A Knowing In My Bones: What is the School of the Red Skywalker?

I have been many things: a dreamer, hospice and psychiatric nurse, death doula, film producer, educator, and now, a messenger. I’m not special, but I’m following my purpose and inviting you to come with me.

For the last six years, I’ve trained death doulas to sit at the bedside. Yet what has been emerging feels less about tending those who are dying, and more about tending what is dying within us in service to a greater collective healing. In these paradigm-shifting times, I steward a space where we can companion the endings and transitions of the old ways of being in humanity that are falling away. Ways rooted in abuse, exploitation, manipulation, and separation.

We are seeing the impact of the call and response many have forgotten we are a part of. Where our fragmentation and unrest within reverberates to the human collective and the Earth. Where Nature responds with any means necessary to recalibrate Herself. I have no doubt Nature will go on, but will humanity?

We are at a choice point—an invitation to shift how we relate to life, from fear to love. To live awake and embodied. To create from coherence. To have the inner ground to hold ourselves and one another as so much falls away and transforms.

This collective is for those who feel the time to remember is now—who know, in their bones, that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

The School of the Red Skywalker is my answer to that call, to share what I know and to learn from you too. I grew up in a culture largely disconnected from a relationship to Soul, Spirit, ancestors, the Earth, and one another. I didn’t know what belonging felt like, how to feel safe in my body, how to stand in integrity within myself and my relationships, or how to work through conflict or repair. I carried grief and disconnection without language or guidance for how to heal it. I felt so unheard that I grew quiet. So unseen and unable to see myself that I crawled beneath my own skin. Utterly alone in rooms full of people. Witnessing myself and others around me living in the mind, and restlessly seeking safety from the outside, because who knows how to be in a body when it feels so unsafe and carries so much unspoken memory? Who amongst us today doesn’t have a similar story?

That disconnection and grief became fuel for my longing for my own Soul’s healing, and to reweave a wider cultural remembering of Soul. This led me first to nursing, the only framework for “healing” I knew at the time, while also seeking understanding beyond the torn fabric of the culture I’d inherited. Sensing that the medical system could not hold the root-level healing I was seeking, I traded resuscitation of the body for resuscitation of the Soul. I was led to death care as a hospice nurse, while deepening my studies in metaphysics and epigenetics, hungry to understand who we are beyond these bodies, and who we are as Spirit. I saw how often it seemed to take the precipice of death for people to be able to turn toward life with vulnerability and connection. Each moment at the bedside breathed Life back into my awareness, though it would take another ten years before that knowing began to integrate and become embodied.

My path later led me to facilitate with the Conscious Dying Institute and to produce the film The Last Ecstatic Days, which brought me to Asheville, NC, where I helped ground the vision of Emberlight: The Center for Conscious Living & Dying.

It was during this time that parts of my Soul that had long been minimized, bypassed, or “transcended” could no longer be ignored. My journey of recapitulation truly began—calling my energy back to myself, not by leaving the body, but by inhabiting it more fully and listening to its painful wisdom.

I called back parts of myself that had long ago left and the many moments of repeated self-abandonment and dishonoring of my body, my heart, and Spirit. At times it took abusive relationships, a natural disaster, and pregnancy loss for me to learn to listen, but eventually I did, and found the healing and awareness I was always seeking came from inhabiting myself and this body more fully.

During this time I also began apprenticeship in Mayan Curanderismo and walked with mentors who taught me what I had always been longing for: healing grounded in community, right relationship, trauma awareness, and ceremony as a way of life. As I called home the fragmented parts of my Soul, I stopped chasing life from pain and began living more from coherence—learning to discern alignment, to become more trustworthy for myself and others, to repair, to forgive without bypass, and to choose from the present rather than projecting and repeating the past. Being witnessed and held in love helped me stand more fully into who I am, and that freedom has become everything.

I have learned the power of this witnessing. What it feels like to give voice to the stories held in the body before a sacred witness—one who has done that work themselves and is able to reflect a mirror of Love. That witnessing gives the gift of a new imprint and experience that we didn’t receive the first time around. And then, the body feels safe. Then we have choice again. And we live all the way to our toes, instead of living through the mind without even knowing it. 

No matter how good our intentions are or how much we care, I believe until we know how to feel grounded in our bodies again and know alignment of body, heart, mind, and Spirit, that we will not know Heaven on Earth. I believe we need as many people as possible who can hold these stories well in these times.

In the Mayan Tzolkin, the Red Skywalker is here to help bring conscious awareness to Earth. This is what I intend to support: that coherence does not come from reaching for the heavens, but by embodying it here, on Earth. By integrating the wisdom above with the truth below. By allowing our wounds to become medicine, and our bodies to become sacred ground.

This is what the School of the Red Skywalker is: a space to do the Soul work of coming home—to Self, to Spirit, to ancestors and bloodline, to community, and to the Earth. I will share what I know, and I invite you to share what you know, so we may remember that we are not alone.

May this be one of many ways we help one another come home and bring coherence to these times. In lak’ech Ala K’in—I am another yourself.

Will you walk alongside me, and teach me too?