Mommy, how are healers made? - An essay about how I got here and my thoughts on healing.

Content note: This essay includes mentions of suicide, underage and above-age substance use, and phlebotomy/blood. Please read with care and pause if needed.

“Mommy, how are healers made?”

"Well… Once upon a time, there was a seemingly average baby boy that was born into a nuclear family, all members appearing very normal. On the surface, this baby was just another baby, but, it turned out, this baby’s soul was given a very important mission - a mission he would eventually begin to sink deeper and deeper into just by living his life… blindly at first, messily as he learned, yet courageously Heartful throughout…"

Hi :-) This is Ohl.

It’s true. I was born into an average family, and I naturally had a purpose in that family. The story I came up with was that I provided immense joy and entertainment to everyone around me. I was uninhibited, funny and improvisational. I would utilize voices, silly dance moves, clever word play, and a very light heart. 

Did I have to do this? Was this purpose dire? Life saving? Life making? 

I sense my joy was deep medicine for the people around me. Maybe my playful jest was inviting others into one of the deepest wisdom wonders of the Universe; all Beings are here to play, laugh, and Love.

Back to the question; I think we all come from the same place. However, that place is unknown to me. Science can explain it pretty far. Religion tries to explain it further, but it is one of the great mysteries and a bedrock question for humans everywhere; How did I get here? 

In this article, you’ll see my personal exploration of that question. You’ll see why I am here as a healer and what I believe that means. Hopefully this sparks things within you about yourself. 

So, back to the story…

I grew up in an oil-and-gas family where it was commonly feast or famine and small country towns. We finally settled in a small town in Oklahoma when I was five. I recall spending a lot of my childhood tagging along with my sibling and their friends, all much older than me, which honestly made me feel very cool, thinking I knew things well before my peers did. 

I remember always being inquisitive and contemplative. I found myself pondering things in public, wondering why no one else was asking why. I recall noticing people blindly going along with systemic behaviors that felt abnormal and off to me. Everyone appeared to know exactly what they were doing. I was often confused. Another perceived difference was I’ve always been sensitive, creative, curious, and a deep feeler, especially around emotional pain. I felt it in myself and in others.

I often felt like a stranger from a strange land. However, it was often said that I was wise beyond my years. Through relating with peers, it seemed I was tuned into an innately intuitive understanding of human behavior, and people found me to be a safe partner to  process emotions and life struggles with. I spent a lot of time helping peers navigate their challenges, genuinely believing I had something useful to offer. 

I loved helping people feel better, though, at some point, I realized how little I actually knew. I started to see that what mattered most had little to do with what I said. It was my ability to feel deeply and empathize fully. I wasn’t afraid to feel.  I just didn’t know what to do with it.

I mostly coped through humor. I was the class clown and the family entertainer. At a turning point at age twelve, I began intentionally altering my consciousness, first with alcohol, then with cannabis a year later, which became a long-term refuge through my teens and early twenties. 

In those formative years, I experimented, often using substances in early to mid high school to numb what felt overwhelming inside. A lot of that terrain is challenging to share and I am choosing to keep it vague right now, but, just know, it got dark multiple times. 

These were adaptations I partly inherited. I was dissociating from feelings that were simply too much to hold. I felt deeply, and I didn’t have the tools to care for that sensitivity. I was searching for answers with what was available to me, even though I knew it wasn’t the way.

My first teacher was my mom…

Like I mentioned earlier, my oldest sibling is 10+ years older than me and my other sibling is 5+ years older. Quite a gap. I heard throughout my life that I was a surprise. My mother rarely agreed with that, but when she did, she assured me I was the best surprise anyone could imagine. She was a mother through and through. When she became pregnant with me, I believe she perceived that as a miracle, and I think that deeply shaped the experience I was to have with her. 

Around 5 years old, I began registering emotional pain in my nervous system, especially loneliness, quietly disappearing from family gatherings and waiting to be noticed, saddened that I seldom was. I realize through my deep work as an adult that a lot of that pain was inherited. Then, of course, more pain got tacked onto that pain from many sources: relationships, humiliation, bullying, loss, confusion, and grief that rarely, if ever, got processed. 

