Journal
Field notes for coming home to yourself.
Tender, grounded writing for the seasons you may be going through.
The library
The body knows the way home.
Tender, practical notes for the middle of it: what happens in the body when your world shifts, why talking didn't fix it, and how you find ground again. Jump to whatever season you're in.
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July 8, 2026
A Snake Crossed My Path in the Rain
A garter snake crossed my path on the Provo River Trail the very moment I asked if it was time to change my life. What the animals show us, and how to listen.
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July 3, 2026
Where Grief Lives in the Body: Losing My Best Friend, and What Helped It Move
Grief does not stay in the mind. It lives in the body, in the chest, the shoulders, the throat. Where grief lives, why it stays, and how it finally begins to move.
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July 4, 2026
The Faith Freeze: Why Your Body Goes Silent When You Question What You Were Taught
The Faith Freeze is the moment your body goes still between an old belief and a new truth. A somatic look at why you freeze when you leave a high-control religion, and how it thaws.
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July 5, 2026
The Healer I Am: From the Girl Who Saw Angels to Cosmic Light Healing
The story of how I became an energy healer. From seeing my first light being at nine, to Reiki and birth work, to Peruvian shamanism, to the vision that revealed Cosmic Light Healing.
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Animal Guides & Spirit Animals
The creatures that showed up right when a message was needed.
Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 13, 2026
The Year Ten Thousand Butterflies Told Me I Would Rise
In the spring of 2019, thousands of painted lady butterflies came north and landed on my arms, a year and a half after my marriage ended. A story of becoming.
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Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 12, 2026
A Mountain Lion Watched Us From the Granite Boulders
A mountain lion watched us from the granite shade on my grandmother's Arizona land. I ran that day. Years later I learned to stand on the boulder and roar.
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Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 12, 2026
The Year the Owls Came for Me
For a whole year the owls kept coming, one after another, until an owl-feather fan was placed in my hands. A story of owl medicine and learning to see in the dark.
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Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 11, 2026
A Lone Wolf Stood Still on the Road to Provo Peak
A lone wolf froze in our headlights near Provo Peak, and I thought of every woman leaving the cage of high-control religion, still searching for her pack.
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Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 9, 2026
A Doe Came to Listen at the River
A doe appeared across the Provo River while my circle of women held one another, a story of deer symbolism, being witnessed, and how the body releases fear when it feels safe.
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Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 9, 2026
An Eagle Swept Down at Utah Lake
The morning after our ceremony at Utah Lake, an eagle swept down and blessed the birth of Rewilding Hearts, a true story of eagle symbolism and vision.
Read the piece Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 8, 2026
A Snake Crossed My Path in the Rain
A garter snake crossed my path on the Provo River Trail the very moment I asked if it was time to change my life. What the animals show us, and how to listen.
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Animal Guides & Spirit Animals · July 3, 2026
What Wild Animals Know About Healing Trauma
A frightened animal shakes the fear all the way out, then walks on free. We are the only animals who do not. What the wild can teach us about releasing trauma from the body.
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Grief & Loss
For the ones you are missing, and the body that is grieving them.
Grief & Loss · July 11, 2026
The First Weeks After You Lose Someone Suddenly
What to do in the first raw weeks after someone you love dies suddenly, when you cannot sleep or eat and the world has broken open. Gentle practices that helped me.
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Grief & Loss · July 7, 2026
What the Body Knows About Losing Someone
The story of losing a girl I loved, the grief my body knew before my mind could, and a gentle somatic practice for the moments loss breaks you open.
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Where Grief Lives in the Body: Losing My Best Friend, and What Helped It Move
Grief does not stay in the mind. It lives in the body, in the chest, the shoulders, the throat. Where grief lives, why it stays, and how it finally begins to move.
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Grief & Loss · July 3, 2026
Grief Rituals: How to Build an Altar for the Ones You Love
Grief needs somewhere to go, and ritual gives it a home. How to build an altar for the ones you love, and keep the dead woven into your living year.
