In early 2016 I hit a breaking point. I simply knew that I couldn’t live the way I had been anymore. If that was what my life was to be, I didn’t want to continue.

My body was wracked with signs of chronic stress. My digestive system was a mess and it was hard to find foods I could eat without being in pain. My nervous system was in perpetual panic mode. Worst of all, I had chronic insomnia. I would go for multiple days without even an hour of sleep. Despite implementing what seemed like every possible recommendation for improved sleep and taking every natural sleep supplement available, nothing seemed to work.

On the outside my life seemed great. I had a successful business, wonderful husband, beautiful boys and lived in a peaceful mountain town.

On the inside however, I was imploding. My husband and I owned our business jointly and I served as CEO, responsible for overseeing client relations, online strategies, managing our team and overseeing finances. I had two young boys and struggled to keep up with what seemed like impossible expectations to be a good mother, wife, homemaker, chef all while working 50+ hours a week for the business. I was exhausted, to put it mildly.

Everything started to unravel when my husband suggested I take an MBSR (Mindfulness-based stress relief) class to manage the stress. When the instructor would ask us to tune in to our heart and see how we were, I would burst into tears. The reality was, I was miserable. The class helped me see it and recognize that I desperately needed to shift something in my life.

In essence, it was a crisis of the soul. Old wounds I had brushed aside were festering inside me after being ignored for many years. My spiritual connection that had been so strong throughout my younger years had all but vanished when my boys were born and life got busy.

I had left behind my chosen career of international public health when I met my husband, who didn’t want to spend his life moving from one post in Africa or Latin America to another every three years. I had stepped away from my Brazilian spiritual practice because I didn’t have the bandwidth to coordinate and lead another group, nor was it feasible for me to travel regularly to Brazil with two young children.

Hitting Bottom

So there I was. Lost. Disconnected from source and purpose. Unable to find a sense of calm in the storm. Unable to rest. Unable to sleep, night after night alone with my increasingly negative thoughts. The only thing that kept me in the world was my love for my boys and concern about what would become of them if I was no longer there. I felt utterly trapped.

My desperation got so extreme that one night I almost ended it all. My husband finally realized the gravity of the situation and agreed to sell our business and step into the unknown.

With that opening, I started to see a light at the end of the dark tunnel. I worked with a business broker to get the business on the market and we sold it within five months. We paid down our debts, took a year off, and everything shifted. I vowed to recover my health and find meaning in my life once more.

Returning to Health

Somehow returning to health and learning to sleep again was much harder than I expected. My hormones were severely out of balance and I was told I had stage three adrenal fatigue. No matter how much I meditated I couldn’t calm my mind and nervous system for more than a short time.

I began to return to nature, spending mornings or afternoons in the forest simply observing the forest life. I laid on the ground for hours at a time, looking up at the sky. Nature began to slowly nurture me back to health again. I started to find a sense of the sacred once more, hidden in the wonders of the forest. Along the way I found help from a naturopath/nutritionist, acupuncturist and had a few sessions with a shaman. I began to find my true self once again.

At the same time, old emotions and painful experiences that had been dormant for years started bubbling up to the surface, forcing me to examine them. I delved into my past, exploring what needed to be witnessed and understood and forgiven…

A year into my recovery sleep and digestion had improved somewhat. My depression had lifted completely and a hunger for life and meaning stirred again in my belly.

Transformation

Then I stumbled across the Four Winds Society, which offered an intensive hands-on six-month training to become an energy medicine practitioner or modern “shaman”. Here I could learn some of the healing techniques and philosophy that I had witnessed traditional healers do during my travels around the world. I enrolled and my transformation began.

As I learned various techniques for healing emotional imprints and past traumas, removing dense energies and retrieving lost soul parts, I practiced on my classmates and they practiced on me. Layer upon layer began to peel away as I shed the parts of my past that weighed me down. I began to understand the roots of certain patterns and fears.