In the family system, I remember my mom crying often and my Heart breaking every time. She held deep sadness and pain from sources and experiences still deeply mysterious to me and others. The lore I have heard and remember, sounds too horrific to be true. And with my dad, I recall witnessing a lot of anger, while my own anger felt shunned. 

So I became the “happy kid,” a role I learned how to do extremely well. Despite being a devoted momma’s boy, a lot of my wounding comes from that relationship. My mother died by suicide when I was 20, a little over eight years ago, a loss nearly indescribable. 

This completely annihilated me. I could barely speak for weeks, stuck in some sort of stunned silence, looping the same unanswerable question: What the fuck happened? 

No one knew what to say, and no one could relate or meet me at the depth of my confusion and grief. I was profoundly alone, and it was from that complete annihilation, stripped bare and in the bottom of a dark hole, that my intentional healing journey finally began.

The only option was to heal…

I started by spending countless hours meditating on the scene of my mother’s suicide. By my own accord, I decided that fully entering the pain was the only way to process it. I allowed myself to reflect on the grittiest questions: about her final moments, the space she was in, and the aftermath of a single moment. It wasn’t to torture myself, but to try to understand. 

This is where I really started to expand my consciousness, far beyond anything I had touched before. It’s where I started to learn empathy at a really deep level, where I learned forgiveness, and where I came to see that even unbearable experiences can carry gifts. 

Her suffering in that body ended there; mine was intentionally beginning, but so was my access to my strength, clarity, and purpose. I learned how precious life truly is, and this experience with my mother is what motivates me to my core. There is no time to waste. Live fully, now. We must face what stands between us and the life we want. That urgency carries a shadow that I work with, but without it, I wouldn’t be here.

I finished college because I knew she wanted that for me, but I knew very well I wasn’t going to do anything with that degree. Feeling untethered, I left the only home I had ever known and moved to the Northwest to become a dishwasher at a restaurant deep in the Deschutes National Forest. 

I knew a few things with certainty: I needed to get out of Oklahoma, I needed challenge and experience, I needed a reset, and I needed to find like-minded people. Luckily, before this all transpired, I was already immersed in Buddhism, Taoism, meditation, yoga, and breathwork, quietly orienting my life toward healing and understanding.

Working with the mystery…

My early practices at age 17 and 18 centered on transcendental meditation, which eventually evolved into Vipassana. I practiced daily, sometimes sitting for long stretches when time allowed during college days, then later shortening my practice as I began full-time, physically demanding seasonal work. 

Along the way, teachers like Ram Dass, Sam Harris, Thich Nhat Hanh, Marcus Aurelius, Alan Watts, and Lao Tzu shaped my inner world and gave language to what I was intuitively seeking.

I explored countless modalities, but what endured were meditation, breathwork, movement, writing, and solitude. I eventually hit a wall. There was only so much healing I could do alone. 

I felt isolated, out of sync with my peers, deeply committed to inner work while others were immersed in recklessness, partying, and surface-level connection. Wherever I went, I felt different and sometimes proud, but mostly confused and frustrated.

My second teacher was my first adult Love…

While elevated 10,000 feet high in a tiny ski town in Colorado, I found love. Someone who saw and appreciated my differences, as I did theirs. We both felt out of place in our environment, and that shared sense of otherness drew us together. It was exciting… and terrifying. 

It felt very fun and normal until COVID-19 shut everything down and pushed us into living together far sooner than we were ready for. The deepest work of my life began to surface in subtle and not so subtle ways. This is where I learned that relationships are, without question, the most challenging and transformative teachers here on Earth School as human beings.

That first relationship brought to the surface my deepest wounds, especially my tendency to appease. I wanted to be the endlessly perfect partner who never caused conflict and always put the other person first. I was obviously lost, easily shaped by others’ perspectives, rather blind to what I truly wanted. After two years, we broke up and that was deeply painful, but I knew how to meet pain: by fully feeling it. 

I spent time meditating, journaling, crying, hiking, and staying close to the emotions rather than avoiding them. While part of me still believed I needed to “get better,” here I was practicing the healing power of simply being with what was present. This pain was certainly less traumatic than my mother’s suicide but because I had that experience, I was able to meet this pain with much deeper consciousness.

