who i am

I am a mother. daughter. sister. wife. auntie.

I am A child 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, or in circle, the mother holds space for you to mine your own stores of wisdom—gently guiding toward light, recentering, grounding, and unconditional love. I hold space and am squarely on the team of my clients, students, and children. I aim 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 Mary Lou Retton, Nadia Comăneci, the Virgin of Guadalupe, my mother, and Dr. J.) I love reading fairy tales, mythology, novels, memoirs, histories…anything really. If it has a witch or someone witch adjacent, I read it. When I was about 23, going through a divorce, I picked up the guitar and found solace in learning guitar and singing. Creativity and art give me life. It is woven into all I do and is the essence of my ethos.

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. I have read and studied the Tarot for nearly thirty years. Certifications were the easy part, and I collected learning for a long time because I love learning, growing, and expanding my offerings. I began by searching for healing within me and then realized it was my calling to hold space for others in this way. My work, life, and 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, healed something in me that I could never pinpoint. I had a hole in me that I tried to fill with alcohol, work, eating and restricting eating, other people, relationships, you name it, 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 intimate/sexual wounds with men, my wounds with other women, my 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, babyloss (one stillbirth and two miscarriages and more), 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 which 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 through gentle earth-based approaches because that is how I heal and continue to heal. In 2024, I studied through Life Esteem to become a Certified Recovery Specialist to be able to coach individuals in recovery coaching through the lens of earth medicine + holistic approaches.

I am also neurodivergent—diagnosed with ADHD, with the Hyperactivity part being highlighted. Diagnosis became a huge turning point for me. For 40+ years, I just thought my brain was broken (I’m still unwinding that, y’all), and through that, I dealt and continue to deal and heal self-loathing and brutal self-talk. Recognizing this part of my psyche has always been there — overactive, fidgeting, hyperfocused to unfocused — helped me understand I am just wired a bit differently. That wiring has helped me become expertly in some things, and it has been disabling in other areas of my life. But I am grateful for my neurodivergent brain which makes connections, processes information quickly, and finds all things a little bit interesting. As I said to my son recently when he was talking about being different in the same way I am different, I said, “Your brain is just fancy, and it makes connections really fast while singing and noticing small insects crawling on the ceiling. Some people will absolutely think that it is brilliant, and others will be confused. Find other fancy-brained people, and you will have the best friends in the world.”

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 Nahuatl language. My grandfather was a political refugee in Panama and settled there. My grandmother was of European descent—her family came from 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 shadows.

I approach life by seeing with the eyes of my eyes and listening with the ears of my ears. I have always created art. I have loved to build, draw, vignette, and make sacred from my earliest memories. 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, and Pachamama. I get my hands dirty in all kinds of projects, from community art projects to shamanic painting to creating jewelry, altar and grid making, and 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.

read MOre about me, my training + the Moon + Stone Healing Academy

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angie? angelica? what gives?

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