My Story
I grew up in the fantastically green Pacific Northwest where I spent a lot of time running through neighbor’s yards, climbing trees, and building forts. Summertime meant tramping around with my family in the North Cascade Mountains, hiking both on and off trail, and drinking straight out of glacier-fed rivers.
At the end of each summer, it was always hard to transition back to school, and days that were chopped up into artificial blocks of time rather than the flow of summer’s natural rhythms. Sunday evenings would fill me with apprehension, as I anticipated the school week to come. I always had to have “something to look forward to,” to keep my attention focused on the future and little islands of potential happiness. Because often, I was gripped with a kind of existential dread that I could not articulate. I was obsessed with knowing what happens after we die (“we become spirits,” said my mother. Yes but then what? For how long…? “Well, for eternity.” But what happens at the end of eternity…?!) and where “the edge” of space was, and what was beyond that…? It was all just too much, and school didn’t even begin to address these deep anxieties. I wanted answers; I wanted assurance. But what I really wanted, I now realize, was meaning.
Strangely, I became adept at doing the school thing, and for the rest of my childhood, teens, and even twenties, this provided my sense of meaning. I formed an identity around being the straight A student, the grade-skipper, the prize-winner. In high school and then college I was an exchange student, lived in other countries and eventually learned three other languages. I genuinely loved learning, was thrilled with life and riding high.
By my late twenties, however, a vague sense of unease began to creep back in. Something was not right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt like I was stuck on the surface of a frozen pond, aware that there was a world of life teeming just below me, but I was unable to access it.
In June of 1999, that world burst through the calm, poised surface of my life. I had quit my job and gone on a personal quest, of sorts, intending to learn how to meditate and dip my toes into some kind of “spirituality.” Instead, with almost no warning, I experienced what psychiatrist Stan Grof refers to as a “Spiritual Emergency.” All those deep existential fears from childhood came rushing back, en masse, along with a host of other psychological, emotional, and physiological phenomena that were, initially, quite frightening. From sudden energetic sensitivities to episodes of unexplained heat and tremors coursing through my body, I was thrust into a state I barely recognized. I spent the next several months reading everything I could get my hands on about spiritual emergency, kundalini awakening, the chakra system, altered states of consciousness, and anything else that might guide me through this novel and bewildering process. In trying to explain my situation to close friends, I found myself often repeating the phrase “if this weren’t happening to me, I wouldn’t believe any of it…”
My Training
My research eventually led me to the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I was overjoyed to find a community of scholars and practitioners who were not only familiar with my kind of experience, but who also found it unremarkable. I earned my master’s degree in Transpersonal Psychology, with a special focus on transformational crisis and spiritual counseling. I took classes and workshops with Dr. Stan Grof and Dr. Richard Tarnas, and through their Psyche and Cosmos courses, began to grasp the profound connections between human experience and Archetypal Astrology. After years of searching, finally: a worldview that made sense.
As I continued on with my doctoral work, I included more courses with Grof and Tarnas, eventually using Archetypal Astrology as a lens through which to analyze specific cases of spiritual emergency and transformational crisis. I also delved deeply into Jungian and Depth psychology, Ecopsychology, Somatics, and Feminist Studies, eventually rooting myself deep in the soil of these connected fields.
After leaving CIIS, having a child, and immersing myself in motherhood for a few years (a PhD in itself!) I felt ready to return to work. I completed two years of guide work training at the Center for Consciousness Medicine (now Gather Well Psychedelics) and another year at the Hakomi Institute of California. In addition to my guiding and Hakomi work, I currently assist in Level 1 Hakomi Trainings for professionals.
These frameworks now underpin my sense of what it is to be a human alive on the planet today. And, thanks to teachers and mentors like C. G. Jung, Joanna Macy, Stan Grof, Tomas Berry, Richard Tarnas, Brian Swimme, Gabor Maté, and Bill Plotkin, I have at last found multiple pathways to meaning.
As a former pastry chef, my heart also belongs to baking,
and I still consider the occasional cake request.