Alysha’s Life Bio
I am Alysha and my journey to deeper self understanding, acceptance, and love began with movement. I had a pretty happy childhood. From a very young age I was fascinated with the many ways bodies could travel through space. As a kid I found endless joy hanging from tree branches, leaping frogging over rocks and doing cartwheels in the backyard. I rarely sat still and was very lucky to have a mother who saw this as a good thing. Looking for a way to direct my excess energy, she enrolled me in my first Jazz class at age 7.
I fell in love with dance. I loved the challenge of learning new combinations and seeing how high I could leap off the floor. I adored the music pumping, the beat resonating in my chest. I felt at home in the dance studio. Through jazz and ballet I was able to express my emotions in a way that I couldn’t do through my voice. The world outside of the dance space was often scary and confusing, but inside, the steps were clear and I knew what was expected of me. When I worked hard, I was paid in praise and lead roles. I learned to be a valuable part of a team and I also learned how to stand out.
Dance was a beautiful and beloved outlet for me. It taught me the value of timing, discipline and how to work well with others. And it was a great gift in its ability to reflect how I had begun to think about myself. It was in dance class that I first observed my body in comparison to others and began to devalue it. The dance studio was where I first gave parts of my body labels of too big or too small. Dance was equal parts amazing self expression, great confidence building and the soon to be very deep roots of self critique and abuse.
As a teenager, these polar extremes of positive and negative self image began to wear on me, though at the time I lacked the tools to verbalize this. My home life was troubled, my mother became absent and my father was painfully unsure of how to talk with a hormonal girl. I was also harboring a secret that I couldn’t tell them. I had been abused by a person in our family, but I too was ashamed to talk about it. This shame ate away at me. I began acting out. I still loved to dance. In fact it remained a safe space where I felt grounded, but I also felt ugly, unworthy and rebellious. I began experimenting with drugs and alcohol. I took up smoking. It wasn’t long before my weekends were spent more altered than sober.
It is so strange to talk about this time in my life because I feel so removed from that young woman who was in so much pain that self destruction became her weekend recreation. But she is a part of who I am and acknowledging her struggle is very much a part of my continuous healing. To her, that self destruction seemed a reasonable solution, a necessary numbing outlet. But somehow I still managed to show up for dance class. Though the mirror in the studio reflected a body I was deeply unhappy with and ashamed of, it also showed me a talented and creative human with hope and drive. I both loved and hated myself, but I kept dancing.
I often flash back on the Indigenous American story about the two wolves. This tale tells us of the two wolves within us, locked in battle. One is evil, filled with anger, hatred, arrogance and greed. The other is good, made up of love, kindness, compassion, and joy. When a young boy asks his grandfather which wolf will win the fight, the elder replies “the one you feed”. Now I’m not entirely sure I hold with the entirity of this story. Though the premise is good, it seems to imply that we should ignore and starve the parts of ourselves that we do not like. And after years of trying to do just this, I have come to believe that pretending our shadow side does not exist is simply one more way to injure ourselves. I finally found peace and joy in looking deeper at the scary parts of me and giving them love instead of neglect. But my younger self did not have this understanding. She was pretty consistently feeding both wolves and allowing them to continue to tear eachother apart. Spending the daylight hours moving her body and the night time hours abusing it. It was unsustainable. I felt awkward, strange and miserable.
The years went by and I made it through college loving the dance but feeling more insecure than ever, completely divided within myself and unsure of where my life was meant to go. Substances still played a major role as well as relationships with inappropriate men. I felt myself sinking. I felt in my heart that the time was coming to make a choice. One night after a particularly trying shift at the bar, I put down my cocktail and made the conscious choice to attend to my own needs rather than that of my boyfriend’s or parents or clients. I couldn’t see the outcome of the new path, but I knew the road I was currently on would only lead to more unhappiness than I could stomach. I left Seattle within the month and my recovery began.