So here I was, onto another journey. I believe I had truly processed the pain from my first long-term breakup. Around the same time, COVID restrictions began to lift and community events returned. I somehow became the busiest social person I knew, something planned nearly every night. 

I loved it. I wore it with a bit of arrogant pride. And in regards to my routines, they were dialed in. I was working out consistently and showing up for my daily practices, no matter what.

The first shift…

One major shift during this period was opening to healing in community. I began attending sound baths, integration circles, men’s groups, improv classes, hiking clubs, and more. This ushered in a whole new layer of healing: relational healing. This helped me to discover who I actually was in connection with others because these containers had certain intentions that welcomed more of my humanness. I started to feel safe enough to open up to others.

That openness led me to my first music festival… all by myself: the final Northwest String Summit. From there, I fell into a three-year chapter I can barely understand because of how big it was. 

There were over 20 music festivals and hundreds of live musical performances I witnessed, as well as hundreds of strange and beautiful interactions with humans of all walks of life.  Following the music led me to Love and heartbreaks as well as the most beautiful, difficult, and surreal experiences. I made it out alive and, I believe, wiser.

A flash forward…

Fast forwarding in the story a bit, I must pay homage to what ultimately broke the spell of bouncing from show to show and leaning heavily on substances; It was Love, Love for a Goddess of a woman. I’ll need a full blog or podcast to speak about Cylver and how our relationship grounded me into the man I had always wanted to become. She didn’t demand or force anything. 

Through the intimacy of partnership, I learned what was right for me, and thankfully, that aligned with what was right for her, and for us.

This relationship has led me to become fully and happily sober. It shifted how I live my life, as if I’m in training to be a king to her Queendom, and more importantly, a future father to our children. And it’s important to say: even before meeting her, I was already naming these patterns in therapy. 

The substances and constant stimulation had begun to feel less enjoyable, or maybe they were always uncomfortable, and I was on my path of bringing more and more consciousness to these experiences. 

Awareness is the centerpoint teaching of transformation. Real change comes from bringing consciousness to what we want to change. Over time, when something no longer nourishes or delivers what it once promised, with the light of our consciousness shining on it, it naturally falls away. 

Like the attractor concept in physics, our systems are oriented toward healing and naturally yearn to settle there, and they will once the conditions are right. This understanding has been a cornerstone of my journey into embodiment, presence, and right relationship with myself and with others.

On the path, there are many moments where things suddenly click, and this relationship has been one of them. I had been practicing embodiment for a long time, but I came to understand there are always deeper layers, always more consciousness to bring into the body and into life. 

I’m not saying the work is finished, far from it, but this relationship and the group work I’d been doing converged into some of the most meaningful changes of my life.

Those experiences that have happened in the last 2 years led to simple, clear realizations about how I want to be: in my body, my mind, my heart, and in the spaces I find myself in. I began approaching relationships with greater clarity and trust within myself, and I noticed a fundamental shift in where my actions were coming from.

For a long time, I lived primarily in my upper centers. Integrating the lower three was revolutionary. Ignoring the body was my mistake; disconnecting from its wisdom is an injustice. 

Learning to integrate the whole body,  its energy, intelligence, and signals, and bringing them all into the center of the Heart, thus acting from there, is what I believe to be the realest work that is available all the time. I’m working on this daily and will be for a lifetime.

Planting seeds…

During those years of music festivals and play, I was also doing a great deal of deep healing work. Through trusting my path and following threads diligently, I found the most profound work available: shadow work, specifically the shadow work guided by my teachers Luke Adler and Jason Lange.

I was introduced to shadow work before I knew what it was. One of the first men’s groups I ever joined was facilitated by someone who had trained with my now-mentor, Luke Adler. Because of that, the group naturally carried strong shadow work undertones. The central intention was to lean into your edge, one of the core pillars of shadow work, and that orientation had a huge impact on me.

Through that group, I began learning more about Luke and his work. I had a clear sense that this man was operating on another level. Deep, precise, and powerful. I started following his offerings closely: joining men’s groups, reading articles on his website, and subscribing to his newsletter. 

I was deeply impressed by the integrity and depth of what he offered, and I felt a strong pull to learn from him. I knew, somehow, that our relationship would eventually deepen into a mentor–mentee dynamic, even though I had no idea how that would unfold.

