There’s something I’ve been noticing recently on social media. Maybe it’s been there all along, but lately I seem to be encountering more and more posts making declarations. This equals that. This is what healing is. This is what the plants are doing. This is proof of my status. This is the problem and here’s how you fix it.

Declarations about spiritual truths, the nature of consciousness, plant intelligence, mystical states. Often spoken with certainty about experiences that, to me, contain a tremendous amount of Mystery.

I keep finding myself asking, “Wait, how did we get from that experience to knowing THAT?”

Because what feels certain can still be very much shaped by perception and perspective.

Some people state how things are, as if their experience means their interpretation is right, and therefore they can claim something about reality. But someone’s spiritual experience is not always a universal truth for other people’s spiritual experiences.

It’s as if these statements are laying a claim on spiritual, metaphysical, mystical territory. Probably not intentionally, but this is how they come across to me. Some are presented as fact. Some simplify entire traditions and bodies of study into something that strips away the nuance, the richness, the wonder, and the depth of what can take years to live and understand.

What concerns me about this is how easily these declarations can hide the deeper inner workings beneath them. There’s the claim, with little visibility into the perception, interpretation, cosmology, training, or experience that shaped it. And little room left to inquire into any of those things.

What I’ve observed over the last twenty years of healing work, personally and in supporting others, is that perception of reality is very easily shaped. To fit one’s own desires. To fit the desires of others. To fit into a consensus reality. To fit into a “special,” “mystical,” “spiritual” reality. To confirm something the mind truly has no answer for.

The mind loves answers and certainty. And to the mind, sitting in the unknown, in the Mystery, can be extremely uncomfortable.

What keeps stopping me lately is when I see someone share a personal experience that seemingly jumps quickly to interpretation, and then to a claim about the nature of reality.

This happened to me. I perceived this thing. I interpreted what happened. And then I decided what it means about reality.

But really those aren’t all the same thing. There are leaps between them.

Sometimes, these can be read as claims about status. In the plant medicine world, there’s the ongoing joke that after a ceremony or two of ayahuasca, a person says that the medicine told them “You are a shaman.” This is an oversimplified example, but I’ve watched some version of it happen again and again after powerful entheogenic experiences. A claim about who they are or what they can do.

Maybe their conclusion isn’t wrong. I’m not one to know. But I know many of us would question whether a limited experience gives someone enough understanding to be certain of it.

Another example I run into: I felt / saw someone’s energy → that is what was happening to them, or this is what they did to me. A claim about another person, or an event, that could hold infinite understandings. Again, is there enough ground under that to call it truth?

It may be true. It may not be.

The experience may have been profound and transformative. The question is what happens in the space between experience and declaration.

I’ve found many of my experiences need to be lived, letting them weave through life, letting them arise again in different forms and situations, letting them evolve into deeper understandings.

There’s something powerful in cultivating a more intimate relationship with the Mystery, with not knowing, instead of labeling and explaining everything away into a neat box.

I think this is part of why I tend to write about process. The path of learning, exploring, deepening, listening, becoming, what is emerging. This is what I love. It’s fascinating to watch things rise from the depths of consciousness that I could never have imagined. And to watch interpretations and understandings shift and evolve over time.

And I have found that if we name it too soon, it loses the Mystery, that raw, wild, life force.

This infinite well of creative consciousness gets reduced down quickly into a meaning that the mind can grasp. Often a meaning that serves the ego. Sometimes in a way that expands it, sometimes in a way that feeds old wounds or ruptures.

What happens if we give room in the space between experience, interpretation, and meaning? If we stay close enough to the raw experience not to pretend we know more than we do? Interpretation can condense down into certainty, into story, and eventually we forget it began as an interpretation at all. We forget the raw experience underneath it.

One of the challenges I’ve had to navigate as a deeply sensitive person is feeling something strongly doesn’t tell me what it means. There could be a thousand interpretations depending on where I’m looking from. What lens is informing me at this moment?

And someone else could have a similar experience and land on an entirely different interpretation. I find that fascinating, and it’s part of why I have teachers, mentors, and guides. People who can see from different angles and perspectives.

A thread that runs through my work: What is perception? What belongs to me? What am I picking up? What is projection? What is trauma activation? What is intuition? What is energetic information? What is plant intelligence?

The subtler and more sensitive our perception becomes, the more it requires cultivating discernment.

