When visiting the hospital, airport, or train station, you may have noticed a small sign pointing off to a dark quiet place to be still, center yourself, and gain perspective on your journey. Here I offer my own roadside interfaith chapel as a place of wholeness for my fellow travelers.
I am a lifelong student of human consciousness, history, spiritual traditions, and self-healing wisdom, and have continually synthesized a wide range of traditions with contemplative practice to learn for myself how to navigate life’s cycles with more clarity and peace.
My journey has taken me through many life extremes while offering access to a uniquely wide range of spiritual traditions and teachers. I have had rare opportunities for deep practice, rigorous academic inquiry, and structured silence—but I’ve learned mostly the hard way through daily painful experience and ongoing unskillfulness. Over the past decade, chronic pain and illness and recurring interpersonal struggles drove me to extremes in self-experimentation with every type of pain management and self-healing modality.
My formal education was in English Literature, emphasizing linguistics, technical writing, and sacred mythology with a wonderful set of professors at Brigham Young University. This led to a 25-year career in corporate writing and omni-platform marketing campaign production until 2024, when I transitioned fully to the nonprofit chaplaincy work where I have been serving as a volunteer.
My chaplaincy training began as a volunteer in a tradition that did not ordain women, where I learned the power of service, scripture, sacrifice, and sacred music while supporting women in crises of all kinds. My own life has taken me through extremes—times of strength and times of deep depletion, seasons of abundance and seasons of scarcity. I have known faith, doubt, and the long road between them. I have spent years in rich community and health, and years in deep isolation and illness. I experienced wide swings in both the shape of my body and state of my reputation.
These experiences forced a path of self-inquiry that has revealed a time-tested approach to healing that is increasingly grounded in both ancient scholarship and lived reality.
Over the past 15 years, I expanded my study into a more intensive multidisciplinary exploration of ancient religious traditions and yogic medicine, deepening my understanding while still working in the private sector and raising four children. I continually sought stronger spiritual medicine for the evolving challenges of marriage, family, faith, and chronic health struggles. I ultimately undertook more formal interfaith end-of-life chaplaincy training and was privileged to staff the Being with Dying as a Upaya Zen Center resident.
Rooted in both Vedic and Buddhist teachings, my chaplaincy work explores how humans can be trained to more sanely approach death more skillfully and practically at the community level, and how this shift can uplift collective quality of life. It is a privilege to walk alongside those at the threshold of death—whether their own, their child’s, or a loved one’s—and to hold hands with those who are struggling to remain in the world. Through experiences of systemic burnout (its own kind of death on many levels) we discover the medicine that restores life. We learn to protect this Life as we remember the time-rooted principles echoed in the wisdom of ageless teachers across all traditions—look inside.
The jewel is in the lotus…the kingdom is within…everything you need in any moment is already (always) playing. The practice is about “attuning to” or dialing up the station we truly choose to harmonize with.
To that end, Music itself has become the best medicine in the work of feeling whole. I’m grateful for a religious life saturated with holy, healing music, constant singing, and mom’s insistence on formal training in piano, guitar, flute, and classical voice. I was so lucky to study under the beautiful Shigemi Matsumoto in Los Angeles for several years and now laugh that the only operatic roles I did of note in Los Angeles were nuns!
While raising my kids I taught children, youth, and adult choirs and voice students and found it a fabulous anti-depressant for both myself and my students. I then fully turned to sacred and choral music in 2009 when I was privileged to join the esteemed Utah Chamber Artists. It was here I discovered the art and magic of group communion and the soul-healing power of holy harmonization. This move led me to a continual string of experiences where I’ve witnessed the divinization of physical spaces and deep transformation of people through the medicine of music.
Since 2018 I have increasingly expanded into the rich world of Vedic devotional music. Harmony is a literal healing medicine and a powerful daily practice for transformational self-healing and deep connection with others.
In addition to enjoying more time for jyotish sessions, I am privileged to be working with two interfaith seminaries developing a joint effort to create an ever-widening global network of well-trained community healing support chaplains. The six-month program will equip community and faith leaders with universally helpful grief, end-of-life, and community pastoral care training to support and strengthen communities in times of crisis and will have its first cohort in 2026-7.
My life experiences have uniquely prepared me to advise people in some of their most difficult life transitions—not only through Jyotish study, but also through the challenges and lessons life has brought which have forced applied practice. I take full responsibility for how I have interpreted and synthesized my study and offer it here in the spirit of service toward reducing the suffering of all beings.
I believe that all teaching should ultimately lead one to access the One in themselves.
“The guru is one—all true external gurus must point to the kingdom within.”
Astrology? Are you serious???
I get it. I was beyond skeptical too. For most of my life, astrology was something I dismissed outright—something for conversation purposes only that no sane person would ever admit to taking seriously. But curiosity (and a trusted recommendation) led me to an experience that changed my view abruptly, adding an expansive, archetypal layer of cyclical understanding.
My yoga therapist (himself a sane person) suggested a session with his Vedic advisor, describing him as a wise, grandfatherly figure who could offer clarity as I struggled to cope with some long-term chronic conditions. With nothing to lose and a dose of curiosity, I booked the session without too much expectation. But then, on that first call, my advisor said something that stuck with me: “I do not simply believe in a divine order, I am a witness to it.”
What followed was a deeply insightful, profoundly practical conversation that helped me make sense of what I had believed was utter chaos. Over time, I came to study this wisdom myself, realizing that Jyotish is not about superstition or vague predictions—it is a lexicon of human consciousness, a practical map for navigating life’s complexities. It’s also a great key code for the serenity prayer—a good guide to how to find out what you can and can’t change.
From a purely humanistic standpoint, cosmological study is useful as an archetypal lens of self-discovery when approaching one’s own psyche—as seen with Jungian psychology. In fact, most don’t realize Carl Jung’s openly attributed his archetypal and psychological theories to the Vedic worldview, and Jung himself was a voracious astrologer in the classical sense. Joseph Campbell similarly relied upon this framework in his Heroes Journey.
We do not have to believe in the sun or the seasons for them to take place. The cosmos is an ecosystem, not a democracy, and we each have our own curriculum to fulfill in our lifecycle. Just as we cannot plant seeds in winter and expect them to grow, our cooperation with natural cycles—both inside and outside of us—allows for a truly harmonious life.
Jyotish is simply a tool for self-awareness and energy management—an ancient discipline offering deep clarity for those seeking to live with more alignment and purpose. It also offers a rare pathway to create a life where one can both experience the wondrous music of the spheres and create a truly divine life while dancing along.