My Spiritual Journey

The Beginning

I was spiritually open and curious when I was young but a pretty early “failure” led to me doubting myself. I was watching a documentary about monks who developed spiritual powers with my mom, and it discussed how these monks had advanced to the point that they could sometimes levitate or fly. I was completely amazed at the possibility and I asked my mother if that was true.

She told me very matter of factly that it was true and it was possible for anyone to achieve the same thing. That if I wanted to fly, all I had to do was decide I would do it. She emphasized that when I really wanted it, it would happen. Needless to say, I yearned for it with all of my young little heart and after various attempts, I did not lift off the ground. I was especially crushed when I asked my mom about this later and she said told me that if I didn’t work, that must mean that I hadn’t wanted it enough. I didn’t understand how she couldn’t recognize the overwhelming intensity of my hope and how confusing the experience was for me.

As I got older, even though I continued to maintain a curiosity, I closed off more and more. I would explore continue to explore spiritual topics with my mom, like Linda Goodman’s astrology books and using the altar we had to the Chinese goddess Gun Yam in the house, but inside I was starting to doubt that any of it was real.

In high school, I entered a very cynical and angry phase and felt like the world was a cruel and uncaring place. I shut down emotionally and suppressed anything tender or vulnerable so I could get through. My undiagnosed illnesses started causing me a lot more issues, as well. My ADHD had always been difficult. I almost never did my homework, but somehow I did well enough on tests and projects so I’d usually get good grades. My Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, the genetic disease that runs on my mom’s side of the family, began to cause me chronic back pain and occasional migraines around 11 years old. I remember once lying down on the cool tile floor in the bathroom in complete darkness, in utter misery, trying to escape the screaming pain in my skull.

In high school the academic pressures increased and my sleep become incredibly dysregulated. I struggled with depression and anxiety, and naturally my pain started to get a lot worse as well. Existing felt very difficult. All of basics that other people took for granted — falling asleep at night, eating meals at regular times, being able to decide to do a simple task and then actually execute it — all of this was beyond me. I looked at everyone else around me and didn’t understand why they made it look so easy, when every single day I felt completely overwhelmed and like I would never figure out the secret that everyone else know. Like I’d never be able to make anything of myself, because every single day I was failing as a person.

Despite my cynicism, I would still consult my mother for spiritual guidance, especially when I experienced my first romantic relationship. I’d become very good at suppressing my emotions to get by, but being in a relationship opened me up and made me vulnerable in ways I hadn’t been prepared for. When we had a fight, I cried for the first time since childhood, and then the flood gates were opened. Unfortunately, her advice often times left me feeling more confused, or like I was still “failing” at doing spirituality the right way. Her spiritual path was mainly focused on accepting circumstances the way they were, but I could rarely achieve equanimity. I now understand that was very natural considering my age and my undiagnosed ADHD and rejection sensitivity (it made every perceived rejection feel heartbreaking), but at the time it just added to my sense that I couldn’t do anything right.

My First Opening – Emotional Connection (2006)

When that relationship ended a few years later when I was 20, it sent me into a bit of an identity crisis. The breakup activated my rejection sensitivity so intensely that I felt like I was emotionally dying, which in a way I actually was. I was able to look back at the relationship and see my own toxic behaviors, which was challenging but necessary shadow work for me.

I had also entered an interesting point in my spiritual journey. I attended a unique ecology-focused college and majored in Ecological Agriculture. Towards the end of that program, I decided to attend an orientation for a different major that they offered, called Consciousness, Healing, & Ecology. There wasn’t any rational reason for me to be interested in it because I was still quite skeptical, so I now see that my Guides were nudging me in the right direction. At the orientation, I learned that the course would explore all kinds of spiritual traditions and practices, and that the year would end with a Vision Quest in the wilderness. Again, there was no logical reason for me to want to do this, but I felt even more drawn to it after meeting the two women who would be leading the class. Against all the protests of my logical mind, I signed up for it.

