SO, HOW DID I GET HERE?
My childhood dream, and everything I worked towards from the age of 16, became reality at age 32. I'd worked with some of the best creative companies in the world and built a few of my own. On paper, it looked like I'd made it. In practice, I felt like I'd become someone else to get there. And when I finally arrived, I was still unhappy and unfulfilled. My outer world didn't match my inner world, and I wasn't sure how I got there, what I needed to change, or how to change it.
I'd assumed the stress was just the cost of a career in art and commerce, not realizing I'd been out of alignment for most of it. I found my happy place sometimes. The rest of the time was wearing me down, in the business and outside of it.
I tried what a lot of people try when something's off. Change jobs. Move cities. Self-medicate. Talk therapy, which gave me a safe place to say things out loud, but not much more than that. Every self-help book and video in reach. None of it moved the needle the way I wanted it to, partly because I didn't have the personal structure, healthy discipline, or ongoing accountability I needed. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready to listen.
What actually shifted things was more specific. A business coach and entrepreneurial support group that taught me about measurable results and kept me accountable. A Vedic meditation teacher who taught me how to quiet a mind that never stopped narrating, and how to actually be present. A career coach, a University of Santa Monica graduate, who gave me clarity and a compass point after I'd shut down my childhood dream and lost my footing. The change in me was obvious. People started asking what I was doing differently, so I asked my coach if she'd take me on as an apprentice. She agreed, and taught me how to do for others what she'd gifted me.
Those acquired tools led me to run my own career coaching practice for twelve years, helping people find and build careers that didn't require them to disappear inside them. It also led me back to the classroom, teaching creativity and critical thinking at UT Austin, and eventually to a weekend workshop on Soul Purpose that gave me the courage to claim the title of "artist" and return to my own uncompromising art practice as a profession.
From there, I completed the two-year Advanced Spiritual Psychology program at the University of Santa Monica, which didn't just give me language for things I'd already been circling, it gave me real tools, tested across hundreds of hours working with others through the same deeper stuff. It showed me how integrated inner work was to outer work. It's also where I recognized how I actually share my gifts with the world, through art, and now as a guide. That's where something clicked: however different our circumstances, most of what gets in the way of living life on our terms traces back to the same handful of things. Limiting beliefs. Self-worth. Old stories we keep telling long after they've stopped being true.
I don't pretend to have all the answers. I'm a work in progress, same as anyone I'd work with. I've peeled away plenty of layers of my own onion and learned that there's always another layer underneath. What's changed is that I can recognize my own patterns from a higher altitude. I can tell the difference between the voice that's actually mine and the ones I inherited and stopped believing a while ago. And I can move through the barriers that get between me and my former self a lot faster. That difference shows up in real, transformative ways. Thanks to a practice that keeps giving me back to myself.