Baltimore native Leah Kalish is perhaps best known for her performance in the 1988 movie 'Bloodsport.' Today she helps people change long-held family dynamics. Photo courtesy of Leah Kalish

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Baltimore native Leah Kalish has worn many hats during her career — dancer, actor, yoga instructor, preschool teacher, and now a therapy facilitator.

Kalish, who was known as Leah Ayres during her acting career, is most famous for her roles in films like martial arts drama Bloodsport (1988) and horror film The Burning (1981).

But Kalish, 68, has always had dreams beyond the big screen. A lifelong dancer who was at the top of her class at Roland Park Country School, Kalish pivoted from dancing to acting after college, and eventually retired from acting to pursue a master’s degree in human development.

“I realized, oh, I need to start now putting my energy into something that I want to build and that contributes to the future that I want to see in the world,” Kalish said.

Now, Kalish and her husband, Bruce Kalish, work as therapeutic facilitators who focus on “family constellations,” helping people to understand how inherited trauma, or intergenerational trauma that is passed from parent to child, impacts the way they navigate the world.

Through all the different stages of her career, Kalish said she’s always aspired to connect with her body, helping herself and others in “integrating mental, emotional, spiritual well-being.”

Charm City origins

Though Kalish now lives in Los Angeles, she was born in Cockeysville and moved to Roland Park with her family when she was five years old.

Her paternal grandfather, Howard Simpson, was the last president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company. Some of Kalish’s earliest memories are of visiting her grandfather at work.

“His office was a train car. I mean, it was so fun to visit him,” Kalish remembered. “We took trains everywhere.”

Baltimore is also where Kalish developed her love of dancing. She started taking ballet classes from Ellen Price Eckhardt, a longtime dance teacher who initially ran her dance school at the Church of the Nativity and Holy Comforter in Cedarcroft.

In high school at Roland Park Country School, Kalish said she led an effort to establish the school’s first-ever modern dance show.

Kalish graduated from high school in three years and attended Tufts University, then transferred to New York University.

While she said the city has changed a lot since her childhood, Kalish’s Baltimore roots have always stuck with her. Her mother still lives in Roland Park, and she returns every so often to visit family.

“I love going back to Baltimore,” Kalish said. “I ship lots of pounds of Rheb’s chocolate to L.A. every Christmas, because all my friends here can’t wait to get their Baltimore Rheb’s chocolate.”

Accidental actor

After college, Kalish stumbled into acting somewhat by accident, looking for a way to make extra money while pursuing a career in modern dance.

“I just went to this agency and I did an audition, and to me, it was like, no big deal,” she said. “I didn’t grow up watching TV — we loved movies. But I got really into acting, that came after the dancing, and it was a way to make money. I loved it.”

Kalish went on to have a successful career in TV and film for more than 20 years. In total, she appeared in seven films and more than 30 TV shows and episodes.

But after two decades in the industry, Kalish said she felt like she “needed to evolve” and pursue something more tailored to her passions.

Around the time she started graduate school, Kalish began practicing yoga and was instantly hooked. It seemed to fit with her dance background.

“I’ve never not been in my body,” Kalish said. “[When] I took my first yoga class, I felt like, oh my goodness, this is what my body’s been looking for my whole life.”

Helping kids move

Combining her graduate school studies on human development with her passion for yoga, Kalish said she realized that yoga is “the best playground you can invite kids to, developmentally,” and started looking for ways to “integrate yoga structures and yoga principles into education.”

For many years, she was involved in the yoga education movement, designing yoga and mindfulness-based curricula for use in schools.

As the co-founder and program director of curriculum design company Yoga Ed and the CEO and owner of Move With Me Yoga Adventures, Kalish wrote the first approved curricula for physical education and classroom wellness, which are still being used today in schools in Los Angeles.

All the while, she continued working as a yoga teacher in Los Angeles, made yoga instruction videos for the exercise brand Gaiam, and co-wrote the Yoga Pretzels and Yoga Planet card decks published by Barefoot Books — sets of cards that teach kids yoga poses.

“You want to be supporting kids in developing their own imagination,” Kalish said. “So instead of watching something, listening to something, how do you help them do that?”

Healing inherited trauma

Today, Kalish focuses more on therapeutic work for adults. In 2006, she and her husband were introduced to a type of therapy called family constellations, an approach that helps clients understand their inherited trauma and family relationships.

What is inherited, or intergenerational, trauma? Put simply, if a parent experienced something like war, abuse or other trauma, they may have become emotionally detached or anxious, which in turn could affect their children’s mental and emotional development.

But there’s a physical component as well: Stress can turn genes off or on in parents, who pass those markers down to their children.

“Inherited trauma refers to the dynamic that is seen again and again in families. That trauma has a huge emotional impact on people, on a family, and often the impact of that isn’t really completely digested or integrated,” Kalish explained.

In the face of a traumatic situation, humans fight, take flight or freeze — that is, they can be aggressive, flee the scene or silently remain in place.

“A trauma response is one where you have to freeze and fragment what would be overwhelming in order to live through it,” Kalish said.

She and her husband trained under Mark Wolynn, a therapist who specializes in inherited trauma. They help clients focus on how they’re physically and mentally carrying inherited trauma, and encourage them to express and work through those traumas.

Learning about family constellations has helped Kalish’s own family relationships flourish, she said. She also recently found out that she’s going to become a grandmother for the first time next May.

Kalish’s current therapy work might seem like a major shift. But the former actress sees a clear connection between all of her pursuits, and how they’ve come together to help her encourage well-being in herself and others.

“When I look back now, I see how as a dancer I got to really root myself in my body and develop really important skills. Then I’m in acting, and I’m mastering the emotional part of that,” Kalish said.

“The work that I do now seems like the next evolution I took to really hold space for people to see a bigger picture and support them in seeing themselves more clearly.”