My journey to this work

I began my journey towards wholeness several years ago. I had been suffering from anxiety and depression and was looking for a remedy, something to help me manage it, something sustainable. I remember going to the counselor at my university - he recommended I take medication. I asked if there was anything else.

He looked at me for a moment, then walked over to his bookshelf, grabbed a book, and handed it to me. I remember feeling so disappointed, like how was this book going to help me to handle these intense emotions? The book he gave me was entitled, "Full Catastrophe Living," by John Kabat Zinn, and it was a book on mindfulness. This book, along with the 8 week mindfulness course I enrolled in at the counseling center, was what prompted my long and bumpy path to healing.

I noticed how the mindfulness practice helped me to manage my anxiety and depression, and minimize the occurrence of full on panic attacks. And as life moved on, I slowly lost interest in such things. I decided to move to Europe, and found that as the years went on, the feelings that I had stuffed down, slowly began to resurface once again. I kept trying to run from them, but they just seemed to follow me wherever I went.

Something then led me to qigong, and I moved back to Atlanta where my family was. I began practicing qigong regularly, and eventually became certified as a Medical Qigong practitioner, by the Rising Lotus Qigong. This daily practice helped me to shift drastically, to center and ground me. It has been a continual learning practice for me. It has always brought me back to myself. Working with nature and the elements has also been so healing. I do believe it is through qigong that I was able to fully open up to shamanism, since in essence, qigong is a form of shamanism that dates back to Ancient China more than 5,000 years ago.

The form of shamanism that I practice is also quite ancient and predates the conquest of the Americas. The Q'ero live in the high Andes mountains of Peru, and are direct descendants of the Inca. They managed to escape the conquest of the Spanish conquistadores, and have only come down from the high mountains for the first time since then in the 1950s. They, like many other indigenous peoples of the Americas, feel it is time to share their wisdom with the rest of the world. I feel very honored to be a mesa carrier, as they call it, from this tradition.

So my path led me to practice this ancient form of healing, and to hold ceremony for my personal healing, and for our collective healing. And I also returned to my meditation practice, and got very deep into these teachings, primarily through Tibetan Buddhism.

Not too long after, my mother became ill and I found that all my years of study were finally put to the test. The lessons and the learning are often times not where we think we are going to find them. Sometimes all the practice, and the sitting is merely to prepare us for the bigger tests. It's true that meditation will connect us with that spaciousness within us. That we will discover that we are a microcosm within the macrocosm, but yet it is never enough to heal the deep wounds and traumas that we all have experienced at one time or another. For me personally, it has never been enough, but it has led me to where I need to go to further my healing - to get relief, and to peel back yet another layer of the onion.

I helped to care for my mother for four years. My daily practice became her daily practice and I walked beside her to the end of her life. During that time I began a yoga-qigong teacher training with Sifu Matthew Cohen in Malibu, California. I also began studying sound healing, and started playing for my mother on a regular basis. I found that it calmed her spirit and helped her to release so much fear and anxiety, it helped me to release mine as well.

Since her death I have been practicing sound healing even more, and incorporating it into my healing sessions as well as group sessions.

My studies in Chinese arts and medicine has also brought me to my tea practice. And I've been actively sitting and practicing tea through the Way of Tea Course by WAO Tea.

All of these practices have led me to look so much more deeply at my own traumas and have played an integral part in helping me to identify them, forgive myself, and attract new experiences that are totally separate from them. And through my deep spirituality, and also my humanity, I hope to share the practices that have served me all too well.