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Grief & Loss · July 3, 2026
Grieving While You Are the One Everyone Leans On
When you are the mother, the caregiver, the one holding it all together, grief has to wait. On grieving in stolen moments, and why the slowness is not failure.
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Grief & Loss · June 10, 2026
Ask your grief a question
A practice for meeting your grief as if it were a stranger who came from out of town.
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Grief & Loss · March 15, 2026
Breaking the spells of silence
On holding collective grief in circle, and refusing to let the hardest stories stay buried.
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Faith Transition & Religious Trauma
Leaving a belief system, and thawing what it left in the body.
Faith Transition & Religious Trauma · July 4, 2026
The Faith Freeze: Why Your Body Goes Silent When You Question What You Were Taught
The Faith Freeze is the moment your body goes still between an old belief and a new truth. A somatic look at why you freeze when you leave a high-control religion, and how it thaws.
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Faith Transition & Religious Trauma · July 3, 2026
It's Not Just You Leaving: How a Faith Transition Ripples Through a Whole Family
Leaving a high-control religion is never only about your beliefs. It moves through the whole family. On the prayer roll, the worried mother, and being loved and grieved at once.
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Faith Transition & Religious Trauma · July 3, 2026
The Shame That Lives in Your Hips: Purity Culture, the Body, and Taking Your Sovereignty Back
Purity culture does not stay in the mind. It settles in the body, in the hips, the womb, the root. Where religious shame lives, and how you take your sovereignty back.
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Faith Transition & Religious Trauma · July 2, 2026
Is It Religious Trauma? The Signs That Live in the Body
You left, but your body still flinches and will not relax. That is religious trauma, held in the body, not the beliefs. Here are the signs, and how they begin to heal.
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Faith Transition & Religious Trauma · May 28, 2026
Which stories you carry
One gift of deconstructing religion: you get to choose which stories come with you, and which you set down.
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The Body & Nervous System
What freeze, fight, and flight actually feel like, and how they move.
The Body & Nervous System · September 7, 2026
What Is Somatic Healing? Why the Body Has to Be Part of the Healing, Not Just the Mind
What is somatic healing, really? A somatic and energy practitioner explains it through one drum, one session, and the moment a body finally lets go.
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The Body & Nervous System · July 3, 2026
Stuck in Freeze: Why You Feel Exhausted and Numb (and How to Get Your Body Moving Again)
Wired and exhausted, numb, sure you are depressed or lazy? It may be a nervous-system freeze, not a mood. What functional freeze is, and how to move your body out of it.
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Energy & Cosmic Light Healing
The part of this work that lives beyond the physical body.
Energy & Cosmic Light Healing · July 5, 2026
The Healer I Am: From the Girl Who Saw Angels to Cosmic Light Healing
The story of how I became an energy healer. From seeing my first light being at nine, to Reiki and birth work, to Peruvian shamanism, to the vision that revealed Cosmic Light Healing.
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Energy & Cosmic Light Healing · July 5, 2026
The Imprint Lives in Two Places: Your Body and Your Energy Field
The imprint of what happened does not live in one place. A true story from a Utah canyon, the fascia of the body, the energetic field, and why tending only one is never quite enough.
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Energy & Cosmic Light Healing · July 5, 2026
What Happens When You Sit With Me: Inside a Somatic and Cosmic Light Healing Session
What actually happens in a somatic and energy healing session with Vanessa. The body and the biofield, hands-on or across a screen, no belief required, and what you carry out the other side.
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Rewilding & the Seasons
Short field notes from the land and the turning year.
Rewilding & the Seasons · May 15, 2026
Rewilding the heart
In nature, rewilding happens on its own. In the spirit, it takes tender, deliberate work.
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Rewilding & the Seasons · April 30, 2026
The Earth's quiet mysteries
Words I wrote at nineteen that still ring true, on our lost intimacy with the living world.
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Rewilding & the Seasons · February 1, 2026
Keep the inner fire
Imbolc, St. Brigid, and tending the flame that guides you through the chaos.
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Rewilding & the Seasons · December 21, 2025
The traditions we keep
Letting go of inherited holidays and building winter rituals that actually mean something.
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