Movement
is the
medicine.

The Origin

I grew up in Boston as the oldest child in a first-generation Haitian family barely clearing the poverty line. I carried a lot — the weight of the household, the pressure that comes with being the firstborn, and the kind of rage and confusion that builds when the world around you is hard and the tools to process it are limited.

In my early twenties I found Capoeira Angola. It changed everything. Not because it made me tougher — because it gave me somewhere to put what I was carrying. The ginga, the jogo, the relationship between attack and evasion that mirrors something true about how human beings navigate difficulty. For the first time I had a language for what my body was holding. The rage became something I could work with instead of something that worked against me.

That opened my world to martial arts, to holistic body movement, to the understanding that the body is not a machine to be trained but a living system that carries everything we have ever been through. From that moment I have been dedicated to helping people — at every age, every stage, every background — begin and further their journeys with their own bodies.

The Lineages

I learned Capoeira Angola under Zumbi, a practitioner formed in the lineage of Mestre Moraes and Mestre Deraldo — two of the most significant figures in the preservation and transmission of Capoeira Angola as a living African Brazilian martial art. Through Zumbi I received not just technique but tradition.

In Pencak Silat I am a student of Guru Dian Nurdini within the Panglipur school — one of the oldest and most respected Silat traditions in West Java. Through her lineage I developed the understanding of body mechanics, spatial awareness, and the relationship between force and flow that now informs every session I run — whether with a child or a senior athlete.

The Method

Capoeira Angola and Pencak Silat are three-dimensional, whole-body, breath-connected movement systems refined across generations. That body intelligence informs everything: the way I read restriction in an adult in recovery, the way I teach a child to coordinate their body for the first time, the way I build strength with a client who has never trained before.

Standard training strengthens muscles. This practice develops something deeper — an inner body awareness, whole-body integration, and the kind of functional capacity that makes every other thing the body does feel easier, more fluid, and more available.