My story

About Me

As a kid, I talked to animals, daydreamed constantly, and played in the woods for hours. Then I “grew up.”

I felt split in two—there was the sensitive and emotional me, and the me who labeled that one as “too much” and “weak.” I tried to control my sensitivity with my will and my intellect. I internalized cultural notions of strength as toughness, self-discipline, endurance.

I felt like I was hiding a grand failure

Though I was always a questioning student, I followed a traditional academic path. I earned a Ph.D. and taught at New York University and Bard College.  I worked as a freelance editor, and I gained over twenty years of teaching, coaching, and editorial experience.

Then my body rebelled. I got burned out. I needed a change.

I left my academic teaching job and ran away to the ocean to become a bartender. I wanted to be in my body. I wanted to live! But bartending became another way to push myself and de-value my sensitivity. I developed chronic auto-immune issues. My legs gave out beneath me at work, and I strategized ways to hide it or work around it rather than listen to my body, as if my body were separate from me.

I felt like I was hiding a grand failure.

When the noise and action and intensity cleared, I discovered my capacity as an intuitive medium

It took a concussion to wake me up. For six months, I couldn’t do the things that made up my life, that I believed were “me.” Who was I if I wasn’t reading or writing, helping someone, working long hours, making drinks, making lists, solving problems, over thinking, pushing through my life?

When the noise and action and intensity cleared, I discovered my capacity as an intuitive medium.

As I developed my psychic abilities, I wasn’t just learning skills. I learned about myself in order to get out of the way.

I came to understand receptivity as strength, and sensitivity as the capacity to see, hear, feel, and know what lies beyond cultural definitions of “what counts.”

I was led down a path where my mind-body dichotomy was replaced by a more complex understanding of the relationship between the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual, all working together in a symbiotic relationship we can’t access fully from any one seat.

I came to understand how I had always communicated with animals and received messages from them, but I didn’t know it.

I came to understand how I had always communicated with animals and received messages from them, but I didn’t know it.

I saw how I had always used my intuition, but I didn’t trust it.

I came to understand how we are always in process, and that growth happens in relation to others: animals, plants, community—the people we love, and those who challenge us.

I feel honored to share what I’ve learned, what I’ve unlearned, and what I’m learning still with those who seek to deepen their relationships with their animals, themselves, their loved ones, their work, their art, and their world.