Another valuable teacher…

Around this same time, at my very first music festival, I fell in love. Hard. Infatuation is probably the most accurate word. I felt seen and loved for who I really was for the first time, which was possible because I was more myself than ever before, thanks to the community and inner work I had been doing.

The relationship was fast, intense, and incredibly painful. And it was necessary, exactly as it was. I mention this relationship because, during the darkest part of the year in December 2022, while I was with this person, I received an email from Luke Adler Healing. 

It outlined a brand-new nine-week program he was launching with Jason Lange called The Heart of Shadow. I remember the moment vividly. I was sitting there in her room, reading the email, and telling her about it. Something in me stirred. It felt like a universal nudge.

The financial cost felt enormous to my 25 year old self. Still, she encouraged me, reflecting back how aligned this program seemed with who I was and what I was interested in. I reached out to ask about a scholarship, they offered me one, and just like that, I was in.

That one program… 

What I couldn’t have known then was how monumental that decision would be. Enrolling in The Heart of Shadow profoundly altered the trajectory of my life. It remains one of the most significant choices I’ve ever made, one that ultimately helped reveal what I am here to do, and how I am meant to serve humankind.

It is difficult to find words that truly capture my experience from that program. It cracked me wide open. It expanded my consciousness more than anything I had encountered up to that point. Looking back now, I can see how each lived experience had been opening me gradually, layer by layer, deeper and deeper, and this program accelerated that process in a profound way. Most importantly, my Heart was online more than it had ever been.

I came to understand just how powerful Love, care, and presence are on their own. Within that container, I was shown a clean, reliable structure for the practice of listening and speaking deeply from the Heart. This is one of the greatest services we can offer to each other. It’s always been one of my natural gifts, but it wasn’t until I experienced it within an intentional group that I fully recognized its power. 

The structure created enough safety for me to practice sharing from my Heart, without it needing to be perfect. It could be messy. There was no judgment. Only radical acceptance for who I was, exactly as I was.

The group held me in my becoming. I was met by men who were ready and willing to support me as I stepped more fully into my life. I fell in Love with supporting others in that space, and just as deeply in Love with witnessing others offer support from a place of genuine care and presence. I was astonished by how men I had known for only nine weeks could Love me so purely and without condition and how naturally that Love flowed both ways.

Our commitment became simple: to be part of each other's support system. So I needed to learn how to receive. That meant bringing my full messiness, my struggles, my shadows, my unfinished edges into the space so they could meet me there. This container gave me undeniable evidence of the effectiveness of the work, men’s work in particular. 

It was the most powerful and impactful form of healing I had ever experienced or witnessed. 3 years later, and I can see how we have all supported each other through really dark times. I feel incredibly fortunate to have this.

A core awakening…

From that point on, I knew I wanted to devote my life to this work. I continued participating in programs with Luke and deepening my relationship to shadow work, breathwork, and meditation. It would take another two years before I fully trusted that I, too, could one day hold this kind of space for others in a way that Luke does.

What I realized was that my lived experience mattered. It was useful. In fact, it was my greatest source of power. No one was asking me to repeat someone else’s words or tell someone else’s story. They just wanted me and my perspective. 

It wasn’t because I was the smartest or wisest in the room (far from it), but because I was learning how to understand my own experience and recognize how it related to the experiences of others.

Relating is one of the most powerful healing forces we have. When you deeply know yourself, you begin to know everyone. In learning to speak from my own truth, I discovered how connection dissolves isolation and creates real transformation.

After being immersed in this work for the past three years, and building upon everything that came before it, I believe, at 28 years young, that I have found some of the simplest and most effective tools for individual healing. And when the individual heals, that ripple effect heals the collective as well.

The relational domain…

I did a tremendous amount of healing work on my own through meditation, somatic practices, breathwork, journaling, reading, and countless hours of podcasts. That work took me far, and it was essential. But it was only half of the healing. 

The other half required stepping into relationship with others and practicing being present with what arose there, especially the triggers. With the way I became oriented, each trigger was another doorway into deeper self-knowledge.

No one is alone in how they feel. We share the same emotions, and our Hearts are deeply attuned to one another. I have found that most humans genuinely want to support, empathize, and help each other. Of course, discernment is key here.. 

