who am i
I am a mother. I am A daughter of the earth. I am an artist. I am a healer—I am both healed + healing.
I have nurtured my people since my earliest memories. On the massage table, in a Tarot reading, in circle, the mother holds space for you to mine your own stores of wisdom--gently guiding toward light, recentering, grounding, and loving unconditionally. I hold space and am squarely on the team of my clients, students and children. My goal is to empower, motivate, and guide men and women into dialogue with their own deep wisdom.
From my earliest memories, I thought creatively, wrote stories, read stories, created plays and shows for my parents, wrote newspapers for the weekend, researched the crap out of everything (Woodward + Bernstein were my childhood heroes, along with MaryLou Retton, the Virgin of Guadalupe, my mother and Dr. J.) I love reading fairy tales, mythology, novels, memoirs, histories…anything really. When I was about 23, going through a divorce, I picked up the guitar and found that solace in learning guitar and singing. But creativity and art gives me life and is an essential part of all I do.
Working with stone, animal, and plant medicine in circle, in practice and in my personal life, I infuse the energy of Pachamama into every aspect of my life from parenting to self-care. I have extensive training in different healing modalities. I have certifications as a Reiki Master, Advanced Crystal Master, Transformational Reiki practitioner, Earth Medicine Practitioner, and space holder as well as having read and studied the Tarot for nearly thirty years. Certifications were the easy part, I believe, and I collected learning for a long time because I love to learn and grow and expand my offerings. I began by searching for healing within me, and then realized it was a calling for me to hold space for others in this way. My work, life, spiritual practice are all one. In 2011, after many years wrestling with the question about my own drinking and relationship to alcohol (spending years sober without guidance), I sought sobriety through a 12-step program.
This, probably more than anything in my life, healed something in me that I could never pinpoint. I had a hole in me that I tried to fill with alcohol, but it was never enough. Recovery helped me look at my own wounding and made me feel worthy of a relationship with Spirit and other people. I started healing my intimacy wounds, my wounds with other women, with family of origin and my childhood. As I sought recovery, I was forced to do trauma work (or I would drink again.) It was not easy, but I can say now that I also am a survivor— a cancer survivor, a survivor of DV, sexual assault, childhood trauma, child-death, caretaking a parent, autoimmune disorders, and trauma. I still have to work on my underlying instinct to numb, dissociate, and escape. I feel so blessed to have found many sponsors, mentors, and guides through therapy, recovery, and my spiritual training who helped me weave my spirituality with recovery, trauma work and the language of self-care.
What recovery gave me was the ability to weave what I do with my clients own explorations of shadow, developmental and childhood wounds, PTSD/CPTSD, codependency and addiction, identity wounds, parental neglect, religious trauma and recovery and living the effects of being an immigrant or first generation American, feeling Other, and experiencing racial prejudice and injustice. I seek to help my students get curious and non-judgemental about themselves and their wounds, so they can get to the thing behind the thing behind the thing though gentle earth-based approaches, because that is how I healed and continue to heal.
I walk the Earth Medicine path. I live gently, working in small ways to heal the Mother as I heal myself. I used crystals, meditation, journeywork, herbs/plants, foraging, daily on myself and my children. I weave spirituality and Spirit into every aspect of my life, my teaching, my circle keeping, and healing work. I follow and celebrate the cycles of the moon, the earth, the day and my life. This is the wisdom I bring to my students too.
I am culturally mixed—my mother is Latina and my father was white (of Irish and Scottish ancestry.) I have a strong connection to Central America and the jungle—the shamanic traditions of the Americas. My mother’s indigenous roots come from El Salvador and the Nahua-Pipil. though through colonization and the repeated decimation of our people, we have lost the connection in our family to the native Nahuat language. My grandfather was a political refugee to Panama and settled there. My grandmother was of European descent—her family coming from the Spain (Catalan) and Italy. I have a matriarchal family, ruled by a long line of creative, strong, psychic storytellers who are not afraid of their shadow.
I approach life by seeing with the eyes of eyes and listening with the ears of my ears. I have always created art, from my earliest memories, I loved to build, draw, vignette, make sacred. It is a way of life, the philosophy of the wild woman. I see opportunities in all things to get closer to the Mother, Great Spirit, Pachamama. I get my hands dirty in all kinds of projects from community art projects to shamanic painting to creating jewelry to altar and grid making to simply cooking a well-seasoned meal. I have dedicated my life to forging a meaningful, passionate and creative life for myself, my students, and my family. As Dr. Clarissa Estes Pikola says, “Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.” And I infuse everything I do with the sacred and creative.