You can feel something with total clarity. You can trust that you experienced what you experienced. And your first explanation of it can still be wrong, or partial, or only true for that moment, or only true for you, or symbolic rather than literal, or something that takes years or decades to unravel.

I was once an engineer and a scientist. Ironically, one of my pet peeves about that world was how they made strong claims all the time. But science also does something different - it asks: What is this based on? How far does the evidence actually let me take it? That inquiry builds an element of caution and restraint.

You don’t run one experiment, confirm your hypothesis, and publish a paper. A single observation can matter enormously without proving anything. You test what you think you know against other experiences. Sometimes the original interpretation deepens. Sometimes it falls apart. Sometimes something you were absolutely certain meant one thing turns out, ten years later, to have meant something entirely different.

What kind of relationship do we have to our own knowing?

I had a profound experience in my first plant dieta with Bobinsana, over twelve years ago. I remember lying on a rock in the middle of the river — feeling, listening, resting. And just like that, in a flash, everything washed away. My awareness took a turn. The structures and strongholds of my mind, the part that analyzes and organizes, the identity I’d built from holding myself together so tightly, the protective stance…dissolved. Before, I was still organized around the familiar sense of who I was. And then, suddenly, that was simply gone. Awareness remained, but without the familiar sense of self. A clean slate, vibrating, full of light. I recognized a soft welcoming, a sense of the cooling waters, and presence of something greater that was seemingly ancient and yet familiar.

It was a life-changing release, a relief. The energy it had taken to hold my identity together let go, and that same energy and awareness was suddenly free to experience something else. Something outside anything I had consciously known.

In the twelve years since, working with Bobinsana myself and through guiding others, my understanding of that experience and of what it was teaching me has continued to evolve.

Let all the stories go and see what remains.

○○○

I have had many amazing mentors, teachers and guides over the years, from different spiritual and healing traditions. All who have trained, studied, apprenticed, been on their own deep underworld journeys, many walking these paths for much longer than I have. Some are lineage holders, carrying specific bodies of wisdom and knowledge. There’s an unquantifiable value in mentorship and apprenticeship with those who have traversed deep and vast territories themselves.

For me, to be able to share the depths of my journey safely with them, to be witnessed, and to let myself step into my own becoming is a gift. They can reflect things I can’t see yet from the depth of their own experience.

And sometimes they confirm something I already knew. I knew it before they confirmed it…and in the moment, it lands.

I just came back from the jungle, once again struck by the depth of presence of one of my teachers there. His ability to drop in, sit with me, smile and show up fully. Not impatient, not hurrying through. True presence, real care, the kind that has time for whatever the moment actually takes.

I remember one time I’d been having dreams about not being listened to. I hadn’t mentioned that to him. But he comes into my room, sits down, and doesn’t move for a long time. I start to share a little. I see he’s not going anywhere, so I share more…and more. He waits until I’m complete. He has twenty other students to see that day, and he clearly knew what was needed. I needed to be listened to.

And then there’s a gentle nodding, a confirmation in his eyes, when I share something I’m noticing from my own perspective. He doesn’t jump in with his interpretation most of the time. Once in a while he offers his succinctly, likely because there’s another element he sees too. But it’s the exception, not the pattern.

My Spanish isn’t fluent, and I can communicate only a fraction of what I want to say with words. So I’ve had to rely even more on these other ways of sensing and communicating through presence, gesture, expression, and what happens in the space between us.

Experiences like these have taught me that I can recognize another person’s depth and authority without surrendering my own.

Someone can know more than I do, may have experienced vastly more than I have, and I still don’t necessarily hand them authority over the meaning of my experience.

One of my favorite quotes from Terence McKenna is: “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”

I’ve learned to let a teacher’s understanding sit alongside my own. I don’t necessarily have to accept it as true or reject it because it doesn’t immediately resonate. I can let it have some gravity, remain curious, and welcome it to move through my own experience.

Sometimes a teaching unfolds over weeks, months, even years…in my everyday life, my dreams, my work with clients. Their understanding doesn’t become mine because they told me it was true. It becomes mine, if it does, through direct, lived experience.

And sometimes it doesn’t. A teacher’s wisdom is also shaped by their tradition, culture, personal experience, and the particular lens through which they perceive and guide. Disagreement doesn’t necessarily mean I am rejecting the teacher or their wisdom.