We cannot invite just anyone into our inner world. But when the container is right and vulnerability is met with care, more often than not, people naturally offer support in ways that are both helpful and profoundly healing.

Leap of Faith…

Probably the second most important, and scariest, decision I ever made was quitting my comfortable medical profession working as a phlebotomist. During all of the aforementioned events, I worked full-time in a blood bank, drawing people’s blood and obtaining what would eventually be used in hospitals for blood infusions. Oftentimes, a life-saving procedure.

While there, I had many ups and downs and learned a great deal about myself and others. For me, the job was about connecting with humans, giving people a great experience. I wanted to laugh and play. It became a symbiotic, synergistic thing. 

I invited others to play in what was a seemingly serious environment, and, oddly enough, many people were receptive to that. Play we did, all while collecting a lot of happy and healthy blood. 

As much as we played, there was equally depth and vulnerability between the donors and I. Once again, I found myself being the safe partner in processing emotions and going in depth about life. I loved having mental health professionals as donors because of my ability to meet them there conversationally and semantically, sometimes even providing deep support for them.

I was also skilled with first-time donors. They tend to be scared, anxious, and right on the edge of an autonomic nervous system reaction. My presence helped people calm down, feel supported, and trust the process. “I help people help people”, that’s what I always said.

Perhaps one day I’ll write more in depth about the valuable experiences I had at the blood bank. But for now, I must explain what happened after I quit.

Into the cave…

It was over a year ago when I came to the conclusion that it was time to quit my job. I had no plan, except an intention to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life. All I knew was I wanted to make art, volunteer at hospice, and study. I saved enough money to live without income for a few months.

My last day of work was celebratory. Then the following weeks consisted of me sleeping… a lot. I was grieving. Not because I was sad or felt wrong about my decision, but because what I had spent the last three years doing was over. All the people I saw regularly, I would likely never see again.

I was aware of this, but I didn’t yet notice the depression that was forthcoming, one that would soon make me question every part of my existence, stripping me down bare and demanding that I meet it. It was a dark night of the soul, in mythic terms.

What was happening was some form of a hero’s journey. I left a place that was very familiar and comfortable to me because of messages I was receiving during my time there, messages that conscripted me into what I now consider the graduate program of my life.

I heard the whispers, answered the call, and then dove into the darkness of my underworld. When I wasn’t sleeping or with my partner, I was facing demons, oftentimes wrestling with them. I had to face their messages. 

These parts were trying to help, but they also wanted me to further isolate myself. They wanted me to run. Parts of me were having serious doubts about everything, even about my relationship with Cylver. That was the scariest thing we have faced yet.

However, the whole time, I knew these doubts and messages were not in my best interest. I knew they were not coming from my highest self. So I worked with them. I stopped wrestling them. I stopped fighting their expressions. I stopped being afraid of them. Eventually, they minimized, and minimized, and vanished. Something in me shifted… I started doing art.

My energy levels began to return. I was doing art… finally. I was reading. I was making moves toward volunteering. I was able to connect deeply with Cylver and my friends. And I was finally able to enjoy the freedom of being unemployed. It took about a month and a half to get to this point.

It was mid-December, after a trip to Tucson with Cylver and a big check-in between the two of us, that I began to emerge from the underworld.

I enjoyed unemployment for another month before thinking about finding a job. By this point, I believed I was going to be a healer. I had no idea what kind of healer, or what that even meant, but I knew I wanted to help people. I knew the job I needed would be super part-time, something meaningful that would also give me time to study and pursue my path.

Somehow, I manifested the perfect job for that. A job where I get to help people and spend a lot of time developing what was to become Moon Mountain Healing.

Thank you, Universe.

Look behind to move forward…

The next step was to find out what kind of healer I was going to be. I looked into so many online programs, all promising something and asking for a lot of money. After searching the internet tirelessly and talking to people, it struck me that I had already been doing this healing work for quite some time.

I decided to look behind me, to see what I had already done, what work I had already experienced that had made the biggest impact on the trajectory of my life. This was what I should explore. I already knew so much about that work. How could I dive deeper into it?

It wasn’t until I had a call with my mentor, Luke Adler, who I reached out to seeking guidance, that things started to take shape. “What can I do?” I asked.

