The Path Beneath the Plan

I work with people at real-life crossroads. Not because something is “wrong,”but because the way they’ve been living no longer fits. The old identity worked, until it didn’t. The plan made sense, until it felt hollow. The life looked good, until it started to feel like a costume. That moment? That’s where my work begins.

I grew up in the Midwest and did what made sense: excelled in school, earned a psychology degree, followed the path that looked responsible and impressive from the outside. And yet, something in me kept asking quieter, more inconvenient questions: Is this actually mine? Who am I underneath the roles I’ve learned to perform? Why does doing everything “right” still feel wrong? I went on to earn my Master’s in psychology and trained as a marriage and family counselor, thinking more knowledge would bring clarity. Instead, it revealed something more honest: insight alone doesn’t change a life. Understanding doesn’t automatically translate into embodiment. And no amount of theory gives you permission to be yourself. That realization cracked everything open.

The Shift That Changed Everything

I was born in Michigan, came of age in Chicago for college, and eventually followed my curiosity west, leaving Chicago with a Bachelor’s degree in acting, with philosophy and creative writing waiting in the wings of my minors. Even then, I was seeking meaning. In what moved people. In what made something land. When I moved to Los Angeles, I found my way into the golden age of immersive theater, where the audience is invited to interact directly inside the world of the characters. I was often cast in archetypal roles: the seer, the healer, the psychic, not as a performance of mysticism, but because those characters required deep attunement, trust, and presence. They were the roles placed in quiet rooms, charged moments, and unscripted encounters where the story depended on real connection. Again and again, I was brought back for the same reason: my ability to connect. Audience members would find me months or even years later and tell me that the moment they remembered most from the entire production was the one they had alone with me. They didn’t talk about the spectacle. They talked about feeling seen. Witnessed. Met. Immersive theater didn’t just change my career; it revealed my actual work. What I began to notice was this: in those moments, I wasn’t really performing. I wasn’t following the script as written. I was listening beneath the words. Tracking the energy. Reading the person in front of me, and speaking directly to that. Something would shift. They’d leave the room changed. Quieter. Clearer. More themselves. That’s when it clicked again. The impact wasn’t coming from the character. It wasn’t coming from the story. It was coming from the relationship, from intention meeting presence.

Landing the Plane

I realized I wasn’t meant to keep stepping into other people’s scripts or hiding behind roles. I wanted to make an impact and support others as myself, raw, present, and real. That recognition led me back through psychology, into counseling and coaching, and eventually into what I now call soul retrieval. Not as a dramatic concept, but as a practical one: helping people reconnect with the parts of themselves that went quiet, dormant, or disowned in order to survive. Every modality since has been a funnel; refining, distilling, and stripping away what wasn’t true, until I landed in work that feels precise, honest, and aligned. Along the way, I studied with healers, medicine facilitators, shamans, scholars, and teachers, and learned just as much from lived experience as I did from any formal path. What emerged wasn’t a single lineage or borrowed framework, but a language and methodology shaped by all of it; a way of naming and facilitating the work I had already been doing. I didn’t find a ready-made manual for this. I had to build one. That process was at times daunting and uncertain, but it was also deeply alive. It asked me to trust what I could see, feel, and name; to stand inside my own authority rather than outsource it. That synthesis is soul retrieval: a grounded, relational practice of helping people reconnect with the parts of themselves that went offline in order to survive. This work eventually became the foundation of my book, It Gets to Be Easy (If You Let It), and of everything I continue to create. Not as a final answer, but as a living body of work. Because in the end, isn’t that what it means to be alive? To listen closely, take responsibility for what you’re here to make, and keep choosing it anyway.

As of 2026, I find myself back in Chicago, not as a return to the past, but as a conscious pause. A retrieval. A place to gather pieces of myself that were set down here long ago, before carrying this work forward into what’s next.

It’s the work I’ve been doing all along.