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About Me

Growing up in The Philippines, Australia, and Los Angeles, Rhea was a chubby child who didn't take the weight off until she set her mind to it as a teenager. She started by joining a gym and succeeded in taking off her "baby fat" by taking on the sport of cross-country running. The confidence that came from not being able to run a mile to being able to race over three mile courses on hills changed her life.

She then continued her fitness journey by studying Shoa-Lin Kung Fu. She learned many styles of fighting, both hard and soft, and learned how to wield a number of weapons. This also opened her mind to the Eastern concept of Chi cultivation, a way to strengthen the energy channels of the body, a subject she enjoyed studying since she was a teenager.

In 1997, Rhea moved to New York to peruse a career in acting and theater. She attended AMDA, a very intense conservatory and was opened to many mind-body, movement practices such as Alexander Technique, Pilates, and Yoga. This gave her a whole new perspective on fitness that included learning to find muscle imbalances and doing specific exercises to prevent injuries, release tension, reduce stress and help improve communication between mind and body. While living in New York, she kept up a consistent yoga practice with Ashtanga and Jivamukti yoga.

After graduating AMDA, Rhea began perusing a career in play writing. She became a member of the 42nd Street Workshop. She put her passion into writing cutting edge plays, workshopping them with other actors and producing them. Here she workshopped plays such as "Galatea" and "The Enlightenment Lodge." She also had the opportunity of having her her plays, "The Loss of Innocence" and "The Ass Monologue" performed at various One Act Festivals.

After giving birth to her son, she moved back to LA and threw her passions into health and fitness. She became very interested in alternative health practices after she discovered that her son had multiple food allergies that few doctor's could help him with. She also became interested in spinal strengthening after struggling with a bad back (now healed) These experiences intensified her need to learn about healthy lifestyles.

She is now an ACE certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor. She is a Rishi institute certified Yoga instructor. She is also certified with AARP in Training Older Adults. and is certified in Zumba and Schwinn cycling. Apart from being the Healthy Lifestyles Coordinator for the West Valley YMCA, she also trains and teaches fitness and yoga classes all over the valley.

Rhea has taught yoga to seniors, working parents, teenagers and children from all walks of life and many different neighborhoods. She even started a family yoga class where she teaches yoga and partner yoga to children and parents in her efforts to help them share intimacy, spirituality and activity in this very hectic age.

As a trainer, she has helped young athletes over come injuries and muscle imbalances thereby improving their performance, helped people lose weight and has improved the posture and mobility of post rehabilitative adults. As a fitness instructor, she has engaged thousands of people to keep up a regular training regimen.

On the side, she continues to write and is working on making her play, "The Enlightenment Lodge" into a novel. She has recently collaborated with Gregory Christian and has written, "the dolls," a suspense thriller.

Location:
United States, Canoga Park, CA
Current organization:
YMCA Healthy Lifestyles Coordinator
Past organizations:
ACE Certified Personal Training, ACE certified Group Fitness Instructor, Rishi Institute Certified Yoga Instructor, American Musical And Dramatic Acadamy Grad, NY
Gender:
Female
Areas of expertise:
Fitness, Writing & Public Speaking, Motivational mentoring, Motivational Coaching, Fiction writing
Languages:
English
Member Picture

TEDCRED 20+

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Making people healthy, getting people active and involved, continuing a network of creativity and art in the community, connecting fields of knowledge to find new solutions and better methods.

An idea worth spreading

I'm interested in using motivational techniques to encourage all kinds of people to keep fitness and healthy eating part of their lifestyle. I'm also interested in using these same techniques to help people battle addiction.

I am interested in bringing my knowledge of movement and fitness to other areas of teaching. I would love to find a way to teach restless children subjects such as math and reading by incorporating movement so they get exercise and involve their bodies in learning. For example, we need to get kids to stand and act as they read. We can involve children in physical games or dance to help teach mathematical concepts. I hope that in the future, we can categorize learners not by, slow, remedial, average or gifted but by kinesthetic learner, visual learner, etc.

I am also interested in using many of the methods I was taught in acting to teach people like teachers or salesmen how to interact with people.

Talk to me about

How being physically fit is the foundation of having a sound mind and a balanced emotional foundation; about martial arts, yoga, chi energy, freeing people creatively, helping families stick together.

