THE MIGRATION NORTH: FOLLOWING ANCIENT CURRENTS At twenty-one, following currents as ancient and invisible as the paths migrating birds have traced for millennia, I traveled north to Colorado. Here, among peaks that pierce heaven itself, on the ancestral lands of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples—cultures that honored two-spirit beings and gender fluidity long before colonization tried to erase such wisdom—my path as healer, weaver, and storyteller continued to unfold like a desert flower that had been waiting its whole life for exactly the right amount of rain. This new land became another teacher, another place of belonging. The high country showed me different ways of listening—to aspen leaves that shimmer prayers in autumn wind, to mountain streams that carry snow-melt stories from peaks touched by clouds, to wildflowers that bloom for just a few precious weeks each year and teach the profound beauty of impermanence. My relationship with the earth deepened into something approaching devotion, a daily practice of falling in love with the world all over again, of remembering that we belong to something infinitely larger and more beautiful than just our human stories. **The Training Ground: Twenty Years of Touching Stories** For two decades now, I have been a student of the body's wisdom—that oldest library where every story ever lived is still being told in muscle and bone, in breath and heartbeat. My hands began their education at the Oriental Healing Arts Institute in 2004, where I learned that touch itself can be a language older than words, a way of saying "I see you, I hear you, you are safe here." What started as 800 hours of massage therapy training became a lifelong devotion to understanding how we carry our histories in our flesh. I studied Tui Na therapy, learning how the body remembers what the mind tries to forget. I apprenticed in Phenomenal Touch, discovering that healing happens not through force but through presence, not through fixing but through witnessing. I trained in the sacred waters of Watsu, understanding that we all need to be held the way the ocean holds everything without judgment. But the deepest teachings came when I learned to work with trauma itself—those places where the body has built walls to survive, where the nervous system still believes the danger hasn't passed. Through Somatic Psychotherapy at the Brooks Institute, through Bridging Soma and Soul, through Alchemical Alignment, I learned what my desert childhood had already whispered: that healing is not about returning to who we were before the wound, but about becoming someone new who can hold both the wound and the wisdom it brought. When I discovered Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy at the Colorado School of Energy Studies, it felt like coming home to something I'd always known. Here was a practice that understood what the saguaros had taught me—that we are held by forces larger than ourselves, that there is an intelligence in the body that knows the way back to wholeness, that the healer's job is simply to create enough safety and stillness for that intelligence to do its work. Most recently, I've been studying Ancestral Healing, learning to work not just with individual bodies but with the lineages that flow through them—all those grandmothers and grandfathers whose unfinished stories still echo in our cells, whose dreams deferred become our inheritance, whose love can still reach across time to hold us. Through it all—through every certification earned, every technique learned, every client whose story my hands have been privileged to hold—I have been learning the same lesson nana taught me in her kitchen: that the deepest healing happens when we remember we're not alone, when we create spaces where people can finally exhale, when we tend each other with the same devotion we'd offer to the sacred.