I was called to be a writer and a healer not because I thought I might like it, but because my path has demanded that I draw on both to make sense of my life.

I’ve been a writer since I could hold a pen, but I learned to use it as a tool for healing after I was diagnosed with scoliosis in a routine check-up at age 10. I was sent to a specialist who drew lines on the x-ray image of my spine to show me where it was wrong, but failed to make eye contact with me. For years, he tracked the angle of my spine, but never asked me about my fears, dreams, passions, and emotional experience of having my insides photographed by a stranger twice a year.

His silence – and my parents’ – led me to skepticism about the depth that Western medicine could go to offer healing. And that led me to my journal. Here I tracked my anger, my grief, my wish to be “normal.” Here I felt all the feelings no one in my life believed I should. I wrote stories and bad poems. I wrote fantasy scenes where I had a perfect body. I wrote love letters to my crushes that I never sent. What I couldn’t tell anyone else, I told those pages.

The year I started my period, the doctor gave me a back brace. It was more than a back brace – it was a two-inch thick corset made of plastic, aluminum, and velcro. I was expected to wear it dutifully beneath my clothing at an age when we feel the worst about our bodies.

I told only my close friends. I learned to avoid hugs and physical touch with anyone but them. I kept a steady pen on paper, hiding my journals in the places I hid my back brace when I realized I had the choice to take it off.

Spending my teenage years scribbling away in little notebooks gave me something few other adolescents had – self-awareness. Journaling is a map to oneself, and I used it to find the gold of my deep sensitivity (another word for intuition) and my passions.

This self-awareness didn’t prevent bad things from happening – in fact, my teenage years were marked by repeated sexual trauma that turned me into an activist for women’s sovereignty and shaped my desire to see people heal their relationship with sexuality. But my self-awareness also gave me something else – a dream of a life outside of the norm and the courage to act upon my desires.

One of these desires was to go to New York City and become the writer I’d always known myself to be. My ship was heading that direction, but after a storm hit it, I found myself at age 22 marooned in the desert mountains of Boulder, Colorado.

The cheeriness of Boulder depressed me. I was a city person in a hippie town. An intellectual wearing black in a land full of “Life is Good” t-shirts. I lived in total resistance to the unshaven legs, the dirty feet, the white guilt. Until Tamara Wells, my first spiritual teacher, taught me how to find flow in the conflict.

Tamara was an intuitive healer and a witch. She was a little crazy, but that was part of her appeal. She taught me the first tools I learned to tap into my intuition and sat me in front of strangers, telling me I could read their energy. When these strangers began to tell me I had acknowledged parts of their nature they had never told anyone, I began to believe it myself.

I studied intuitive healing for three years, both with Tamara and in a more formal program. It was my first spiritual awakening, one that blew apart my life and inspired me to listen to the wisdom within me above anyone else. I began seeing clients regularly, supporting them to find answers, both from my intuitive insight and guiding them to uncover their own.

I knew then that healing was the work I was meant to do.

I began to write constantly. It gave me inspiration and motivation. Yet it wasn’t enough to make sense of all the senselessness around me.

I was living in the most stressful city in North America, grinding away at an intangible job, and trying to love a partner who was suffocating me. My back – that old twisted spine – began to scream with pain, and I often struggled to take a deep breath. In an exposed-brick Brooklyn yoga studio, I found spaciousness. I found my breath. I found a connection to my body. I found strength, in all meanings of that word.

Yoga saved me then, giving me the tools to cope. It saved me again when my mother got cancer, and a year later when she died. It saved me another time when I received an infertility diagnosis and was told I’d never conceive naturally. And it saved me again when I realized I needed to leave my then-wife and all our friends because I had forgotten who I was.

And when I had finished blowing my old life to pieces, yoga put me back together. It led me to a new partner, a new long-term spiritual teacher (Santi Devi), a new baby (conceived naturally), a new course of study of herbal medicine and natural healing, and a new job ghostwriting for a world-renowned teacher of Ayurveda and yoga.

I moved to Kaua’i to learn from and work for this teacher. She gave me a rooted foundation in yoga and taught me life-changing practices and anatomical awareness. She taught me the fundamentals of Ayurveda and how to cook well and live simply. I wove my life into this school, not only studying with and writing for them, but offering hundreds of intuitive healings to the guests who came through our doors.

The most important lesson I learned from my time there was what kind of teacher I didn’t want to be. After seeing this teacher verbally abuse and gaslight her students, I leaned on my other spiritual foundations. I used these to remind myself daily that the real work we must be focused in healing on is expanding our ability to give and receive love so we don’t end up trusting someone who cannot do that for themselves.

I spent four years turning this teacher’s iron words into melted jaggery. I gave her a warm and welcoming public image that attracted scores of young, thin, perfectionist white women into her lair. Yet I eventually could no longer battle with the reality that the more time her students spent with her, the worse they felt about themselves.

