This isn't your typical About page. It's the story of how I came to this work, why I created Sanctuary of Stones and Archetypal Stone Medicine, and why I work at the deepest level of human experience.

There is a particular kind of unhappiness that is difficult to explain to people who have never felt it. It's not the unhappiness of a life that has fallen apart. It's the unhappiness of a life that looks fine from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.

No matter how much effort or intelligence you bring to the problem, the feeling doesn't go away. This is because the problem doesn't reside at the level of logical thinking. It is a soul problem that must be dealt with at the deepest level of being.

I know this from experience.

So, get comfortable and settle in. Perhaps there will be aspects of my story that you can relate to, even if only on an archetypal level.

The Long Way Around

I spent my late teens and almost my entire twenties struggling with a severe alcohol addiction that nearly killed me. I don't say that for effect. I mean it literally: withdrawal-induced seizures, emergency room visits, years of progressive dissolution that took everything I thought I was and left me with very little in the end.

At 28, during my first Saturn Return, I finally got sober for good. I didn't know at the time what a Saturn Return was or what it meant that the cosmos had chosen that particular window of time to force a reckoning upon me. But now I know why.

Once I got sober, something in me that had been buried under years of chaos began to bubble to the surface. I went back to school and earned a BA in Journalism and Human Rights Studies while working two jobs. I did a study abroad in Rwanda during the 20th anniversary of the genocide, studying peacebuilding, post-genocide restoration, and collective trauma.

After that, I earned an MA in International Affairs: Conflict and Security from The New School in New York City. I thought I was going to be a conflict photojournalist. Then I got pregnant with my first daughter, then my second. And the trajectory I had been building toward shifted in a way I didn't choose and couldn't have predicted.

The Synchronicity That Changed Everything

My oldest daughter was an unplanned but deeply welcomed pregnancy, and she was born nearly four weeks early — on October 16th. My first daughter was born on the exact date of my four-year sobriety anniversary and reunification with her father, Taylor. The synchronicity was so incredibly profound - the same date for. all three major events in my life, four years apart. It was a death, birth, reconnection, and rebirth... all on October 16th.

That synchronicity blew my world wide open. It sent me on a search that hasn't stopped since. I began studying synchronicity seriously, which led me to the work of Carl Jung, who is responsible for the theory of synchronicity. I also began studying astrology as a psychospiritual diagnostic tool.

Jung called astrology synchronicity on a mass scale, and the natal chart is a map of the meaningful coincidence between the moment of a soul's arrival and the precise configuration of the cosmos at that exact moment.

I analyzed the synchronistic dates in my own natal chart. I studied Jungian depth psychology, Stanislav Grof's transpersonal psychology, the Western esoteric traditions, philosophy, consciousness, and ancient and modern cosmologies. I went deep into my research and didn't come back up until I had a framework that could help me understsand what I had experienced. That framework became the foundation of the work I now do with stones and the psyche.

What Was Bubbling Beneath the Surface While I Tried to Figure it All Out

While all of this inner work was unfolding, my professional life was a bit of a different story. I had built a small marketing company, and I was good at it technically but completely wrong for it at the soul level. Because of this misalignment, I burnt out fast and decided to shut it down.

I was living a double life. I built professional identities that looked credible from the outside but felt like wearing someone else's clothes from the inside. I was living life the way I thought I should based on external pressures, all while my soul was screaming to be heard. 

When one's soul is not fully expressed, everything in life feels like a constant struggle and uphill battle, like the universe is conspiring against you. That's how I felt for a very long time, that is, until I started moving through midlife and my perception and world view changed. Through astrology, I got a very clear picture of how the seemingly disjointed pieces of my life, including my passions, struggles, skills, natural talents, and curiosities, fit together to create my individuation journey.

What My Natal Chart Revealed

At the beginning of my PhD journey, I started to take astrology seriously and learned archetypal astrology from the founder's daughter, Dr. Becca Tarnas. It was during those years of deep, doctoral level study of archetypes, archetypal cosmology and astrology, and of the Western philosophical worldview that I learned to read my natal chart as more than a personality profile and instead as a map of my soul's journey. I began utilizing advanced techniques that go beyond sun signs and surface-level interpretations to the deeper cosmological underpinnings of human life experience.

What I found was unambiguous and so magically accurate that it brought tears of joy, awe, and surprise to my eyes - really, I cried because I was so flabbergasted that astrology 'worked', when before this, I didn't see the connections because I wasn't going deep enough. My vocation, the work I came here to do in the world, is written in my chart with such pinpoint accuracy that gives me even more evidence that the path I'm walking will be a fruitful and fulfilling one.

Stones sit at the center of all of it, where Earth and cosmos meet, where matter and meaning are not separate things. Every thread in my natal chart leads to the same place. My work with stones is not a career choice I made completely consciously. This is the direction my soul was leading me in, and it became glaringly obvious in my chart.

Purpose and vocation, for me, are two distinct spirals that are intertwined but separate, operating simultaneously in one's life. I am living proof of this.

How Sanctuary of Stones Came to Be

Sanctuary of Stones began as Sanctuary Vibrational Jewelry selling pieces I made by hand with natural stones as energetic talismans. But as I deepened into the research, took more trainings, and got more certifications, the work naturally expanded and I began selling loose gemstones and mineral specimens. I grew an affinity for rare, unusual-combination stones and their unique vibrational signatures. So, while I was building my own private collection, I began selling them to my customers too and received affirming feedback about their energy.

As my interest in stones grew, I pursued certification in colored stones through the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). I needed to understand the crystallography, chemistry, and physical structure of stones at the scientific level in order to find the connections between what ancient traditions had known for millennia and what modern mineralogy and physics could confirm.

Alongside my work with stones, I deepened my training in BioGeometry and vibrational radiesthesia, the science of detecting and modulating subtle energy fields. I trained as a Daoist Stone Medicine practitioner, learning to work with stones on the body's meridian system. I trained in the stone medicine ways of many other traditions and will continue to broaden my knowledge in this area.

Being immersed in research on bioenergetics, subtle energy detection and measurement, ancient Egyptian temple science, and other vibrational sciences I was naturally led to the world of sound, with a particular interest in crystal singing bowls. I spent fourteen months training as a sacred sound healer where I learned all about how sound heals every aspect of our being, and how stones can used with sound for profound healing. I then trained in behavioral psychoacoustics and brain entrainment sound engineering, where I learned to create holotropic soundscapes with binaural beats to open the door to the transcendent realms and connect more deeply with the stones I was working with.

All of this was in service to one question: what is the most precise, rigorous, and complete method I could create for helping a person understand what their soul is here for, and for clearing the obstacles standing in the way of living from one's soul? From this, Archetypal Stone Medicine was born.

Where I Am Now

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate completing my doctoral research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where my dissertation is entitled The Individuating Cosmos: Toward A Jungian Fractal Cosmology of Synchronicity, Archetypal Time, and Deep Meaning.

This research is the theoretical, methodological, and philosophical foundation on which the client and teaching work I do at Psyche & Stone rests upon. When I do custom talisman work for a private client, my methodology and framework is grounded in my research. 

As a gemologist, designer, and scholar-practitioner, I give you the precise, research-backed tools to live from your own natal chart and soul mission. This is the work I have come here to carry out.