It was a very interesting experience to spend a year studying with a group of very spiritual women as a person who was deeply resistant to everything we were learning. When we would do meditations for things like meeting our Animal Guides or regressing into past lives, I just felt like I was making everything up. I was told this was normal but I didn’t feel normal. I felt like the odd one out who was constantly hiding how bad I was at spirituality. I decided to try some energy healing sessions but didn’t seem to experience anything, although I found the emotional counseling aspect very helpful. I found all the material we were covering fascinating, and yet there was the constant “buuuut…” voice piping up in the back of my head making it hard for me to really take things in.

Whenever we would explore the scientific aspects of certain things, like mindfulness or how the spiritual practices can re-wire the brain, I would cling onto them as if they were a life preserver. I did start that feel like perhaps, just perhaps, there was a benevolent unifying force holding the universe together. Spirit felt like the most comfortable name for it, even if when I would attempt to pray or connect I still had a very strong question mark about whether this Spirit was indeed on the other end, actually hearing me. I also learned about Spirit Guides in the class, but mostly filed that away as random trivia I probably wouldn’t have a use for. (Hahahahaha.)

I did learn to appreciate the powers of intention and ritual, and how rites of passage can be helpful on an emotional level.

I did immensely benefit from being introduced to a workshop called Naka Ima, which was a Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practice paired with an intensive breathing exercise. Since it didn’t require any specific spiritual beliefs and was more focused on releasing emotional densities, I felt “qualified” to do it. That would continue to be my main spiritual practice for the next 12 years even though I mentally classified it as a therapeutic practice. I would attend the workshops on and off and practice recognizing and releasing emotional attachments on my own. It was powerful and potent tool that helped my emotional development immensely, because as I started to discover through the work, I hadn’t learned the healthiest emotional patterns growing up.

My Second Opening – Maybe There Is More…? (2012)

When I was 25, I entered into my second serious romantic relationship and what would be the next catalyst for my growth. The relationship was quite short but very toxic. I had to suppress a lot of parts of myself to keep my partner comfortable — my polyamory, my queerness, my genderqueer expression. He also had an irrational jealous streak which meant that I sometimes felt uncomfortable spending time with other people because of how he might react, amongst lots of other red flags about his narcissism. Our break up, which was long, drawn out, and extremely messy, sent me for another tailspin. I couldn’t understand what was so fundamentally wrong with me that people who promised me forever over and over again would then reject me so completely, how they could go from seeming to worship me to finding me annoying and unbearable.

I was in such emotional pain that I was absolutely desperate for guidance. I started looking into a spiritual resource that I’d been told was a good way to deepen the practices we did at Naka Ima. It was called The Pathwork Lectures, and had been channeled by a woman in the 1960s on a wide variety of spiritual topics. Certain aspects of the lectures turned me off, such as the sometimes brusque language and how some of the social views were old-fashioned. But there were many things that the lectures covered that started to clear up my years and years of spiritual confusion. I also began to recognize certain patterns in myself of choosing partners who I didn’t really like that much and could judge, as a way of feeling better about myself.

Diving into those lectures, suddenly topics like reincarnation, spiritual purpose, and manifestation were laid out in a way that made sense to my logical brain, in a fashion I could digest it and somehow wrap my mind around. It also helped me see my emotional state with a completely new level of clarity so that I was able to learn from a lot of the mistakes I’d made with that partner.

It was still INCREDIBLY uncomfortable, to the point that even entertaining the idea of actually, truly believing in reincarnation felt like a shameful thing to admit out loud to someone else. I started to implement the practices that I learned in the lectures, such as setting positive intentions and asking for Spirit’s help to release my blocks and resistance. I began to notice tangible improvements in my self and my life, many of which could not be explained logically. Despite the material evidence happening in front of me, I was incredibly twisted up inside and could barely open up to other people about the depth of the opening I was experiencing.

My path seemed to be accelerating, though, because instead of a large gap between relationships this time, I jumped into my next one pretty quickly. It was really lovely for the first six months but went quickly downhill from there. Soon I was so busy managing this new toxic connection that I closed right back up again, and put away all those uncomfortable spiritual questions into a box. I did try to continue using some of the practices I had learned, like working with intentions and manifesting, but as time went on, I got less and less results and soon dropped off completely.

