When I was a little girl, I would spend hours in the trees, in the fields, talking to rabbits and dragonflies. I was a wild child, always in nature. I felt more connected to nature than I did people. I was quite shy with people.

At a very young age, I saw a lot of struggle in my parents with their health, I stepped out of childlike wonder with feeling like I had to take care of them (which was never the case, it’s just how I perceived it.)

I carried a lot of “impending doom” from a very young age.

I was anxiety-ridden, struggling with insomnia from the time I started Kindergarten.

When a storm would roll through, I would obsessively watch the clouds for tornadoes. I often had storm emergency kits prepared for our family stored underneath the staircase, if a big F5 rolled through.

If my Dad disappeared in the afternoon and no one knew where he was, which often he had just driven down the road to go visit with a neighbor, I would panic strickenly look for him in all of the old buildings on our farm, afraid I would find him dead.

These were normal thoughts for me and I had barely started elementary school.

By the time I was 12, I was seeing a counselor, as depression and anxiety were my “normal”.

We sold our family farm to move to the city when I was about to start high school. It was quite traumatic for my anxiety-ridden personality.

I sold my horse, said goodbye to my friends that I had known since we were in diapers, and tried not to get eaten by the wolves of high school drama at a school that had 10 times the amount of students that my country school had.

I had a lot of dark energy that surrounded me, even though I came from a loving family. I lived in a constant state of fear. I know now that much of my struggles stemmed from being someone who felt other people’s energy and felt spirits in the room, but didn’t understand that at the time or had someone to mentor me through that.

I met an older guy at a job I was working who made me feel special and accepted. Feeling special and accepted was something I had struggled to find in the city, a place that I felt very lost and alone in.

This lead to me beginning my rebellious years, moving out when I was 16 to live with a “thug”.

Fast forward 3 really dark and fucked up years, I started a life of “normalcy”.

I worked a 9-5 job at a bank, I would go to concerts a few times a year for a fun weekend away. I watched a lot of Netflix, spent a lot of time with my best friend of 20 years, walked my dog, and would drink a bottle of wine on the weekends.

It was very therapeutic for me in these years, to recover from much of the trauma I had experienced in my days hanging out in drug houses. Depression and anxiety weren’t really alive in my experience anymore.

Fast forward a couple of years, I was introduced to the world of entrepreneurship and personal development. A fire was lit within me, and for the first time in my life I felt like I finally knew who I was and I was actually passionate about something.

I started on the whole positive thinking train, which began to drastically shift the Universe that I was seeing reflected around me.

Fast forward into my time of true liberation, I had just left a long term “vanilla” relationship, walked away from a mortgage, and I started truly LIVING. I booked as many trips as my bank account (and credit card Hahah) could handle.

I loved meeting new people, going to tattoo & personal development expos, hitting up every conference I possibly could at the time, having a great time on Tinder, and spending many hours on the highway in my SUV off to another adventure.

I even went off to Vegas by myself because everyone else I was planning on going with had ditched out. I knew I would have a great time in my own company and I would make friends while I was down there. I admit there were shady times of being a bit too reckless, but nothing bad happened.

I had Mexico, Cuba and Dominican booked all within 4 months of each other. I was living the high life, working from my laptop, earning free trips, traveling as much as I could, and I even met a charming Irishman who is now my husband in Cuba. Life was going great.

The last couple of days on my trip to Dominican, things took a dark turn. My friend and I went through a traumatic experience at the hands of the security and management of our resort. This was a time that I was following the “rules”, being safe, and it was even a sober night. We came home as shattered versions of ourselves.

Suddenly the anxiety and depression that had clouded much of my childhood flooded back to me as I learned how to live life with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The better part of the first year after the trauma was spent in a lot of darkness, with flickers and glimpses of my true nature/spirit dancing and weaving streaks of light in the darkness.

After a weekend of Neuro-Linguistic Programming training, I had felt a huge shift as the majority of the energetic charge from the trauma dissipated in just 1 session. I was ready to move forward with my life and start my journey as a coach/healer.

Fast forward to the 1 year anniversary of the trauma, my dog and I are on a flight from Calgary to Vienna, packed up with my life in 3 suitcases (which was mostly crystals and New Age books), to start our new adventure of living life abroad in Austria with my soulmate.

The first year in Austria had many beautiful magical moments and many challenging lessons.

I experienced many ego deaths as all of the conditioning from my upbringing & culture unraveled.
My consciousness was expanding at a very rapid rate and I was understanding life at new profound levels.

I was building my coaching business while being mentored by a couple of really powerful teachers.

I was working through the grief of moving away from family, friends, Canada, and losing my best friend of over 20 years.

My fiance and I were planning our wedding and enjoying being together, rather than having an ocean in between us.

We were on a train or a plane every 4-6 weeks heading off somewhere.

We moved apartments, and dealt with a lot of stress around my Visa and getting legally married in a country foreign to both of us.

And in all that, even though I practiced gratitude every day, my heart was still very closed.

It would open here and there for a few weeks or months at a time but then would close very easily with one of the many initiations that Spirit was sending me.

Healing modality after healing modality, I would spend hours every day in my own spiritual practice, with yoga, breathwork, meditation, NLP, energetic clearing, getting coached, and though my channel was opening and I was having many beautiful and profound experiences, I still felt like I should be happier than what I was.

My life is a life that is so beautiful, so blessed, and I have much to be grateful for, then why was I still struggling with holding joy in my being for long periods of time?

This past weekend I was initiated into shamanic journeying. I had recently connected to one of my own past lives as a medicine man and was delighted with how easy it was for me to connect to the Spirit world in my journeys.

The most profound wisdom was coming through from my guides, so simple yet so sweet and so life-changing.

During a power retrieval, what came through is that there were many times in my life where an aspect of my soul fragmented off, and I lost a piece of my childhood, my teenagehood, my young womanhood and as a result I became very “serious”.

I had lost touch with the childlike wonder that I was born with.

The spirits flicked a switch, and the power of that child-like wonder was resurrected within me.

I feel a wholeness I have not felt in a long time.

I immediately have seen this shift reflected in my reality.

Yesterday on a walk out to the forest with Lyla, a mother was leading a pony down the road with her young daughter on the pony’s back, learning how to “post” with the pony’s gate. This was something that I would’ve been doing as a child.

I looked up at the sun at one point and I asked a pondering question out loud, and immediately a butterfly twirled around me giving me the answer to my question.

The dragonflies also held close to me during our walk.

The mushrooms were in abundance on the mossy trunks and roots of ancient trees.

Everything was cast with a golden hue from the October sun dappling through the fire colours of the trees.

The entire forest was alive.

I could feel the consciousness and frequencies of nature through my skin.

My heart bursting with solar flares and fireflies.

I walked through the forests with the childlike wonder that I had lost when I got off the kindergarten bus to find that my Dad had been injured.

I didn’t have to force the connection, I didn’t have to remind myself to be mindful, I didn’t have to spend an hour in meditation to get to this place, it was just there, so loudly present, that I couldn’t not communicate and dance with the intelligence of Mother Nature.

It’s interesting that this aspect of myself was restored in just 1 shamanic journey, as leading up to my weekend away I had felt called to write letters/speak to various old versions of myself to give her a voice in case there was still an aspect of her in my subconscious mind that was wanting to be released.

It’s like I was unknowingly preparing, clearing space for my soul to come alive in.

& so my nugget of wisdom I have to offer you is, sometimes we can get super serious on our journey, and if that’s the case for you, see how you can resurrect childlike joy and wonder in your being, and of course, if you need assistance/guidance, I am here.