Slowly I began by reading the self help books I had bought but never opened. The Four Agreements, You Can Heal Your Life, and Excuse Me Your Life is Waiting all stoked the fire within my heart that had been calling out for my attention. Step by step I moved into a space of self acceptance and everything in my world began to shift. I traveled, I moved, I danced, I loved and lost, and I learned. The process was at times heartbreaking as the parts of my life that no longer supported my new self began to fall away. But there was no going back. I was getting ready, though I was not sure of what I was preparing for. I lived my life, opened a business, made amazing friends and married an unusually good man. And still I felt lacking in purpose. I constantly questioned my path.
The answer came in 2017 when I gave birth to my daughter Oona. The responsibility felt shocking. As I held my new little human in my arms, it suddenly became undeniably clear on what the next step should be. The way I did everything had to change. It was time to clean up my self worth and move forward to be the best example for her that I could possibly be. I refused to model for her a woman full of fear and frustration, unfulfilled needs and goals. I realized that creating the path of happiness for her, required me to go deeper into my unhappiness than ever before, and come out on the other side with understanding, compassion, and joy.
I called a friend who had just completed her coach training and hired her on the spot. Together we started to peel back the layers of my wounding. A lifetime's worth of scarcity mindset and lack of self worth slowly emerged to be acknowledged and healed. I no longer looked at myself as a victim of others’ bad behaviors or circumstance and discovered all my experiences were gifts to me. Even and most especially the shitty ones. By shining a torch onto my shadow sides, I began to explore the possibility of loving every part of me, with a focus on the areas I had hated in the past.
I signed up for more coaching, added some therapy and made the choice to drastically up my self care routine. I was starting to see the connection between the way I valued myself and the way I spent money. I began, more than ever before, to put my money where my mouth was and bet on myself. The old patterns began to drop away even more quickly than before. I no longer craved nights out or nicotine. I only wanted to hang in spaces where I felt surrounded and supported. Fear started to fade to be replaced by excitement for the future. I started to feel happy, even though my body was a size bigger than I wanted and my bank account sadly lacking in zeros.
As I began to heal emotionally I became aware that my movement practice was changing. Rather than working out to make my exterior body look better to others, I started to appreciate how amazing my body was and exercise based on what I felt it needed at any given moment. I began to move from joy again. I actually began to listen when my body ached with exhaustion. Instead of forcing it forward and pushing through fatigue, I allowed myself space to rest. And my body began changing. I felt stronger than I ever had before. My aches and pains decreased as my confidence in my body and my abilities increased. I began to see my full potential and my body became the vehicle for a new and very much deeper self confidence. Everything shifted as I chose to love myself. Slowly, but definitely noticeably, all the aspects of my life began to adjust with my new understanding; that I was more capable than I could have ever dreamed before. I began to embody the woman I wanted to model for my daughter.
It has been a long road. One with many stops and starts, leaps forward and falls backward. Though I have heard others speak of a spiritual awakening that was instantaneous and permanent, mine was definitely more of a baby step process of learning, forgetting and relearning until finally the principle of self love started to stick. The real changes came when I finally chose and committed to showing up for myself, over and over again. The falls back into old patterns became less and less. Leaving situations that no longer supported my growth became easier and easier. Now I find I am able to let go with love and step forward unattached. And I beat myself up a lot less because I know now that this isn’t a contest or a sprint. I am playing the long game that is more about accumulative wins in the self love game than it is about crash diets or short term ego boosts. Because true happiness and self acceptance is cellular. It permeates everything.
Today I am so in love with life. Universal flow and love has become my partner, gently nudging me in the direction most likely to support my new state of being. In 2021 I left my beloved studio in Hailey to follow my dream of creating on my own time and sharing my gifts with a broader audience. The Wanderful Bodies you see here now is just that. It is my most authentic voice, sharing all the tools I have learned along the way, with the joyful purpose of creating with intention and contributing to the greater good. With Wanderful Bodies, I choose to share tools to empower, energize and support those who resonate with the mission of co creating a more loving, compassionate, and balanced world for ourselves and for our children.
Welcome Wanderful!