The Third Opening – Surrender (2018)

This next toxic relationship I had entered was full of emotional volatility and betrayals of my trust, but I had a very high tolerance and I’d made the mistake of intertwining our lives, which made the prospect of breaking up even scarier for me. I would bear it, and bear it, and bear it some more. I kept trying to mentally figure out the “right approach” so that we could get back to an enjoyable connection like we’d shared in the beginning, feeling like if I simply kept relentlessly trying to fix it, eventually I’d find the magic formula. Every magic formula I tried involved me doing all of the emotional labor, naturally, and none of them were sustainable for that reason. I was also doing a lot of judging and controlling that I didn’t want to look at, and kept telling myself was justified because of my partner’s bad behaviors.

But even I had my limits, and about six years in, I experienced a betrayal powerful enough that it made me re-think every experience we’d ever shared. Spirit timed this whole event so that was I was far away from home, so the whole thing was even more disorienting and it made me feel extra powerless.

This is an excerpt from a journal entry that I wrote about what happened next:

I was lying in bed, sometime around 2am or 3am, and hit a point of such internal pain that I didn’t know what to do. My mind was frantically circling around all the different options and nothing felt RIGHT, and I had no clarity whatsoever. I was swimming in doubt, feeling so internally conflicted that it was almost physically painful.

Looking back, I see that I found my moment of surrender. I was breathing desperately, gasping in air like I was drowning. I started praying, “help me, help me, help me,” continuously to the universe, because it felt too big, too painful for me. I couldn’t find my way out with my mind this time, I couldn't calm myself down, I couldn’t feel okay. I’m not sure how long I stayed like that, pleading for help; it was one of those interminable moments that stretched out in a timeless way.

And, like grace, I began to calm down and the intensity dialed down. I felt like I could breathe again.

After awhile, I asked myself in that open space, what do I really want?

And what came to me surprised me. Because it wasn’t a particular choice, it wasn’t a particular scenario. It was just a deep knowing and a feeling. All I knew was that I wanted the highest good for everyone involved in this scenario. Whatever that highest good looked like, since I had no idea, but I had a clear sense that all I wanted to do was contribute to that. To everyone growing as they needed.

So I prayed again, feeling so cracked open that it was if I was speaking from one of the deepest parts of myself:

Please, let me be the clearest channel for the highest good.

Please, let me be the clearest channel for the highest good.

Please, let me be the clearest channel for the highest good.

It was honestly one of the most beautiful moments I’d ever experienced, on the heels of one of the most excruciating things I’d ever experienced.

Now, over my years of dabbling in spirituality, I’d have the occasional physical side effect, generally mild enough that I could write it off as something else. For instance, sometimes in the after effects of an intense emotional release, my vision would change. And the next day after I woke up from my moment of grace, my vision shifted. It would stay that way for three whole days.

Everything became INCREDIBLY sharp, like I could see every single leaf on every single tree, and the colors were intense and vibrant. There was also a sensation in my head, where it felt... open, and that somehow corresponded with my field of vision feeling wider. It also just felt spacious inside of my own mind, like the inside of my head was ten times larger than normal. My thoughts were calmer, more focused, and I just felt pretty okay, centered, and grounded. I that the people supporting me were surprised at how quickly I bounced back from what had happened. I had never had the vision effect last three days before, but I figured it was just because of how intense the experience was and didn't really think about it much afterward I got home.

When I got home, I primarily focused on trying to figure out how I was going to move forward. The clarity I’d achieve didn’t last, and I wrestled with a lot of internal conflicts of how to move forward. And then a whole bunch of things seemed to start going wrong all at once, like a tidal wave of bad energy, and I began to research the Dark Night of the Soul, because I felt like I’d entered mine. A few months later, I started journaling in a blog of mine again and it helped me a lot. I started focusing more on myself, trying to create healthy routines, and using the blog as a place where I could go and vent when I was feeling confused. I had a lot more energy and felt more motivated in general.

As the month progressed, I started doing more affirmations, praying more, and just generally processing as many emotions as I could. And then my vision started changing again, but instead of being associated with moments of emotional pain, it started coming during moments of spiritual openness. At first it was sporadic, here and there, and then it became more and more regular.

And that’s when things really started shifting for me.