It’s been a beautiful and enriching practice, and a careful one, to remain in relationship with my teachers and the Mystery herself without abandoning what I know.

What concerns me, seeing these broad claims lately, is I wonder what it does for people. Without discernment, which takes time and experience to cultivate, people can get too attached to someone else’s map to step into their own knowing, their own sovereignty.

These declarations aren’t only a matter of whether the speaker is “right.” In spiritual, healing, plant medicine spaces, speaking with certainty has power.

Someone says “This sensation means X. This medicine is doing Y. Your experience means Z.”

If that person has a perceived authority (they are a healer, teacher, facilitator, guide, influencer) someone else may begin interpreting their own experience through that person’s map and forget to create their own.

I see it clearly when someone comes to a session with me already with another person’s interpretation of their experience. So and so told me this is what’s happening. Someone told me my guides are saying this, or my ancestors are doing that. They may be believing something they were told in a reading, or something they saw in a post. They are living in someone else’s meaning instead of their own.

That can be a real part of someone’s process. It becomes a problem when it replaces their own knowing instead of feeding and nourishing it.

I’ve done this too. And I’ve seen how I’ve hidden behind it, afraid to step into my own knowing.

Which is why historically I’ve been careful in what I share with clients. I don’t always know what someone will do with something I’ve shared. Whether they’ll weave it through their own experience, or give it too much authority. I have to trust myself in the moment. What comes through, what feels useful to name, and what is better left for them to discover.

Some of the most potent teaching I’ve received hasn’t been about giving me the meaning. It’s helped increase my own capacity to see.

And the edge I’ve found myself walking goes both ways:

Can I receive a teacher’s understanding without replacing my own experience with their map?

And can I offer what I see without replacing someone else’s experience with mine?

Maybe the work on both sides is the same - becoming more discerning, more embodied, more capable of staying with an experience long enough to discover what we know and what we don’t.

○○○

In being so careful not to overclaim, not to impose my knowing on someone else’s experience…have I sometimes gone too far the other way?

I’ve been sitting with another dimension of this exploration. An over-attachment to process itself. I think I’ve stayed too long in I’m still exploring, and have avoided saying I know this. Not “I know this is universally true,” or “This is the nature of how consciousness works.” I don’t claim that. But I’ve been on this journey for more than twenty years.

There are things I do know. I still don’t hold them tightly. I know any of them could change, deepen, or reveal another layer, a deeper truth tomorrow… But I do trust them.

I recognize when something feels performative or not yet embodied. I know when someone has gotten lost in a story. I can feel when an energetic process is still moving and when it comes to a completion for now.

I know how to guide someone more deeply into their own experience rather than giving them an interpretation that may not be theirs.

I know how to help someone move out of talking about an experience and into what is actually happening in their body, sensations, energy and perception.

I know how to bring someone back to the moment before the story. Before the interpretation. What happened? What did you feel? What did you perceive? What’s here now?

I’ve learned not to jump in simply because I want to help. I’ve learned when to offer structure and when to allow something to unfold.

I’ve learned that an energetic process takes the time it takes. Not my time, and not the client’s desired timeline.

There are also skills I’ve cultivated over the years, ways of grounding and clearing energy, working with plants, and navigating energetic space.

And there are things I’ve learned through sixteen years of working with and being in relationship with plants.

I have experienced that the plants reveal their wisdom over months and years, if your awareness can follow it.

I can hold space for someone else’s plant experience without deciding what it all means for them. I know how to guide someone deeper into their experience, deeper into their relationship with a plant.

I’ve seen plants open entirely new possibilities, and I’ve seen how easily we humans can slip back into old patterns. An intense experience doesn’t automatically mean embodiment. Embodiment is an ongoing process. Some things take years.

Many years ago I could not have honestly said any of that. Now I can say it without hesitation. This isn’t based on one or two experiences. I’ve encountered, practiced and observed these things over and over, until some became knowledge I trust and some became things I know how to do.

And here’s the shadow side. I notice my tendency to underclaim constantly, hiding in many places once I actually look. I often soften something I actually knew clearly into “I’m wondering if …Maybe...” in my own writing, with clients, with friends and family. Or I over-explain something I actually stand behind that doesn’t really need me to do so. And I catch myself even with my teachers, understating what is actually true in my experience, so as to keep the humility, to keep myself in a role of “student” not to overstep. It’s like a deeply woven pattern I’ve built my whole way of presenting myself around.

