For much of my life, it felt excruciating to be me.
An early life of ruptures and wounds had formed survival patterns into persona, obscuring the beauty of my true essence. By the time young adulthood came around, I had unknowingly been carrying decades of the unspoken generational weight of what had been carried before me. And still I pushed forward. I built a career, gave years of deep service, and then, when I knew it was time to leave, I leapt, and have kept leaping, chapter after chapter, in devoted search of the life I could feel waiting for me.
I have always felt guided. And there has always been an innate trust that resides deep in me that has allowed me to follow Source (Creator, the Great Mystery, God, Spirit, or the loving hands of the unseen), pointing me forward, listening and following, again and again.
Each step of the labyrinth I have walked felt guided and aligned at the time, until it didn’t. And the further I walked into the unknown, my mind would try to make sense of the path unfolding, to organize it into something I could understand, to know where it was leading me. At each unexpected turn, I would be reminded again and again that Source was not working on my mind's timeline, and that there was no point in attempting to control the outcome. The stepping stones were real and leading me somewhere, but in the living of it, all I could feel was that I kept arriving somewhere that wasn't quite it. The only honest path forward was to continue to say yes, trust in the unknown, and take one more step into the dark.
My healing journey began early. And for more than twenty years it has been one of the most constant and defining threads in my life. Not a linear process, or contained, but woven into everything. The choices I made, the paths I took, the way I moved through the world. I worked with dozens of practitioners and explored countless modalities, offering layer after layer of myself to the process of remembering who I am. Each process revealed something. Each experience shifted something. And still, for a long time, there felt like no escaping the pain of being me. It often felt in those years of deep work and struggle, as though something in me was irreparably lost.
I had grown up in a world where the path laid out before me was familiar. I knew early on that it wasn’t my path and that I would need to find my own way. I put myself through university, working alongside studying, taking on significant debt. Against considerable odds, I landed exactly the career I had worked toward. I gave myself to it fully for nearly a decade in roles that carried real weight and responsibility. But the impact I had imagined making was never quite reachable. And after years of giving everything I had, I was burned out, heartbroken, and slowly coming to terms with the fact that this path, the one I had fought so hard to build, was no longer the one.
By 2017, something had shifted on my journey that I could no longer ignore. I had stepped further onto my spiritual path than ever before, and what I found was an existential knowing so deep and undeniable that my entire life, as I had built it, could no longer stand. There was no running from it. No denying it. It felt choiceless at the time, like it was going to fall, whether I owned it or not.
Looking back, I can see that Source had designed my exit masterfully. The door opened through the things I loved dearly, creative pursuits and passions that had been running alongside my life and career for years. The plan was half-baked, but I understand now in retrospect that it was the only way I was ever going to leave, and time was of the essence.
And so everything that belonged to my old life fell away at once, work, relationships, home, and the structures I had built to keep myself safe. Not because I dismantled them deliberately, but because they had been dismantled. I walked out without a clear map, and what followed were some of the most disorienting, financially challenging, and ultimately formative years of my life.
In the wake of leaving it all behind and pursuing a creative entrepreneurial adventure, I began to find my way toward my path in the healing arts. People whose gifts I trusted had begun reflecting something back to me, that I was carrying my own healing gifts, that my sensitivity ran unusually deep. And so, I started to explore and train in the energetic realms. And I soon began to understand that what was moving through me didn't fit neatly into any single tradition. Every time I would attempt to align with a practice, school, lineage, or philosophy, it became increasingly clear that my path didn't fit inside a known label or box.
That journey of self discovery felt like a homecoming. For the first time, I began to understand why I was the way I was. My whole life I had carried my sensitivity as a burden, even a flaw, and now I began to see it as the gift it had always been.