The Fourth Opening – Discovering My Energy Healing (2019)

I was 33, and the next seven months of my life were a wonderful spiritual roller coaster. It began with my curiosity opening up again. During my last opening, I’d started to dip my toes into the waters and considered that maybe this whole world of energy, reincarnation, and a divine loving Spirit could be real. Now I was wading in, feeling more and more like this could actually be true. What I’d been yearning for all my life could be real. That led to more and more questions. If energy healing was real, why couldn’t it cure all the physical problems we have? How much of this New Age stuff that people talked about was actually true, and which sources should I trust?

And then a truly scary thought: Did the heightened empathy I’d had all my life mean that I might have some minor psychic abilities? “Aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!” My ego internally screamed at me, terrified that people would think I was delusional or ridiculous. Because even if psychic abilities were real, it would be so arrogant of me to think that I could possibly have them!

Then I came across a woman who does Chinese Energy Healing, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I could attend an energy healing session and actually experience it. Actually feel something. Just believing that possibility was so powerful it made me cry, and I booked a session with her. About two weeks later, I had my session:

I had my appointment with the Chinese energy healer and was suuuuuuuper nervous/excited beforehand. I shared with her that I’ve been going through a spiritual opening and don’t have a specific thing I’d come to the appointment for, just that I am open and feel like I am finally receptive. She intuitively sensed a lot of spot-on things about me, including one of my most difficult patterns – running into constant limitations and the “happiness” limit I’ve internalized, where I believe there’s only so much happiness I’m allowed to experience.

When she works on it, I feel intense energy moving through my hands, shoulders, and body. I’m so amazed that I’m actually experiencing the energy!! We work on a few other things that come up, and she gives me the homework of specifically allowing myself to be excited about things more.

When the session is over I felt like the top of my head has been blown off, and I have a sense of floating, like my body’s lighter. As I step back outside again, there’s a butterfly migration happening. There are hundreds of tiny butterflies flying through the air all around me and it’s so incredibly beautiful. I feel like I’m in some kind of amazing dream.

After the appointment, I noticed other things shifting – I started feeling like I needed to move more, wanting to dance and go for walks. I started taking walks out to a local waterfall. I felt more spiritually connected. Over the next few weeks, I began to play around with trying to send energy to friends and family members.

From that point, I went all in.

I still experienced doubt with EVERY single new thing that I learned or tried, because my resistance was powerful, but I was able to work through it. I started recording videos on my phone where I simply chatted out loud with Spirit and discussed whatever I was feeling or thinking at the time. I began doing breathing exercises regularly to help with all the energy moving through me. I set up an altar, went out and stood under a freezing cold waterfall multiple times, explored entheogenic mushrooms, and eventually signed up for an Energy Healing Class with the same healer who did the session that was so powerful to me. Even before I attended the class, though, I realized that I’ve been healing all my life. My friends have told me repeatedly that talking to me can feel like a therapy session, and I was always offering people massages, advice for lifestyle changes, and coaching people through difficult moments.

Attending the class was very helpful, although much like in college, I felt like I still didn’t quite measure up. My belief had opened up a lot, but I was still wrestling with deep feelings of unworthiness. A sense that energy healing was great for people like the teacher, and she was awesome at it, but that I was too unimpressive, too inexperienced, and I still had too many doubting voices in my own head. I couldn’t possibly make a living doing something like this because I didn’t feel qualified at all.

I still continued to experience more growth. I attended my first psychic fair and I had an incredible time going to group healings, lectures, and checking out the various offerings available with my mom. We really bonded throughout this whole period and she acknowledged the ways that she’d made my journey more difficult in the beginning, recognizing some of her covert narcissistic tendencies. I even attended the Level 2 Energy Healing class, and learned more about the Chinese Energy Healing modality which I really liked and really resonated with. I started to slowly take stock of my life and began to make shifts, some of which were very exciting. I gained a lot of insight into the way that I’d essentially gone through a Narcissist Master Course in my life path and realized that I could offer to support to people who’d experienced narcissistic abuse, or potentially to recovering narcissists as well.

However, about three months later the pandemic hit, and I was once again overwhelmed by the demands of life. I owned a small food business at the time, and we were INUNDATED with orders at the beginning of lockdown, doing seven months worth of revenue in a single month. I would continue to grow emotionally, and I became better at more regularly requesting assistance from Spirit, but my practice went dormant again for the next four years.

