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I launched myself into Nia Moving to Heal (M2H) a year ago. Since then I have taught three classes a week at a independent living complex, as well as twice a month at a memory care center. To quote a friend of mine, “This work is changing me.” As a teacher, Classic Nia calls for…

Ask anyone who is a Nia aficionado, and they will tell you one of the most valuable gifts of Nia is the community that grows around it. In fact, community may be the greatest gift of all for our health and well-being and Nia delivers that. According to Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect:…

My goal as a Nia teacher is to “deliver the promise” of Nia, one of the tenets of our practice. The promise is to deliver a body/mind/spirit class, honoring The Body’s Way, led by the Joy of Movement, and made available to everybody. Until recently the classic Nia class has been mostly accessible to the…

I’ve enjoyed 25 years as a Nia® teacher, trainer and choreographer. In the years prior to my Nia career I studied dance and theatre, group fitness, kinesiology, human physiology, and human psychology. Dance has been the defining aspect of my life, beginning at age 20 when I studied dance at UT Austin. It was a…

My life is a story written in chapters that revolve around where I was living at the time. The chapters have included Venezuela, Nicaragua, Libya, Italy, Switzerland, England, the UAE and the US. My father took the opportunity to work in the oil business overseas, thus the international background. Relocating is a signature move of…

Long ago, when I first began my career as a group fitness instructor, my goals were driven by charts, measurements, distances, time, scales, and body fat percentage. These numbers, along with their ranking from poor to excellent, defined my reason for exercising and teaching aerobic dance classes. However, I had found my way into it…

Little did I know back in March that so much change and growth were at my doorstep. The transition to teaching online Nia classes was an epic shift for me and all of Nia. Beyond catching up with and understanding the technology, I have had an immense inward expansion that has connected me in new,…

One of the great gifts, and responsibilities, of being a Nia teacher is being able to bring music into people’s lives, in a powerful way. Music touches the whole being, directly mapped upon the brain. It’s a tool we use to bring physicality, emotional tone, mental fascination, and the mystical quality of the spirit into…

As Nia teachers, one of our key tasks is to learn a new routine. We are fortunate to have a team of Nia choreographers that produce an eclectic collection of Nia routines. The routines are built on the framework of Nia’s 52 moves, so there is a uniting language for them all. However, the music,…

I moved to Santa Fe, NM from Austin, TX in 2002. At that time there was just a handful of Nia classes going on in Santa Fe, and I was determined to see Nia flourish there. I had several false starts with studios, taught in almost every venue in town, and finally ended up working…