He reflected many powerful things back to me, sharing my story through his perspective. He spoke about me creating spaces for people to heal and assured me that I was ready. I left that call over the moon, enlivened. And he gave me a breadcrumb to follow.

He mentioned the breathwork he had introduced me to years prior, and the human who hundreds have trained under, David Elliott. David had some upcoming healer and breathwork facilitator trainings scheduled, happening not too far from Eugene. And the timing was right.

He also offered a program that he and Jason developed for people who had gone through the Heart of Shadow and wanted to train in the way they do shadow work. It was an opportunity to learn more about the work and to do some really deep work on myself. I said I wasn’t ready.

Then, a couple weeks later, during a meditation, it clicked.

I was ready…

Shadow work was something I already knew quite a bit about after being steeped in it for the last three years, and it had contributed more than anything else to my transformation. So why would I not learn how to help others in that same way? Why would I offer anything less than this, knowing it was the most powerful modality I had encountered?

I exited the meditation and signed up immediately. Bam. Two big training events on the horizon: breathwork and healer training with David Elliott, and shadow work training with the humans who helped start this whole journey of transformation. I knew right then, I was all in.

This brings us to the summer of 2025. Chock full of retreats, trainings, and ceremonies, as well as stepping into a facilitator role for a men’s group I created in the Spring. I came out of all of that ready to launch a legitimate business. 

Moon Mountain Healing was born in early August, right before my first group breathwork offering at an ongoing healing container here in Eugene called Community Healing Night.

So much work has been done to get me here, externally and internally. Ultimately, I want to help others heal and transform their lives into what they want. That has been the main driving force. And I want to make it sustainable for myself and my family.

As David Elliott says, the Universe is my employer. Abundance is all around us. I feel supported every step of the way by the universe, even when it gets so hard that I want to delete everything and act like this never happened. I know this is my path because of how my life has unfolded, guiding me here, step by conscious step. 

Thoughts on healing…

Healing requires a lifelong commitment to learning ourselves. This doesn’t mean constantly analyzing every thought or action. In fact, overthinking is often the shadow at work, pulling us back into the head and away from the body. The invitation is much simpler, though not always easy in practice: slow down and drop into the feeling body.

When we allow the mind to connect to the body, using thoughts and images to help us listen rather than dominate, we gain access to where trauma, conditioning, and early wounding are actually stored. Through the simple acts of noticing, feeling, and reconnecting mind and body, things begin to shift on their own. Energy starts to move. We begin to move.

The mind tends to run in loops. But when we step out of those loops and into embodied awareness, we create space for something new. With Loving, conscious attention, stuck energy begins to release, old patterns loosen their grip, and we are able to move forward again. Loving Forward, with more presence, clarity, and ease.

In healing, from a nervous system lens, we loosen our entanglement with our stories, creating space in the body and in consciousness to step outside of them and see them for what they are: tightly wound circuits of neural connections spiraling through the nervous system, like a tornado.

Just moments ago, you were inside the storm, identifying fully as it. And now, enough space exists to step outside and hold it gently in awareness. No matter how true it was, or how necessary it once was for survival, we can see it is no longer serving our current life.

What are healers?...

In my view, healers are people who have leaned into their edges again and again, expanding their edges so much that, when it comes time to support another, the space they can hold is vast. 

That spaciousness invites someone in healing to meet their own edges without fear of relational consequence. There is a felt sense of relief in that kind of presence: Finally, someone who can hold my full humanness without ridicule, rejection, or ostracization.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean healers can support others anytime and anywhere, for however long. There is still a human capacity that we must all honor in order to support others. It is unwise to attempt to hold deep, supportive space for others when a capacity has been reached or surpassed.

So healers and teachers, too, have edges they continue to meet. What often distinguishes them is that they have cultivated and honed skills for working with those edges. They know how to stay present while supporting others, and how to tend to themselves later. Healers have discernment and, hopefully, boundaries. 

They keep showing up, even in uncertainty. They are comfortable in the not-knowing, and they trust themselves enough to act with care and integrity in service of someone else’s process.

At the core, healers are simply humans who decided at some point “I am devoted to healing”. Everyone heals in their own way, and anyone can heal. Many people don’t even realize how healing their presence already is. Choosing to consciously serve as a healer for others is a bold and meaningful commitment, but it’s important to remember that healers are nothing special. 