I saw that I had spent the last 30 years of my life busily overcommitting to my work, community and friends as a coping mechanism – taking on much too much and thereby tying myself to a life of stress – to escape a pit of sadness that opened up around feelings of abandonment after my parents’ divorce when I was 13. The dark pit only widened as life went on, stretched and expanded by life’s disappointments. I had spent my life trying to outrun the shadow of darkness because I didn’t have the time, courage or the tools to turn and face it. Now I did.

I looked into the pit, little by little, extracting pieces and events that needed to be seen and felt. Each uncovered layer held some sort of nugget of wisdom. I realized that every challenge I had faced might now help me help others, having carved out a well of compassion along with the pain: The sexual abuse and bullying I experienced as a child, the loss of a sense of home and security that comes with parents’ divorce, the breakdown from excessive people-pleasing and overwork, all brought valuable lessons. I had also learned what it means to be in a relationship with an abusive partner (my first husband with whom I shared a short marriage in my 20’s), who gradually eats away at your self-esteem and sense of reality until you can be easily manipulated. He also initiated me into the pain of intimate betrayal.

My transformation came through releasing the emotional imprints, feeling and letting go of the wounds, and then finding wisdom from the experience. I understand now that each challenge we encounter in our lives has a greater purpose, expanding and polishing us for what is to come.

I continue my own journey of healing and self-discovery (a lifelong path), but my heart feels at peace knowing that what I’ve experienced might now help others release anxiety, heal old wounds, emerge from depression, or find sleep again. I can help point the way to a path of deeper purpose and meaning in life, following some of the guideposts and techniques that helped me.

Connections with Spirit

As a child I could see spirits and remember past lives as if they were almost as real as the present life- and sometimes more so. I felt as if I was still the young woman from my previous life, somehow stuffed into a new body I didn’t remotely recognize. It seemed to me that something had gone wrong, and the curtain that should have closed on my previous life to shut out those memories never did.

This created a lot of confusion in my young self about who I was and how to relate to a strange new world that didn’t recognize any of what I was experiencing. The first time I began to feel understood was at the age of 20, when I went to study at the University of Dakar in Senegal for a year. There, much of what I perceived of the Spirit realms was validated by friends and members of my host family, who found it quite normal that the ancestors needed tending to and could offer guidance, or that some spirits just hung around after death for various reasons.

A few years after returning from Senegal, I discovered the Brazilian tradition of Umbanda and began training as a medium to receive and channel various spirit guides of light. They were brilliantly wise and expressed much of their guidance through metaphors of nature. The weekly rituals to receive the guides in community were the highlight of my life for a decade. The tradition also revealed a vast philosophy around cycles of nature and the four elements, that helped me make sense of my life and the world around me.

After I became a mother and returned to the US, these connections slowly dimmed. Life’s busy-ness didn’t allow time for spirituality, and I found myself without a supportive spiritual community. This contributed to a strong sense of loss and isolation, and I began to lose trust in my intuitive senses. I believe that also contributed to my personal crisis in 2016.

Fortunately the clairvoyance and connection with Spirit that I had as a child and young adult has returned, and I can now use it productively to help others through energy medicine and other services. I have found more peace living with a foot in this physical world and a foot in the world of Spirit, and the sense of dissonance from my childhood has quieted. I strongly believe that everyone can benefit from an expanded worldview that embraces the unseen worlds of energy and Spirit.

Vision

I want to share and manifest a vision of a community of people united in our connection to nature, the cycles of the moon, the sun and the earth, and our support for one another as we journey through life.

I seek to create natural, nourishing spaces where we can come together to deepen our understanding of life by sharing our reflections and insights. Each of our paths is rich and meaningful – and we each have so much to share with others. We can uplift one another, learn from each other, and create supportive networks to hold those in need.

If you share this vision, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly. I love to collaborate with like-minded people. You are also warmly welcome at any of our upcoming events.

Wherever you find yourself along your own path of healing, I wish you well. Life presents us with a continual stream of challenges, intended for our evolution and expansion. May you always hold yourself in compassion and grace, no matter what you are experiencing. And remember that you are never truly alone. Help is always available.