Awake

This is the story of my becoming. With an honest and humorous voice, I detail my otherworldly, gut-wrenching, and heart-opening adventures in spiritual awakening, emotional healing, and intuitive development.

This is the book I needed but never found on my own twenty-year path. It is a glimpse beyond the veneer of spiritual perfection into the living, breathing heart of reclaiming our wholeness. It is intended to affirm our faith in the benevolence of life, align us with the voice of our heart, and redeem the suffering that breaks our hearts open to compassionate service.

I couple my story with poems that transcend the linear mind and Tarot symbology to evoke the universal nature of our journey Home. Much of the narrative takes the form of conversational dialogues with friends, boyfriends, healers, astrologers, therapists, and unseen beings.

By detailing my own experiences with past lives, astrology, Tarot, intergenerational healing, plant medicine, inner child work, trauma therapy, energy work, channeling, and starseeds, Awake illuminates how embodiment transcends the meditation cushion. It galvanizes a wholehearted embrace of the messiness, fierceness, and grace of life as vital parts of the journey to liberation.

Drink it in. Let it teach you how to transmute or die.

 Upside Down World

My favourite Tarot card has always been the Hanged Man. There he is smiling amusedly while hanging on for dear life. From where does he source his easeful surrender? The Hanged Man is a powerful symbol because he represents the role of paradox in our lives: Through letting go, he transmutes a torture instrument into a symbol of divine glory. He has no control but complete freedom, no time but exists in the timeless, no recourse for action because he has already gotten his way. He jolts us out of our half-baked assumptions and flings us unceremoniously into the arms of truths hidden in their opposites.

The Hanged Man is also the inspiration for my first children’s book. After learning from children for twelve years as an educator, I wanted to return the favour and give them a sense of the great truths of life in a language they could understand. I also wanted to honour the universal nature of the lessons by setting them in a different culture. And so the story of a young Turkish girl discovering the paradoxes at the core of life was born. The more she gives, the richer she feels, the happier she is alone, the more friends she makes, the more she embraces the quiet parts of life, the more she discovers that it is a beautiful mystery.