Discomfort and disease are one of your body’s primary ways of communicating with you; every ailment is its attempt to draw your attention to specific ways in which you are not living in alignment with your actual needs or beliefs. Despite what we may tell ourselves, our body does not care that we *have* to do something we don’t want to do, or that we think we *should* do something we don’t want to do, or that we are unhappy with our circumstances but are unable to change them at the moment; it only knows that we are unhappy, and it will keep beating us with the Unhappy Stick until we either change our perspective and find genuine peace or the situation shifts.

Physical issues, or persistent anxiety or depression, can certainly occur if we are experiencing a purely physical imbalance such as nutrient deficiency or toxicity—This is one of the reasons I always prefer a client to have seen their primary care physician for a comprehensive metabolic panel before they see me for a chronic ailment. Sometimes, it really is as simple as you are not getting enough iron or vitamin D! However, when this is not the case, our ailments usually indicate that our emotions are involved, and that we are chronically dismissing, minimizing, rationalizing, or refusing to let ourselves feel unpleasant emotions such as guilt, shame, grief, sadness, fear, resentment, or anger. These emotions can be related to something current, they can be linked to past wounds or trauma, they can be reflective of worries surrounding future events or encounters, or they can be a combination of all the above. Just because we tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel something doesn’t mean that we don’t; again, the body is not interested in your judgements or justifications. Ordering yourself to stop grieving, for example, is not the same as actually moving through a necessary period of grief, a period whose duration we do not get to choose. The body knows the difference.

This is why any experienced healer will tell you that to heal, you need to feel.

Many times, despite our very best efforts and intentions, we cannot figure out what we are feeling; some of us are not inherently deep feelers, or we find the experience of feeling unpleasant and avoid feeling at all costs, meaning that when we do try to feel, we don’t know how to interpret our emotions or what to do with them. Or, if we do know what we are feeling, we do not know why. Sometimes we know, but for the life of us we can’t figure out how the heck to let those feelings go. That’s where I come in. During your session, I will help you understand how to feel your emotions (This is both simpler and more complicated than you might expect, depending on your degree of experience in this arena), interpret your body’s messages, and provide you with the tools to begin healing.

Sometimes healing happens in session. I have had countless instances of colds, flus, sore throats, allergies, chronic coughs, vertigo, migraines, back aches, and other assorted ailments begin to resolve or simply cease for a client during session. Anxiety and depression can also be affected to a significant degree. Other times, healing begins as you continue working on yourself for days, weeks, months, or years to come. If we are attempting to eliminate a disease that has been with us for a long time, we need to change what is likely a deep-rooted mental and emotional pattern, and this takes patience and persistence. There can be quick fixes with this kind of healing—sometimes, we are so relieved that someone finally hears us that we just let go of the maladaptive emotional patterns all at once, and our body responds instantly. But these kind of fixes are rarely permanent; the moment we are put back in the kind of situation that prompted those patterns in the first place, our old responses will tend to reassert themselves, and with them the illness-cycle begins all over again. To truly heal and completely cease recreating an illness in our body, we first need to understand the precipitating mental and emotional patterns, and then it usually takes some time to change them. As we do so, the body begins to repair itself, with a complete return to healthy functioning depending on numerous factors, including the initial amount of damage; the degree to which we are honoring our body’s individual needs for nutrition, physical activity, and rest; and the speed of our progress towards a full release of the patterns that created the issue in the first place. For some of us, this may be the first time we’ve ever tried to treat ourselves with love after a lifetime of living with a tyrant in our brains. And like any new thing, we all fumble a bit in the beginning, and practice makes perfect.

I am my own best example of how this all works. Years and years of supposedly seasonal- and pet-allergies, severe acne, sinus infections, chronic pain, constant panic attacks, and a myriad of other ailments are so far behind me that I can’t recall when I experienced the last bout. I haven’t had the flu in over a decade despite never getting a flu shot, and my last cold was years ago. BUT I also have an auto-immune disease for which I still take medication. The medication allows me to remain mentally and physically functional, giving me the ability to continue working with and releasing the emotional patterns that created the disease. This work has been a tremendous gift for me; as I’ve steadily focused on facing, feeling, and releasing the specific insecurities and other maladaptive beliefs linked to the illness, I have become a much happier, outrageously more authentic individual. In healing this part of my body, I am becoming me. When the emotional issues are all finally resolved, I expect my body to finish healing itself as well. In the meantime, I bless the illness for all that it’s helping me learn and love about being myself, even on days when it annoys me. Ultimately, every illness is a blessing, if we can understand what it’s trying to show us.

