Hi, I’m Nico.

I don’t do small talk.

Growing up as a gay kid in fundamentalist Catholicism, I was raised to believe my body was the enemy & my desires were sinful. Everything revolved around the church - where my artistry, sensitivity, intellectual interests, sexuality and deep, wild expression were wrong.

I was taught that all that beauty came from the devil.

So, I turned to academic achievement, bulimia, drugs and alcohol to numb me from myself. I lived inside a veil of perfectionism and body shame, hyper vigilant against the deep fear of being seduced by my own dark side. 

After years of substance abuse that resulted in countless brown outs, black outs, and mornings of crippling shame, I decided to get sober.  In the same month of learning to live without these substances, I also decided to enter an acting conservatory at the William Esper Studio in NYC.  What followed felt like taking a jackhammer to everything I had pushed way down inside all those years.

The Esper Studio introduced me to the radical notion that the body is the source of all our creation. It forced me to look behind the walls I’d built inside myself + examine all the ways I had learned to hide my truth in order to fit in. Under the guidance of a brilliant human named Theo Morin, I was introduced to movement for the first time. For the first several months, I would end each movement exploration on the floor sobbing, touching decades of pain + fear that I had hid behind perfectionism, eating disorders, and addiction.

As I began to experience and express my inner landscape, I learned that even pain could feel good when fully surrendered to my creativity. It was the stuckness that had been unbearable.

My sober community taught me the importance + power of connection and community. We are not meant to hold our stories + process our lives + champion our growth alone. NOPE. Connection is like breath.  We have a need to be known- like, really known.  They introduced me to the power of deep honesty + truth.  

In the decade since then, my life has been devoted to discovering how music + movement lead us back to ourselves through the brilliance of our bodies.

I stepped onto the 5Rhythms teacher training path in 2016, and found the tools to leap even further beyond my fear into the wild, passionate, rude, intuitive, powerful, sexy and inventive human I was born to be. It taught me to meet my inner critic and move through shame till I broke through into states of pure pleasure and creation. Through the dance, I went beyond basic body acceptance to a place of wonder + awe at the weird freaking mystery of my own being.

As I learned to trust my instincts, I watched my body transmute old pain and deep blocks into earth shattering aliveness.

The most recent evolution of my work integrates the studies of pleasure, anatomy, and emotional release as avenues for opening to our own aliveness through the body.

I’ve been blessed to study and apprentice with badass movement leaders, train as a crisis counselor, mentor and be mentored by a few special folks who consistently rock my world.

Today I seek out unapologetic risky creative action I couldn’t have imagined even a couple years ago. I’ve transformed what I used to think was brokenness into a courageous path of truth.

I know now that all emotions + experience come from the body’s inherent genius. I also know the magic that happens when we follow ourselves fully into creative action.

Let’s dance.

xo, Nico.