My journey to inner work began when I was nineteen, when I embarked on a two-year period of weekly psychotherapy with a therapist who introduced me to Buddhism and often read poetry during our sessions. Through this experience I discovered how the language of poetry can open unexpected pathways for healing the soul.

Around the same time, I joined a monthly women’s sweat lodge led by a Lakota grandmother. Through those two years of ceremony I encountered the transformative power of ritual, grief work, song, and prayer, and witnessed the depth of healing that can arise in community.

I later served as the fire-keeper for the sweat lodge, a role I felt honored to hold in support of women’s healing work.

Several years later I experienced a prolonged medical crisis that brought me into an extended period of profound suffering for many years.

When conventional medicine offered little relief, I was drawn into a deeper commitment to my own healing work that ultimately reshaped the course of my life.

Over time I came to understand this period as a profound initiatory passage, my medical crisis opened a deeper calling to the sacred work of accompanying others on their own path of healing.

In many indigenous cultures, such experiences are recognized as a form of “shamanic illness”—a necessary threshold each person must take when they are called by the ancestors into the role of becoming a shaman.

I came to see that my own suffering was a summons from my ancestors— an initiation into the lineage of becoming a healer.

During that long stretch of illness, meditation became an anchor for me. I immersed myself in the Buddhist Vipassana tradition, a path rooted in mindfulness and deep inner seeing.

I also studied yoga philosophy and asana practice (yoga poses), which helped me return to my body and cultivate a deeper sense of trust in life.

Dance became another important practice, allowing movement to express what lives beneath language.

I also began engaging in years of dedicated personal healing work through Internal Family Systems, art therapy, somatic therapy, parts work, bodywork, dream work, as well as psychedelic and ancestral healing work.

I worked extensively with my protector parts and inner “exiles”—the wounded children and adolescents, frozen in time by overwhelming experiences, carrying unprocessed fear and sorrow in the depths of my body and psyche.

In this process I gradually met and tended the places within me shaped by fear and unprocessed pain, attachment wounds, betrayal and narcissistic abuse, chronic anxiety and insomnia, nervous system dysregulation, fear around being seen, and long-standing patterns of self-protection.

Over time these patterns softened, giving way to greater self-compassion, confidence, creativity, coherence, and trust in the unfolding of my life and the greater forces of the universe.

Alongside these forms of healing, I entered more deeply into soul work— the work to discover who I am at my true core— that would become central to my path.

I began embarking on regular 4-night solo wilderness vigils— often called vision quests— in the desert canyons of southern Utah, a ritual I have continued twice a year for the past seven years.

Time alone in the wilderness without distraction, has helped me connect to who I am at a core level as well as deepened my relationship to the earth and the wider cosmos.

I also devoted myself to creative practice, especially writing and self-portrait photography, using image and words to enter my inner world and follow the archetypal and symbolic currents shaping my life.

Self-portrait photography has been a profound avenue to document my evolving relationship between my inner world, the living earth, and the unseen world.

These experiences have been instrumental for nourishing my creative life and have helped me understand what my unique gifts are to offer the world.

My own healing journey has offered me a more expansive life,
where everything feels more in flow, where I feel in-sync with the whole universe, and life often feels imbued with meaning and magic.

All of these experiences shape the way I hold space for others. My work is grounded in lived experience, a long-standing dedication to healing, and a deep respect for the intelligence of the body, psyche, and the living earth.