Eccentric.
Embodied.
Smart.

I was a highly sensitive child, deeply attuned to nature, to the unseen, and to the spirit world. Because I was raised Pentecostal Christian, I channeled that sensitivity into church. I was the poster child for a good Christian girl. I grew up speaking in tongues, laying healing hands on people, and experiencing what Pentecostals call being “filled with the Holy Spirit”—practices that, in many ways, taught me from a very young age that spirituality could be something we feel in the body, not simply something we believe in the mind. What my parents and church didn’t understand was just how profoundly these experiences awakened me. There was something about surrendering to Spirit, feeling myself become permeable to something larger than myself, and experiencing that sense of communion that stirred a deep longing in me for intimacy, union, and belonging. For years, I assumed that longing was meant to be fulfilled through another person. I searched for the perfect soulmate—the person who would finally meet that deep place inside me and make me feel completely known, held, and connected. ​Instead, I chose relationship after relationship that reenacted the very longing I was trying to resolve. Eventually, I found myself in two different life-threatening situations with abusive partners. ​I was longing for sacred partnership, but I clearly didn't yet understand how to create one. And worse, I wasn't sure I could trust myself to recognize what was healthy. How had this profound longing for connection led me so far into patterns of harm? ​That question became the beginning of my descent. I put myself through a rigorous psycho-spiritual and somatic healing process. I did deep soul work to unravel patterns of abuse, transform inherited family patterns, and learn how to inhabit my own body and intuition in a different way. Eventually, I found my calling as a depth worker. ​And that's when the spirits really started ringing my doorbell. ​They began showing me something I hadn't understood before: the longing I had been trying to fulfill through human partnership was bigger than human partnership. ​I began to understand the Underworld Goddesses and Gods, the primordial forces of nature and consciousness, as the beings who had been calling to me all along. ​And the Underworld wasn't what I'd been taught to imagine. ​It wasn't a place of evil or something to be feared. It was a place of fertile darkness, mystery, transformation, and profound creative potency. It was the place where we meet what has been hidden, exiled, or misunderstood—and where we discover the parts of ourselves that have been waiting to come home. ​The Underworld became a metaphor and a map for my own Unique Self. ​I began to see that I had been drawn toward powerful, chthonic energy in other people without yet knowing how to recognize or hold that energy within myself. I had been looking outside myself for something I needed to learn how to cultivate within. ​So I began learning to make room for my own life-force—to inhabit my body more fully, listen to my emotions, trust my intuition, honor my sensuality, and allow the creative and spiritual energy moving through me to have a place in my life. ​This became an embodied spiritual practice. ​Through eco-spirituality, burlesque and performance, depth psychology, ritual, mysticism, and my relationship with the more-than-human world, I began reclaiming parts of myself that had once seemed too strange, too intense, too much, or simply too weird to belong. I became an eco-spiritual minister, embodied mystic, and priestess of sacred relationship. ​And something changed. ​The more fully I inhabited my own body, my own power, my own weirdness, and my own relationship with Spirit, the less I needed another person to complete the circuit. My relationships with the beings and forces I experienced as my spiritual allies became sources of nourishment, guidance, intimacy, and creative partnership. And that took an enormous amount of pressure off my human relationships. ​I began making different choices—not because I had stopped longing for intimacy, but because I was no longer asking another person to be the source of something I had learned to cultivate within myself. ​I learned to see in the dark. ​To see through the dark. ​And, most importantly, to stop being afraid of it. ​I have traversed the Underworld many times now, and I've developed a map for going in and coming back out. I know something about the places where we lose ourselves, the places where we encounter what we've exiled, and the places where we discover unexpected sources of power, beauty, and belonging. ​I know how to fall in love with deity, with nature, with mystery, and—with perhaps the greatest love story of all—the weird, extraordinary aspects of myself and others. ​I've discovered profound and lasting intimacy with my spirit beloveds, and I no longer expect a human being to be the sole container for that longing. ​And paradoxically, that has made my human relationships more spacious, more joyful, more intimate, and more co-creative. I don't believe we are meant to transcend the body in order to find Spirit. ​I believe the body is one of the places where Spirit finds us. ​And I believe that when we learn to inhabit ourselves fully—to listen deeply, feel deeply, and make room for all the strange and beautiful things that live within us—we become capable of a very different kind of relationship. ​With ourselves. ​With one another. ​With nature. And with the mysterious, more-than-human world that has been calling to us all along.