FINANCE TO BUDDHISM…

In my twenties, I was working in finance and tech, building the kind of life that looked stable from the outside. I spent nearly a decade climbing the corporate ladder — but underneath the success, something felt disconnected. I had learned how to achieve, but not how to truly listen to myself.

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. Layoffs swept through my company, and I was offered a choice: stay with increased responsibility, or leave with severance. It was terrifying — but some deeper part of me knew I couldn’t keep living on autopilot.

I chose to leave.

With my severance, I went on a month-long silent meditation retreat. That experience changed the direction of my life. When I returned, I began working at a Buddhist meditation center in Chicago, where I spent the next seven years immersed in mindfulness, meditation, community practice, and Tibetan Buddhist teachings.

What began as a personal search slowly became a path of service.

BUDDHISM TO COACHING…

Working at a Buddhist center meant sitting with people through every kind of human experience — anxiety, grief, relationship struggles, illness, uncertainty, joy, transition, and loss. People came carrying real lives, and I learned how to meet them with steadiness, honesty, and care.

At the time, I didn’t think of myself as a coach. I saw myself more as a listener, mentor, and spiritual caregiver. But looking back, this is where my work truly began.

The contemplative practices I trained in taught me how to slow down, stay present, and listen beneath the surface. The community itself taught me something equally important: that people rarely need to be “fixed.” More often, they need space to reconnect with their own wisdom, truth, and capacity.

That understanding still shapes how I work today.

COACHING TO MENTORSHIP…

As our community grew, it became clear that inner work alone wasn’t enough. We were asking deeper questions about race, violence, belonging, inequality, and what it meant to build genuine community in the middle of a fractured city.

In Chicago, I became involved in youth mentorship, community organizing, and social engagement work. Alongside others, we co-created gatherings and programs that brought together young people, activists, nonprofits, and spiritual practitioners across lines of race and class. One of the projects I helped support was Speak Up Chicago, a youth-led open mic and community initiative that brought together artists, young leaders, and meditation practioners across lines of race, class and culture.

This work changed me.

I began to understand that healing is not only personal — it’s relational, cultural, and collective. I saw how much people longed not just for insight, but for belonging, dignity, and spaces where they could actually be seen and heard.

Many of the young people I mentored during that time are still part of my life today.

Read Article: Speaking Up and Speaking Out

MENTORSHIP TO FACILITATION & PLAY…

As more people entered our community, I saw how difficult conversations could easily fracture connection when there weren’t shared tools for communication, repair, and trust-building.

That realization led me deeper into facilitation and embodied practice. I trained in InterPlay, restorative and transformative justice, Art of Hosting, and other relational approaches that emphasized movement, dialogue, nervous system awareness, and collective participation.

These practices transformed the way I held space.

I became less interested in authority and more interested in creating conditions where people could feel safe enough to become real. Humor, movement, creativity, and embodiment became just as important to me as insight and reflection.

I began facilitating spaces that invited not only healing, but connection, honesty, play, and collective repair.

During this period, I began facilitating dialogues across difference, partnering with youth organizations, violence prevention groups, and contemplative communities in Chicago.

Read Article: Waking Up the Sleeping Giant

FACILITATION TO RITUAL & ANCESTORS

Over time, I began to feel that conversation and facilitation alone could not reach everything people were carrying. Beneath many modern struggles were older griefs — inherited histories, cultural fragmentation, migration, silence, and disconnection from lineage and land.

That realization drew me toward ritual and ancestral work.

I began tending my own lineage more deeply while studying practices of ancestral healing, ceremony, grief tending, and embodied spirituality. I found myself returning to older forms of wisdom — to fire, song, rhythm, prayer, silence, and communal ritual as ways of restoring connection.

The facilitation trainings gave me frameworks. Ritual gave me roots.

Today, my work weaves together embodiment, contemplative practice, relational facilitation, ancestral healing, and community process. Whether I’m working one-on-one or with groups, my intention is the same: to help people come back into deeper relationship with themselves, one another, and the life moving through them.