I was fourteen when I first dreamed of opening a studio that I didn’t yet think existed. My dream was to open a “one stop shop” for all things related to well-being. This thought felt particularly novel, given I grew up in a small town in Kansas that didn’t have the faintest idea about what I’ve come to know as healthy. Think Wonderbread, fast food, and daily consumption of sodas, and you’ll understand my childhood. In my mind, the studio had a smoothie bar, a yoga room, a meditation garden, and various holistic practitioners: acupuncturists, massage therapists, and mental health therapists, to name a few. I was sixteen years old when I stumbled onto the actual existence of a Mind, Body, Spirit Center in Iowa, and from that moment on, I knew I was onto something.

Throughout my youth, I could tell something wasn’t quite right in my body, but I also didn’t have anywhere to really turn for answers, guidance, or insight. The few times I mentioned something to my local doctor, I was told there was nothing wrong with me. I always had strange symptoms, and no one could ever give me any type of answer as to what was causing them. Additionally, I never really had much energy.

I also felt very different from others around me, as I seemed to be a deeper thinker and feeler than most of my peers. By the way, I’m not saying in any way I was “better” than anyone. If anything, I felt more flawed and like something was wrong with me, given I couldn’t really find anyone to reflect my inner experience back to me. All of that changed, though, when my health took a drastic turn, and I ended up at the Mayo Clinic due to ongoing, mysterious, grand mal-esque seizures my senior year of high school. This led to a whole host of exploration into various healing modalities, including seeing a local therapist who practiced hypnotherapy.

Though hypnotherapy didn’t cure my seizures, it finally gave me a space where I could explore and express the depths of myself. I had always been a vivid dreamer, and my experience of hypnotherapy was similar to that of a waking dream. One session would leave me in an almost peace-trance for a few days. I decided to follow in my therapist’s footsteps, and set my sights on becoming a Marriage & Family Therapist who was also trained in hypnotherapy.

The Youngest in the Room

I was seventeen when I graduated high school, and I was twenty when I graduated with my undergraduate degree. I was a woman on a mission! But more than that, everything I learned in my undergraduate degree was aligned with family systems theory, human development, and self-actualization through the lifespan. It was as if I was beginning my Masters curriculum before I actually did. I’d always had a passion for families, seeing patterns, and helping people become the fullest version of themselves, so none of my schooling ever really felt like “work”.

I finished my Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy at twenty-three, leaving me as the youngest in my cohort. Before I’d even graduated, I was already trained in hypnotherapy and using it with clients during my internships. I continued to use it for years afterward and was always blown away by the level of access people could gain into themselves. Hypnotherapy changed the way I saw things, leading me to recognize how much of what we call “who we are” is really just the meaning we assign to something that once happened to us, even in a moment that might not be consciously remembered.

Coupling this information with my family systems lens, I found a way of seeing people not as isolated symptoms, but as parts of life’s unfolding of a story much bigger than any one person. Everything felt connected to something more, something deeper, or something previous & unconscious.

I opened my first private practice that same year at twenty-three years old, carrying both of those frameworks and a hunger to keep learning that hasn’t let up since.

Pitstops Along the Way and the Widening

A few years after graduating, I began working at a natural health clinic. I didn’t start out practicing therapy there; instead, I used the experience to learn more about the fascinating relationship between the mind, body, and spirit. Many of the patients would come from all over the country—sometimes from different countries, seeking answers to some of their chronic and mysterious health conditions. The clinic specialized in Lyme Disease, but we saw many other cases too. Eventually I made a case for the mental health component of the patients’ journeys and began doing therapy there as well.

I learned various ways our bodies communicate with us, including how some of our physical symptoms can be linked to difficult emotions or traumatic experiences from the past. My own meditations deepened, and I was able to hear my own body’s voice in a way I hadn’t fully recognized before. After some time had passed, I felt something else beginning to stir in me. While I enjoyed the work I was doing, I still felt there was more to explore. Without much more than a hope, an intuitive hunch, and an inner pull, I packed up my car, stepped away from my practice, and moved to Southern California.

