My Story
Growing up, I often tried to imagine my life as an adult. I saw myself pulling up into my two-car garage after a long day of work. I parked my car and sat for a moment in the driver's seat, reflecting on my life, my career, what I'd accomplished… But before I could walk inside, the dream unraveled. I had no will to go further. I knew there had to be something more to life, but I had no idea what was missing or how to begin to find it.
Travel became my way of searching. At 16, I jumped on a chance to spend a summer in Spain—language classes on an old university campus, weekend trips to castles, and the intoxicating feeling of everything and everyone around me being new. On the plane ride back, I promised myself I’d live in places increasingly different from my home in suburban Los Angeles until I reached the most distant and different place I could find. Over the next six years, I went to college on the East Coast, studied abroad in Paris, and toured Australia, Europe, and Asia.
My first job after graduating from Yale was as a volunteer in Riobamba, Ecuador—teaching English in a university classroom nuzzled between grazing sheep and an office where old illuminated manuscripts were stuffed into a cabinet. I spent the afternoons with my host mother running errands in town, learning to bargain at the marketplace, and making yogurt from milk fresh off the farm truck. On the weekends, I piled into the kitchen with all of the aunts and cousins as we chatted and chopped and stirred, making lunch for the whole family. At the end of the year, a student came up to me at my goodbye party. A bit tipsy, with tears in her eyes, she placed her hand over my heart and said, “Chimborazo es tu corazón.” That tall Andean peak that watched over our town—the namesake of our province and the center of the country—had begun to open my heart.
Soon after, I started graduate school at the University of Chicago. My desk was always piled high with books, but at night I’d put my homemade cassette of Latin dance music in the stereo, twirl around for a few minutes by myself, and collapse in tears. I dove into pages of logic, philosophy of science, Freud, and the thinker who caught my attention most—Marx. While I didn’t believe in his solution, his description of the problem blew my mind open. Western materialism, the life I’d grown up with, felt empty because it removed us so far from the basic acts of living—from things like making a home, gathering food, and building community—that we could not truly recognize ourselves or our world.
By the next year, I was back in Riobamba, and within another year, I’d made my way to the Ecuadorian Chocó, a coastal rainforest not far from the Colombian border. I didn't want to be that gringa who shows up saying, “Teach me what it is like to be you,” so I made another promise. In return for learning from the native Chachi and Afro-descendant people who lived there, I’d share whatever I had that could be of use. It took no more than a few weeks to realize that, while I’d finally reached the most distant and different place I could find, that magical forest, along with the way of life it sustained, was disappearing before my eyes—trees being felled, animals over-hunted, fresh waters poisoned... The next few years of my life were taken up with trying to help mitigate the devastating losses and, at the same time, to help the people navigate the sudden poverty, illness, and alienation that came with globalization. I'd married a Chachi from the community, and our two families created a nonprofit organization for grassroots conservation and sustainable development. We were fighting against forces much greater than us. It felt like pouring a bucket of water on a building consumed by fire. But how could we stand there and not try?
Over time, those forces took their toll. For a decade, I found a way to retrench, to fight back, to grow through every challenge and start anew. I returned to L.A. after nearly dying of Dengue Fever and eclampsia giving birth to our first child. I went back to live in Ecuador when the director of our organization turned corrupt. I continued working as the region grew more violent, even after we were held up at gunpoint in the middle of the night. As the kidnapping threats increased, I fled with my family to a distant region of the country, continuing to support our nonprofit from my location in semi-hiding. It was only after our children were attacked again there that I finally went back to the States.
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At that point, I finally realized that I'd more than fulfilled my promise to share whatever I could with the people of the Chocó. And along the way, I'd gained much more of an answer to my original question. What is it like to be you? What is it like to be me? Living at the edge of Western society, I'd developed a much deeper sense of how a culture or a way of life shapes philosophy. I could see how perspective shaped not only the answers but the questions themselves: What does it mean to be alive? And how do we live well?
A few days before Thanksgiving, I found myself in my childhood home, standing in my parents' office next to the computer, holding the phone. “Do you remember me?” I asked the Dean of Humanities. “You told me my story would make a great book, and one day I might want to come back. You said that I could.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” he replied, “I do. But I didn't think it would take you ten years.”
Within a few months, I was back in graduate school, but it was much harder to convince my department that the rainforest was relevant to philosophy and that a mom with three young kids could earn her PhD. I was the only woman in my class, carrying a mountain of extra burdens—homeschooling children who needed extra care, supporting my husband through community college, stretching every penny to help family in Ecuador, and regularly falling ill myself. Proudly, I was also the only one in my class to graduate on time.
That could have been a happy ending. I thought I'd finally give my kids our safe forever home—a place we could set down roots and enjoy the ease of financial security. But my tenure-track job offer fell through; suddenly, we needed to retrench again. I took a temporary teaching position and began preparing for another year on the academic job market. Somehow we'd make it through. Then, one dark night—the autumnal equinox, in fact—my oldest accidentally slammed the car trunk into my head. For a moment, everything stopped. I'd been hit. I wondered if I should scream. The next morning I tried to lecture but found myself back home in bed, speaking in tongues. I knew I wasn't making any sense, but it was the truth of my heart pouring out. “Enough is enough,” the Universe seemed to say. The doctors told me I needed to learn to quiet my mind if I wanted to heal from the concussion. Finally, I closed my eyes, deepened my breath, and let myself notice what was there. To my surprise, as time slowed down and I leaned in to that quiet, what I found was love.
After decades of traveling the world in search of answers, I began to travel inward. After a lifetime of trying to understand with my mind, I began to feel my way through my body and my senses. I breathed in frankincense and stared at the leaves on the old tree outside my window, dancing in the autumn wind. I felt like I, too, was hovering somewhere midair, but I let the roots of that tree ground me. I let the light of the sun and that love guide me. When I woke in the dark with nightmares, I chose to get up and meditate, to give myself as long as I needed to connect with that love, to settle and find peace again. I sat for hours sometimes, journeying and listening, processing whatever wanted to come up instead of fighting it. After seven days, for the first time in years, I slept through the night.
Life did not grow easier right away. So much had accumulated over the years; my marriage, my health, and my children all suffered under the weight of what we had been through. But mindfulness opened up a path for me through it all. I had a place I could return to for peace and healing, again and again. After a year of practicing on my own, I took up the formal study of energy healing. And over the following decade, I developed my own techniques for bringing philosophy, mindfulness, and energy healing together. In the way that I once built conceptual maps to understand philosophical theories, I created embodied pictures to guide healing for myself and others. It became a way of accessing truth while embracing the unknown, of seeing clearly while releasing judgment, of finding peace and healing even as life continues to challenge and confound.
In my years as a teacher, I've learned that everyone has their story—their struggles and their triumphs. This feels especially true in our complex, post-pandemic world today. I know from my own experience that on the other side of crises lie so many gifts—growth, creativity, connection, compassion, understanding... I have hope that we can make it through our challenges, individually and collectively. And above all, I believe what matters is that we try, that we each do our part to grow step by step, breath by breath. In that spirit, I share with you my work of the Energetic Picture—with faith in your journey and ours together.