Healers are not separate from their humanity, nor exempt from messiness or imperfection. What sets them apart is that they have done their work and discovered a reliable, steady, and spacious capacity to support others. To get to this point is a natural and uncontrived process. 

Resonance matters…

There are many kinds of healers, each with their own flavor. It’s important to find someone whose presence, words, and energy genuinely resonate with you. And at the same time, stay discerning. 

Notice if something feels off. Does this person seem to want something from you? Do they trust you as the expert of your own life and healing? How does my body feel when sharing space with this person? These are some essential questions to consider when choosing who to work with.

So… where do healers come from?...

We are no different from one another at all. Humans are natural healers. We are constantly healing ourselves and one another, often without realizing it. This is the natural flow of being human. Healing wants to happen. However, suffering is part of that process.

In the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, suffering is named plainly. It is not a mistake. It is a prerequisite of the healing path. Suffering and healing are interconnected, which leads to my belief that suffering is not separate from the process, but an essential part of the equation.

Much of what I understand at my core has come not from doctrine, but from firsthand experience. I hold a belief that many healers have either been healers before, perhaps in other lives, or have been working out their soul’s “karma” in ways that led them toward healing themselves across long stretches of time on this planet... or maybe other planets. Whether taken literally or symbolically, this idea points to something ancient, familiar, and universal that is fully alive in many people.

And on a more grounded level, healers come from those who first choose to heal themselves. The next layer unfolds when someone begins showing up for others in the same ways others once showed up for them. And the deepest expression of this path is the conscious choice to create space, intentionally, humbly, and consistently for others to do their own healing work.

To wrap this up…

We all come from a mother. In my case, a deeply wounded mother. I know many can relate to that. We are all born in a similar way. While our contexts and stories differ, each of us was formed in a mother’s womb and arrived here as a newborn. Our circumstances are not the same, but our origin is shared.

What I’m pointing to is this shared relationship with mystery. We all come to Being in the same mysterious way, and because of that, there is a depth of connection always available to us beneath our differences. We are far more alike than we realize. We all emerge from the mystery, and we are all doing the best we can with what we were born into.

So, what is your story? Who are the people who truly showed up for you in life-changing ways? What was the catalyst that set your healing journey in motion? How have you met the challenges that shaped who you are today? What has actually worked for you along the way?

These are the questions I hope you’re sitting with. Looking back at where you’ve been and honoring what you’ve become is a beautiful act of self-discovery. It’s a chance to celebrate.

Life may not be perfect, but take a moment to witness all you’ve endured. Look tenderly at the human you are, carrying wisdom earned simply by continuing to live, learn, and experience the unfolding.

Where are you now? What are you doing? Where do you want to go? These are essential questions on the healing path. And the most powerful truth about that path is this: you get to create the life you want. I know this because I’ve lived it. 

When healing is working, you can see it, not only in how you feel, but in the way your life begins to reflect your deepest dreams, either by becoming them or by steadily moving you closer and closer.

So here I am now, stepping into this healer role. Thank you for joining me here. I am learning what it means to be a healer, what it means to be enough, and what it means to already have everything I need to do this work. 

I never could have predicted that my life would lead me here, yet this is where it has guided me. I was reticent at first, but I can’t imagine anything more aligned. I am finding my own way through connection with all that is around me.

Wrapping it up even more… hehe

Let me be clear: I am still in the work, deeper than ever. I remain deeply, messily human. I have no interest in performing guruhood or projecting spiritual mastery. Instead, I continue to meet my edges again and again, using the tools I’ve gathered along the way. And each time I do, I feel those edges soften and expand, creating more space within me to hold others in their healing.

I care deeply about doing this work with integrity and Heart. I want to do the best I possibly can, and that means continually letting go of perfection, which I’ve learned is one of the greatest enemies of action. If there is one thing I trust above all else, it is this: listen to your Heart and act from that. 

Wherever the Heart beats is exactly where we are. We are here together, hearts beating simultaneously. The Heart speaks quietly, gently, and with a deep knowing. When we listen and act from that place, we rarely go wrong. And if you fall short of that, like I have many many times, just know you can’t mess this up. 

Blessings. I hope this has been supportive in some way. Much Love to you all.