Eventually my dream job became too much of a nightmare. I left the island for Mexico, nursing my two-year-old daughter and my wounds.

My new home was a small pueblo outside of Mexico City where no gringos dared visit. In the quiet of the mountains, my body fell apart. I’d held it together through death, divorce, cross-continental moves, a difficult childbirth, an abusive teacher, and strains on all my relationships, but it said “no more.”

My body was racked with joint pain, back pain, and digestive distress, yet through the pain I found intuitive guidance unlike any I’d experienced before. I suddenly knew what herbs to take, which practices to do, when to rest and when to wake early, and who to ask for help. I found a greater rhythm than I’d ever known, despite the disruption of the near constant pain.

It was a new level of awakening, marked by inner peace in the face of external struggle. Truth and lies became clear. My passion for life and my desire for depth merged. I was without conflict, even in the face of the greatest physical turmoil I’d known. I began teaching on my own at that time, sharing what I’d learned through women’s circles and 1:1 coaching designed to awaken our sleeping power and rewrite our stories.

After a COVID-inspired move led me to Vancouver Island, Canada, I finally settled into where I want to be professionally – guiding people to reclaim their eros. Eros is that magnetic, enlivening, power that is often seen in love and sexual expression, and it puts us back in touch with our original life force.

I began studying the nature of power with Kasia Urbaniak, pursuing professional certification as a somatic sex educator from the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, and training as a Dominatrix under Colette Pervette. Here, I began to understand how to access power in the body, ways to awaken more vitality, and the ways the erotic can help us overcome trauma, cope with physical pain, and experience the bliss that makes it possible to deal with all the rest.

This led me to co-create Worshipper ritual theater with Phoenix Amara in 2022. We birthed this project from our shared desire to reinstate the power of love and sacred sexuality and a passion for the power of mythology to shape us. We’ve done five shows to date and are currently expanding the project into its next iteration. From Worshipper, we have expanded into the Holy Eros Institute, a home offering retreats, 1:1 coaching, and group events for those who want to learn how to do love better. Together, we also cohost the Holy Eros podcast (available anywhere you get your podcasts). 

I don’t believe that we are our certifications. I don’t believe we need certifications to be able to become healers. But I do believe that my teachers deserve some love because they are the reason I’m here right now. I’ve done many, many trainings and read more books than I could ever list here, but here are just a few of the most significant individuals under whom I’ve studied:

• Tamara Wells (private apprenticeship, 2002-2005)
• Vessa Rhinehart, Bob Whilhite, Lee Gilbert (intuitive development training, 2002-2005, advanced level in 2012)
• Santi Devi (private, ongoing mentorship focused on working with emotion, ego, and the state of surrender, since 2014)
• Shelley Torgove (750-hour certification in herbal medicine and traditional healing, specialty in women’s health, 2014-2016)
• Myra Lewin (200-hour yoga teacher certification and 600-hour Ayurvedic counselor certification, earned alongside a four-year apprenticeship, 2013-2018)
• Robert Svoboda (various trainings on yoga philosophy and mythology, ongoing since 2015)
• Kaya Midlin (yoga nidra, feminine divine, and Bhagavad Gita, ongoing since 2018)
• Maya Tiwari (womb medicine, 2018)
• Regena Thomashauer, aka Mama Gena (Mastery and Creation 2019, ongoing)
• Kimberly Ann Johnson (various trainings on finding power through the nervous system, since 2019)
• Kasia Urbaniak, The Academy (various trainings on power, ongoing since 2020)
• Doctors at the Vaidyagrama Healing Village (various courses on Ayurveda since 2020)
• Robert Moses (Hatha Yoga Pradipika, pranayama, and kundalini, ongoing since 2020)
• The Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education (study in progress since 2021, includes training on erotic power, intimacy coaching, consent, healing touch, and more)
• Corinne Diachuck and Katie Spataro (Essentials of Touch — inspired by Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent — 2023)
• Mehdi Darvish Yahya (somatic sex education to heal trauma, 2022)
• Colette Pervette, Mistress Class (2024)
• Shibari Academy certification (2024)
• Every single client I’ve ever interacted with – they teach me far more than any course I’ve taken
• My daughter and my co-parent, both of whom teach me patience and the joy of being seen for who I really am

I have been blessed to live and work on many different lands amongst many different people. I acknowledge the gifts my ancestors have unwittingly given me that allow me a life of choice and geographic mobility (and also their teachings about staying still, which I’m still learning). Currently I call home the unceded land of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island. I humbly acknowledge the history and the present truth that rests here and everywhere I’ve lived. I am eternally grateful for everyone who has held the wisdom of the land intact despite centuries of efforts to separate us from its teachings.