Mary has criss-crossed the United States moving from her hometown of Allentown, PA to Miami, FL to Portland, OR to Chapel Hill, NC to Boulder, CO. In every one of these cities, she worked in the recreation field, from lifeguarding to aquatic instruction to martial arts. Recognizing this ongoing vocational choice, she earned her Master’s in Recreation Administration from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2002.
Part of her Master's degree included an in-depth formal qualitative study of the perceived benefits of To-Shin Do among practitioners. Her study showed that her peers were experiencing many of the same positive results that she herself had noticed since beginning study in 1998. The benefits emerged in the study via repeated themes of authority, knowledge, connection, service, and personal fulfillment - themes which clearly mapped to the mandalas used in the esoteric Buddhist practice studied by the founder Stephen K. Hayes.
Through this and other experiences her sense of connection to the Buddhist lineage deepened, and the cross-training benefits of Buddhist mind study with To-Shin Do martial arts body-movement study became more apparent. She took Practice Director vows in the Blue Lotus Assembly under Mr. Hayes, owns a dojo in Boulder, and earned her san-dan 3rd degree black belt.
Despite the hectic hours of entrepreneurial service, she still finds time to volunteer and give free seminars to community groups, sororities and businesses on self defense and self confidence. She is the current Treasurer of the Boulder Parks and Recreation Foundation. For her own recreation, she hikes, swims, and skis with her husband Kevin.
Mary is proud to be living fully and freely as an empowered, educated woman with her own business bringing her inspiration and dream to the world. She loves nothing more than to share that power and knowledge with others, especially women finding their own way to power and dream-manifestation.