And that has consequences. When I underclaim, people don’t necessarily know the depth of my experience or the capacity I’ve cultivated. And perhaps more importantly, I don’t fully inhabit my wisdom myself.

It’s a little ironic to think that the devotion to the Mystery can have its shadow aspect. If I am so devoted to staying open that I won’t let myself recognize what my own experience has actually taught me, then even the not-knowing starts to lose its potency.

I don’t want to say “stop making declarations” or “qualify everything you share.” There is power in being able to stand behind what we actually know.

And I know not everything we express is meant to be a claim about truth or reality. I love creative expression through writing, poetry, art, metaphor. Letting the mystical speak through us.

There’s a real difference between speaking from a simplified interpretation dressed up as a claim on reality and naming something learned across years of direct experience. A difference between naming what I understand to be true for me, and telling someone else what their experience means.

So what’s my relationship to what I know? Is it a belief? Something I’ve repeatedly observed? Something I was taught secondhand? A single experience I haven’t tested? Something I can do, reliably, over and over? Intuition? A metaphor I don’t fully understand yet?

Maybe there’s a precision in knowing how much I can stand behind something — what kind of knowing I’m speaking from, the difference between an experience and the interpretation that followed, and how to translate what I’ve learned into words.

“I have observed this over and over” is still different from “this is universally true.”

I don’t know what consciousness ultimately is. I don’t know whether every energetic perception I have is objectively true. I don’t know what another person’s spiritual experience means for them.

And none of that undoes the things I do know.

So I can say: This is what I have learned. This is what I repeatedly observe in my work. This is where my understanding has changed. These are the questions I’m living into now.

We don’t have to choose between Mystery and knowing.

○○○

Maybe discernment is part of learning to hold both.

Discernment isn’t only knowing when not to claim something. Discernment is also knowing when you can say something from your experience. It’s not about making bolder statements, or shouting louder.

You can be learning, listening, immersed in the Mystery and still be able to say:

I know.
I have observed.
I believe. I no longer believe.
I have learned.
I can do this. I can’t do this.
I don’t know.

And this can change how we can meet each other.

In conversation, there is an openness, a willingness to explore the territories without holding so tightly to something. To open, to listen, to receive and explore.

I personally love learning with others who are navigating this Mystery in their own way. Their knowing doesn’t have to replace mine. I can receive it, question it, be changed by it. And we can discover something new together. It invites deeper relationship, a shared learning, an exchange of wisdom. When I don’t surrender my knowing to yours, I can actually show up and be with you more fully.

There’s a deep beauty of being able to walk this edge of standing in our own deep experience and remaining open to what else is possible.

Because the Mystery is bigger than all of us.

○○○

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Some of the deepest, most perceptive and sensitive women I know are also the ones most often overlooked.

I’ve watched this pattern for over twenty years…in workplaces, communities, relationships. But I’ve seen it most clearly in healing and spiritual circles, the spaces that are supposed to see people most deeply.

It’s a far-reaching pattern in our culture, which isn’t designed to value these qualities.It’s designed for what can be seen, named, and understood as progress. Visible achievement.

We might assume that in healing and spiritual spaces it will be different. They are more conscious and more attuned to the depths, to what lives beneath the surface. And yet the same blind spots can show up there too.

I’ve been immersed in many of these spaces, learning and working. From both sides, I kept seeing the same thing.

And it took me a long time to name it, even for myself.

When I say sensitive, I don’t mean fragile or weak.

When I say deep, I don’t mean loud, visible, or performing confidence.

I mean women whose nervous systems, whose very energetic makeup, are registering far more than most people realize. They notice emotional shifts in a room before anyone names them. They track unspoken power dynamics, relational undercurrents, and subtle energetic changes. They sense what’s arising, what’s being avoided, what’s underneath. They perceive layers of reality that others don’t notice.

Many of these women grew up being told they were “too sensitive”. Toughen up and get over it. The word itself became a wound. Even I sometimes hesitate to use the word “sensitive”, as it has had an implication of being “less than.” But sensitivity is NOT a character flaw. It’s a nervous system and capacity of awareness that is attuned to subtle information that others miss.

Sensitive and deep women operate a different design, a different way of perceiving. One that takes in more bandwidth of subtle information, processes it all deeply, and often integrates more slowly, because what it is integrating is layered and multi-dimensional.

