My Story:
The Path Of Love & Rediscovery
I grew up the seventh of eight kids in a loud house filled with love, competition, and big personalities. There was always energy in the air. We pushed each other. We fought. We laughed. We learned how to be strong.
But strength took on a new meaning when my older brother Brent passed away in 2004. I was 18 years old. Grief entered our home in a way that never fully left. That loss lit a fire in me. It made me disciplined. Focused. Driven. I poured my pain into swimming.
I became an All-American, a Big Ten Champion, and an Olympic Trials swimmer. From the outside, it looked like success. Inside, my drive was fueled by something deeper. Grief. A need to prove myself. A need to make my life mean something.
But performance could only carry me for so long. When my college swimming career came to an end, I felt lost. The structure was gone. The identity was gone.
Without it, I had to face the questions I had spent years avoiding. Who was I without achievement and performance? And was I worthy of the life I was living?
These questions did not stay confined in my mind. They followed me into all areas of my life, especially my relationships. And when my relationships ended, I did not just feel heartbroken. I felt defective.
I wondered if I was worthy of love. I wondered if there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
So I turned to understanding people more deeply.
After my athletic career, I dedicated my life to service. I became a volunteer firefighter, EMT, occupational therapist, coach, and healer. Over time, I noticed something fascinating. Humans were not random. We had patterns. Patterns of belief. Patterns of behavior. Patterns in how we love, how we protect ourselves, and how we unconsciously repeat the same struggles. Helping people see those patterns became part of my work.
But there was one pattern I still hadn’t fully understood... My Own.
At 35, I had a thriving therapy practice. I was helping others transform. My life made sense on paper. But beneath the surface, there was a whisper I could not silence. Eventually, the whisper became too loud to ignore.
“There has to be more.”
So I did the only completely logical and totally sane thing anyone in my shoes would do... I left everything and began what became a three-year sabbatical across India, Nepal, and Southeast Asia. I lived in ashrams. I practiced yoga, breathwork, and meditation for several hours a day. I believed I was on the path to spiritual enlightenment.
Instead, my life fell apart.
A few days after a major surgery in India, my partner and I separated. I was alone, recovering, living in a tiny room on top of a building in heavy heat and humidity. My face throbbed from surgery. My heart throbbed from heartbreak.
I remember lying in bed crying, asking myself, how did I end up here?
I thought I was supposed to be evolving. Instead, I felt more lost, broken, and unlovable than ever.
I went from seven hours of daily practice to mindlessly scrolling Instagram and questioning my entire existence.
And the challenges did not stop there.
I was bitten by a dog while hiking in Kashmir and had a severe reaction to the rabies vaccines. I crashed a motorbike in Ladakh and couldn’t move well for weeks. I suffered a stroke and temporarily lost vision on the left side of my field of view.
For nearly two years, over 90 percent of my sabbatical was injury, illness, heartbreak, and disorientation.
I kept asking, why does this keep happening to me?
But despite everything, I refused to go home. I was determined to understand. I was willing to let the experience break me open completely.
In my third year, something began to shift. There was more ease. More flow. More connection with the people I met. And slowly, a deeper understanding began to emerge. I started to see that none of these experiences had been random.
Each challenge carried a gift.
The heartbreak after my surgery forced me to deeply study relationships. It pushed me to develop boundaries. To understand polarity, desire, and emotional safety. To hold myself and others accountable in a way that I never had before.
The dog bite led me to spend months in Buddhist monasteries and even to a chance meeting with the Dalai Lama. The motorbike accident taught me how to slow down and to receive help from strangers. The stroke taught me the sacred importance of aligning mind, body, and heart.
Every loss gave me clarity. And slowly, the story I had carried for decades began to dissolve. I realized I was never broken. I was never unlovable. I had believed that story for so long that it felt like the truth.
That realization changed everything.
The events in my life, even the most painful chapters, have been an expression of love, shaping me into a deeper awareness and perception of life.
I began to see something extraordinary. Across yoga, Buddhism, neuroscience, trauma healing, and high-performance psychology… the same transformational pattern kept appearing. Different traditions. Different languages. But the same process.
A process of breaking old identities, reconnecting to truth, and rediscovering who we really are. I did not learn it from a book. I lived it in my body.
That process became the foundation of my work.
It became SPIRIT Alchemy.
Over the past decade, I've walked alongside hundreds of women through this process. Here's what I see happen: women who spent years understanding their patterns finally start changing them. The shift isn't intellectual. It's something they feel in their body.
If you've read this far, something in you already knows.
You've done the work. You've had success. You've checked the boxes. But somewhere along the way, the color started to fade, and now you feel muted, distant, and disconnected from the woman you know you're meant to be.
That's not a failure of effort. It's a signal that you need something different.
SPIRIT Alchemy was built for exactly that moment.
Achievements:
I share these not to impress you, but to show you: I understand both the heights of human performance and the depths of human suffering. I've lived in both.
Master's Degree in Occupational Therapy
Expert-level Myofascial Release Practitioner
Health and Wellness Coach
Life Transformation Coach
Relationship Coach
Yoga and Meditation Instructor
Wim Hof Method: Trained Instructor
Volunteer Firefighter & EMT
Master Scuba Diver
Swimming Coach
Olympic Trials Competitor & Big 10 Champion (Swimming)
Summiter of Imja Tse @ 20,300ft
Met the Dalai Lama after a chance encounter following a dog bite
Collaborated with Sadhguru at Isha Yoga Center in India
Still Have Questions?
Find answers to the most common questions about SPIRIT Alchemy, working with Scotty, and what transformation actually looks like — including why some women choose to work with a man.
