Hello + Welcome!
This work, this project called Collective Revolution Healing, is the culmination of my life’s work.
Short on Time but Want to Read a Little?
If you’d like to know more about my journey, I invite you to keep reading below.
I have been collecting tools, participating in classes, reading voraciously, and being whipped and sculpted like crazy by life, since my early teens.
In childhood, I made contact with the spirits of the land as I swang on my backyard swingset, asking for a gently nudge when I received the right message. I went to Sunday School and felt like a serious black sheep.
I was the friend in my early teen years who had the tarot cards and wanted to play with the Psychic Circle (anyone else remember this?). I tried Christianity on for size a few more times, but it left me certain that there had to be more. I remember frequent trips to actual bookstores(!) during these years, which would have me happily camped out in the New Age and Occult section.
I was the one, in between partying like my life depended on it in college, who was going to psychics, dabbling in astral travel, and got really lit up when I read “The Celestine Prophecy” for the first time.
Through the next few decades, I alternated healing sessions, workshops, and certifications, with weekends spent at the bar. I devoured books on consciousness, souls, witchcraft, and alternative healing. I went back and forth, back and forth. Taking my healing seriously when it was convenient for me.
Yoga, Reiki, and When I Found Out I Couldn’t Have Children
When I was in my first marriage, I was initiated into energy healing in the Reiki Lineage and continued studies, completing Levels I and II in person, and pursuing Master-Level studies online. I have since come to believe we all have the abilities to perform energy healing, and while tapping into a specific practice is helpful in the beginning, it is not necessary. Our grandmothers did not know what Reiki was, and they healed us just as well, if not more so, with their hands when they naturally tapped into that river of love that flows through us all.
In this time, I had an ectopic pregnancy and because of complications in the surgery, my dreams of carrying a child were shattered. The weight of this sat on me like a weighted blanket. For a really long time (It still hurts sometimes.)
When I was able to come up for air, a lot became clear and I realized my future was not with my partner. We amicably separated and then divorced, acknowledging that we could not give each other what we needed.
In the years that followed, I dove deeply into the mysteries of Yoga, and renewed spiritual studies with fresh energy, allowing the pain to serve as a catalyst for growth. I learned the principle of transmutation during this time. Composting fear and the freedom that comes with surrender.
Portland, Finding the Love and My Life, and My Initiation Into the Underworld
After following the urging of my soul, I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2014. The cloudy, rugged, romantic coastline called to me. The mossy carpet of the forests, the trees so tall you could barely see their tops, called to me. The sweet, soft fronds of western red cedar, beckoned. And I said yes.
I met my husband John in 2017 and was immediately and strongly drawn to him. He says the feeling was mutual. We dated for 3 years and then Cvid happened. We were used to a rhythm where he traveled a lot during the week for work and I had some time on my own. We got used to that and like pretty much everyone on earth, we were tested as we were all of a sudden crammed together in our tiny little house in Portland. I don’t need to paint any more of a picture here, I know you all understand. There was nowhere to go but the grocery store and a neighborhood walk for a long, long time.
We thrived. We grew closer in the time together and got engaged in August 2020. Then, in late 2020 and early 2021, John started to not feel good. His doctor thought it might be allergies. Then asthma. Then a suspicious x-ray turned into an emergency CT scan which turned into the beginning of our upside-down life.
He was diagnosed in April 2021 with Pleural Mesothelioma. A terminal kind of lung cancer caused by asbestos exposure. We were shocked and everything stood still. And our foundation was completely ripped out from under us at the same time. I found myself desperately, frantically calling every hospital with expertise in the rare cancer, every help line, every source of potential information, trying to find some hope, any hope, any glimmers of light I could find. There wasn’t much.
He began chemotherapy, then had a major (13-hour) lung resection surgery, 6 weeks of daily targeted radiation, followed by 9 months of mostly clear scans. We got married in Hawaii after the first 2 rounds of chemo. Then, in February 2022, while we in the early phases of John receiving “clear” scans, I slipped on ice and shattered my leg. Which led to two surgeries and 3 plates and over 20 screws and 3 months of being non-weight bearing. Our ability to enjoy this treatment-free time turned into John doing everything (and I mean everything) around the house, and assuming the role of my full-time caregiver. We were tossed from one giant storm right into the eye of another.
I had no choice but to let go… and surrender. I was mad, I was devastated, but what else to do? I started re-reading “Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender” by David Hawkins (good book btw)…and vowed to keep my eyes wide open.
I kept wondering, what lessons were here for me to discover? What truths were being shown? I was determined not to let this experience and this time pass by and not mine for the gold.