In group settings especially, this can become an overwhelming amount to process. When your nervous system is naturally attuned to the field around you, the boundaries between your own experience and everyone else’s can become difficult to hold. This isn’t being “weak” – it’s the other side of the same gift.

These women grow by learning how to stay anchored in themselves, how to stay in their center. Containment, boundaries, differentiation.

It’s not something that develops in isolation. It requires feedback in the moment. Relational mirroring. Someone who can reflect your own system back to you accurately enough so that you can learn to work with it. Over time, that mirroring helps build capacity to be with more. The answer isn’t simply to regulate your nervous system better or harder. It’s to look at whether the conditions in the environment are actually supportive of what’s needed.

I’ve sat in healing and spiritual circles where the people who are the most visible — asking questions, processing aloud, taking up space — were the ones who received the most attention. And I’ve watched others (most often women, but men too), sit quietly at the edges of those same circles, doing something different. They weren’t checked out or disengaged. But actually deeply integrating. They were processing internally, integrating layers of perception, but doing it in a way that doesn’t read as “progress” to anyone watching.

I was one of these women on the edge of the circle.

In plant medicine circles, the same pattern. The person moving loudest through their process, the one who takes up the most energetic space in the group, the one requiring the most attention becomes a gravitational pull. And the person sitting quietly in the corner, tracking the entire field, feeling everything happening for everyone, goes unwitnessed or becomes invisible to the room.

Often that’s fine. More than fine. It’s where she does her deepest work, in her own way, in her own rhythm. But there are times when she genuinely needs the container to meet or hold her. And those are the moments that reveal whether a space is truly built for her kind of depth or only for what it can easily see.

I remember a night in the Amazon, probably 15 years ago, early in my journeys with Ayahuasca, when my process finally began and came fully alive after everyone else had started to wind down. The curanderos had gone to sleep. The space was quiet. And that’s when my system finally had enough room to open.

I didn’t dare wake anyone. Instead, I found another participant and asked if they would just come sit with me. So I wouldn’t be alone. Just having another nervous system there to anchor me in the space. Someone to help me find the edges of myself again as I slowly came back to “normal” reality. This was not simply that one night, but the first night I truly recognized that I processed differently than others around me.

The reason this happens isn’t intentional or malicious. It’s structural in the collective perception.

Most group environments, even well-intentioned healing ones, are built to recognize what is visible. What reads as progress. Expression. Intensity. A breakthrough that can be named and pinpointed the next day. A cathartic release. A dramatic shift that everyone in the room can witness. Nobody designed it this way deliberately. It’s just what’s easiest to see and talk about on a human level.

Even in some spiritual spaces, there’s an unspoken template for what transformation is supposed to look like. The dramatic initiation. The archetypal or mystical story that supports an identity shift. The vision that can be shared in an integration circle and heard by everyone in the room.

I remember sitting in integration circles after some of my first ceremonies, listening to people describe wild journeys: mystical encounters, visions, aliens, other beings. And what I had received was something so quiet and so deep I had absolutely no words for it. The plants had shown me something about the cycles of karma, about the eternity of consciousness itself, divine love and about the way everything arises and passes. It would take me many years to begin understanding what I’d received. Definitely not the morning afterwards.

In those circles I had no idea how to share, and in comparison to others, it looked like nothing had happened.

But what I’d received was real. It was deep and life-changing. It just had no form I could offer the integration circle. In a group space organized around what can be spoken and witnessed, that silence read as nothingness. To others, perhaps, as someone who hadn’t gone very deep.

For deep, sensitive women, the most significant changes often happen quietly, internally and through time. Through slow reorganization, somatic integration, meaning-making that happens below the surface of what anyone can see. Their growth doesn’t announce itself. It settles and reforms the foundation of who she is.

When that kind of depth unfolds in an environment that can only recognize what performs well, it becomes invisible.

I’ve felt this invisibility even when I was helping hold the space. There were ceremonies where I was quietly carrying part of the field. Something a teacher once named out loud, to my surprise. And yet in the visible social structure of the room, I wasn’t the one being called on or invited forward. What I was doing simply was. And was unseen by most.

