About Aimee
Along the river
Every morning when I’m able I walk along the riverwalk of the St. Johns River here in Jacksonville, where I’ve lived for the past 15 years. My walk typically takes me over two bridges, the Acosta, Fuller Warren, or Main Street, giving me a bit of a challenge and an expansive view of the river. When I can’t walk in the morning, I try for the afternoon, and at this point I’ve walked in heat, rain, and wind so biting cold I’ve rethought my choices several times. But I keep coming back, this hour seems to set me right in a way few other things can. The other reason I return day after day is the dolphins.
When I first started taking these walks, I thought the dolphin sightings were a rarity. But as I returned daily, I began to spot them with increasing regularity and with what I eventually came to recognize as a skill.
Only occasionally would the dolphins just appear. I learned that to find them I needed to scan the river slowly and deliberately, moving my gaze across the water while keeping my focus wide. And I wasn’t really looking for “dolphins.” I was watching for a subtle shift in the surface of the water, a change in the way the light reflected off it. That was my first hint, and then suddenly I’d spot a fin. I’d watch for where it disappeared and then see another. I’d narrow my focus a little more and suddenly there were dolphins, gliding, playing, jumping as far as I could see. A moment earlier I had simply been walking alongside the river. Now it was full of life and a little bit of magic.
Over time I got so good at spotting the dolphins that I can sometimes catch a fin or two from my car as I drive over the river. Some days I see them only from a distance, a quick confirmation that they’re still there with me on my walk. And then there are the very special days when they swim close enough that I can see the texture of their skin, the light catching their backs as they break the surface and the water rolling over them again. They move quickly. A fin, a flash of a back, and then they’re gone beneath the water before I can ever get my phone pointed in the right direction.
As I’ve been collecting my thoughts around attention, I realized that my dolphin spotting is its own kind of attention practice. I start wide, scanning the whole river without looking too hard at any one thing. Something shifts and I narrow in: the surface of the water, the light, a fin. Then I widen again, following the movement and noticing what else appears. What once felt like luck became something I could practice.
Movement
For most of my life if something was difficult, I assumed the answer was more effort, more control, more perfection. From the outside, I appeared capable. On the inside, I was working constantly to hold everything together, terrified one mistake would reveal the cracks.
As an I recognized a similar pattern in my students. Some of the brightest, most creative children I taught struggled not because they lacked intelligence, potential, or motivation, but because the demands of school did not match how they learned and processed. So much of their energy went toward trying to keep up and get it "right" that their strengths were often buried beneath the effort.
Working in a corporate environments, I often saw versions of that same mismatch. I saw it in how skills were taught, how clients were communicated with, and in workplace demands that didn't always create the best conditions for people to do their best work. I was experiencing some of it myself.
As a student, I loved learning, but that didn't always translate into how I performed in school. A few insightful teachers helped me understand that there were different ways to learn, engage, and demonstrate what I knew, and that shifted how I saw myself. One high-school English teacher let me move around during class, and I found I could stay engaged in ways I couldn't in other classrooms. Years later, movement became central to my own teaching.
When I became a teacher, I was always looking for different ways into learning. Performance was only one part of the theatre curriculum. I brought the same creative lens to theatre history and dramatic literature, creating opportunities for students to engage with ideas, process what they were learning, and demonstrate what they knew. Sitting, reading, and listening were only a small part of that. Movement, creativity, collaboration, and play weren’t just part of the curriculum, but fundamental to how we learned and shared what we knew.
My interest in movement eventually led me to a children's yoga teacher training, where I hoped to come away with some new tools for my classroom. Instead, I found vocabulary for things I had been observing in my students and experiencing in myself for years. As I learned more about anatomy, physiology, breath, and the nervous system, I began to understand more clearly the relationship between what was happening in the body and how we process and learn.
When I began incorporating yoga at the start of class, I noticed a shift. Even a few minutes of movement and breath seemed to help students regulate and make learning more available. Other adults noticed it too, and students began telling me they were using the breathing techniques on their own, before a stressful math test or when they were feeling anxious. The very things often treated as distractions from learning, like movement, breath, and the body, could actually help create the conditions for it.I was seeing the impact in my classroom and experiencing it in my own life, and I wanted to understand more.
I went on to complete my 200-hour yoga teacher training and continued into advanced 300-hour teacher training, deepening both my study and my own practice.That desire to understand more is what initially drew me to ADHD Coaching. I wasn't looking to become a coach so much as looking for a deeper understanding of ADHD and the neuroscience behind what I had spent years observing, experiencing, and discovering through practice. As I dove into the neuroscience, I began connecting the dots between regulation and executive function, and why changing our state could affect our ability to direct attention, regulate emotion, access working memory, and initiate action.
I found myself particularly drawn to working with adults, especially those coming to understand their neurodivergence later in life and parents learning to support both their children and themselves. When adults have greater access to themselves, they can change the conditions for the people around them too.