The Iseum of The Veiled Lily
Where nature, ritual, creativity, and the inner world meet.
Journey Philosophy Worldview
My work has grown from lived experience, continued study,
and an evolving relationship with nature, spirit, and the body.
This is the story of where I have been, what has shaped me,
and what I continue to carry into my practice.
I. Roots Of My Journey
My story did not begin with me. I was born into family histories shaped by colonization, migration, poverty, tragedy, violence, and religious extremism. These histories influenced how love, authority, fear, and survival moved through generations, even when their effects were not understood or openly acknowledged.
My childhood home was dysfunctional, unstable, and often unsafe. Survival required silence, watchfulness, and endurance. Growing up between cultures brought additional layers of cultural assimilation, language barriers, poverty, and isolation. Chronic illness and neurodivergence shaped my experience as well, long before I had the understanding or language to recognize what was happening within me. I learned early how to adapt, suppress my needs, and remain alert to the emotions and behavior of those around me.
But suffering was not the entirety of my childhood. Beauty had a place in my life, and much of it came through my paternal grandmother. She was gentle, creative, and deeply connected to the Earth. In her garden, I learned to care for plants and witnessed the quiet satisfaction of helping something grow. Through her music, I discovered expression and a sense of freedom. Her steadiness offered me a form of safety that was otherwise difficult to find.
When she died, I lost more than someone I loved. I lost one of the few people and places through which I had experienced tenderness, consistency, and belonging. Only later would I understand how deeply her garden, creativity, and relationship with the natural world had shaped the person I was becoming.
II. Surviving The Storm
I left home with very little: a bag of clothes, a pillow, blankets, and a few belongings that mattered to me. I had worked throughout high school to save enough money to leave, but shortly after I moved out, my mother emptied my bank account. My father did not intervene. I was left without the security I had worked for and came dangerously close to homelessness. There were times when I stole food because I had no money to eat.
Returning home would have meant returning to abuse and control, so I stayed away. I slept on a floor, struggled to feed myself, and endured years of instability while trying to build an independent life. Leaving gave me freedom, but freedom did not immediately give me safety. Much of my energy remained devoted to surviving one day and one crisis at a time.
Over the years, I built a successful career as a floral designer and entrepreneur. I became capable, resourceful, and outwardly independent, but professional success did not resolve the internal consequences of what I had lived through. Depression, anxiety, complex PTSD, chronic illness, and neurodivergent challenges continued to affect my life.
For a long time, I did not understand how many of the qualities that had helped me survive, including vigilance, endurance, self-reliance, and the ability to suppress my own needs, had also made it difficult to feel safe once the immediate danger had passed.
III. Remembering The Old Ways
Therapy gave me valuable language and helped me understand parts of my experience, but I continued to feel that some layers could not be reached through conversation alone. I became increasingly aware of how disconnected I felt from myself, the people around me, and the world.
Nature became central to that exploration. Time among plants, trees, water, and changing seasons offered a sense of connection that I had rarely experienced within human systems. I began learning from spiritual traditions and practices that resonated with me while becoming more conscious of the responsibilities involved in approaching knowledge that came from cultures and lineages beyond my own.
As I moved out of survival mode, I also began to recognize qualities within myself that I had previously suppressed or mistrusted: intuition, sensitivity, creativity, and a deep responsiveness to symbol and ritual. I came to understand these qualities not as proof of a special identity, but as parts of myself that finally had enough safety and attention to emerge.
IV. The Climb At Teotihuacán
During a trip to visit relatives in Mexico, a scheduled one-hour layover became a six-hour delay. Rather than remain in the airport, I made the spontaneous decision to take a taxi to Teotihuacán and arrived just before sunrise.
I stood at the base of the Pyramid of the Sun as the first light of day began to beam down from the top. In that moment I felt compelled to climb. I moved step by step, stopping to catch my breath as the stairs grew steeper, until I reached the final stretch, without stairs, and continued on my hands and knees until I reached the peak.
At the summit, surrounded by wind and sunlight, I felt fully present in my body. For someone who had spent so much of her life enduring, adapting, and disconnecting from herself in order to survive, that presence felt profound. I was exhausted, but I was there.
The experience felt like a personal portal. It did not erase what I had survived or transform me into someone new, but it gave me an image I would continue to carry: the knowledge that I could meet the climb as the person I already was. Something shifted in my relationship with myself that morning, and I never entirely returned to the way I had understood my life before.
V. Reclaiming My Medicine
My continued personal exploration eventually brought me into relationship with ceremonial plant medicine. Within supported settings, these experiences helped me encounter emotions, memories, and family patterns that had remained difficult to access through language alone. They did not erase my trauma, but they allowed me to experience parts of it through the body, symbol, and altered states of consciousness.
Some ceremonies brought vivid imagery and a felt sense of connection to my lineage.
I hold these experiences as personally and spiritually meaningful. Their value has been in what they revealed about the grief, resilience, and responsibility I already carried, and in the questions they asked me to continue exploring afterward.