There have also been times I asked for help. I remember telling a facilitator once that I was hooked into someone else’s energy and couldn’t find my way out. What I received was a gentle redirection to “have compassion”. Which didn’t address what I was experiencing. As if what was happening in my system wasn’t the thing that needed tending.

That’s what it looks like when a container has blind spots.

When these patterns go unrecognized, a woman who isn’t seen or attuned to starts to doubt herself.

Not the container, but herself.

She doesn’t trust what she experiences or knows.

She assumes her quietness means she isn’t growing. That others are advancing and she is behind. That she simply isn’t advanced enough yet. That the capacities she senses in herself aren’t real enough to embody in public.

She learns to hold her wisdom inside, below the surface. She performs and masks enough to fit in, and keeps the rest private. Her depth keeps developing, but without accurate witnessing, it can’t fully stabilize. It doesn’t become something she stands in and refines.

And there comes a point eventually where it becomes exhausting. It works…until it doesn’t. She no longer wants to hide the most real parts of herself just to belong in a space that has unspoken expectations.

This isn’t failure. It’s actually an intelligent adaptation to conditions that aren’t really right for her development.

I remember another ceremony, early in my journey, where I told a facilitator I was feeling everything in the room, everyone’s process, all at once. She sat with me for five or ten minutes, gently attuning, helping me clear and find myself again. Not because something dramatic happened, but because she accurately understood what was needed and met it.

One person. Five or ten minutes. The right kind of attention.

The conditions that support many women aren’t complicated. But they require attunement.

Spaces small enough to offer real attunement. A pacing that honors how someone actually processes. A facilitator who can recognize depth that appears to be quiet and who knows how to repair when something is missed. Not a grand intervention, but just sustained, accurate witnessing over time.

When those conditions exist, something shifts. I’ve experienced it myself and I’ve seen it in women I work with. They settle into themselves, their medicine, their truth, their power. They stop monitoring themselves for signs of inadequacy, or modulating themselves to fit in. Creativity flows through them more easily. They begin to embody the wisdom they’ve been carrying quietly for years — not in a loud way, but in a grounded way. They stop standing at the edges of their own gifts of perception, and embody them.

They are able to live from what they know. Not because something was fixed or healed, but because something was finally seen and attuned to.

The structure and awareness of many healing spaces aren’t built with these types of systems in mind. But they can be. I saw this clearly in my energy healing training, where we studied different systems of perception and how each one processes, heals and integrates in its own way. None better or worse, just different.

When facilitators and communities develop the awareness to recognize how different systems work, everything changes.

I’ve seen this pattern again and again. In myself, and in the women I work with.

If this feels familiar, you’re not alone, and you’re not imagining it.

Sensitivity isn’t the problem. It’s a different kind of intelligence that simply needs the right conditions to learn how to work with it in an embodied way.

Because I’ve been the one skipped over in many situations, I know what accurate witnessing requires and what it offers. It’s a lived experience in my body, in my energetic field, in my nervous system.

That’s the work I do with women — so their depth, their sensitivity, and their medicine becomes something they can actually live.

𖠰 ↞↞ ꩜ ↠↠ 𖠰

In 2012, I quit my job in San Francisco and went to a yoga teacher training in Peru.

At the time I was an environmental engineer, moving through the system as one does: college, grad school, work…grad school again, work. Somewhere in there, a marriage and a divorce.

Always moving forward, but never really having a break long enough to drop into who I was beneath it all.

Or to listen for what life might have been truly asking of me.

The training felt like a doorway. A place to breathe, to move my body, to land in myself and to be in the sacred mountains of Peru.

I’d already been to Peru several times before that, called to the cultures of the mountains and Ayahuasca in the Amazon, that had shaken something very deep awake in me.

The training itself wasn’t cushy in any way.

Every morning we woke up early in the cold Cusco air, and hiked from San Blas straight up the mountain. I mean straight up, to 11,000 ft. We practiced yoga for 6-8 hours a day outside in the sunshine. By the time we returned back down the hill, we were beyond exhausted, and there were still studies waiting.

Plant medicine work was woven into the training — a way of deepening consciousness and awareness. Looking back now, I would never recommend those journeys, and the way they were held. The space was loose and uncontained. The facilitators were more interested in their own desires than holding a strong integrous space for deep work.

But I was listening to the pulse beneath it all.

It was a wild time to navigate through, and every cell in my being was there for it 1000%.

