Born in the muggy, swampy, heat of the night in the Southern part of Florida, I grew up reading an R.L Stine a day while sucking Minute Maid triangle shaped, orange flavored juice bars as mosquitos zapped on the back porch in the background. The daughter of an atheist and a polytheist, I spent a few formative years living at a Hindu ashram with my mother and brother, which only aided to push me farther away from participating in organized religion. I preferred outer space as my theology and was known to skip class to sit in Barnes and Nobles and marvel at the oversized, colored pages of the universe in my lap.
Experiencing sexual and mental abuse throughout my childhood, I expressed these painful energies through three -isms for the better part of my adult life: lush-ism, wander-ism, and fornication-ism.
Tired of the same circus show, and on the brink of a nervous collapse, I left Florida at twenty-four with a one-way ticket to Tokyo and a backpack, embarking on a modern day, female hero’s journey, taking me across all seven continents and over fifty countries. However, like in most airports, I arrived to each new place with the same old baggage.
It wasn’t until I made the trek down to Peru, sat with shamans in the jungle and drank ayahuasca, that I was able to release the negative and harmful patterns of my past, and reclaim the parts of me that had been lost. And it only took drinking ayahuasca twenty times.
My mission now is to share my personal stories of transformation through the use of psychedelics and plant medicines to help shift the culture and world view of these sacred practices in relation to healing trauma and evolving our personal and collective consciousness.
I am lucky enough to live in a magical part of the world, Aspen, as I work on my memoir.