What followed was a further series of leaps I hadn't planned, each one orchestrated by something greater than my carefully laid intentions. Costa Rica being one of them. I arrived unexpectedly, through circumstances I had not designed, and the Universe conspired to keep me here, closing doors behind me before I had the chance to consciously decide to stay. In those first years, this land held me through enormous initiations, cycles and thresholds. When the time came that I needed to say goodbye, the loss was profound. Only with time and clarity did I come to understand that my temporary exit from these sacred lands was a necessary reorientation, one that would allow me to return in a far stronger and more grounded way. It took time, but I kept listening and following, and eventually found my way back.
When I returned to Costa Rica on my own terms, I expected to find solid ground. And what I found instead, was further deep initiatory cycles. Things had shifted unexpectedly, and I found myself building a life from the ground up in a foreign land. It was one of the more intense chapters I had walked through, not because the external circumstances were catastrophic, but because the internal reckoning, death and rebirth had brought me to my knees.
In the years that have followed I have found my way. My relationship with these sacred lands and the spirits that move through them have led me to an incredibly beautiful and symbiotic relationship with the Bribri and Cabécar peoples, the indigenous stewards and protectors of the primary forest, waters and lands of Talamanca, here in the south Caribbean of Costa Rica. This relationship continues to inform my learning and practice in ways that go beyond what words can adequately hold.
What has emerged on the other side of every one of those initiations, is a life rooted in quiet, devoted service. My purpose continues to unfold with depth and power. And I am learning, more and more every day to trust in that.
I have become a woman deeply rooted in my heart. I have become a safe harbor for all of the parts of myself that were once exiled. I have journeyed to the far corners of my psyche and developed a relationship with the unseen that is clear, quiet and authentic. I am unafraid to live my truth and walk a path of integrity that needs not be seen by anyone. I am in deep, everlasting love with my essence and grateful for every aspect of my journey. I am a warrior in service to Source (Creator, the Great Mystery, God, Spirit) and am an ongoing, humble student of this life.
Living from this place feels like the kind of peace I never thought was possible. I am now capable of leading myself with both strength and gentleness, kindness and fierceness. I operate, for the most part, from the loving, safe inner space I spent decades searching for, and never knew I could build from within. And I continue to dedicate myself to my ongoing healing, learning and development. I have not arrived, but I can now confidently access peace within my heart and on my path.
I am a medicine woman and ceremonial space holder whose practice weaves shamanic energy medicine, somatic processing and ancestral healing among other practices and modalities. I work in relationship with the land, elemental forces, plant and animal spirits, and the unseen allies that move with us. I am honored to be a student learning within the cosmovision and spiritual practices of the Bribri and Cabécar peoples, and alongside my plant allies and other powerful medicine workers who are also walking the path of service in integrity. I work with a small number of people at a time, in containers that are unhurried, soul-led and held with the full strength of everything I have walked through to be here.
The path of the medicine worker is not chosen so much as it chooses you. It does so through a process of stripping away everything that is not true, initiation after initiation. My experience in deep immersion with plant allies has been an important part of my healing and learning, and has allowed me to explore behind the veil of ordinary reality and my psyche. Physical injury and illness has brought me into direct confrontation with my own body and its wisdom. Thresholds of grief, sacrifice and surrender have been incredible teachers. Each process left me more empty of what was false and more full of what is true. The emptying being the training.
If parts of my story feel resonant or familiar, know that the beauty and trust I have made my way to is not reserved for me. It's available for anyone. The journey is not easy, quick, or without cost. It is a lifelong unfolding that asks for your presence, your devotion, your willingness to make hard choices and the maturity to welcome parts of yourself home that you have long kept in exile.
If you are willing to show up for yourself, to advocate for yourself, to meet yourself with love and integrity and to face what needs facing, a life you may not yet be able to imagine becomes possible. Walking alongside another on this journey does not make the path shorter, but it provides something irreplaceable — a light and a hand in the dark, and the experience of being truly witnessed and seen along the way.
If you are ready to go deeper, I am here. Reach out.
Vané
My Story
