The longer story

I grew up outside Boston, and in fourth grade the yearbook asked what I wanted to be. I wrote two things: a teacher, and someone who makes people happy. I didn’t know the word therapist yet, but I became both. I taught elementary school, then went back for a graduate degree in counseling, because I wanted to understand how people heal when their own experience feels too heavy to hold. Nine-year-old me had the plan right. He just left out the part where it kept going.

The other thing arrived quietly, with no headline. Small things I couldn’t explain: a timing to people and encounters that kept repeating, radios clicking on to the right song at the right moment, and underneath it the feeling of someone right beside me, in a good way. It happened too many times, in too many ways, to call it coincidence. I found it interesting, kept my doubt, and didn’t call it anything. It just was.

As the years went on it got more frequent and harder to explain away. People, circumstances, the timing of certain encounters. I stopped trying to rationalize it and just enjoyed it. I didn’t tell anyone. It became normal. Somewhere in there I was already connecting with spirit and didn’t know it. No ghosts, no urgency to deliver anything to anyone. The more time I spent sitting with people, the more it showed up. This was before the internet had answers, so I picked up a few books and let curiosity lead.

Then I met my husband, and it became something I couldn’t deny. We traveled constantly, and I kept having these encounters with strangers. Somewhere in a conversation I’d mention that I could feel someone they loved who had passed, and I’d share what I was receiving. It wasn’t heavy. Nobody stopped the record. It moved through the conversation like it belonged there, and it was healing for all of us. Once it was out in the open, I could finally breathe with it.

That ran for about four years before I ever touched the word medium, and somewhere in there I got intentional about it. I always asked permission first, and I always kept it light. What came through wasn’t strange. It was their life: the energy they were buying into right then, the next steps for their passions and relationships. Tangible, empowering, no predictions. Spirit guided how to present it so it never crossed a personal line, and the grace of it mattered to me as much as the information. My husband was there for all of those first conversations, and he held the truth of what he saw, plainly. We let go of our old beliefs about almost everything together. What a gift, to do that with someone. My family and friends came along the same way, not through announcements, just by witnessing it, little by little, until it didn’t need a label.

I loved teaching. I loved counseling. And I’ve never been able to resist a new road. At thirty-one we traveled the world for a year, came back, packed up everything, and landed in Echo Park. I call that stretch my renaissance. Leaving a life behind has never scared me, because nothing gets left. It all comes with me. That’s not walking away. That’s letting go.

Early on I went looking for others doing this work: mediums, channelers, spiritual people. I wanted to compare notes. Instead I felt like a tourist on a trip I hadn’t signed up for. I didn’t have the kit of clothes or the calm, almost checked-out vibe, and I wasn’t after anything but the experience itself. Everyone seemed shored up, with a ready answer to every question about death and the afterlife, and a list of shows and books to go with it. They had the storybook experiences, a grandmother at the foot of the bed. I had radios and phone calls, and I saw my own insecurity all over them. That was my red flag. The connection looked like a stepping stone, and the thing being fed was the ego. I still wanted in, though. I applied for a job at a well-known spiritual shop in Echo Park before I’d done a single session, and never heard back. What that left behind was resolve. Nobody was going to define how I embraced this part of me.

So I started the only way I could think of. I printed business cards. Yes, we had business cards back then, and no, we didn’t have Yelp or a website or anything else. I took a stack of them on my daily walk around Echo Park with my dog and left them wherever I went, one on a coffee shop counter, one on a bench, never handing them to anyone, just trusting that wherever a card landed there’d be a return in energy. Every day on that walk I focused on what it would feel like to be sitting across from someone doing this. That was my whole marketing plan. Within a week the phone was ringing. Within a month I was being asked onto radio shows. I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles except my husband. No agent, no mentor, nobody who’d ever done this. Looking back, that’s what focused intent and focused emotion do. The things you’re truly passionate about find their way into your experience, and it all comes full circle.

I was terrified. I had never sat down across a table and done a reading for money. My very first client was a comedian who booked the session to get material for a bit making fun of mediums. He didn’t tell me that until he was walking out the door, when he admitted he didn’t have much to work with. I told him he’d have to get more creative. People started driving up to our loft, and every session I was panicking that I was doing it wrong. There was nobody to tell me if I was, except the person sitting with me. In the room I was completely in the zone. Afterward my mind would take over, and I’d spend the night worrying whether they got what they came for. For at least two years that was the pattern: exhilarating during, self-judgment after. If I couldn’t connect, I refunded the whole thing, and I still do. I think of those years as tuition. What they taught me was to give a session everything, then close the door behind it and enjoy my life. I still get a little anxious before someone arrives. That’s fine. It just means I care about the precision and the gravity of this, and I always have.

Within a couple of years I was booked almost every day, and the ride got loud for a while: TV, the LA scene, people whose names you’d know. It felt like being validated, and then it cooled off the way Hollywood does, and I saw it for what it was. I’m glad I did it. I got to meet people with real talent and insight, and I learned that they’re just people. But that isn’t what this is about, and I’m not trying to sell you on who’s sat in the chair. I kept going the same way right up to COVID, when everything moved to Zoom overnight. I was sure a screen would break the connection. It didn’t change a thing. Then in 2021 our twin boys arrived, and I stepped back to integrate. Living this work as a parent refined my sense of what it’s actually about, and I’ve come back to it refreshed and all the way in. The classroom, the counseling, the fatherhood, this: one thread.