Over time, I studied, practiced, and learned from teachers, elders, and guides. I came to understand that a profound experience does not automatically create wisdom or grant authority. The work continues through integration, accountability, discernment, and respect for the cultures and lineages from which these practices emerge.
My understanding of medicine also expanded beyond any single plant or ceremony. I began to recognize medicine in nature, art, sound, ritual, community, and the body’s capacity to communicate what the conscious mind may not yet understand. Reclaiming my medicine has meant recognizing these sources of connection within my life and learning what I can responsibly offer in service to others.
VI. Walking The Path
As my spiritual practice deepened, I understood that personal experience alone was not enough preparation for supporting others. I sought teachers, healers, and traditions that emphasized humility, consent, responsibility, and respect for the lineages from which their practices emerged.
Over the years, I trained in Reiki, sound healing, ceremonial facilitation, and death care. Each discipline brought its own methods, ethics, and responsibilities. Together, they taught me how to remain present with grief and distress, create intentional ritual space, and work with the body, sound, and subtle energy without assuming authority over another person’s experience.
My studies in alchemy and my ordination as a Priestess within the Mystery School of the Temple of Isis gave me an additional symbolic framework for understanding transformation, dissolution, death, and rebirth as lived processes rather than abstract spiritual ideas. These teachings continue to inform my ceremonial practice and my relationship with the unseen.
I remain a student. I continue to learn, unlearn, and refine my practice through study, experience, relationships with teachers and community, and attention to the living world. Whether I am offering sound, ceremony, gatherings, or death care, my intention is to work with integrity, reverence, discernment, and deep listening.
VII. My Worldview
My worldview has been shaped by living between cultures, languages, and different lenses of understanding the world. I grew up in a multicultural and bilingual home, have spent extended periods of my life in Mexico, and have been fortunate enough to travel and form relationships with people from different cultural backgrounds. These experiences have repeatedly shown me that no single tradition or worldview holds every answer.
These experiences have also made me conscious of the limitations of dominant American culture, particularly its emphasis on individualism, productivity, material success, and separation from the natural world. I believe we lose something vital when we understand ourselves only as individuals moving through isolated lives. We are shaped by our families, cultures, communities, environments, histories, and the systems in which we live. What shapes us affect our choices, and our choices affect one another, often in ways we may never witness or fully comprehend.
My continued connections to Indigenous spiritual traditions have only deepened my respect for their knowledge, which brought into my field of vision a recognition of humanity's relationship with the Earth, the ancestors, community, and the unseen dimensions of life. These traditions are not interchangeable, nor do I believe their wisdom can be separated from the distinct peoples, lands, histories, and responsibilities from which they emerged. I approach what I have been permitted to learn with gratitude, respect, and an awareness that spiritual knowledge should not automatically be treated as something available for personal consumption.
I remain open to spiritual mystery while also valuing psychological understanding, critical thought, and honest self-examination. My continued studies have given me language for certain patterns I had already experienced: the shadow, archetypal imagery, inherited psychic structures, and the lifelong movement toward greater wholeness. I do not regard spirituality and psychology as opposing forces. Both can offer ways of understanding the parts of human experience that resist easy explanation, provided neither is used to escape reality, avoid accountability, or claim authority over another person’s inner life.
I believe healing is both personal and relational. Healing ourselves does not automatically heal the world, but it can change what we pass forward. It can alter how we love, how we respond to pain, how we participate in our communities, and whether or not we repeat the patterns we’ve inherited. Personal transformation cannot replace collective responsibility or structural change, but it can affect the kind of presence we bring to both.
Ancestry, to me, is not only a story of inherited pain. Alongside generational trauma, we may also carry generational courage, creativity, instinct, endurance, knowledge, and love. Many of our ancestors survived circumstances we can scarcely imagine, often without the language, safety, or opportunity to examine what they had endured. I honor their survival while also acknowledging that survival can leave wounds that continue through a family until someone becomes willing and able to face them.
Within my own family, I was often the black sheep, the scapegoat, and the person who resisted abuse, manipulation, and attempts to silence or diminish me. For a long time, I understood that resistance primarily through pain and alienation. I now also recognize within it discernment, courage, and a refusal to surrender some essential part of myself.
I consider myself a cycle breaker. Breaking a cycle is not one triumphant act. It is an ongoing practice of becoming conscious of what I carry, taking responsibility for what is mine, grieving what cannot be changed, and choosing what I will no longer pass forward. Shadow work has not transformed me into someone without shadows. It has asked me to recognize them as part of my humanity and bring them into a more honest relationship within myself.
I do not believe one person can heal another. We can witness, accompany, create, teach, offer practices, and help cultivate conditions in which healing may become possible. Each person remains the authority on their own inner life. This understanding informs both the services I offer and the way I hope to meet the people who enter this space.
My worldview continues to change as I change. I no longer need it to provide certainty about every mystery. I want it to keep me curious, responsible, connected to the living world, respectful of what I do not know, and willing to revise what I once believed. I am grateful for the life I have survived, the life I am creating, and the people, places, ancestors, and the spirit world that have helped me find my way here.