The Fifth Opening – Healing My Body (2023)

I was 37, and the pandemic left my body in bad shape.

I’d been seeing massage therapists and acupuncturists for many years, because my EDS caused a lot of muscle tension and I really benefited from regular release. I’d been through a lot of ups and downs with my EDS at this point. I’d had flare ups over the years that left me nearly bedbound, and a very bad one in the early years of the food business where the repetitive work wore me down so much that I wondered if I was going to end up in a wheelchair. Luckily we were able to find a machine to take over a lot of that work, but I never fully recovered from that event either. I had to make a number of lifestyle shifts: my shoulders became so bad I could no longer carry a purse, and on bad days even my bra straps put too much pressure on them. I had to use a special kind of chair at my computer, because I couldn’t handle regular chairs for extended periods anymore. I started taking pillows with me everywhere because chairs without extra cushioning caused me pain very quickly. I couldn’t stand in place easily, and standing in lines would often cause me migraine-like flare ups that sent my entire body in a pulsating pain and would render me nonfunctional for the rest of the day. All of this just became a normal part of my routine over the years, losing more and more function.

Post-lockdown, the pain and brain fog were making it increasingly harder for me to function. I used food as a way to soothe myself, which of course created a negative feedback loop where the more I ate foods that triggered more physical pain (sugar and carbs were my surefire pain-trigger foods), the more I craved them to compensate for their side effects.

I’d become wary of “fad approaches” to healing the body over the years, associating juicing and any kind of fasting with the anti-feminist messages of toxic diet culture. I’d also started to internalizing messaging around how any type of sugar was harmful, including fruit sugars, believing that according to new scientific findings, drinking fruit juice wasn’t that much better than a high sugar soda.

Simultaneously, I’d experimented with fasting in the past and had found it beneficial for me, so I was conflicted. Eventually, my desperation once again trumped my doubting mind, and I decided to give the Master Cleanse a shot. I’d previously experimented with smoothie fasting or water-only fasting, so this was a totally different protocol for me and I had no idea what to expect. I read a lot of people’s blogs about their experiences to get a sense of what I was in for, and I mentally steeled myself for the worst because most accounts were honestly pretty miserable. They pretty unanimously emphasized the benefits they felt afterwards, though, so I thought it’d be worth some temporary discomfort to help reset my health.

What I thought would happen: I’d spend ten days suffering, and then I’d be able to maintain healthier eating habits for awhile afterward, which would hopefully help with my pain.

What ACTUALLY happened was that… the protocol was surprisingly easy and enjoyable. There was physical discomfort, certainly, but it didn’t even come close to the amount of physical discomfort I was already experiencing every day. I was in such a difficult place with food before starting the protocol that I was essentially battling powerful cravings on and off all day long. When I gave in, I hated myself because I knew I was hurting myself physically, and when I didn’t give in I sometimes literally spent hours fixating on the foods I wasn’t letting myself eat. So the rather mild urges to eat I experienced during the protocol were almost funny to me — they usually passed within minutes, instead of torturing me for hours! How cute!

The most surprising thing that happened was how quickly my body healed. During the protocol, my daily pain level reduced by 75% and my brain fog was mostly cleared. I had a new motivation to improve my hydration and my usual cravings were gone, replaced by cravings for salad and hummus. It cleared up the last of the perpetual raspy voice that Covid had left me with. I had the same vision change I’d had during my previous spiritual openings and became inspired to reevaluating my work. I’d been unhappy with my food business for many, many years but hadn’t been able to figure out what new direction I wanted to go in. I started seriously thinking about the logistics of a life coaching business, an idea I’d toyed with on and off for quite awhile. That was the seed of the idea for what would become my healing practice.

Overall, I just felt good. I felt so good… that it made me sad. Because it felt so strange to feel good, it made me realize how much I’d been suffering and just tolerating it. Not just physically but with my work, as well. The protocol inspired me to eat raw for awhile, and then embark on a juice feast* for 25 days during the summer. I ate raw fruitarian for 10 days after the juice feast, reveling in the novelty of eating all the fruit I wanted. I’d been limiting my fruit for years because I was afraid of how the sugar might affect my pain, so it was truly glorious to indulge in mango, banana, grapes, cherries, and all the bounty of the season. This whole experience paved the way for what would come next, which I wouldn’t have anticipated in my wildest dreams. (*A juice feast is similar to a juice fast but there’s a few main differences, the vital one being caloric intake. Juice fasts are typically very low calorie protocols, between 500-700 calories a day. Juice feasts emphasize getting at least 1,200+ calories a day, and always having more juice if you experience any hunger.)