Well, then, in August 2022, just as I was regaining some mobility, the cancer came back. John started immunotherapy, which he tolerated really well, until he didn't. In late November 2022, the immunotherapy went wild and attacked his liver and lungs, which gave him hepatitis and pneumonitis. He was started on 100mg of steroids. If you have ever taken steroids for any inflammation, you know this is a VERY big dose.
Then, on December 25, 2022 my dad was admitted to the hospital in Michigan, On January 1, 2023, his soul left his body and dissolved back into the rivers of love that are around us all always. I was there with him in his last days and moments. It was a deeply sacred and holy thing to witness.
One month later, in February 2023, the cancer started growing again and John started back on chemotherapy. Treatment options dwindled further in the summer of 2023 when he developed a reaction to one of the two chemo drugs, so treatments since have been just one type of infusion. At the time I write this, he is deciding to take his first official break from treatment and skip December’s dose so he can fully enjoy Christmas.
I know this is A LOT. A lot more than you probably wanted to know.
But I offer all this background because I want you to know me, to know my story, and to know that I’ve got a lot to swim through every day. I want you to know that despite all of this, this heavy and pretty scary world I’m living in, I am still finding ways to practice daily gratitude, to see the beauty in all things, and take time to feed my spiritual life. I need it now more than ever.
I still take time to do ceremony, to learn new skills, to build community, to go on retreats when I can, and it’s my dream to help you do these things, too. I strongly believe that before I came into this life, I co-created it in concert with great spirit and I live every day knowing my purpose is being further refined with each dive into the depths.
I welcome you to join me in this affirmation.
If you skipped to this section, welcome!
Formal Trainings and Areas of Study
I completed formal social work education and received my Master’s of Social Work (MSW) from the University of Michigan in 2008, which greatly informs all of the work I do, every day. It sharpened my passion for activism and introduced me to so many heart-led humans, fearless in their big, unapologetic, gorgeous vulnerability.
I have also completed Reiki (energy healing) trainings through the Master level and a 200-Hour Yoga Teacher training program with Lotus Seed Yoga in Portland, Oregon. I have studied Shamanic and earth-based spiritual traditions, the Akashic Records, Tarot Cards and other divinatory practices. I have done extensive training in the development of intuitive practices and ritual development. I graduated from a three-year apprenticeship in Folk Herbalism at the School of the Sacred Wild in July 2024 with Marysia Miernowska, and have also completed training as an End-of-Life and Grief doula. Finally, I have completed training in levels 1-3 of Breathwork with Erin Telford and David Elliott.
Above all else, I have my earned and learned life experiences to draw from.
All of the above lends to my work as a ceremonialist, crafting ceremonies to celebrate and mark important events and times and transitions in life.
None of this means anything, however, without also committing myself to unlearning the ways of being that have been drilled into me (and most of us) as we have unknowingly stewarded the colonial capitalist patriarchy. I will continue to hold myself accountable to practicing right relation in every exchange with other human beings, as well as reciprocity with the earth and all of my relations.
In our 1:1 mentorship sessions, we will work together to develop goals, and will choose from the menu of options that I can provide.
Our sessions may include:
Counsel + Intuitive Guidance
1:1 Breathwork Ritual
Finding your Voice and Strengthening Self-Expression
Fear-Healing Rituals
Strengthening your Intuition
Energy Healing
Yoga (Focusing on Restorative postures + Yoga Nidra for deep relaxation)
Customized Herbal Support (Tea Blends, Tinctures, Elixirs, Oils)
Akashic Record Readings
Grief Expressions and Ritual
End of Life Planning
Ceremonial Design
And more…
You Have The Tools
Interested in finding out what mentorship might look like for you?
Finally, I’d like to take the opportunity name my teachers…
My parents for giving me life and being my original teachers
Life
Nature
God/Goddess/All that is
Social Work: Many splendid souls at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, MSW
Breathwork: Erin Telford + David Elliott
Herbalism: Marysia Miernowska, April Graham, Karen Rose, Rosemary Gladstar, and above all, the plants themselves
Earth-based Spirituality: Starhawk and so many others, but Sweet Medicine Nation has been my primary in-person teacher
Unlearning, Decolonizing, Antiracism: Dra. Rocío Rosales Meza, Resmaa Menakem, Monique Melton
End of Life Work: Pamela Stone, Stephen Jenkinson, my father
Akashic Records: Leah Garza
Yoga: 200-Hour YTT with Lotus Seed Yoga, completed in November 2019
Reiki: PJ Spur + Betty Segerdahl