After the training, I returned to the Amazon where I’d been several times before. I volunteered at an Ayahuasca retreat center teaching yoga, helping in the kitchen and savoring precious time away from the world.

Way out in the jungle, the initiation called for a tattoo, designed with a Shipibo artist at the kitchen table.

I wasn’t really a yoga teacher, and I knew then that it was not my path. A deep practitioner, yes. But there was something else that was calling me…

I didn’t know what it truly meant at the time, but I had made a drastic choice to leave the system.

I had no idea what life outside of it would look like. Only that I needed to step away in order to discover parts of myself that had been swallowed up by playing the game, fitting in, being the good girl.

Until then, most of my life had followed the path that was approved of. The version of me that made sense to the rest of the world.

But I’d been hiding from the deeper parts of who I was.

And an ancient remembering stirred. The deep interconnectedness of life.

I grew up loving nature and wanting to take care of the Earth from a place deep within me. But that part of me had been swallowed up in a culture so disconnected from right relationship with the Earth. So I did what I could in the ways that the system allowed.

I had to reclaim the part of me that had so much to give in the world but didn’t fit into the box.

Reclaim my wild creativity. Reclaim the sensitive, perceptive one. The one who saw things others didn’t, not only in the visible world, but in the subtle energetic realms, and the realms of the Great Mystery.

As a young girl, I had sensed there was something far greater moving through this world than what we could see on the surface. And I found her again.

Life was far more interconnected, intelligent, and alive than the version of reality I had been taught to believe in.

A deeper order was always unfolding. Each of us working a piece of the great puzzle, even when we cannot see the whole mystery.

Once I ventured into this new territory of self-discovery, there was no clear reflection back. I simply did not fit in. I wasn’t definable, and I could tell it made many uncomfortable.

Over the years I found amazing people who could reflect back pieces of it — mentors, spiritual teachers, healers, my energy school, others on the plant wisdom path.

But it’s really a journey that is deeply individual.

No one person or group can fully reflect what is uniquely yours. Your design, the way you perceive the world, the hidden gifts you have to dig deep to uncover. The way those gifts want to move through you, and the way they are meant to be expressed and shared in the world.

Going a different way means paving a path into new territory, into the frontiers of consciousness.

I’ve always been drawn to those who move in different rhythms, and I’d finally taken the leap myself.

What I didn’t realize then was that it wasn’t just a break from the system. It was the death of the identity I had built inside the system. The version of myself that knew how to “belong” in that world.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of a long journey and apprenticeship. In learning how to listen to the Earth, to the plants, to Spirit, to my own wise rhythm.

A long journey of unlearning the conditioning that shapes who I thought I was supposed to be.

The plants were some of my greatest teachers, and still are. In ceremony, in dieta, in the sounds and sensations of the jungle. In prayer, in listening.

So was yoga, energy healing, temples, and ancient lands. So were the mountains, the deserts, the rivers.

And so was silence, stillness, meditation.

So was the body. So was my jungle dog. So were the trees outside my window.

What came through time was a reclamation of sovereignty, a rediscovery of true power. In a modern world that runs on power over, so many of us hide our true power. We disown it, so that we don’t get caught in the dynamics that cause so much pain and destruction.

Sovereignty became a daily ritual and practice of holding my own energy and life force, tending to it, and directing it to what matters most.

I’m still in that becoming. It never ends. And I find myself again at a place where deep, tectonic shifts are happening beneath the surface. The cracks in who I was are still opening, and reorganizing.

I welcome it. I breathe. I connect to the Earth. And I rest in a deeper trust that the Great Mystery wants to move and shift me into new territories — and I give my life to that.

The other day, as I was sitting with the extreme discomfort of it all (once again), I realized I’d much rather be in the uncertainty, the unknown, the deep listening, than caught in a life that didn’t fit.

Fourteen years later, I am deeply grateful to the 31-year-old me who took that leap. I don’t recommend that path for everyone, and yet I know my own path couldn’t have gone any other way.

For without her, I would not be here.

I would not have learned my own discernment through listening to the plants, to Spirit, through tracking the energy, through feeling when something is aligned or not, and moving when the moment is right.

A Yoruban teacher once told me something that stayed with me. When I asked her, “How do you know if you are following Spirit?” she answered:

“The only way to learn is to follow what you think is Spirit… and then you will know.”

It’s a path of slow medicine. One that isn’t learned in our fast-paced, achievement-oriented Western culture.

