Why This Exists
Healing came first. Everything else grew from it.
Homelessness. Depression. Cancer. Three thresholds, back to back, that could have taken me under. Instead, I chose to sit inside each one and study what it had to teach me. I leaned into the depths of my own mind, and over more than twenty years of practice, I found the tools that carried me all the way through, into remission, and back to myself.
I wanted to take what those years taught me and give it to the people who need it most right now: kids. The stress children carry today is different from what most of us grew up with, and too many of them are reaching for a phone to cope with it, which only makes it heavier. I wanted to teach them something else, a way to come back to themselves without a screen.
When I began substitute teaching, I saw it up close: children with nowhere to put what they were feeling, and teachers with no time, no resources, and a curriculum that acted more like a placeholder than a plan. In special needs classrooms especially, it broke my heart to watch how little support existed for the kids who needed it most.
So I did what had always worked for me. Breath. Stillness. A few minutes of guided quiet. I used it in the classroom, in in-school suspension rooms, with my own children growing up, and with kids in my own community, enough of them that people started calling me "Woke Mom" for how I showed up for their families.
Greater I Am Academy is what happens when that becomes a place, not just a moment.