WHERE MEDICINE READINGS CAME FROM
I have always been able to see colors around people - it is as natural to me as feeling the sun on my face. One day I mentioned this to some of my friends, and I realized from their reactions that this was highly unusual. I began turning to mystical books in search of answers. It was then that I realized the colors I could see had a name, aura. Though life at home was extremely tumultuous, I felt solace in my fascination with art, like that of William Blake or the mystical poetry of Rumi and Hafiz.
Because there was no university for what I wanted to study, I had to find my own way. In my teens I began practicing zen meditation and then studied and taught Hatha Yoga and Ayurveda with a wild and powerful woman named Ifat. I traveled back and forth to Thailand where I studied sound, crystal, and energy healing. By the time I was twenty-four, I had built a solid following for my work and opened my first brick and mortar business where I facilitated what I called spiritual counseling and energy healing. I worked 60 hour weeks, offering my classes by donation while supporting all the other practitioners, and sometimes potato chips were all I had for dinner.
Eventually I had the honor of finding myself in an eight year Vegetalismo (plant medicine) apprenticeship going back and forth from New York to the Peruvian Amazon in Mestizo healing. Despite being terrified of singing, I persevered through a very intense but beautiful apprenticeship focused on singing to and fasting with the Amazonian plants. After eight years, my training culminated when I found and prepared my own Ayahuasca vine, only to realize that after all that hard work, I didn’t want to offer Ayahuasca ceremonies, because I didn’t want to give people anything outside themselves to heal.
Before awareness around cultural appropriation was more widely acknowledged, I started becoming very sensitive to the harm it can cause. During my apprenticeship, Ayahuasca went from being virtually unknown to very popular. I recognized that even though I had this rare, extremely authentic experience, this wasn’t my culture and it didn’t feel right to offer what wasn’t mine.
Around this same time, I gave birth to my daughter, despite having been told at a very young age that I wouldn’t be able to have children. As I held my newborn baby in my arms, I asked myself, if there was one thing I would want to give this child, what would it be? And what came through very clearly was confidence.
I knew in order to give this to her, I needed to have it for myself. Knowing this gave me the courage to be able to put down all of these titles, labels, and even identities that I had so diligently explored and passionately invested in and finally open up to seeing my own light. But I still wasn’t sure exactly what form my work was meant to take.
To support myself and my family, I got a job as a hostess in a vodka bar while my daughter slept. Though I had worked in plenty of service jobs, going down those stairs sort of felt like a metaphor for where I was in my life. When I was empty, and it felt like there was nothing in me but the energy of a black sky on a new moon, I sat in meditation and asked myself, if it is not this modality or this teaching or this plant medicine, what is it I am meant to do?
And very clearly, Medicine Readings came through: the components, how they weave together, the ritual bath prescription, and even the price, which was way outside the range I was comfortable asking for at the time. And somehow, I trusted it. I recognized that what was coming through was Love, and that even though Medicine Readings didn’t have an existing framework outside of me, Medicine Readings felt real and true for me.
As I started to learn more and more that healing work was not about me, things fell into place. It’s funny how life can hold us when we are finally ready to trust it. Even though I wasn’t sure how one day would lead to the next, something inside me said, keep going, you are doing well. Synchronicity would find its way to me at times when I was really willing to show up. Small but magical things would happen, and sometimes bigger ones, like when I showed up to a new healing space I was renting for the first time and the New York Times was there and asked to interview me.
It is this process of unearthing and trusting our own true healing light, this nature-based form of emergence, that I hope to inspire in my work.
There may never be a shortcut for you to learn who you are and what you can offer the world, but there is so much wisdom to be gained from deeply discerning what is Love and what is not, what is true for you and what is not. There may be no exact formula that works for everyone, but there are certainly tools, simple and ancient ways of knowing, that bring us back home to ourselves.
Medicine Readings are my way of sharing my ability to read auras and the gift of spiritual guidance I’ve been given, while still always inviting you to Be Your Own Healer. It’s important to me that what I share in our time together is always ran through your own processing system, and at the end of the day, I hope you forget it was me that even said it in the first place.
I hope you remember that all the wisdom you could ever need is inside of you, coming through the place within you that’s connected to the Love in all things.
