05/25/2025
“In my daughter’s shoes.”
This phrase is a salutation, a beckoning. If you've landed here, I imagine you’re curious about what I mean by it.
I want to begin by saying: everything in my life has led up to this phrase. In my daughter’s shoes. And it’s true, though for the first 30 years of my life, I had no idea I would ever birth a daughter. As a mother to a 13-year-old girl, I can now say with both shamanic insight and deep maternal knowing: everything I’ve ever experienced lives within my daughter’s shoes.
I wish I could say, “Let’s begin,” or “Let’s continue…” but honestly, I don’t know where this journey will take us. What follows is less a story and more a transmission of the Mother Heart.
The photo you see here was taken in my healing sanctuary during a photoshoot in October 2024. I had very little time to prepare, let’s be real, the idea of a photoshoot feels dreadful. Trying to “pimp ourselves out” for the work we do? Exhausting. And often, it's all for the illusion. The mask. The fanciful masquerade of what healing and therapy should look like.
After nearly 20 years in the wellness field, I can say this: most of what’s captured in a photo—yoga poses, sound baths, polished aesthetics represents about 0.000001% of what this path is truly like. It’s not real. And I’m over pretending.
Back to the shoot. That day was chaos. Amid the moxa, massage, craniosacral therapy, and incense smoke, I felt both present and elsewhere.
This photoshoot wasn’t about marketing. I wanted to show something real. Just two years before, I’d started dressing in a way that felt more like me. Sacred, adorned. But that day, it wasn’t the clothes that mattered it was the intention. I chose a photographer, Kristin, who I knew could see through the dark. A woman who could hold chaos and grace. A sister in spirit.
When she arrived, 12 years of unraveling poured out of me. She just stood there, smiling, holding it all with the knowing of someone who’s traversed the underworld. We shot the rituals, and then it was just me in the sanctuary I built.
Continue reading in my latest Substack. Link in comments✨️