Madison was raised on the edge of a forest in the Cuyahoga River Valley of Ohio as the oldest of 3 girls. Her family was creative, connective, and also dysfunctional, with an addict parent, and a shadow over her mixed ethnicity. She painted and wrote from a young age, and taught art classes as a teen. 

Leaving a stressful home, she moved to Northern California at 19 where she worked as a waitress, on farms in the mountains, learned survival skills and permaculture, and found buddhist spirituality while also finding home in the DIY / queer / punk scene. She then backpacked through Central and South America for 2 years, often solo, and was initiated by the Shipibo tribe with plant medicine. 

Upon returning, she left an unhealthy relationship, worked as a nanny and landscaper, and was introduced to her mentor Jen Rothman, who taught her about Somatic Experiencing™ and The Diamond Approach; descending into deep layers of the heart. Through this, she had an awakening out of shame from her past and found healthy aggression to heal sexual assault trauma. 

She started the Somatic Experiencing™ Training in Berkeley at age 22, started seeing 1-1 coaching clients, got certified in Shakti Naam yoga, and started teaching a weekly movement class called Self Care For Caretakers to help mothers and people in the service industry create empowered somatic space for themselves.

After living in a co-op with wonderful friends for 3 years, she felt fed-up with new-age spiritual communities and felt they lacked grit and embodiment. She moved to Oakland, CA to attend Mills College. She learned about the sociology of revolution, activism from Black Panthers, queer theory, and how hard it was to be a student with ADHD working full-time. 

Madison developed a chronic illness that left her bedridden for weeks and reliant on friends for care. She was seeing clients through word-of-mouth and undercharging because she thought it was bad to charge for healing work. Due to financial stress she started a computer coding bootcamp right before the pandemic started. She felt like with all the wisdom she had gathered, she still couldn’t make a living or find her dignity in the world, like she had hit a dead-end in her spirit.

After 10 years in Northern California, she returned to Ohio where she met with childhood friends to read The Artist’s Way while on lockdown. She realized although she had been taking so much knowledge in, she was still blocked at putting it out because of shame of being seen. She found radical, decolonizing, authentic business coaches that unblocked her ick with money, social media, and business, and changed her practice name to Radiant Somatics. 

Within 4 months of finding her voice and sharing her wisdom without shame and connecting creative coaching to somatics, Madison became a full-time somatic practitioner. Soon after, when her estranged father passed away due to addiction, she went to Lisbon, Portugal and knew she wanted to gift herself an era of beauty, softness, and exploration after so much struggle. 

In Lisbon, she met an incredible community of artists from all over the world, sang in cafés, shared in poetry groups, and centered her joy fully for the first time, building a home with her best friend in her dream apartment, having a lot of fun and freedom for the first time, while also grieving her ruptured family. 

In 2024 Madison started teaching somatic groups online and in-person. A beautiful culture developed as radical cuties from all over the world came together to connect through healing shame, creative unblocking, trauma healing, spiritual expansion, and business growth. 

Madison recently returned to the US to give back the beautiful inspiration, perspective, rest, and resource she was gifted from Portugal, and it has accumulated into her life’s work of Radical Attention, a 6 month course for perceptive, visionary creatives to heal from functional freeze. 

Madison is now in Los Angeles with her 2 sisters and best friend Starkey. She will be assisting Somatic Experiencing™ trainings and teaching in-person classes in 2026.