Momentus Coaching was in part born from my many (many, many) many hours of conversations with these intelligent, dedicated, super motivated, yet at times exasperated students. I am grateful to my students who revealed to me the challenges of contemporary university life. I started as a GSI (graduate student instructor, another name for the TA) back in 2001, and had been designing and teaching my own classes since 2008. “I had the wonderful, exciting opportunity to teach university students. I am forever enchanted by the landscape of the Andes Mountains and the loveliness of my Peruvian families. I even wrote a book about it, but I am pretty sure no one has actually read it. I directed the Las Varas Archaeological Project, which investigated ethnic interactions that occurred at a thousand-year-old village in a valley with an almost unpronounceable name in northern Peru. “For my dissertation research I conducted archaeological excavations in Peru. No wonder I would embark on a career as an anthropologist, an archaeologist, and now a fitness coach/trainer. I think my immigrant experience proved formative in shaping my outlook, my encounters with the variegated prisms of individuals that define the human experience. “I was born in Taiwan and moved to the US in 1988. I have a hard time writing about myself in the third person, so I am going to do this in quotation marks (sorry Rory).

She has published articles on archaeobotany, ceramic geochemistry, and social complexity, and is the author of Mahan and Baekje: The Complex Origins of Korean Kingdoms. Rory has a doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Oregon, and is in training as a Qigong teacher through the Peaceful Dragon School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After working through her own anxiety, grief, and trauma, Rory realized what she truly wanted: to help people reconnect with themselves when they’ve let some other force guide them off track. Students and scholars at all levels face huge pressure to succeed in a very specific way, and it’s easy to lose track of what you actually want from life, and what really motivates you.

She did eventually go back to school, and found that once you’re trying to get a PhD there are more “supposed to”s than ever. She dropped out of high school at 16, got a full merit scholarship to a private college at 18, graduated summa cum laude, and then got a job as a receptionist so she could hang out with her friends and just be 22 for a while. Rory has always tried to do what seemed right for her, not what she was “supposed” to do.

Peaceful dragon school ann arbor