This was the summer of 2014, I had just finished writing my third novel (the only novel that was in good enough shape to query agents about). I was lying on a blanket next to the turtle pond in Central Park, below Belvedere Castle. I has taken psychedelic mushrooms for this first time in ten years (plant medicine has been immensely healing for me);

I looked up at the sun-drenched, puffy cloud filled sky and said to my friend, “I don’t want to write fiction anymore. I just want to help people heal.”

Again, the change was instantaneous, I stopped writing fiction, signed up for Dharma Mittra’s teacher training, got certified as a Reiki healer, and started leading healing workshops called “Alchemizing Pain into Light”. In those workshops the attendees came forth with childhood trauma and psychological questions that I felt unqualified to answer. It felt unethical for me to continue doing healing work in this way without getting my Master’s in Psychology.

This was a HUGE decision to make. I hadn’t intended on going back to school, but my heart called for me to make this choice. I had just enrolled in Ashley Turner’s Yoga Psyche Soul teacher training and realized that she had gotten her master’s from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Synchronicity gave me the push I needed, and in September 2016 I made the choice to go to Pacifica Graduate Institute to get my master’s in psychology. Pacifica is in Santa Barbara, California, and I lived in New York City, which meant I would be flying to campus for four days each month for the next two and a half years.

I didn’t think about it. I just knew I had to do it. So, I decided that fairies would pay for it (hello abundance way of being), and I applied, was accepted, and started attending classes at Pacifica all within a three-week period. I took a leap and trusted that I would be caught.

As I got deeper into the program, my whole world unraveled. I realized that to let go, we must first learn to healthily attach. Attachment, the dirty word of the spiritual community, became the missing key in my own healing. Through my internship of being a therapist at an addiction center, writing my thesis about Instagram addiction, and my own history with addiction and addictive behaviors, I realized how these addictive tendencies had been a mask for my deeper attachment wound, which can only be healed in relationship.

For years, I had been focusing on individual healing without realizing that what was truly going to help me to feel safe enough to trust and let go was relational healing (therapy, group healing, etc.). This wound had been driving my life for years, and I had no idea.

I graduated from Pacifica Graduate Institute in May of 2019. In that program, I was able to see where I had unconsciously spiritually bypassed my childhood trauma, my attachment wounds, and my ability to express my very real human emotional needs. This was not intentional. I believed I was doing all the right work, but the thing is, I needed to not only be doing individual healing work, but also relational healing work. We need both.

Co-regulation leads to self regulation. Without co-regulation, in the form of someone able to safely hold us while calling us on our BS, we will stay stuck.

I needed to process my attachment wound, which meant feeling internally safe enough to BE my most powerful self. Around this same time, I began practicing kundalini yoga, which had me chanting daily. This chanting was deepening me into my body and toning my vagus nerve. It was here that I began to understand the importance of re-wiring your nervous system out of scarcity and survival and into abundance and expansion.

I had been doing ALL the healing things for years, but despite my having been doing all of the somatic practices (the ones that are supposed to regulate the nervous system), I still did not feel SAFE to release the sneaky and subtle addictive behaviors. My nervous system was wired for survival and while the somatic practices helped, my mind was

strong, and I held on tightly to how I knew safety. My nervous system was brilliant at protecting me from the pain that felt too big to feel, and to release those protectors I needed to create internal safety.

This is when I had an AHA moment… to create my vision and receive, I had to feel safe to receive.

It ALL comes back to internal safety, so I stopped seeking external saving. When you have internal safety, which comes from re-wiring your nervous system out of scarcity

and survival and into safety, abundance, and expansion you feel safe to process your trauma, BE with the pain that once felt too big to feel, have faith in the unknown, and create your life.

Feeling able to BE with your pain and the unknown makes you the most powerful person in the world.

Just after the pandemic hit in 2020, I entered Dr. Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry program where I dove deep into processing my childhood and generational trauma and my triggers. This is where I connected to tiny Yarrow, began to hold her rather than shame her, and truly began to understand what internal safety means.

When you create internal safety and PROCESS your trauma (we all have trauma. The history of humans is filled with it, and it lives in our nervous system’s)  EVERYTHING changes in the most expansive, beautiful, and powerful of ways. You feel safe to DECIDE to be powerful in your life, to create your life, and to no longer need saving or to be hyper independent and a martyr. 

I want you to know–you are so unbelievably powerful. And when you heal you feel safe to expand into embodying that power. This is where your magic lives. This is how you shift your energetic vibration and create a life that feels how you want it to feel.