My own radical evolution has actually unfolded during my journey as a space-holder.
A Bit About My Path
For much of my life, and throughout a significant portion of my personal growth journey, the depth of my wounds remained hidden, even from myself.
In 2010, I began working deeply with sacred medicines and healing practitioners across a variety of modalities. I experienced deep transformation and growth, yet I still found myself hovering on the surface of my pain, unable to access the core of my dis-ease.
At 42 after 12 years on the personal growth path, life offered me a perfect storm. In the span of just three months, I was initiated into the Bwiti tradition, moved to another country, became a mother, and co-founded an Iboga retreat with my husband, Anthony. Any one of these rites of passage could have catalyzed profound transformation. I chose to walk through all four at once.
I was raised in a loving, yet broken home. Both of my parents were deeply wounded children of addicted and highly dysfunctional families. Without realizing it at the time, I endured emotional and physical abuse, repressed trauma, and lived within cycles of codependency, enmeshment, and control. I had constructed a narrative that my childhood was mostly happy, and that belief made it nearly impossible to understand why I continued to attract toxic relationships and painful experiences, or why I carried such deep patterns of control, anger, and frustration.
Motherhood, the medicine, and our retreat center became mirrors, illuminating the shadows I had not yet met as well as unearthing repressed memories locked away for decades. Eventually, the survival strategies that had held everything together stopped working. What followed was an unavoidable reckoning , and it was in that rubble that everything I now know about real change began.
Becoming a mother to our brilliant daughter continues to reveal parts of myself in need of liberation and authenticity.
This journey has been beautiful, messy, and profoundly empowering. It humbles me daily, and I love who I am becoming in the blaze of the fire.
The Missing Piece
Through years of personal excavation and eight years as an Iboga facilitator and coach working with close to 1,000 people, I came to know from lived experience the deep imprint traumas leave on the psyche and the body. And yet, despite all of that work, I was still recreating variations of the same painful reality.
The lightning bolt came when I discovered the nervous system as a doorway — not just the mind, not just the spirit, but the actual biological baseline from which we operate. Suddenly I realized I was still running old survival programs, and no amount of awareness was going to override that without direct, intentional and targeted work.
And then I encountered the work of my mentor David Bayer, and everything clicked. He combines the mind, nervous system and spirituality in a way that landed profoundly. I have been shaped by many extraordinary teachers — Abraham Hicks, Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Ekhart Tolle, Nanice Ellis and many more, each of whom gave me something essential. But this was the piece that brought sovereignty and full embodied power within reach. Not as a concept but as a lived experience.
What crystallized for me, and now sits at the heart of everything I do, is this: emotional processing helps you understand your past, somatic work helps your body feel safer, but neither one actively trains the conscious mind to operate on a different frequency, to learn to create the reality we desire. If the mind isn't retrained, it will keep pulling the nervous system back into fear thus repeating the same patterns. The mind has to develop agency first. When it learns to choose a powerful meaning instead of a primal one, the nervous system can finally hold regulation. I learned how to play the game. And it changed everything.