People don't know that I'm good at

freelance writing,knowing what causes people's physical ailments by talking about their lifestyle, yeast over growths, food allergies, using different approaches to reach different types of people

Comments

  • TEDCred score: +20.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

  • +2

    A reply on Talk: Tony Porter: A call to men

    Dec 29 2010: Regarding the Man and Woman box, all dogmatic stereotypes are suppressive. Telling men that they have to be cut out a certain way is oppressive to the man and insecure men react in anger because that is what the man box tells them to do. The manbox also makes them insecure because they feel they will never be accepted unless they fullfill it. This goes for all stereotypes of race creed or culture. The true virtues that all people should possess such as knowledge of the difference between right and wrong is overlooked by a shallow need to fit into a dogmatic stereotpye. The result is people who don't do what is right. This man was told to rape a woman to fit the man box. Truly, a real man would save the girl but the man box has caused such an insecurity in boys due to the way they are pressured that such acts of courage become less important than impressing his backwards peers. Oppressive roles cause us to seek validity from our oppressors over looking within our hearts
  • +3

    A reply on Talk: Tony Porter: A call to men

    Dec 16 2010: Interesting question, Andrew, about the woman box. I think the womanbox would be full ideas that we must cry over everything, do a lot of shopping, and wait desperately for a prince to sweep us off our feet. Also, I think it would say that if we are strong, confident and stick up for our rights as women, men will think that we are bitches. They will be intimidated by us and no one will ever want to marry us. I also think it would say that if men act violently or disrespectfully towards us, it is because we provoked it somehow. This is obvious by many of the commenters who wrote that women prefer the alpha male type who tries to control or is violent towards women. This is so far from the truth that I am convinced that this man box is more powerful than I imagined. Just as the friend who didn't think he raped the girl when he did thought that she asked for it, so many men still think that when a woman is in an abusive relationship, it is something she wants.
  • +14

    A reply on Talk: Heribert Watzke: The brain in your gut

    Oct 20 2010: What I got from this talk is that most of us eat cooked food. I eat a ton of raw food but I still eat some cooked food and cooked meat. In our evolution, we had to eat meat in order to survive the ice age. When we did this, our populations skyrocketed. Meat saved our species. But what I really got from this is to listen to our gut. If you feel stronger, happier and fitter eating a vegan diet, then that is what is best for you. I find that I am stronger, happier and more energetic if i eat some meat. Being a vegan was not good for my health. Rather than assuming we know the perfect diet for everyone, we must teach people to really listen to their gut and eat what is best for them and not what will make them sick and we should look at how are body reacts to food objectively as well.

  • A comment on Talk: Heribert Watzke: The brain in your gut

    Oct 20 2010: I think the answer to Watzke's question on how cooking will help our gut communicate better is simple. We must cook food that is not so tasty that we overeat but not so bland that we won't touch it.
  • +1

    A comment on Talk: Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight

    Sep 27 2010: wow, that truly was an idea worth spreading.
  • +4

    A comment on Talk: Isabel Allende: Tales of passion

    Aug 16 2010: This was a gutsy speech, one that didn't hold back or try to appease the audience. It was raw, courageous and passionate. I'm awed by the comments. I'm amazed at how many people were insulted by her facts and opinions. The truth is, women all over the world are still treated like slaves and Allende sites many brutal examples of this. I wonder if the commenters who disagree with giving women rights so they can be better mothers and members of society also disagreed with our emancipation of black slaves here in the US? I don't think she means to put down men but so called, "alpha males," men who believe it is their right to enact violence on his wife and children. If you have ever been a victim or family member of a man like this, you will know what she is talking about. I'm amazed at how many women took offense to her feminine views but this is just an example of how some people prefer slavery over freedom and empowerment.
  • +2

    A comment on Talk: Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

    Mar 7 2010: This talk really inspired me as a performer and a fitness instructor. I have been taught that there are different types of learners. When teaching yoga, I have learned to give verbal cues, visual cues and feeling cues. I am a kinesthetic learner. I need to do things in order to understand them. Most physical people are kinesthetic learners. they excel in athletics but are stereotyped as being slow because our school system favors audio or visual learners. I am trained to make people move. I was just thinking that we should use methods in fitness instructing and teaching yoga in teaching children in the classroom. What if they stopped categorizing children as remedial or gifted but as audio or visual or kinesthetic learners. I can tell when one person responds more to words or pictures or feelings and I think we can easily divide people up based, not on their test scores, but on the way they learn.

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