My Personal Journey
Create a Positive Shift
My life started to drastically change in 2019. I had been living a devoutly religious life through the main sect of Mormonism. I had been raised in the church from infancy until age 33. I had checked all the boxes until this point, in order to make it into the Celestial Kingdom where Heavenly Father lives, after I die. I got baptized as a child, attended all meetings every Sunday, I served a Mormon mission of 18 months at the headquarters of the church where I was a tour guide preaching the word of God and then I got married in the Mecca of Mormon temples where I served my mission in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Then my dad died. I was devastated. I started to have all kinds of emotions, thoughts and questions. Prior to this, I had gone to see a psychic, a want I’ve always secretly had, but never allowed myself because it is considered “evil”. In this reading, the Psycic told me I was clairvoyant, among other abilities. I actually laughed out loud and wrote the experience off, completely. A few months later, when my dad passed, I started to hear his voice outside of my body, I started to feel his presence and his direction in a way I had never experienced anything before. It scared me, so I reached back out to the psycic for help. I went on a long journey and apprenticeship with her as she helped me navigate my newly found spiritual gifts over the course of 2020.
My 8 year marriage had been slowly crumbling, unbeknownst to me until 2020. I had become more sensitive to the spiritual world and information about my husband and our marriage started to surface. I discovered he had been cheating on me, laundering money and evading taxes. This was just the tip of the ice burg. It sent me on a downward spiral and we started going to a therapist. We had several sessions with this therapist until one day she pulled me aside and informed me that she had diagnosed my husband as a clinical narcissist. “Narc-is-ist…” I repeated back to her. “Whats that?” I had heard the word, but I had no idea it was a real personality disorder that could not be fixed and that I would have to make a choice: to stay with him and know he would never change or to leave him and find a new life. After countless hours of research, I realized I had been abused emotionally, mentally and sexually. For 9 years. I could finally put words like “love-bombing” “gaslighting” “narcissistic supply” and “hoovering” on all the innermost feelings I’d felt while in his presence. I could never pin point why I had felt the way I did until this moment. It was simultaneously liberating and devastating. I knew what I had to do. I chose me. For the first time in my whole life. I chose ME. And it was uncomfortable.
I had never felt pain like this before. Knowing the path ahead of me, changing my whole life, I felt sick. Paralyzed. I woke up with a panic attack every morning during this 3 month process. My hair started falling out in clumps. I rapidly lost weight. I barely ate anything.
I got a lawyer. I filed for divorce and we separated. During this time, I felt like I had experienced yet another death, one right after another. I was so distraught, so broken that I sought out alternative means of healing. I had been working with my Emotional release Coach and therapist for 5 years before this. Which I believed helped me to get to a point where I loved myself enough to fight for myself, instead of allowing this behavior and abuse to continue. I believe there are modalities, other than traditional therapy, that are imperative to healing BIG wounds and BIG traumas. I elicited the help of my therapist friend who had been telling me about “plant medicine” for a while. She had told me about her family using psychedelics to go deep within their psyche and pull out past, unresolved issues, each having a different experience according to their personal needs. A tailored, spiritual encapsulation of your life.
On the plane ride over to California where my friend and her family lived, I made a secret pact with myself that if this didn’t work, my alliterative was death. I couldn’t live within my body knowing this person had used me so cruelly. I felt worthless. The first time in my life I considered and understood suicide, a very foreign concept to me at the time.
