How To Be a Healer

Yesterday I talked to a woman who said, “If I could model myself after you, I would.” That she was inspired by my business and my life and the work I do in the world.

I was a little taken aback, but you know how this goes—my life, probably much like yours, looks great from the outside.

I’m a healer. A teacher. A modern day medicine woman. After our work together, my clients have quit soulless jobs and created their calling, ended exhausting marriages and found their soulmates, changed counties and countries and finally found home…Not to mention, built businesses doing exactly what they’ve been called to do.

I’ve studied with mystics everywhere from the back swamps of Louisiana to the back rivers of India and 23 countries in between.

In 2015 alone, I facilitated transformational healing workshops in NYC, Seattle, Hawai’I, online and all over Australia.

I’m even gracing my first magazine cover next month (more on that soon).

Sounds pretty fancy, huh?

But becoming a healer was never in my game plan.

Throughout my life, I’ve wanted to be a chemist, own a clothing boutique, be a supermodel, a travel writer, a Janet Jackson backup dancer and eventually a holistic psychologist (before I even knew if that was really a thing).

I wanted to see the world and study cultures and write books and even tinkered with the idea of getting a PhD. But it never occurred to me that I would become a healer.

More often than not, people are distracted by the power of mysticism and ritual and sacred medicine. They are mesmerized by healing, without ever knowing the path of the healer.

So when my new friend asked, “What’s your life story? How’d you get where you are today?”

I couldn’t do anything but give her the real answer.

I got here because a family member’s rage and pain and undiagnosed mental illness dominated my childhood.

I got here because of silences and secrecy and suppression.

Because when I was 19 years old, standing in my college dorm room, someone died and I wanted to cry. But couldn’t. I’d forgotten how.

I got here because I thought love meant taking care of abusive people, no matter what happened. Because I had boundaries as firm as cotton candy.

I got here because you answered the questions I thought, without me ever having to ask. Because I knew things, without knowing how I knew them.

Because I listened deeply, with my ears and heart and soul and heard everything.

I got here out of desperation. And depression. And determination.

I got here because no matter how good my life looked, I still felt powerless and lost and disconnected.

I got here because I couldn’t find my way home.

Because no one was going to save me.
Because I had to mine for my own answers.
Because my liberation was all up to me.

My first step towards becoming a healer was healing myself. Naming that something was wrong. That I didn’t want to live like that anymore. And that things could get better.

The practices I teach, the gifts I share, the medicine I bring are not just theory.

They are real. Tested. Tried and true.

They are my own roadmap of survival.

But the medicine I teach is not about following in my footsteps. It is not about connecting the prearranged dots, coloring by numbers or simply adding water and stirring until the perfect spiritual solution emerges.

My medicine…true medicine…is about helping you find and live your own.

So you can honor the truth in your trauma. Neither glorifying nor victimizing it, but trusting it. Scouring your own winding path for liberation. Folding yourself into the crevices of your life until your relationship to it transforms.

Your healing is not about finding the “right” tarot cards or “perfect” crystals or being told what to do by one more holy book or teacher.

It is not about following the rules or beating yourself up when you don’t or falling into full prostration at the feet of Oprah’s new favorite guru.

Your healing is an inside job. It’s about meeting yourself face-to-face and eye-to-eye and heart-to-heart and compassionately, lovingly, truthfully accepting everything that emerges.