It’s a path of deep listening, where we quiet our personal will enough to receive deeper guidance.

It’s a path of surrender, where we trust the guidance even when it doesn’t fit the plans of the mind.

It’s a path of relationship, holding life as an ongoing conversation with something much wiser and larger than we know.

This way of living isn’t about escaping the world or rejecting it, but learning how to live within it without being caught in the places that hold our authenticity back.

It’s not a path for everyone. But I want to honor those who are called into their own deep listening, following the path of their heart and soul, and aligning with the current that wants to move through them.

Thank you for your courage, your trust, and your willingness to step into the unknown.

The path has not been easy. But it has been true, in the truest of ways.

ㅤ𓆸 𓃮 ㅤ𓆸

There is a power in using our voices to speak up, for ourselves and for others. To use our voices to share, to teach, to send a ripple out through the collective. And there are many voices doing that right now.

But I have been sitting in a quiet restructuring. A few days ago, in our gathering on feminine power, as several women shared they were feeling silent, it became clear this isn’t just mine. There’s a deeper season of work moving through many women. Foundations shifting beneath the surface. After tending to others, after being available and always “on”, there is a call to turn inward, to listen within, to listen to Spirit.

We can’t skip over this sacred part.

Some of us are in deep cauldrons of transformation. Deep in the descent, deep in the underworld of consciousness, deep in the rebirth.

I have seen healers, teachers, and social media influencers urging others to speak up, to use their voices in times like these. For some, this is aligned. But for others, it can bypass the depths that many of us are actually moving through.

For there are those of us feeling what is happening in the world so deeply. We are in our own internal process of feeling, sensing, releasing, reweaving. Many of us have been working internally for months, years, decades, lifetimes, to release through our bodies, our psyches, our consciousness, what we are now seeing manifest in the mainstream. The truths coming to light.

Yes, this can be a time to speak up and out, but in right alignment for the chapter of transformation we are each in. This is essential.

There are times when the work and the temple must be tended to from within - requiring a sacred silence. It is here that we return to the truth.

This silence holds a frequency that allows our depths to be known. To be remembered and woven back into the fabric of our being.

I know there can be many reasons for silence, but I’m pointing to the sacred stillness that sits behind it. Deep in the witnessing. In honoring and reverence for all of life- life as it moves through us, and life as it moves through the collective.

It is not a withdrawal or an avoidance. It’s a devotion. Devotion to sacred intelligence that needs space to emerge from its depths.

It’s been amplified since returning from my last trip to Peru. I’ve been challenged with sharing publicly and engaging on social media. I’ve been deep in internal spaces - reorganizing and restructuring.

A new baseline has been installed by the plants, and any expression that isn’t rooted in that baseline feels off. It’s not the time yet. The human needs time to catch up. And that takes quiet space.

Being exposed to the external world of events, people’s opinions, emotions and processes has required a new level of discernment. I’ve needed to tend to the internal sacred space with care, with love, and with reverence for the work unfolding.

One of my teachers says that the work with the plants is like a temple, and to tend to it and care for it. To be mindful with whom and what we share. I’ve respected his teachings and continue to learn the deeper inner workings of what that truly means.

Not everything is meant for public consumption. I’ve always found sharing to be an art, one that I love, but there’s a refinement that is being called for now. Especially now.

The day I left the center in Peru where I had been held in sacred space, in dieta, within twenty minutes my neck broke out into a rash. It blistered and covered my entire neck. It was very uncomfortable, itchy, and lasted well over ten days. My body reacted immediately returning to the world, letting me know viscerally that something deep was shifting. And that it must be handled with care.

There is a time to speak up, to share, to express, and to weave who we are into the collective in a visible way.

And there is a time to remain silent. To be in ceremony with ourselves, with the process that is unfolding, and with the way that Spirit & consciousness is moving through the deep dark corners of our being with her own wisdom and intelligence that only she knows.

What eventually emerges is truer and more refined. And essential to the unfolding, internally and collectively.

For those holding their sacred silence, I feel you and honor you. I know your work is moving through quietly and deeply - reaching into unseen places that are shifting the course of our world.

For millennia, humans have retreated into silence to do their sacred work.

In times of instability and rapid change, tending the inner temple becomes even more essential.

Silence is sacred work.

𓁹 ㅤ♡ 𓁹

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