Little did I know, I WOULD be dying that day. I experienced the death of my old life and I was re-born, crying, screaming, flailing, just like a new born. Pandora’s box had opened and I couldn’t go back. During the first part of my journey, I saw my life flash before my eyes. Starting from the most current to my childhood. I was reminded of my feelings during my courtship with my husband. How I cringed when he touched me. How I found him unattractive. How I wanted to RUN when facing him at the alter in the Mormon temple on our wedding day. How trapped I felt, forced to marry him. And how I ignored ALL of these signals my body was giving me. How I ALLOWED his behavior and abuse. This all made perfect sense in the 2nd section of my journey. I was brought back to my life as a Mormon, growing up in the ideals and commands of the church. I saw that the Mormon church represented the “narcissist” I had found in my husband and how I represented the “empath” and the “follower” that creates a toxic, unhealthy, but working machine. The leaders (who are only men) of the church control, manipulate and abuse their followers through fear. No wonder I had allowed the same behavior in my marriage. I literally didn’t know any different. The last stage of my journey is harder to explain. Needless to say, it involved sexual abuse in my childhood that I had missing pieces of that corroborated it and helped it pieces come together. I had disassociated from this experience that my mind had been shielding me from to protect me.
Right after this experience, I was taken in by my friend’s family. I lived with them. They took care of me. We did more plant journeys together. Here I experienced natural forms of MDMA, LSD, and Psylicybin in a spiritual and setting. All of my journeys were hard and healing in their own way. After a few months of living with them, I felt it was time to go on a self exploration journey. I had gone to Mexico several times with my husband, but this time I was going by myself. To find a new me. I cried at the airport. For the first time in my life, I was alone. I was raised in a family of 7 people. I went from my nuclear family to a Mormon university where I had 8 roommates, to my Mormon mission where you are literally not allowed to be alone, (unless you are in the bathroom) to my marriage, which I was taught from infancy would be the only way to live with God and my family and my “eternal companion.”
I had no idea HOW to be alone.
I spent 2 months in Tulum, Mexico. I had never been out of my state by myself, let alone another country. I cried everyday. I felt so confused and lost. I put myself in compromising situations where, not once but twice, I almost got raped. I sought out a shaman in the area. I found a beautiful ashram on a few acres of land situated right on a cenote. Here I met beautiful mama Sophie and Abuelo Antonio. I lived with them, I slept in a hammock in a bungalow. Here I experienced Ayahuasca, Buffo (toad) and finally my beloved Kambo. When I experienced Kambo for the first time, I was enthralled! I felt like I was feeling duality for the first time. Exquisite pain. Exquisite joy. I was simultaneously living two, juxtaposed realities. And I LOVED it. It felt so liberating. I had to know more. I spent a month learning, experiencing, and appreciating this beautiful, sacred medicine.
It was there that Kambo opened my eyes and helped me see that “you can’t heal in the same environment you got sick” and I knew I had to move from Utah where my marriage and my religion were. I had always wanted to live an East Coast life, so I moved across the country to Boston, Massachusetts, all by myself with a few sentimental belongings. I didn’t know a SOUL. I completely started over and learned that I had hit a glass ceiling in my previous life and there was so much more to be explored, but my boat was only big enough for me. I kept finding myself in more toxic, unhealthy relationships with men and realized that there was something I needed to heal within myself that kept me in this cycle. I made a new vow to myself that I would never allow this kind of energy in my life, even if it meant being alone for the rest of my life.I realized that I would rather be in my own energy than force myself to be around people and places and things that weren’t serving me and making me sick.
My divorce took 4 years. 9 different, hellacious court hearings. $70,000 in lawyer fees. It definitely proved to me that my decision to leave this man was the right one. The way he slandered me, maliciously withheld from me, and wielded control over me led me into an extreme depression. I felt trapped and it was very hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This landed me in the mental hospital. I had become a danger to myself and I did what I knew I had to do and checked myself in. My experience in the ER was very disturbing. After 3 days of sitting in a chair I was not allowed to leave. I was placed in a dark room with patients who were screaming and crying hysterically and given minimal mystery food, I was placed in an ambulance and carted off to a mental health facility where my roommate was a homeless man. My 2 weeks here were something out of a horror movie. I had truly hit rock bottom. I realized that the systems is corrupt and it’s ultimately a business and businesses need money. They want to keep you sick. As I was navigating a way to escape the new hell I found myself in, I received a random phone call from my brother, which rarely happened. I knew there was something wrong. He told me that my mother, (who had years previously endured a 3 month coma and woke up with brain damage and was then handicapped) was dying and that I needed to come be with her in her last days. I had been estranged from my mother and family. Leaving the church, getting divorced and partaking in psychedelics is very frowned upon and resulted in sort of shunning. I was told that I was a sinner, I needed to repent and that I had joined a cult. This was so painful that I stopped talking to my mother, altogether. And now here she was. Dying. Asking me to come be with her.
