Self-Driven, Community-Based Healing
Our bodies, minds, and hearts know how to heal themselves, given the right container. We just have to give them the space to remember.
Remembering requires feeling safe and supported—something we can learn to cultivate within ourselves and our communities.
My goal is to facilitate the rememberings: fostering spaces, places, and connections where we help each other through the crossings. To do this, I draw from:
- Jungian, archetypal, and depth psychology and philosophy
- Mystic, contemplative, and esoteric traditions
- Cosmological cartography: Navigating our lives using charts and cards as wayfinding systems
- Internal Family Systems, trained through Ralph de la Rosa’s School of Grounded Transformation
- Compassionate Inquiry and the trauma work of Gabor Maté
- Direct experience through peer-, self-, and community-guided and -supported medicine journeying
- Sound healing, somatic movement, and ecstatic dance
About Me
My journey has been anything but “typical.” If you’re here, maybe yours has been, too.
I want to help remind people of what our brains may have forgotten, but our bones and souls remember:
Your body, mind, and heart know how to heal themselves.
It starts with reconnection to self, each other, the natural world, and the divine.
Intuitive, ancestral, Indigenous, somatic ways of knowing, doing, and being—grounded in the cycles of nature and ecological principles—help us remember.
Our pain can not only be reframed, it is an essential part of our healing.
Those labeled disordered, weird, or queer would be shamxn, healers, and teachers in a different cultural context. The disorder is our world.
I believe what most ancient cosmologies teach: that life is interwoven, symbiotic, and mycelial. Consciousness is relational. Healing is systemic. Love is the fabric of an emergent universe that needs each of us, exactly as we are.
Initiation as Path
Ancestral traditions involve initiations: trials involving pain and hardship, often with existential odds. These help people find their inner strength, higher purpose, and role in the community and cosmos, returning changed. We have lost touch with these rituals and practices in the urban Anglosphere, leaving a deep void and collective yearning.
If you’re lucky, the initiation finds you anyway. I am blessed to have experienced multiple. The first came when I left an abusive marriage and came out as queer, trans, and relationship-anarchist, repressed for a lifetime due to the Evangelical Christian church I was raised in. I found community and meaning in unexpected places—first through writing about food systems, farm-to-table culture, and craft beer as an award-winning journalist, and then through a deeper awakening to grief, myth, consciousness, and ceremony.
The second came in 2022, when I attended a queer-led ayahuasca and Compassionate Inquiry retreat at the Temple of the Way of Light in Peru. It was a before-and-after moment. Working with the Shipibo medicine system, I experienced not just spiritual breakthrough but physical, somatic healing. The plants brought me back into relationship with the Earth, soul, and life itself. And I continued to find practices that brought me back into relationship with body, spirit, and soul: energetic medicine, somatic healing, ritual, journaling, ancestral dreaming, plant work, and deep inquiry.
The third came through rupture: breaking my pelvis and sacrum in five places. I healed without institutional support, leaning on community, intuitive practice, and natural medicine. I still live with disability and chronic pain. Yet I am grateful for everything that has happened. Not always right away, and it takes work. But I have moved from the depths of suicidal despair to a deep love for life and embodied belonging that I hope to help others discover for themselves.
Re-Enchantment and Remembrance
I no longer just function—I’ve fallen in love with the universe.
I no longer just don’t want to die—I lust for life.
What I once sought in religion, I found through direct experience with the divine, encountered in all things. My world has been re-ensouled.
I have grown the most through what I’ve learned from the Maya and Shipibo lineages as well as archetypal frameworks, all of which have shaped my ceremonial practice and cosmological understanding in ways I continue to integrate daily. I’ve sat in ceremony with Shipibo healers, received training in Maya timekeeping from a recognized lineage holder, and learned from leaders on topics like archetypal astrology and depth psychology. These traditions transformed not just my spirituality, but my physiology, my relationships, and my way of seeing the world. I approach them with humility, respect, and a commitment to sacred reciprocity.
Current Work & Ongoing Study
Today, I study Indigenous healing traditions and archetypal frameworks through a PhD at the Transart Institute for Creative Research. My work centers on the ways we connect, heal, and transform through altered states—especially for those moving through major life transitions, including queer, trans, and neurodivergent people, and those leaving repressive religious or relational structures.
But my practice is not academic in the traditional sense. It’s not a method or a model. It’s a remembering. A listening. A living relationship with grief, beauty, and the sacred.
Be it art or the helping professions, my goal is to help others return to the sacred—in their bodies, community, ceremony, and the time outside of time. To remember who we are, where we’ve been, and our true purpose.To hold space for the initiatory pain we’re taught to fear—and help transform it into path, portal, and power.
Let’s fall in love again.