My Personal Journey

By age thirteen, I had already lived through a great deal of trauma and devastation: the shock of finding my father after his suicide when I was three, incest at six, and the terror of an attempted rape and a death threat during a home invasion at twelve.

It was 1984, and almost no one understood PTSD or recognized its symptoms yet. I was simply labeled bi-polar and handed medication to numb what I was feeling. No one seemed to know to ask the most important question: 'what happened?'. Even heavily medicated, I carried a crushing lack of self-worth, rage, a heavy depression, and no real desire to keep participating in life. As a late teen, I lined up every bottle of medication I owned and swallowed every pill. Fate had other plans - a friend found me unconscious, and I woke up in a hospital, strapped to a bed with a tube down my throat. I still carry a tender memory from that near-death experience, a voice gently asking, "Are you sure you're ready to go?"

Apparently, I wasn't.

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The years that followed were still shadowed by deep lows and suicidal thoughts throughout much of my twenties. I engaged in many dis-empowered situations, and painfully dysfunctional relationships. In my late twenties, I contracted Lyme disease, a vicious illness many still consider incurable. For years I was disabled by arthritic pain, relentless headaches, brain fog, and bone-deep fatigue. Looking back, I won't pretend it was easy; initiations rarely are. But it became the very thing that gently, and sometimes not so gently, delivered me onto a path of self-inquiry, self-knowledge, and sexual healing. I had nowhere left to hide. I could either take a courageous, honest look at myself, or resign myself to a life of continual pain.

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So I chose the mirror.,

I committed to meeting myself and my past with real honesty, I explored a wide variety of healing modalities, sought support from generous teachers and guides - including master plants. Along the way, I came to understand that the Lyme symptoms were speaking to me, revealing an inner distress, trapped emotions, and a quiet reluctance to be here, in a body, at all. I began to understand that true balance wouldn't come from tending my physical body alone; my mental and emotional bodies required attention as well. I went deep into questioning the beliefs, the experiences, and early conditioning that had shaped me. There was a mountain of anger and grief to move through before I could make peace with my childhood, and only then could I learn what real acceptance and health felt like. It was a potent, often grueling journey, one that softened and opened the further I walked it.

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Now, from where I stand, I can say with a full heart that the Lyme was a blessing. Its symptoms were alarm bells, calling my attention back to old childhood wounds. The dis-ease within had handed me a choice: keep ignoring my repressed emotions and let my body carry them indefinitely, or meet the situation with courage and an open heart, the only road that led to real peace and self-acceptance.

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Through this process of re-integration, I did the deep inner work of learning to trust my intuition, express myself authentically, live in my body rather than flee it, and honor that tending to the body, mind, and spirit are essential to genuine healing. I can say, with full sincerity, that I'm grateful for every hardship I survived. Without them, I wouldn't be who I am today; they lit the fire that led me to study, embody, and now share the work I love.

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In choosing to live, to heal, to fully commit to the world of the living, I was given something few people ever receive: a lived understanding of what true healing feels like, and the compassion to walk beside others as they find it too. My work today is helping people uncover the healer already living inside them. What I offer my clients isn't secondhand theory, it's wisdom held in my own body, earned the hard way, through years of walking this path myself.

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