My first practice mapping is live: returning to running after a long break.

It's about how containment (not willpower) cultivates ease, and why the mundane barriers matter more than technique ever did.

My first application of contemplative mapping didn't go as planned. Family loss reshaped what practice could look like, revealing a gap in the framework and raising questions about how practitioners' embodied practices shape the relational climate children need

Can data science help us understand contemplation at scale? Before answering, I need groundwork - systematically mapping my own practices through a framework that honors both embodied knowing and methodological rigor. This post establishes that framework.

Last week I gave a presentation in my data science class asking whether computational methods could capture contemplative transformation in teachers. But as I prepared it, something else surfaced: I can't study contemplative observation without doing it myself.

Last week I shared a blog piece about life mapping my educational journey—drawing the tenure track as a jail. Today, I'm sharing an article about reclaiming my voice and journey by learning to say my own name.

"The Myna Bird Knows Her Name" (original title: In the Liminal Space: Self-Compassion When Systems Fail) has been published in Lion's Roar Magazine's Bodhi Leaves section—exploring how mispronunciation and marginalization became invitations to reclaim voice, and how liminal spaces became training grounds for practice.

In January 2022, while building reliability for our PreK inclusion study, I drew my first life map. I drew the tenure track as a jail—black and white, with vertical pillars.

The discomfort was so immediate that I drew a second, safer version to share with teachers. I was asking participants to be vulnerable about their educational journeys while hiding my own.

Three years later, I'm sitting with what that first map revealed about researcher positionality and the ecology of institutions of higher education.

What 272 teachers taught me about invisible infrastructure

Liminal spaces—those thresholds where you never quite belong—aren't just places of struggle. They're sites of insight that reveal what institutions miss when they only measure what's familiar.

What becomes possible when we design with people from liminal spaces rather than for them?

EI/ECSE faces devastating federal cuts that demand our fierce attention and action. What if we centered relational infrastructure as we work to protect, strengthen, and rebuild?

This practice and website are dedicated to my daughter. She is only four, but she has already been my greatest teacher—showing me in real-time what I've known in my bones but couldn't quite articulate since I was a little one myself.