That’s where the mind-body-spirit connection I’d sensed as a teenager became more embodied. There were clean juice shops on nearly every corner, and loads of healthy, fresh food that my tastebuds didn’t know they’d been missing. I began practicing yoga with serious yoga teachers. I joined a Life Beyond Death group, and we each shared our experiences of loss and our evidence of how consciousness lives on after the body ceases to exist. I had my first astrology reading. I met with a few psychic mediums. I began deep bodywork, and I was in acupuncture regularly. And I was in therapy with a holistic, body-based therapist. Needless to say, I was the healthiest I’d ever been in my entire life, and it felt good. Really, really good.

When I moved back to the Midwest a few years later and opened a second practice, I brought all of it with me, whether I announced it or not.

Souls, Not Clients

Here’s the thing nobody tells you in graduate school: some of what makes a practice actually work has very little to do with technique. I never thought of the people I worked with as clients, even though that’s the word I still use. I thought of them as souls. And something about the way I showed up—curious, unguarded, willing to see more of a person than the intake form asked for—let people feel cared for in a way that went beyond the clinical frame of I am the therapist, you are the client.

That depth was the thing people said they couldn’t find anywhere else. It was also the thing that, over time, started to create friction.

The White Coat Problem

Depending on who sat across from me, I found myself having to hold back. Not because what I had to offer wasn’t real or wasn’t helpful. It was more so because some people had come in expecting a very specific kind of clinical work, and anything outside that frame risked reading as unprofessional, or worse, illegitimate. I respected that line. I still do. So at times I built bridges instead. For instance, sometimes I’d point out that Carl Jung, one of the actual forefathers of modern psychology, ran an astrological natal chart for every psychoanalysis patient he saw. I wasn’t pulling a rabbit out of a black hat or any other voo doo thing that one could’ve tried to project onto me. In fact, I was standing in a much older tradition than people realized.

But increasingly, I ran into something harder to bridge: clients who wanted me to be the expert in the white coat. White coat thinking meant I was the authority figure with all of the answers. I would be the one to dole out the diagnoses, the one who took full responsibility for them, and the one who carried the weight of their healing for them. I understand the appeal of that. I even understand the need for it, sometimes, for a little while. But my actual goal has never been to be the authority on someone else’s life. In fact, my goal has been the exact opposite. I seek to get people back in touch with their own soul. When someone hands themselves over that completely and has no interest in taking back over at some point, it doesn’t just slow the work down, it puts a kind of liability on me that was never mine to carry.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the majority of the people I worked with, but it led me to do a lot of my own soul reflecting on who I was as a practitioner and what I was (and wasn’t) willing to sign up for in my therapy office. I knew I valued the therapeutic relationship and wanted to continue to help others grow, but I still felt my own need to grow myself into who I knew myself to be deep down. I felt the pressure to conform to the “clinical white lab coat therapist” but knew that wasn’t me. One afternoon while driving home from work, I was reminded of a dream I’d had of a PhD program in Georgia that offered coursework on the psychology of mind, body, and spirit. I went home and immediately began my application.

Georgia, and the Deeper Dive

I moved to Georgia to pursue my PhD in transpersonal and humanistic psychology, closing my Midwest practice and opening a new one there. I spent those years going deeper into Jung: learning to analyze dreams, speak with the unconscious, and access the parts of a person that talk therapy alone rarely reaches. Somewhere in there, I stopped practicing hypnotherapy, having outgrown what it could offer me. I trained in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, and I also went down the neurofeedback rabbit hole for a while.

It was also around this time that trauma became the word everyone in the field was saying, all the time, about everyone. It’s real, and it’s very important work. I don’t discount that for a second. But I noticed the toll of the field’s near-total fixation on it: the heaviness in the way a person’s story can start to calcify around a single wound. What I’ve found, again and again, is that when people can be helped to see what happened to them from a perspective larger than the event itself, something shifts that trauma-processing alone doesn’t always reach. Getting someone open to that bigger view is often the hardest part. But once they are, it changes everything.

It was also in Georgia that I underwent formal training in psychological astrology, eventually earning my diploma in that as well. That training changed how I see our everyday world, in big and small ways: I can no longer ignore the archetypes moving through a person, finding their way through a headline, or making their way through our culture. Using astrology as a symbolic reflection of what is going on within a person’s psyche and bringing that into a clinical setting has been of tremendous value to many of the people I work with. Often, the common thing I hear is, “Ohhh, that makes so much more sense now.”

