How I came to this work.
A B O U T
I am a yoga teacher and intuitive energy practitioner supporting people through life’s transitions, recurring emotional patterns, and seasons of change. Through intuitive guidance, emotional energy clearing, and personalized yoga, I create space for people to listen more deeply, explore what may be ready to move, and reconnect with the wisdom already within them.
I work from Glen Ellen in Sonoma County, California, and Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, as well as online with people around the world. I also offer retreats in both California and Florida.
This is the longer story of how the work began, the teachers who shaped me, the years I spent on the road, and the meaning behind the name Luzia.
It began with yoga.
For more than fifteen years, yoga has been both my personal practice and one of my greatest teachers.
What began as a physical practice gradually became a deeper way of understanding myself. Yoga taught me to notice what was happening beneath the surface, to remain present during moments of discomfort, and to listen to the quieter wisdom of the body. It opened the door to my study of breath, mindfulness, embodiment, and the connection between body, mind, and spirit.
I completed my first 500 hour yoga teacher training in Marin County. I later completed my 200 hour and advanced 300 hour trainings with Lesley Desaulniers at Padma Studio in Fairfax, California. Her approach reaches far beyond physical postures. She teaches yoga as a way of living with greater presence, compassion, awareness, and connection. Those principles continue to shape my personal practice and the way I support others.
Over the years, I have taught thousands of public classes. Each one taught me something about paying attention. I learned that two people can arrive in the same room with entirely different needs and that meaningful teaching begins with listening rather than following a predetermined plan.
Today, I teach privately, online, and through retreats in California and Florida. These more personal settings allow me to respond to the person in front of me and create a practice around what they need that day.
A private session may include movement, breathwork, meditation, or rest. You do not need previous yoga experience or a particular level of flexibility. We begin with how you feel, listen to what your body is asking for, and allow the practice to unfold from there.
WHERE IT STARTED
Then something asked me to look further than the body.
T H E T U R N
The Essence Healer Training with Cru in Costa Rica.
As my spiritual path deepened, I felt called to explore healing beyond the physical. That calling eventually led me to Cru and The Essence Healer training, an experience that became one of the most meaningful chapters of my life.
Cru’s work centers on creating a space of unconditional love where healing, growth, and a deeper connection with oneself can unfold. One of her teachings has remained with me and continues to shape the way I approach this work:
“You are your own medicine for all of what needs healing within you. I am just a bridge, a tool, a facilitator to help you to unfold yourself.”
Cru
This philosophy is at the foundation of the way I work with others. I do not believe I am the source of another person’s healing. My role is to listen, create space, offer guidance, and help you reconnect with the wisdom and intuition that already exist within you.
Through The Essence Healer training, I learned to receive intuitive guidance through imagery, sensations, emotions, energetic information, and symbolic messages. I also learned to allow each session to unfold according to the person and the moment, without trying to direct the experience toward a predetermined outcome.
Learning to receive intuitive information was one part of the process. Learning to trust what I received took much longer. My work with Cru also became deeply personal. She helped me move through layers of conditioning, fear, and limiting beliefs so that I could begin reconnecting with who I truly am.
The greatest gift she gave me was the reminder that everything I had been searching for was already within me. That realization is now at the heart of my work. Someone helped me remember it first. Today, I have the privilege of creating space for others to remember it in their own way.
Luzia was given to me in a session, years before my training.
ON THE NAME
A few years before beginning my healer training, I was working privately with Cru when she gave me my spiritual name, Luzia.
Luzia means “the light,” but the meaning she shared with me went deeper. It is the space between the inhale and the exhale. The pause. The stillness where nothing is being forced and something quieter can be heard.
Her words brought me back to my first yoga class in my early twenties. As I rested in Savasana, I noticed the space between breaths for the first time. My mind had always raced, but within that small pause, I found stillness.
Years later, receiving the name Luzia felt less like becoming someone new and more like remembering something that had always been there. Cru described Luzia as everything I had forgotten about myself and Jill as the part of me that had carried me far enough to remember.
I deeply honor both. Luzia does not erase Jill. She includes her.
For me, the name is an invitation to return to the light, the heart, and the sacred space between the inhale and the exhale. It is where I first became still enough to hear myself.
AND THEN, TWO MORE
Before I ever did this anyone else, it was done for me,
Later, during the Essence healer training, Cru gave me two more readings. One of my soul’s essence, and one of the concept I carry through this life.
“The light that sees you.
The light that shines for you.
The light that guides you.
The light that welcomes you.”
The second reading felt completely different. Where the first was vast and quiet, this one was light and full of joy. Bells, laughter, the sense that joy can move through a room, and part of the work is helping people wake up from a heaviness they’ve come to mistake for ordinary life.
FROM MY SOUL ESSENCE READING, GIVEN BY CRU
“Joy is the medicine of the future.”
I’ve thought about that for a long time. So much of this work sits close to grief, to burnout, to the hardest part of a life. This reading reminded me that the goal of moving through these things isn’t to stay solemn. We can go fully into grief, fear, and difficult transitions and still remember that joy, lightness, play, and connection are part of healing too.
That’s why you’ll find both in how I work—the depth and the lightness. For me, one doesn’t really arrive without the other.
FROM MY CONCEPT READING, GIVEN BY CRU
SINCE 2020Then we left, and spent three years on the road with Kambo medicine.
In 2020, Todd and I found Kambo medicine during a period when I was deeply burned out, physically unwell, and carrying years of stress and unresolved trauma. What began as part of our own healing soon became an unexpected new chapter of our lives.
When the pandemic closed the yoga studios where I had spent years teaching and changed Todd’s work almost overnight, we felt called to travel and bring Kambo to communities with limited access. Over the next three years, we traveled throughout the United States and held thousands of ceremonies for people navigating chronic illness, addiction, emotional exhaustion, and profound periods of change.
Those years taught me that holding space is not about controlling someone’s experience or having all the answers. It is about presence, humility, discernment, and knowing when to step forward and when to step back.
My understanding of ceremonial work was also deeply influenced by Elizabeth Bast Mbeye, who taught me to approach medicine with reverence and to recognize that the ceremony itself is only part of the work. What happens afterward matters just as much. Integration is where we begin to understand what an experience is asking us to change, release, or embody.
I believe these medicines can be profound teachers, but the goal is not to continually search for the next ceremony or breakthrough. Ideally, we begin to need less. We learn to listen inwardly, trust ourselves, and recognize that the wisdom we have been seeking also lives within us. The medicines and teachers we meet along the way can help us remember, but eventually we begin to understand that we are the medicine, too.
Today, Todd and I continue to offer private and group Kambo ceremonies from our home in Glen Ellen, carrying forward what these years have taught us about presence, respect, integration, and the sacred responsibility of holding space.