Twenty years ago, the energy gave me my first major adjustment and set me on a new path.

I grew up in an environment where external validation mattered most. I learned to perform, to please, to push and force myself, and to never ask for help.

By my teens and early twenties, I’d become increasingly isolated, hiding in work achievement, relationships, obsession with appearance, and secret forms of escape to avoid the chasm inside that I didn’t know how to feel.

By my early 20s, the structure was cracking. My hidden world was becoming unmanageable. I had begun to recognize it — I remember distinctly thinking, shortly before the brick came through my window, that if something didn’t change, I was going to die. But I didn’t know how to change. I felt trapped in my own creation with no way out.

Then grace arrived in an unexpected form. I was arrested for selling drugs. The truth I had been hiding was exposed. The energy blew open that compartment.

I entered a 12-step program and was met with acceptance and support by people who understood what I was going through. I felt God for the first time in that raw place. That was where my healing began.

It wasn’t a single initiation. There were many over many years and thresholds. For a long time after that first demolition, I was still oriented in the story that life was “happening to me.”

The pandemic brought a storm that changed my trajectory again. A convergence of forces: initiations through dedicated mushroom work, entering the world of horses (including multiple significant injuries), and a profound rupture around belonging and tribe. Mothering had already been training me in integrity and responsibility. Together, these initiations created enough pressure for something essential to break and also to be held as new pathways formed.

I didn’t go back to sleep. I got the memo, and I’m still working from the directive: I don’t use this energy. I serve it. This is my job.

That was the real beginning of my new life — when service became my orientation.

Today, I live my life on the mat. Experience is the teacher. I am a student, practicing. I read the energy and back what it shows me. I’m training to listen and feel for deeper truth, for the messages of how and where to move.

I know I have blind spots, and I work with fellow travelers and teachers to help me see what I can’t see on my own.

My primary teacher is Perri Chase. I want to express gratitude for the teachings and transmissions of Nevine Michaan, Jamie Rae, Amy Lee, John Cole, Nicole Daedone, Ra Uru Hu, and my trainer Kari Marinucci. There are others. I’m deeply grateful for all the lineages that have shaped my path.