When I was 18, I loaded up some things into my boyfriend’s race car and left the Wisconsin cornfields for South Florida's palmy beaches. It was complete culture shock. My small-town, white upbringing hadn’t prepared me for the rich, vibrant diversity that pulses there. How didn't I know about the Caribbean island communities, the Latinx diasporas from Central and South America, or the Jewish communities from the eastern seaboard? It was as if the actuality of my country had been hidden from me, somehow a secret —and I began to wonder what else I was oblivious to.
 

It would take many more years—and many initiations—for me to fully understand the deep moral responsibility that lives in me as a White American. We are literally living on the bones of Brown Indigenous people that settler colonies tried to erase through violence and genocide. We are operating inside systems built on the backs of enslaved Black Africans stolen from their homelands to work for a supremacist fantasy dressed up as prosperity. And systems of race and class still have the masses in a chokehold of greed cloaked in the fallacy of superiority. Yet somehow if you are White in this country, you can live your whole life without being told you have any responsibility for this destruction. You can float above the ache and the violence.

 

I didn’t see the story—or my place in it—for a long time. Meanwhile my own story exprienced shattering. First losing my mother from cancer at 50 a few years after I moved to Florida. In the years after her death, I learned I wasn’t truly accepted by my family. I hadn’t settled into the narrative of a small town life. And that noncompliance with the norm was enough to cast me out.
 

So I continued to travel.
 

First to Nepal. To learn how to farm small scale. I knew there were people who were building a different paradigm. I wanted to belong with them. I studied regenerative agriculture, learned how to steward soil and seeds, how to lead small teams. I made a covenant to grow and eat organic food as a daily devotion and my vote for how I want Earth’s body to be treated — as well as my own.
 

And eventually, I realized: our inner worlds are also ecosystems. That tending to grief, dissociation, addiction, ancestral harm, spiritual longing—that, too, is soil work. 

Andrew Harvey of sacred activism teaches this. For those of us wanting to respond to the rising fascism in our outer world, we first/simultaneously must attend to this inner soil. For our outer world mirrors what is within us, and we all have inherited inner systems of oppression and division.

​

A huge toxicity to both my inner soil and my physical body: alcohol. It became clearer and clearer that our culture's normalization of this substance couldn't go on any longer in my life. Its poison and my lineage's genetic addiction to it was crushing me. I experienced a traumatic brain injury and soon thereafter was day drinking. Drinking alone. Drinking and driving. And drinking way more than was healthy. My dad had climbed his way up to sobriety years earlier and my brother was trying. I was in a deep dark hole and knew that to support them - and myself - I needed to get out but didn't know how. A few fierce friends, lots of prayers and tenacity, and the grace of the Almighty is how I finally did reach a life without alcohol. That was in 2018.

 

My own brokenness and numbing tendencies helped me to understand my clients more deeply.  I had begun to map the different parts of myself - some holding different pains, some holding different desires and all of them making up the diversity of my inner world ecosystem.

 

But my inner world fragmentation was nothing compared to my first client. She trained and continues to train me in the extreme impacts of fragmentation of the inner world in response to trauma. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) pathologizes this response as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID.

 

But we call it DIA for Dissociative Identity Adaptation. Because just like nature, our inner worlds are intelligently designed to perpetuate healthy life. They adapt. It is not disordered how the inner world splits off in response to trauma. It is ordered - adaptation. And the tools you'll read about below approach this response, known by the mainstream world as DID, and regenerate her and others' inner soils to become whole and harmonized people again. Through the work of the coaching container, we are students of liberation reclaiming lives.
 

So what is the regenerative force that is the foundation of all of this inner world healing? Our connection to That Which is Greater. Becoming a leader of my own life and the coaching container I get to carry all has to do with my walk with this Force, my spirituality.  

My spiritual questioning started in South Florida when I lived with Rastafarians. I practiced kemetic yoga. I found myself wandering into the traditions of Sikhism, Buddhism, Baha’i. Seeking. I prayed in the Native American Church - carried cedar in Sundances, sat in lodges. I fasted for vision. And eventually, my heart came home again to the living Christ—but by then, I had braided all those traditions into one knowing: we are meant to walk with That Which Is Greater, not through dogma but through our own unique and sovereign relationship with this Force.
 

And I know this now—deep in my marrow: To lead our lives with love, we must lead from that Source.

That relationship is the root system of regenerative leadership. It’s how we restore equity to social systems and health to ecosystems. It’s how we stop being agents of harm and become beneficial organisms to Earth.
 

I want to build my life to stand in the name of Love. I want to be Love’s ambassador—and awaken with others who carry that same fire. Through this coaching hearth, through this multiracial, anti-racist community of Earth stewards, I am tending the flame. Every connection built in Love is a spark for justice. And I believe with everything in me: we are the ones the ancestors dreamed of.

​

And we’re just getting started.