About Audrey

People tend to overutilize words like “journey” and “path” when it comes to a reflective narrative about the self and how one got from point A to Z. It’s a process, a metamorphosis. That’s what they say. But these tired tropes aren’t altogether inaccurate. There’s a reason “The Hero’s Journey” has become the most familiar allegory for the internal climb one takes through life to gain reflection or wisdom to disengage from repeated cyclic lessons that result in re-wounding and atrophied resilience. I suppose I’m the very definition of these things.

I was born wired differently from other people. Consequently, I wished desperately to reconfigure this wiring to whatever norm was defined by my peers. It’s lonely for us square-pegs until we find the people that bind us to this earth instead of levitating into our make-believe universes and potentials that have yet to be realized. I’m not from here. I suppose I would define “here” as a place where people easily harm each other, lie, and seek to promote all things beige. My world requires striking colors, art of all mediums, and the presence of music to echo from mountain tops. Where just “being” is enough. To seek the knowing of oneself is paramount to spending all waking hours contributing to another’s bottom line. Where I come from, people see each other as magic. They celebrate individual truths as divine instead of meeting difference with rage, fear and forced persuasion.

All that aside, I have inhabited this world, navigating within it in varied states of thriving – or not. Like many, I traversed the underworld before clawing my way out. The details of which are offered in my memoir, written for all the girls and women who weren’t given voice to the awful things that invade our bodies and spirits in a realm that opposes our very autonomy. I spiraled into every dark chaotic corner I could find and immerse myself in, to understand it. To conquer it. I created a human life, nearly losing mine. Then I did what you’re supposed to. I got degrees. I couldn’t see living here without lifting up the pained. I became a social worker. I worked with the dying and then those recovering from kissing the veil. For years I witnessed, comforted, and modeled how to give and receive love to those quite literally mending fractured hearts with broken valves, clogged pathways and paused heartbeats- brought back. To learn to feel and move in a body that had betrayed them. Becoming something new. Reborn.

Everything moves, expands, evolves. I started a private practice, casting a wider net of service to my world, community, and others that were wired outside of beige societal boxes. After 15 years of counseling others, I found that mental illness was really pathologized fractures of the spirit aching to be released and seen. That it’s blocked energy, sinking in the bog, drowning like Artax in the Swamp of Sadness. The Neverending Story brought us all childhood trauma and hearty helping of truth. That we can all drown in sadness, forgetting the divinity that resides within. That we have the power to break free.

My salvation came from an unexpected spontaneous kundalini awakening. In every hero’s journey, there is a moment in which the protagonist is about to give up and to succumb to the sadness, when they are gifted a key. This key is the luck dragon swooping in to rescue Atrayu from the bog. Kundalini was my iridescent dragon of hope. It healed all the parts of me that needed lit up from the shadows of chaos. Only to reveal what Dorothy found when leaving Oz, that “she had the power all along.”

This becomes the part of our tale when the hero creates a new world. My awakening has offered me gifts and knowledge that feel miraculous- because they are. My true desire is to share these gifts with  true seekers. May these offerings bring you the keys you need to move toward your light.