ABOUT

MY STORY

I am a lot like you. I have struggled with workaholism and was terrified of going outside of my set career path for fear of failure and because I didn’t know who I was without work. As a humanitarian aid worker, I felt that I'd found my true calling, and there was always more work to be done and always people to assist who had much bigger problems that I did. Career success was how I measured my self-worth, and I couldn’t stop worrying about how I was going to make it to the top of my field, meet the partner of my dreams, buy a house, create a happy family, and live that perfect life I’d read about in books and seen on TV and social media.

But work always came first, even to the detriment of my relationships with friends, family, and romantic partners. The more I was willing to give, the more my employers were willing to take, as there was never enough time or human resources to respond to whatever crisis or urgent task was at hand.

As my career progressed, from Cameroon to the DRC, to Afghanistan, to DC, and to Niger, my bosses gave me increasingly challenging assignments with levels of responsibility to match. I took them on with zeal, downplaying my anxiety and stress, spending countless hours in the office, and uprooting my life for the benefit of my job. Meanwhile, as I moved up the career ladder, my mother fell ill with ALS—a terminal illness that slowly paralyzes the entire body—and, as her only child, I became her caretaker. I struggled to get through the day—it was all about survival.

When she passed away, I took an especially challenging assignment in Niger, what I thought was my dream job, and moved away yet again from home and friends, losing myself in my work to avoid losing myself in grief and loss. It was much too raw; too painful. Always having a fondness for wine, I increased my daily intake—working long hours each day and then numbing myself to my pain. I knew I was unhappy, but I didn’t know what to do next. Every place I’d lived, every job that I’d had, every relationship…none of them felt right and I’d never felt happy or settled for any extended period of time. It felt like something was truly wrong with me. I found myself crippled by unexplained chronic back pain, in a relationship with someone who lied to and didn’t value me, and discarded by my job when I became physically unable to sit in front of a computer for 8+ hours each day. 

This was the rock bottom moment. I couldn’t numb my pain anymore and needed time to truly heal. 

I quit my job with a plan of traveling the world and writing a book, but three months into the planned year off, COVID-19 hit. Instead of fleeing back to the US, where I’m from, I felt called to stay on the tiny island of Gili Air, Indonesia.

I dedicated time to myself and finally slowed down. Through writing, I processed deeply repressed feelings I didn’t even know I had. I got back in touch with my musical side, learning to play the ukulele and the harmonium and feeling the release of years of pent-up emotion through singing. This experience inspired me to explore the healing power of sound, embarking on a 300-hour sound healing training with Shift Meditation and learning about how sound vibrations have the ability to heal the physical, mental, and emotional bodies.

After losing my nephew in a tragic accident, I also discovered the transformational power of breathwork and became a 400-hour certified Alchemy of Breath facilitator. Combining this with yoga, meditation, earthing, writing, making music, better understanding the neuroscience of healing through reading and research, talk therapy, and deep internal reflection, I was able to find the right package for transformative healing. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to healing, but I learned that understanding what’s going on in your nervous system and actually addressing it through a combination of both approaches that are top-down (where your thinking brain understands what is going on) and bottom-up (where the pain stored in your body and unconscious mind is addressed) is crucial for the process to unfold in a healthy, balanced, and sustainable way. With that, my pain finally diminished. I was able to start my own small business that flourished. I met a man who became my husband. Instead of going back to the city where I’d lived longest, I realized I was meant to live surrounded by nature.

My healing journey isn’t finished—it’s a life-long process and there is always more to learn and experience—but I realized that combining scientifically-proven, body-oriented therapeutic modalities with coaching and the support of a positive community was deeply healing. And it’s something I can’t wait to share with you!