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.
Life as Ceremony
Today, I study ancestral healing traditions and archetypal frameworks through my practice-based doctoral work with the Transart Institute for Creative Research. For me, life, art, practice, and research all are one, and all are ceremony, unfolding across realms both apparent and unseen. I explore the ways we connect, heal, and transform through ritual practices that invoke the divine through altered states. I focus especially on how these intersect and invoke major life transitions, including queer, trans, and consciousness emergence; death and illness or injury; psychedelic experience; artistic connection; therapeutic parts work; and spiritual awakening.
My practice is not academic in the traditional sense. It’s not a method or a model, though it employs many. It’s a remembering. A listening. A living relationship with grief, beauty, and the sacred.
My goal is to help others re-ensoul their worlds; to remember who we are, where we’ve been, and our true purpose; to hold space for the transitions we’re taught to fear; and to help transform our wanderings into path, portal, and power—alone together.