03/05/2026
For Yogi
My heart.
My soul.
My teacher.
In 2012, I enrolled in the Karen Pryor Academy for one reason: to become a better person for him. I wasn’t trying to start a business. I simply wanted to understand dogs better so I could do right by the dog who meant everything to me.
While I was there, something unexpected happened.
Working alongside Yogi and learning under an exceptional instructor, Laurie Luck, I discovered the work that felt most natural to me — helping dogs and humans understand each other.
The trainer I had hired earlier to help with Yogi later invited me to volunteer teaching group classes in a jail dogs program at a county jail. That invitation would end up shaping the direction of my work in ways I couldn’t have imagined at the time.
Neighbors who had seen me out walking Yogi alongside the family’s dogs — dogs who had pulled their people around for years — began to notice something different.
The group walked on loose leashes, and at intersections they would stop and sit together in unison. The dogs loved doing it.
Soon neighbors began asking for help with their own dogs. That’s when I first began to consider working with clients professionally.
Through all of it, everything I was learning, practicing, and figuring out in those early years started with Yogi.
One of the first serious cases I took on involved a family in my neighborhood whose two dogs had begun having serious conflicts. One dog would attack the other seemingly out of nowhere. The incidents were becoming more frequent, leading to frightening and expensive after-hours emergency vet visits and giving the family a growing sense of hopelessness.
It was the kind of case most new trainers might avoid. But I believed I could help them — I had recently completed a course designed specifically for trainers working aggression cases.
I worked with the family, and the attacks stopped.
They were among my earliest clients, and we stayed in touch over the years. There was never another incident between the dogs. They went on to live long, happy lives together.
When I began going into people’s homes professionally, I started noticing something.
Over the years I’ve occasionally heard people say something like,
“Wow… my dog usually avoids people, but he wants to interact with you.”
At the time I didn’t understand why. Later I began to see what might be happening.
Looking back, I began to understand what they were responding to. Years of breath work and mindfulness training had already shaped my nervous system. Over time I realized dogs seemed to respond to that.
As a caregiver and director of a nonprofit respite care program supporting people living with dementia and their families, I worked in trauma-informed care — experience that later shaped how I worked with the humans on the other end of the leash.
Learning and practicing Nonviolent Communication further deepened that work.
Over time, these experiences came together and shaped my own approach to helping dogs and the people who care for them.
This work became about more than training dogs — it became about helping nervous systems find steadiness together.
The work kept growing. Word of mouth spread. Veterinarians, trainers, and behaviorists began referring people to me. Along the way I also became a mentor for trainers in a dog training academy.
After a few years assisting with the Rescued Program at the jail, the trainers I worked with asked me to lead it — a real honor.
Today I continue working with dogs and their people, supporting trainer development, and leading training at the jail, where I volunteer my time.
In many ways, my work in this field began there. What started as volunteer work has remained a way for me to serve both the men in the program and the rescue dogs in their care — dogs learning the skills they need to become adoptable and stay successfully in their forever homes, while the men themselves are changed through learning and practicing positive reinforcement.
Yogi passed a couple of years ago.
He was one of a kind. Irreplaceable.
I will never stop grieving him.
Everything I’ve been able to do in this field traces back to Yogi.
This work — and whatever good comes from it — belongs to him.
