Cycles of Self Love

Cycles of Self Love

"You’re just another hippy girl."
Maybe so. Or maybe I'm a woman who chose a path against the current of the mainstream — one that demanded more strength, resilience, and unrelenting faith than I could have ever imagined. This is a window into my early years, the crucible that forged the bones of a modren shamanic awakening.

These initiations begin long before we recognize them. They’re written in the stars, braided into our bloodlines, sewn into the fabric of our childhood wounds. For those truly appointed, awakening begins not in light, but in extreme darkness.

As a child, my life unfolded as a long, unrelenting chain of traumatic events. I was shuttled in and out of the foster care system, each separation from my biological mother carving another wound into my heart. The grief of those losses was so visceral, so profound, it transfigured me. It was my first teacher in immortalizing pain and grasping the untamed depths of unconditional love.

At twelve years old, desperate for reprieve, I wrote a letter to God asking to attend boarding school. Four years later, against every odd, that prayer was answered. I was accepted into a private Ivy League-affiliated school in Regina, Saskatchewan — a monumental turning point in my life. Before Luther College, I could barely open a book, let alone imagine articulating the concepts I now carry. That school prepared me for dimensions of life I didn't yet know existed. I was immersed in a nurturing, diverse, and artistic community that cracked open my mind and soul.

From there, I pursued a degree in Social Work — a field I understood intimately from the inside, though not yet from the outside. Each class unearthed buried grief and awakened me to a sobering truth: the systems designed to save us were breaking us. I had a vision of becoming a clinical social worker, someone who might shift those structures from within. But even then, I knew I’d drown beneath the endless weight of other people’s suffering. My empathy ran too deep, my spirit too tender.

I was disillusioned by the materialistic culture around me. I could feel the heaviness in everyday transactions — the unseen suffering that clung to products in store aisles, the ache behind assembly lines and marketing campaigns. Learning the story behind Coca-Cola — a product once concocted to stimulate soldiers during war — unraveled something in me. I began seeing the ripple effects: obesity, addiction, ADHD, and the epidemic of poor mental health we now collectively bear. These realizations sent me into waves of mental and emotional breakthroughs, each one a summons back to nature.

I moved to Nelson, BC, and everything shifted. What began as a relocation soon became a full-blown shamanic awakening. At times, it felt like lightning bolts coursed through my body, cracking me open from the inside out. I spoke of it to no one, except one dear friend fresh from deep healing work in Peru and training with Keith, the Cacao Shaman of Guatemala. He became my anchor, my teacher, and a safe harbour as my world dissolved and reassembled.

We traveled down the coast of California as I left university behind, searching for a way to balance the bipolar symptoms that gripped me. Surfing became my sanctuary. It was during those sacred moments in the ocean that I threw my last bottle of medication into the water and vowed to find another way.

Later, I returned to academia — this time to a holistic medicine school in Victoria, BC. The difference was immediate and visceral. In small, sacred circles, I studied everything from organ systems to organic farming, finally learning to nourish both my body and soul.

Throughout it all, I carried a complex relationship with my body. In my earlier university years, as a competitive middle- and long-distance runner on the national track and field team, I suffered from amenorrhea, a binge eating disorder, and severe hormonal imbalances. But through my shamanic awakening, my menstruation returned, and I began the long, slow journey of healing my relationship with food and reclaiming my womanhood.

I was only medicated briefly at 17 and 18. But even then, I knew the pharmaceutical industry was never designed to heal the soul. My mother’s life was a testament to that — a woman with severe mental illness, abused by a system that numbed but never nurtured her. Her unhealed trauma passed to me, a dark inheritance I carried in my body like a ghost.

My childhood was a study in extremes: light and darkness, life and death, torture and silence. No one around me knew the depths I was wading through. But at eleven years old, I forged a connection with my higher self — a guiding light that would never leave me, even when I wanted to leave myself.

I didn't choose this path. It was chosen for me. Every ounce of suffering, every dark night, every cosmic initiation was designed to dismantle me so I could remember the truth of who I am. God’s voice, though faint at times, was always there. And though I railed against it in agony, some part of me knew I was being prepared for something far greater than my own life.

For years, I remained silent, shackled by shame. I felt unworthy to bring the heaviness of rape, family neglect, and abuse to God's altar. These wounds felt filthy, impure, unredeemable. It took decades to understand that healing isn’t about purity — it’s about reclamation.

And so, I began. I walked the tightrope between victim and savior, learning the seduction and suffering of both. I fell, relapsed, rose again. Through forgiveness, compassion, and an unyielding devotion to feeling it all, I began to clear lifetimes of pain — not just for myself, but for the collective human spirit.

This work has never felt like mine alone. It is for every soul aching in the shadows, for those silenced by suffering, for those whose pain society would rather forget. Through these cycles of self-love, I’ve become a vessel for what humanity so deeply needs: to truly feel pain, to hold suffering with tenderness, and to remember that within our deepest wounds lies the medicine of our liberation.

And now — finally — I speak.

“Cycles of Self Love”