My Story: From Spiritual Collapse to Certified Akashic & Reiki Practitioner

I grew up as the only child of two highly successful engineers, and from the start I sensed things most people around me did not — stories, patterns, presences. I learned quickly that those parts of me were not welcome in the room, so I got good at hiding them.

I spent years trying to become the person I thought the world wanted. I joined spaces that valued me for how I looked, performed the role, and collected achievements to prove I was finally figuring it out: luxury retail, analytics, IT, software development, marketing, and a stack of certifications that were supposed to quiet the noise inside me.

None of them did. The more I performed a life that fit, the further I drifted from the one that was actually mine. Along the way, I relied on prescriptions — narcotics, stimulants, antidepressants, and sleeping pills — mixed with alcohol just to keep functioning.

By the time I was 21, I had already survived sepsis, five serious hospitalizations, and a priest had read me my last rites. I sensed presences standing guard in hospital rooms long before I understood what I was looking at. Those moments kept cracking the illusion that I was built for the conventional life I was chasing, but I was not ready to listen yet.

The first time I really listened was in 2018, when I attended the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California for an enneagram workshop. I ended up doing tarot pulls for strangers all weekend. For a perfectionist who had spent her whole life checking boxes, it was the strangest possible place to feel at home — and I did. That should have been my first real clue that I had been running from the very thing I was looking for.

Esalen opened a door I did not know I had been knocking on. In 2019, sepsis nearly took me again — the second time my body had to fight its way back from the edge. After that, I went to a Dr. Brian Weiss workshop on past life regression. Through hypnosis, someone deeply educated and insightful gave me the tools to access my visions and dreams in a completely different way — and with a purpose I had not understood before. That changed everything.

Then 2020 forced the world to stop, and I used that stillness to keep digging. In 2021, I went to Peru for my 200-hour Hatha and Vinyasa yoga certification. I never taught yoga long-term, but it cracked something open and sent me deeper into the work.

After Peru, I fell into a whole world of mindfulness practices, Dr. Joe Dispenza conferences, NLP training, Access Bars, and every other modality I could find. I was trying to understand why I kept ending up in the same place, even when I changed the scenery. I was getting closer, but I was still missing the piece that explained why I absorbed everything around me so deeply.

Healing was never a straight line. Before I could get to the real work, I had to walk through something that almost broke me.

At 29, in early 2022, I met a man in NYC where it felt like fate and endless opportunities were colliding, literally right next to the Empire State Building. The red flags were obvious from the start — extreme control and manipulation — but I wanted the story to be different. I dropped all my spiritual practices for love and ignored the warnings, trying to love him into being someone he was not.

The manipulation escalated until I no longer trusted my own perception. I went back to a psychiatrist in the hope that becoming a "better girlfriend" would fix what was actually broken in the relationship. Trapped in that isolation, I returned to prescription medications just to get through the days. The version of me that showed up during that time made choices I am still working to forgive.

That relationship ended in 2023. Only then could I see the pattern clearly: I had fallen into the hands of another narcissist, and I had abandoned myself to do it. Right after that breakup, I discovered I am a 5/2 Reflector in Human Design. That was the moment shit finally clicked — learning how my energy actually works, how deeply I absorb people and environments, and how my profile operates, gave me the framework I needed to understand my past without drowning in it.

But that clarity came in right at the beginning of the plant medicine mentorship I was about to enter, and I still had not fully learned the lesson. I was still looking for answers outside myself, just in a different costume.

After the relationship ended, I was in the middle of a psychiatric episode and knew I needed deep intervention. I had already tried ketamine-assisted therapy and was ready to enter the world of plant medicine. I went to a shaman in Savannah, Georgia, as a client — I just wanted help. I never expected her to look at me and say that my true calling was to work with her and become a shaman. She promised credentials, experience, and a Ph.D. in spiritual counseling. Believing I was in safe, professional hands, I paid $12,000 for an Ayahuasca and psilocybin ceremony.

That turned into a nearly two-year mentorship. The whole time, I still maintained a full-time job in software development — balancing ceremony weekends with sprint deadlines, standing in the Records at night after writing code all day. Three months before the final summer solstice 2025 retreat, I was in a car wreck that should have killed me. I felt Archangel Michael wrap an angelic bubble around me, and I left the scene without a scratch. Then, at that summer solstice retreat, the whole thing imploded the day we exposed her as a fraud and a compulsive liar. There was no Ph.D. and no cross-training with seven tribes. She had taken Ayahuasca for the first time in 2020 or 2021, and by 2023 she was charging people up to $25,000 while subjecting mentees and clients to financial, psychological, and sexual abuse.

As more truth came out, I learned we were never receiving real Ayahuasca. The medicine was altered. We were given datura, a flower that keeps you conscious while stripping your ability to make decisions of your own free will. It was used to put us under hypnosis during what had been sold to us as sacred ceremonies. Instead of healing, I felt dark and complicit. The betrayal cut even deeper because the one thing I had turned to for salvation had been weaponized against me.

Because she was never trained, not a single one of our ceremonies was protected. We were left completely vulnerable — energetically, psychologically, and spiritually — overloaded and wide open to a psychiatric break. The container that was supposed to hold us through deep healing was never built, and the harm that followed was devastating.