The Sixth Opening – Giving My Life to Spirit (2023)

The Master Cleanse and juice feasting reawakened my interest in energy healing. I decided that since I was physically improving that I should strike the iron while it was hot. I started attending some healing events on Zoom and booked a session with an energy healer who specialized in dealing with the energetic causes of physical issues. I had some fascinating physical sensations during the session with her and felt that she was able to get to the root of a lot of emotional issues I’d been wrestling with for a long time. I immediately booked another session and started researching the pendulum, which had been the tool she used to do her work.

I purchased a pendulum and at first it seemed like it was responding, and then… nothing. Absolutely no movement whatsoever. I saw the practitioner had written a book, which outlined most of the main aspects of how to do her modality, so I bought that and read through it in record time. Still couldn’t get the pendulum to do anything! Next, I turned to Google to see what other people did when this happened, but none of the common advice worked. I just couldn’t get it to respond no matter what I did.

Still looking to improve my physical condition, I signed up for a Star Magic event that was happening in Southern California. It looked like a very intense experience which was a bit intimidating, but I was hoping it might be just what I needed. I was also still fixating on the pendulum and decided to sign up for an online self-guided class the practitioner was offering, thinking that the solution to my problem might be somewhere in her more direct teachings. Yet again, no luck! I was starting to get frustrated that after trying so many different avenues I was still striking out, so I was getting tempted to just give up on the pendulum entirely even though I had a niggling sense that it could be really beneficial for me.

Then, the practitioner reached out to me by email because she’d noticed I was doing the self-guided course. She let me know that she was doing a master class if I was interested in joining. I confessed how unresponsive my pendulum was and she said that was a common issue, and we would absolutely fix the pendulum problem so that I could properly learn the modality. I signed up right away.

I attended the Star Magic event and it was a very profound experience. The amount of time we spent doing strenuous breathing exercises was completely different than any physical workout I’ve ever experienced before — doing intense breathing for twenty minutes straight is no joke! At certain points I honestly don’t know how I managed to stay standing, but I dug down somewhere very deep and managed it. During the holotropic breathing session I think I left my body for about 10 minutes, a first for me. I also experienced very intense tetany which I decided to breathe through.

After the tetany, I felt that a lot of energy had been cleared through my hands. Some of it was the repetitive motions I’d been doing for work the past decade, and some of it felt emotional and related to how tightly I’d always tried to maintain my “grip” on life. I felt physically stronger after the event. Overnight, I was able to stop wearing sandals in the shower, which I’d been doing for years because I found the hard tile floors too painful on my feet. I was amazed! I also noticed that I handled the flight home much better than normal, because any kind of extended sitting was always challenging for me.

Around the same time the new class started. Outside of the class, my teacher and I worked one-on-one to address the blockages I was having with the pendulum. We had a couple of false starts where it seemed to be fixed and then would act up again, for example suddenly no longer giving me “yes” answers to anything. After about two weeks, I was off and running with a functional pendulum, and then I really began to play and it literally opened up an entirely new spiritual world to me.

The teacher had made it clear in the class that when we were working with the pendulum, we were working with Guidance teams. Either our own or the other person’s. So at this point I understood that whenever I asked the pendulum a question, I was asking my Guidance team. I started gaining an awareness of the different types of Guides that existed. For some reason I couldn’t explain, I was COMPLETELY obsessed with this new healing modality I was learning and was practicing on myself and others almost constantly.

