Suzanne Snijder van Wissenkerke

I enjoy living and working in Claremont, a college town in southern Calif.

I played piano since age five. My first jobs were (in order): waitress, nursing home aide, factory assembly, fast food peon, door-to-door sales, secretary. Later, I taught English in Taiwan, and traveled in Asia. Just married, I lived in Gouda, the Netherlands for a few years, and learned the language. When we relocated to California, I was six months pregnant and knew nobody. What to do? Massage school, as a lark. Everything that came before --- canoeing every summer in the Boundary Waters, a liberal arts degree, conservative religious upbringing --- gifted me toward serving others, seeking solace in nature, using common sense, manual labor. Living in foreign places, I learned to listen to people through more than their words. I learned to see multiple perspectives, to accept ambiguity, to trust my gut. When I began with massage, I couldn’t know that it would lead me on to study structural balancing, then craniosacral and visceral, then Somatic Experiencing, and to incorporate it all as integrative bodywork. But in re-tracing my steps, I see the path appears fluid. My passion for working with my hands emerged from familiarity with the keyboard. Now as I sit with a client, I continue to listen for the notes between -– the ones that, in relationship with the others, create harmony or dissonance.