For much of my life, I had names for the different things I did, but no single language for what they had become together.
I could speak about mediumship, shamanic practice, energy work, dreams, other lifetimes, the natural world, the body, intuition and the many ways information seemed to arrive. I trained in different traditions and developed practices of my own.
But the work itself never happened in separate pieces.
I listen. I receive. I notice what becomes present.
And when something opens, I follow the thread.
Sometimes that thread remains close to the life a person is living now. Sometimes it moves through the body, relationship, memory, another lifetime, a guide or presence, an ancestral or cosmic story, a forgotten ability, or something that has been waiting a very long time to be recognized.
Over the years, I came to understand that this is the work of both the DreamWalker and the StoryKeeper.
One follows the story wherever it opens.
The other recognizes what belongs together and helps bring its meaning home.
Lineage + Lived Initiation
My way of seeing did not begin with training. It began within my family and through experiences I had long before I had language for them.
On my mother’s side, she was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. My maternal lineage is Métis, and my mother carried her own intuitive gifts. She was ordained as a healer by Monseigneur Proulx.
On my father’s side, intuition often expressed itself through symbols — cards, tea leaves, palmistry and visionary art. Looking back, I can see that listening beyond what is immediately visible was present on both sides of my family.
My own experiences began early. At five, during an accident, I experienced myself outside my body. I don’t know whether that early encounter made it easier for me to access these states again, but experiences of this kind continued throughout my life.
Many were difficult to speak about. There was not always a place for them in the world around me. An experience could be dismissed as a dream, imagination or fantasy, even when it had affected me deeply.
But I continued to follow them because, to me, they carried a reality that felt deeper than the suffering I knew in my everyday life.
Within them I encountered intimacy, closeness, love, compassion and care. Those experiences showed me something about Life that the circumstances around me could not.
They became something I trusted enough to return to.
Over the years there were dreams, out-of-body and near-death experiences, visionary encounters, energetic openings, shamanic journeys, experiences with the elements, plants and the natural world, becoming the Tree, and entering what I came to know simply as the nothingness.
I did not always understand these experiences when they happened.
During my near-death experience as a young woman, I experienced myself helping others. I did not return with an explanation for why I had been shown this. What remained with me was something much more immediate: it was one of the most meaningful experiences of caring I had ever known. I returned carrying that experience in my heart and mind.
And this became a pattern throughout my life.
I returned to experiences that had affected me. Sometimes months later. Sometimes years later. I listened again, questioned what I thought I understood, and discovered things I had not been able to recognize when the experience first occurred.
Relationships appeared. Patterns became visible. An experience I had once understood one way could reveal something entirely different when encountered again from another place in my life.
The Tree did not give me words. It gave me an experience of how Life moves.
It has taken years of returning to experiences like these to begin finding language for what they were showing me.
Looking back, I can see that this returning became a practice of its own:
Experience → Return → Recognition → Language → Embodiment
Perhaps that is also why I learned not to dismiss an experience simply because we do not yet know what it means.