Miraculously, the facility discharged me and I went back to Utah. I spent a few days with my siblings, but ultimately they left me alone with my now comatose mother who was endlessly suffering. I had just escaped the mental hospital and they left me alone to witnessed my mother’s horrific death. All by myself.
I was beginning to see a theme in my life. I started to accept and embrace this theme of being alone, instead of fighting it. I faced my biggest fear and I decided to do some solo traveling. It was terrifying at first, then it became my air. I went everywhere. All over the states. Then on to Turkey. Thailand. Indonesia. India. My divorce finally went through and I could breathe again. It was like a magic spell had been lifted. I realized that life is short. My parents had both died in their early 60s. I could die any day. Why not transmute my pain? Use it to help others? Why not use my training to create something special?
After all was said and done, I was no longer in an unhealthy, abusive marriage, I was no longer under the thumb of a suffocating and controlling religion. I could finally make my own decisions. I could do whatever I wanted to. I realized that I had never been more happy in my entire life! I attribute a great deal of this to the plant and animal medicine that stepped in and saved me from a lifetime of submission, torment and toxicity. It CHANGED me. Forever.
There was something missing for me, however. Taking this journey was imperative, but I wished for a conduit, a vessel for my experience to transmute itself. All of these emotions, feelings, and realizations would come up beautifully, but with nowhere to go. They would just be buzzing around in the ethers of my mind and I had no idea how to box them up or what to do with them.
Enter the Integrative Processing Technique. I had been going to school at the Institute for Healing Arts during my divorce. I had been going to my own Emotional Release Coach for 6 years prior. I just wanted to learn about what she was doing for me and it was “something to do” at the time. Little did I know that it was going to pair gorgeously with Kambo and psilocybin. It was the perfect way to integrate everything that comes up in a session, all while receiving reiki which helps move the energy through. I knew that spirit had been leading me to this new modality all along. This process not only helps to put your medicine experience in a safe container, but it wraps it up with a bow.
And thats what I’ve been doing ever since! I LOVE LOVE LOVE what I do because I get to meet incredible, amazing souls like yourself. It helps me realize my pain was for a purpose.. It makes me feel like, actually, I’M NOT ALONE. I was just looking for my tribe, my REAL people. And here you are, landed on my website! I believe we truly are just “walking each other home” in this life, but its important to pick the right people do do it with. Your energy is the most precious thing you have and you should protect it fiercely. Never trust a skinny cook, or in this situation, an inexperienced therapist.
If you know anything about plant or animal medicine, you know it can be an intense experience, however, I promise you that it will be worth it. In all of my journeys of the mind, body and soul, I’ve had very few moments where someone was there to hold space for what I was going through. There were so many other people that the shaman had to administer to, that I felt overlooked and under loved. I will be there to help you unpack, process and integrate your journey, every step of the way.
I am a space holder. I am a soul see-er. I have been where you are and I will walk with you. I do not tell you what to do or how to do it. I will facilitate your experience and you will find your own answers that are already within you. I set a container in which you can truly be vulnerable. I make it my job to make sure you feel safe, protected and comfortable. I love you. I haven’t even met you, but I love you! I am truly honored you would trust me with your heart, mind and soul. I hold it sacred.
Emotions are my jam! Please email me any questions or concerns you may have. I’m so happy to answer them!