About Christy

I am a bodyworker who stopped pretending the body was the whole story.

Twenty three years of my hands on other people's bodies taught me that the tissue keeps a record. It keeps the accident nobody talked about, the year you said yes when you meant no, the grief you got good at carrying. Most of what I do now is helping people read that record and put some of it down.

I have been an Ozarker since I was eleven. Springfield is home now, and 2001 is the year we came back. I am a licensed and nationally certified massage therapist, a fascial release therapist trained by Maria Alfieris, an awareness coach, a cacao practitioner, and the person who builds the backend for heart led businesses and nonprofits. The through line is the same in all of it: nothing heals while it is still being ignored.

What I do now

I also wrote a children's book, If Chakras Were People, now in its second edition, for ages three to eight. You can see it here.

What changed, and what I know now

In October of 2026 my right wrist gave out. Tendinitis, and the only real treatment was rest, which meant two weeks with my hands on nobody. It was the longest I had been off the table in twenty three years.

What I found in that silence embarrassed me at first. I had built a practice that only worked if my body never failed, and I had quietly believed I was only worth what my hands could do to another body. That belief was not humility. It was conditioning, and it was expensive.

There was a second realization behind it, and it is the one I am still working out in public. For most of my life I was the woman who never asked for anything. I ran on being needed. I kept a ledger of everything I did for people and never once said the totals out loud, and then I quietly resented that nobody had noticed. I have spent the last two years learning what that cost me, and what it cost my husband, and I have written about both. How martyrdom keeps women small is the first half. The other half of the ledger is the part that was harder to say.

So the work I do today looks different than it did three years ago, and so do I. I still put my hands on people, and I love it. But I no longer build my worth on it, and I no longer run a business that breaks if I take a week off. I ask for what I need out loud. I let people carry their own things. I teach other people to do the same, because I have watched what happens when nobody teaches them.

If you want to know whether you run on that pattern, there is a free quiz here: Might you be a martyr? A woman in one of my circles called it the most expensive personality trait she had ever been praised for, which is exactly right.

How I got here

Life before massage taught me plenty about what I did not want. We relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee so I could help open and manage a law firm, where I worked in IT and administration and ended up running a branch with fourteen attorneys. Then we came home to the Ozarks in 2001.

I was licensed in 2003. I co-owned Life Essentials Wellness Center starting in 2004, taught massage business courses at PMTC Massage School, and spent years building things that had very little to do with a massage table. I published the Ozarks' first holistic wellness directory, the iBody Directory, in 2012 and again in 2013. I helped organize the Well-fed Neighbor Alliance and promote the 1,000 Gardens project, which is where I learned WordPress. I built the first website for Dancing Mule Coffee in those years, and it is still one of my favorite places in town. I revived a fifteen year old garden program for the local food bank. I helped allocate a $2.1 million grant funded alliance for walkability projects. I co-founded the Queen City Beard and Moustache Federation, which went on to raise over $120,000 for local causes. I was a partner at Theta Wellness Center, part of the team behind its original 2017 expansion.

Every one of those started as an idea and ended up in someone else's hands, running without me. For most of my life I thought that was a failure to commit. It turns out it is the thing I am actually good at, and now I get paid to do it on purpose. The most recent one is EMC2 Festival, which I help run with three partners.

The training

My fascia work comes from Maria Alfieris of Magical Hands Physical Therapy. I studied with her in Orlando in July 2024 and Atlanta in February 2025, both two day workshops, and in November 2025 I hosted her at Embody in St. Louis to teach. I am working on bringing her back to Missouri, with Springfield as the likely home.

In early 2025 I completed Paul Chek's Holistic Lifestyle Coaching Level 1, which put movement, nutrition, rest and joy into one frame instead of four. I hold four life coaching certifications and I am an Access Consciousness Bars practitioner. My cacao training came through Keith's Cacao in February 2023, with a practicum alongside Riddhima Kowley-Khan, based in London.

Plant medicine

In January 2025 I became Secretary of the Board of the Psychedelic Society of the Ozarks, an organization built around education, community, and safe practice. That role grew out of a long standing advocacy, and the advocacy deepened in 2025 when I began working with other medicines, including Kambo and Hape, and traveled to the Peruvian Amazon twice for a ten day dieta, sitting in ceremony with ayahuasca ten times.

My own journey through, and alongside, addiction is the reason I take all of this seriously rather than romantically. The only person any of us can truly rescue is ourselves, and that is not a sad sentence, it is a liberating one.