MY STORY

The impetus for and evolution of my work arises out of a life-long personal journey of seeking a sense of belonging not only within myself but also in and with the soul of the world. 

In 2012, after ten years of anesthetizing addiction, the looming threat of death inspired me to scratch and claw my way out of the grave and back to myself. In those proceeding days of ribs-cracked-open exposure, self-loving parts of me were curiously searching for the gifts of the wound. Marion Woodman said, "The way to healing an addiction lies in finding a connection between body and soul" and for me, this was true. 

In the following years, I was drawn to a mentor in an alternative field of psychology called Processwork, and another who taught embodied somatic practices. As an intellectual, it was important for me that I also have a solid theoretical ground in which I could root and better understand my experiences, a worldview that could accommodate the life-altering changes I was experiencing. I found that and more in my academic pursuit of Jungian depth psychology.

Through these mediums, I rediscovered myself, but more than that I rediscovered the adventure of being human. Not only had my since deadened inner world reawakened, but I began to recover a sensibility that I had lost in childhood, a perspective that sees the world as sentient, intelligent, and in meaningful conversation with me. 

I found that by choosing to be in all of life, with its missteps and truths, loves and pains, victories and defeats, the light of consciousness can be fully expressed and experienced. It is by choosing to actively participate in the unfolding of my life that I remember my sovereignty. I realized that while I cannot control Nature, I can consciously participate in and relate to how it expresses in and through my experience.

Seeing all moments, including the challenging ones, as part of a cosmological web of belonging places one right in the heart of the mythic imagination. I am learning that it is through this channel that we get the potential to return to the deepest parts of soul. And by returning to soul, life becomes reinvested with passion, enchantment, and purposeful meaning. This is not to say that life is devoid of pain, difficulty, or discomfort, but it is to say that these experiences, too, offer an opportunity to know ourselves and the world around us more authentically. 

Pursuing this work has allowed a painful past to be repurposed and made sacred and this is a gift I hope to offer back to the world.