When people talk about fate or destiny, it tends to be depicted as something that is imposed upon us, something that we do not want but to which we must ultimately surrender. But Destiny and Desire are actually one and the same. We are all gifted with a powerful, internal Knowing: we Know what we are supposed to do with our lives, and who we are supposed to be, because, if we were to strip away all of our fears and limiting beliefs about ourselves and our life, we would want to do or be that thing. This is not to say that there won’t be challenges, and that some aspects of the journey will not be painful; pain is the great teacher, and our lives are defined by how we confront challenges, both those desired and those seemingly thrust upon us. But if we were able to have a heart-to-heart conversation with our soul, it would tell us EXACTLY what it wanted from life, and that oh-so-wonderful-feeling wanting would align precisely with what we are SUPPOSED to do with our time here.

So why aren’t we all living our destinies and simply and effortlessly being who we are? Because we have a million-billion-trillion rules, overt and unwritten both, that vehemently tell us that honoring what feels good is bad, bad, bad. On top of that, we harbor conscious and unconscious beliefs about what would happen to us if we disregarded the rules and did those things anyway, and these beliefs either keep us from trying, or they create the circumstances necessary to sabotage our desires if we do.

My role here is to:

1. Help you strip away all the “rules” and beliefs that prevent you from hearing and honoring your true desires—the ones you are meant to possess!—, both those related to being who you really are and those concerning actions you would like to take.

2. Help you understand how these beliefs were developed, and the wounds that reinforced them.

3. Validate these desires through explaining to you exactly how they are represented in your astrological and numerological charts (which, believe me, they will be. Contrary to the way it is often depicted by pop-culture, astrology is neither witchcraft nor fanciful hocus-pocus. It is a math-based method of examining how you fit into Existence, and it is multifaceted, complicated, and comprehensive. Most people who belittle or demonize astrology do not actually understand how it works and/or have never had their chart done by expert astrologer). I may also employ my intuitive abilities, which, while we are speaking, allow me to pinpoint areas of your inner- and outer-life which need specific attention.

By the end of your session, it is my intention that you feel validated, liberated, encouraged, and eager to go forth and BE YOU!

What is an animal totem? While the English word “totem” has Native American roots, the concept is universal and found in almost every ancient and indigenous culture worldwide, from Australia to China to England to Norway to the Sudan. Each of these cultures had/has its own unique beliefs about totems, including their role in our lives and the way in which one connects with them.

A complete discussion of totems is beyond the scope of this space, but one of the best ways to understand them in a modern context is as symbols for our unique selves, representing both what we love and what we fear about ourselves, and everything in between. Each totem (we all have at least a handful, as we are far too complicated for our Self to be encompassed by a single creature) also connects with specific aspects of our personalities and the targeted challenges that we experience in learning to understand and embrace these parts of ourselves. They represent our dark sides and our potentials: When we are able to identify a totem, it can teach us about who we are now, who we want to be, and how to go about getting there.

People always ask me if our totems are “real” animals, as in, is a Bear-spirit really coming to me and teaching me? In my experience, No and Yes and Maybe. I’ve had totem animals appear for my clients and for myself in more ways than I can count. Yesterday, a possum trundled through my garden at a time when possums never meander through. Possum is a totem for a dear friend of mine that I messaged that day after not having spoken with her for some time. Every time Possum comes by, I’ve either just interacted with her or will within a few days, so I know she got my message. So, a real live possum just stopped by on behalf of my Possum Person friend, but when Polar Bear wants to let me know something important about my mother, I’ve yet to see a Polar Bear in my garden! Most of the time, when I interact with one of my own totems, or with a client’s, it’s through a brief vision or a sudden Knowing that that critter is present. When I was in the middle of yoga the other day, I had an intense vision of an enormous dragonfly landing on my chest. Was there a real dragonfly? No. Did it feel like there was? Oh my, yes. Sometimes there’s just a concentrated imagery-fest; everywhere I look, there’s a t-shirt or bumper-sticker or billboard or tattoo of that animal. Sometimes the animal shows up prominently in a dream. At the end of the day, I figure the actual nature of the animal—real creature, spirit, manifestation of our own psyche— doesn’t matter, as the response is the same. Sometimes the creature has something to say, and that’s always wonderful. I love when our totems actually TELL US what we are supposed to be doing/learning. But when they don’t, which is most of the time, I do a detailed analysis of what the animal represents on a symbolic level, and from that, I know what I need to share with you.

So what’s a spirit guide? Aren’t these the same? Not exactly. Something that you thought was a spirit guide may wind up revealing itself as a totem, but a totem is not a spirit guide. In a nutshell, totems are with us for the duration of our lives, though they may feel more or less significant depending on the degree to which we are working on those things that they represent. Remember, they are linked to who and what we are. A spirit guide shows up to help us with a specific situation, and once we’ve dealt appropriately with said situation, we don’t see the creature anymore, or the encounters aren’t as meaningful. Spirit guides can stick around for a long time, but they do eventually depart.

My job is to explain to you what it is that is being communicated. The Universe most often speaks to us in symbolic terms, and animals are bundles of symbolism! This symbolic language is one that I speak fluently after a lifetime of study and practice, and I love being able to serve as your translator.