Nobody handed me this. My whole life I believed the way you learn anything is to find a guide who already knows how, and being the small student felt comfortable, until it didn’t. What this asked of me instead was trust and patience, enough to find the teacher within. These days I don’t try to understand it with my mind. I trust it in my being, like knowing I have brown eyes. I keep the questions around, because they’re what keep this alive and evolving instead of parked in the past. Curiosity was my ticket, not certainty. What I do is no more and no less incredible than a surgeon’s hands, a dancer’s focus, a musician’s ear.

I’ve watched, over and over, what happens when someone remembers they have their own access to their own knowing. If a session eases suffering by pointing you back to that, it did its job. Nothing new is being added. I’m reminding you of what was already there.

The most engaging part of this work is connecting people with their loved ones in spirit. I’m not here to convince you of anything about the afterlife, and nobody needs my cosmology. What I carry, I’ll share the way I’d share any experience, as mine: fifteen years have left me with the sense that we are eternal, held in something like a soul group, a symphony moving through us, refining itself toward how connected it all is. That’s the view from my seat, an example and not a map. Yours might sound nothing like it, and that’s the point.

When a loved one comes through, they arrive with their signature. Their personality, their rhythm, the patterning of their voice, the quirks. Man, do they love their quirks. But the people who sit with me rarely describe the session by the details that landed. What they describe is the room changing. Somewhere in the first few minutes something opens, and even the most closed-off, arms-folded person in the chair has access to the unconditional love coming through. They laugh more than they expected to. They feel lighter, clearer, more like themselves. And it doesn’t end when we say goodbye. For many it carries on for days, a quiet knowing of real freedom in a space inside themselves they’d forgotten was there.

Spirit does more than say hello. They walk through the inner landscape of your life, the relationships, the patterns, where your focus has been going and where it wants to go. Not as coaching, and not as a to-do list. It’s a reconnection to your own inner knowing, the one the mind is so good at distracting you from, and people are often surprised to find it doesn’t require a mountain of work. Not more therapy, more yoga, more practices. Just recognition. What happens after is yours: whatever path you choose toward your own eternal nature, the session acts as a catalyst for it.

Here’s what still humbles me. It isn’t the name or the birthday or the one memory nobody could have known that does this, though those come through too. It’s the rhythm and the way it’s channeled, the combination of all of it, that connects at a level of knowing. That has nothing to do with my skills. It’s the soul group carrying the message. I’m the mouthpiece.

People arrive from every direction, and they all arrive with the same thing: themselves. I’m not building followers, and I don’t need you to see the world the way I do. Every culture, every family, every person has their own way of understanding this life, and I’ll meet you inside yours. What I do isn’t new anyway. It’s ancient, and it lives in everyone.

Neutrality, balance, and love. That’s the discipline under all of it.

Neutral means I see patterns of energy, not verdicts. People ask me constantly: is he the one, should I leave, is she toxic? I understand why they ask, and I won’t do it. Those are living, complicated, human things that deserve respect, and a cheap answer from me is me climbing into the director’s chair of your life. That chair is yours. I’ll pick up what’s already in motion, the near things, but I don’t sell ten-year forecasts, and I won’t tell you where you’re going when you die.

This is not cold reading. No broad statements, no fishing. The details either land or they don’t, and I’d rather they fail honestly than succeed sloppily. That’s what evidential means. And if one is enough, one is enough.

I meet your experience exactly as it is, with no need to dress anything up so you feel better. Losing someone is its own process, and every way through it is valid. After fifteen years and thousands of sessions, not one spirit has ever come through saying they were not okay, or stuck. Not once. I don’t say that to soothe you. It has simply never happened. What still humbles me is the precision underneath all of it: that any of this is happening at all.

I’m imperfect, with the full catalog of human stuff, and fifteen years of this hasn’t lifted me out of the mess. It’s given me humility, some grace, and a perspective that keeps evolving because it has to. In the room, none of it is heavy. I laugh a lot, and I’ll say the strange small detail out loud before I’ve worked out what it means. You tell me what you recognize. Underneath all of that there’s something quiet, and that’s the part doing the work.

There’s nothing to prepare. The one thing I ask is that you hold off on sharing anything about who you’re hoping to connect with or what’s going on in your life until we’re in the session. Questions about how I work are always welcome. The rest I’d rather receive fresh. Over the years I’ve found the connection is clearest when it’s purely inspired, not a mix of inspiration and what I already know. We sit for ninety minutes, in person in North Hollywood or on Zoom, and it’s the same either way. It’s recorded, and the recording is yours. Whoever shows up, shows up, and it’s usually exactly who needed to.

However you arrived here, through a quiet nudge, a moment of curiosity, or a feeling you couldn’t quite name, I’m glad you did. Come as you are.