world of massage therapists consisted mostly of young, often impulsive people with active personal lives. They were bursting with great ambitions and good intentions, but struggled with inconsistent communication skills, and varying degrees of emotional maturity. However, they excelled at thereapeutic massage. Needless to say, it was a profound adaptation experience for me!

I began my new career journey into therapeutic massage by enrolling in an Advanced Shiatsu massage course at the North Carolina of Natural Healing in April 2005. I then enrolled in the National Massage Therapy Institute (NMTI) of Northern Virginia in May 2005 in order to acquire comprehensive therapeutic massage training, and became an NCBTMB Nationally Certified massage therapist in December 2006. I later became NCBTMB Board Certified in 2015. My first employer was in 2007 at "Jus' Massage" Spa, a small family business in Fairlakes, Virginia. While I continued to work part-time at Jus' Massage over the years, I also worked at other spas, wellness studios, and clinics in Northern Virginia and Washington D.C. before being employed in April 2011 at the Serenity Day Spa Division within the Sport and Health Club Corporation, at their Oldtown Alexandria, Virginia location. Even though Jus Massage Spa ended in 2018, I continue to work at Serenity Day Spa on a part-time basis until the present day.