In 2017 I was a hot mess. My entire life had been built up around my work in India coaching the Tibet Women’s Soccer team. I didn’t know who I was without it. My entire sense of self-worth and purpose for living was based on it.
When it all came crashing down, my mental health did, too.
Depression, punctuated by waves of intense anxiety, became my new normal.
I spent months numbing myself watching YouTube videos in a small village in Spain. I entered into a state of not feeling – anything at all. I had trained myself to no longer feel the pain, and in effect, I could also no longer feel joy. I felt strongly that my life was over – that I had experienced everything I was meant to, and that I might as well die.
One night my despair got so bad that I decided if I managed to wake up the next morning I’d do something about it. Sure enough, I woke up.
I began the process of designing my own therapy regime. I committed to six sessions with a world-renowned psychotherapist to cognitively unravel my time in India. I traveled to Guatemala to enroll in the Moon Course at Las Piramides del Ka – an overview of numerous metaphysical arts – to reconnect with the unseen world all around us. I dosed myself with medicinal psilocybin to reawaken my neuropathways. And finally, I dragged my husband back to Spain to walk 940 kilometers on the Camino de Santiago – the world’s most famous pilgrimage route – to work the feelings back into my body.
When you walk 20-30 kilometers per day, day after day after day, with no personal space and no comforts, a process of alchemy begins. Sure enough, my walking therapy began by triggering the intensely negative emotions I stored away deep inside my cells – anger, fear and terrible disappointment. There was no chance of numbing this time. I had to walk. One foot in front of another. And as each foot pounded on the trail, day after day, I slowly was able to process the emotions and allow them to pass through me.
By the end, I had never felt so good, so whole, so healthy and so free.
This has led me to you.
My husband James and I decided to start Ascension Therapy Clinic shortly after our Camino so that we could bring the things we learned to people all over the world through BWRT, life coaching, past life regression and hypnotherapy.
I designed my signature program, the 30-day Ascension Empowerment Intensive, to recreate my own customized therapeutic journey for others, weaving together a variety of modalities to address mind, body and spirit for a totally holistic approach to therapy.
You can read about our pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, and both of our healing journeys in our book The Camino Provides: A Curious Guide to the Camino del Norte, available in paperback and on Kindle.
Read more about the Ascension Empowerment Intensive here.
