What is a Shaman?

• Roots

I was born into a lineage of healers, dreamers, and intuitive people- the kind who always knew things without needing words. My Mayan roots run deep, and though I didn't fully understand their meaning as a child, I always felt the pull of something sacred in the natural world.

The women in my family carried medicine, but fear and religion buried it under silence. My grandmother - the keeper of that lineage - never spoke of it. She withheld the truth, whether out of fear, conditioning, or her own pain. I wouldn't understand that until she came to me years after her death.

• Breaking Point

I didn't grow up in a home that understood emotions. In my family, feelings were things you swallowed, not expressed. Love came with conditions. Authenticity came with punishment. I learned early how to shrink myself, how to take on everyone else's chaos and call it peace. It made me strong in survival, but empty inside. I built a career in corporate hospitality, became a massage therapist, opened a wellness business - on paper, I was thriving. Inside, I was burning out. When that business collapsed, I lost everything I thought I was.

• The Awakening

I ran to the mountains of North Carolina to breathe, to hide, maybe to disappear. There, in the stillness, I met the truth I'd been avoiding. One night, my grandmother appeared - not as a memory, but in form. Her eyes were fierce. She said, 'Wake the fuck up. I'm sorry I didn't tell you the truth. You need to know who you are, and you need to act now.' That moment shattered me open. It wasn't gentle - it was a spiritual intervention. The woman who hid the medicine handed it to me in death, and I couldn't pretend not to hear.

Since that night, I've walked the long road of remembering. Cognitive Behavior Therapy, ceremony, deep shamanic study, brutal honesty - it's all part of it. I'm still walking it.

I still live among the same family patterns that once crushed my

spirit, but I no longer give them my power. Healing, I've learned, isn't about escaping the fire; it's about learning to stand in it without losing yourself.

If you're reading this and still living in the chaos - if you're exhausted from trying to hold it all together - I see you. You're not broken. You're Becoming.

Healing isn't a straight line. It's messy, humbling, and holy work. You don't need to be ready. You just need to be willing.

If you're done pretending and ready to reclaim your truth, I'd be honored to walk beside you.

 Let us begin this journey together, my friend.