Then, about two weeks after my pendulum began working reliably, I was doing a session where an Ascended Guide showed up. She instructed me to connect with her at the beginning of each of my sessions. I found this both exciting and terrifying. It was one thing to understand that we were working with Guides to do healing, but it was another thing completely to experience communication directly, which wasn’t a normal part of the modality. After that experience with her, EVERYONE’S Guides started showing up, in every single session I did. They began to direct me to try new things, and to create new processes to work with them more directly. They had me plant a bunch of energetic seeds for spiritual development in myself, which again! Exciting and terrifying! I of course wanted to grow spiritually, but I still felt vastly underqualified. I was literally a student in a class and didn’t feel like I was anywhere near impressive enough to deserve this kind of attention.

About a week after that, I started putting two and two together and began to realize that some of my “random” thoughts weren’t so random. I started to use the pendulum to double check whether they were actually Guidance messages, and just about every single time the answer was yes. My mind was BLOWN, in a good way.

Looking back, I now understand how important that was for me. It gave me a tangible, external way to validate my thoughts or intuitions, which was absolutely vital for me as a person recovering from a lifetime of relationships with narcissists. My first and last instinct was always to doubt myself, to question my own integrity, experience, or worth. Those frequent confirmations helped me gain confidence, because I haven’t been in a lot of situations in my life where I had unlimited access to that kind of validation from an external authority figure. (That was how I perceived of my Guides at the time, as spiritual authority figures.) They were re-parenting me in a way, doing the spiritual equivalent of helping me learn how to walk.

I didn’t have much time to recover from these newest revelations, though, because two days later they started to send me more complex messages and information. That they wanted me to be a channel for new Archangels that hadn’t worked with humanity before. The name of one of them came to me: Archangel Arandael, a forest angel. I had been mildly panicking basically through this whole process of learning to talk to my Guides, but this information COMPLETELY overwhelmed me. I talked to my mother about it, pacing around the room shouting about how I didn’t know what to do with this information.

I broke out into a literal panic sweat! Why did they think I was the person for this job? Number one, I was super uncomfortable with the Archangels and had barely wrapped my mind around working with them. I had a lot of judgments and reservations about anything related to Christianity, and I associated any type of Angel with Christianity. Beyond that, though, I couldn’t imagine myself as a channel. I still felt like I barely deserved the title of energy healer. When I thought about launching a life coaching career, the best I could imagine for myself was slyly incorporating a little energy healing in on the side and hoping it did some good. I never imagined myself amounting to more than that. So to be told that beings who had never worked with humanity before wanted me as their spiritual representative turned my entire worldview upside down.

On October 27th, 2023 I decided to do a little experiment. The Guides had been popping up so much when I was practicing this new modality, and they’d been giving me SO MANY suggestions for new and different healing activities to try with the pendulum. The direct communication was increasing more and more, and I thought… maybe asking them for more direct Guidance in my life would help this process along?

So I asked them: Would you like me to consult you for all my decisions throughout the day? I got an immediate yes.

I thought it would be a temporary exercise we did to help increase my ability to receive information, but what I didn’t realize at the time is that this was when I chose to turn my life over to Spirit. To living in service full time. This became clear to me over the next few weeks, but I didn’t recognize the weight of what I was doing at the time and how much healing it would bring into my life.

At the time I’m writing this, that was exactly six months ago.

Since then, I have done immense amounts of healing work on myself. I found the perfect buyer for the food business, and I sold it to them by the end of 2023. My mom and I began to heal emotional wounds that had been affecting us my whole life. I began to share her Guide’s messages with her and she embarked on her own journey of healing, decluttering, and reconnecting with Spirit. We started addressing some major issues in the home, and I began to travel again, more than I had in the last decade. I started studying spiritual topics VORACIOUSLY and went from being severely limited by my pain to being active ten to twelve hours a day.

I began to really, truly know that my Guides have been with me since the beginning of my existence and that they profoundly love me, which is a truly wondrous realization. Some of the initial energy boost faded after the first few months, but I’m not worried because I know my growth is operating in an organic, unfolding fashion. There have been plenty of difficult moments along the way but it’s been such a gift to be able to work with these Divine Beings and begin sharing their messages and healing with other people.

Since I usually work in sevens, I suspect I have a seventh spiritual opening on the way… or maybe I have another 13 openings to go, wouldn’t that be fun? 😅 Whatever’s next, I walk my path knowing that I’m supported by Spirit every step of the way, and walking alongside a team of loving Divine Beings who are doing everything in their power to help me.