For over a decade I was known as the Book Shaman—a title a past client gave me because she saw something in our work that went beyond the manuscript. I’m damned proud of helping so many authors write their books, build their businesses, and land on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. The work was real and it was profound, and to see them shining out in the world is utter delight.
But…what I couldn’t fully see during that decade was that I was also flat-out hiding. Working writing-adjacent, hanging on others’ stars while I covered my own shine with a dusty old tarp that smelled faintly of cat piss. It allowed me to be close enough to the things I loved and to my purpose without the cold, hard exposure of donning my peacoat and galoshes and braving the storm.
What I could see, very clearly, was that my work was never about the words on the page. People signed up to “write a book”, but client after client after client transformed in deep ways from the coaching process itself. Together we identified their patterns, picked up the threads of gold they’d left behind, examined the stories they inherited, and found the genuine meaning in the lives they’d lived.
The book was never the point.
The writer always was.
My formal coaching journey began in 2013. Since then, I’ve completed four distinct coach trainings—about five years of my life given to deepen my practice. Today I am a Master-Certified Jungian Depth Coach, a Certified Equus Coach, and a Certified Spiritual Teacher, with additional training in Mind Body Coaching. I also teach and mentor other master-level Jungian coaches as a way to give back to a process that changed my life.
When I’m not coaching, I’m creating. Writing has been my first love since the age of seven when I penned my first brilliant short story about a witch with carbuncles. That love continued through my teenage years, though admittedly my vast memoir at the age of fourteen was a bit morose. And the romance novel I wrote at seventeen with my towering experience in the matters of love? That was better left in the drawer. These days I’m working on a fantasy novel about grumpy weeds and a weird western about a gnat named Louis.
I’ve moved over thirty times, but for now I reside in the Wild, Wild West with my menagerie of four-leggeds on a sanctuary I created with my own two bare, arthritic hands. I steward two horses, two chickens, and two whole colonies of cats—every last one of them abandoned, rejected, or in need of a renewed second half of life. My two pups? Chosen and spoiled rotten to the core. I’ve since settled into this place where I was planted, and I steward the land too. Besides…the moving wasn’t always that exciting. There were times I ended up in the deepest bowels of our great Mother Earth. For example, I spent a year living in Rawlins, Wyoming where I was blown back and forth across the road and where I ran home from school every day on the lookout for dark vans that kidnapped children. I once peed my pants while frantically searching for my latchkey.