My study of astrology and desire to use it therapeutically also made an old problem sharper: it’s very hard to reach someone who is married to their suffering, their diagnosis, or their story, from a viewpoint that big. The shift to being a beloved member of the cosmos and seeing life as being the bringer of lessons—sometimes extremely painful lessons, but nevertheless, lessons—is very, very different than seeing yourself as a victim of your circumstances. Casting blame without looking to see what the underlying meaning of a life event might be for you is the same as missing the forest for the trees.

To be clear, I don’t need every client to be on a quest for the deepest soul work available, nor do I reject the idea that horrifying, traumatic things happen to us all the time that are no fault of our own and are beyond our control. I love working with people on ordinary, wholesome conflicts such as marital communication, everyday anxiety, and the regular stuff of being human, as well as helping them sort through some of the traumatic material that’s been left unprocessed within them.

I’m also not looking to be seen as more enlightened than anyone. I just wanted people to be looking for a safe space to explore their insides and discover deeper dimensions of who they are, what makes them tick, and how to separate themselves from the patterns they inherited. I just never wanted to be seen as a white coat with all the answers or an expert whose knowledge is supposed to be someone’s cure. Instead, I wanted to bring who I am and what I have to offer, from one soul to another, and see what new pathways we might be able to forge together.

What I Learned From the Other Side

In my own years of seeking and immersing myself in clinical theory, academia, and New Age Spirituality, I’ve met with many, many different practitioners with different sets of credentials. One thing I learned is that there is no “pure path” or one right way to do anything. Additionally, people are drawn into the holistic health world for all sorts of reasons and motivations. I’ve run into some flat out dangerous practitioners who put on a good show at first. I’ve met people with incredible life stories and who have a genuine servant’s heart. And I’ve met people who are brilliant but have very large shadows they are unconscious of, leaving them with no choice but to project that onto the people they’re working with.

When you feel you’ve tried the mainstream approaches and are wanting to look at a less conventional or more spiritually-oriented solution, just know that just because someone practices something different or more holistic, that doesn’t make them an adept, skilled practitioner. People are people, and it’s important to use your discernment, listen to your gut, and do some real research before subjecting yourself to anything different than what you’re used to. Sometimes people who take on the “guru” status are the people we most need to be on guard with.

What I came to understand, underneath all of the various experiences I’ve had, is disarmingly simple: what actually helps people is a practitioner who can be fully present with them, and see a little further into them than they can yet see into themselves. That’s it. That’s the thing that makes someone feel safe. Everything else, whether it be the modality, the credential, the language used, is secondary. I’ve since stepped back from most of the outside seeking I used to do, and I feel good about that. I don’t want to be part of the problem of bouncing from thing to thing or chasing the next promise to help someone achieve mastery. Instead, I want to be part of the solution. A real, grounded approach to spiritually-integrative, soul work that also accounts for the psychological component of our nature.

Finding My Native Tongue

A few years ago, I moved back to the Midwest (Kansas City, MO) for good and opened my current practice here, while still working virtually with some clients from my Georgia years. About a year after that move, I trained in the Akashic Records. It turned out to be the missing piece I hadn’t known I was missing.

I’ve always been intuitive, finding myself more attuned to a person’s soul and unconscious than to whatever their conscious mind happened to be saying in a session. Learning to open the Records gave that instinct an actual language—a way to have direct dialogue with someone’s soul that feels as natural to me as breathing. I’ve since brought it into sessions with some clients, and what’s happened in a single Akashic reading has, more than once, gone deeper than months of talk therapy could reach.

Which leaves me with the question I’m still living inside: how do I offer more of this—regularly, openly, as a real part of what I do—without losing the rigor and structure that clinical training gave me, or running up against the lines that clinical work still, rightly, has?

I don’t have a tidy answer yet. But I know this much: whatever I build next won’t ask people to choose between the psychological and the spiritual. That was never a real choice to begin with. It’s the studio I dreamed up at fourteen, minus the smoothie bar—a place where the whole person gets to show up, and so do I.

If you’re looking for that same kind of space — one that holds your psychology and your soul with equal seriousness — I’d love to have you in a session. Book a session or learn more about how I work.