My dad was a Vietnam Veteran who killed 69 people in the war. Every day, he took his rage and pain out on me and my family, and I never knew what was going to happen next. One day I’d be handed a $100 bill for no reason and the next I’d be beaten for leaving my ice cream bowl in the living room.

At my earliest opportunity, I moved from D.C.—as far away as I could—to go to college in California. You might think I would have been interested in psychology, but I couldn’t sit through the first ten minutes of Psych 101. As the teacher drew a brain on the board and divided it into parts, something inside me was repelled so I got up and left.

I actually fell in love with history, and in hindsight it was the perfect major to develop the methods I use today. My professors at U.C. Berkeley taught me that—contrary to what I’d always thought—history wasn’t set in stone. It was actually one big, dynamic story.

I loved college and was proud to have started a new life for myself, but I also realized that no matter how far away I moved from my past, all the old family trauma was still with me.

I was lonely and depressed and couldn’t escape the incessantly negative thoughts in my head.

When I went to see a traditional therapist, I left feeling worse than when I walked in.

That same day, through a series of synchronistic events, I discovered an alternative to talk therapy that used applied kinesiology. The practitioner, Maureen, was the most empathetic and non-judgmental person I’d ever met.

She didn’t see me as “broken,” but as someone who had picked up a lot of negative patterns from my family. And she told me that every pattern can change. Life had been chronically stressful since birth, and with Maureen’s help, I set the intention to find peace, even though I’d never experienced it before.

As I began to understand patterns and how changeable they are, a new world opened to me.

In my spare time, I began taking seminars and studying everything I could get my hands on about transformative coaching methods. Then one day I was sitting in class and someone gave a talk about the Achuar, an indigenous tribe who live deep in the Amazon rainforest.

The Achuar are a “dream culture” who believe that dreams are reality. More, they believe that every person needs a dream to work toward every day.

I’d never felt that powerfully called toward anything in my life.

I needed to go down to Ecuador, but I was a broke college student and couldn’t afford the journey. Two years later my dream came true when I was offered a volunteer English teaching position in Achuar territory.

I sold everything I owned and jumped on a plane.

The Achuar were the happiest people I’d ever met, and their homes didn’t even have walls. They were even more aware and less judgmental than Maureen. And for the first time in my life, I felt connected to a loving, universal force that ran through everything. Every day, I cried with joy.

I’ve had many guides over the years, but the jungle, and the people who call it home, have been my greatest teachers.

What I learned from the jungle, about what it means to evolve, became deeply embedded in my work. I facilitated repatterning sessions with tourists and other guides, but after an unfortunate incident where I injured my knee, I was forced to return to the states. It was painful to come back home and for years, I wrestled with the contrast between their culture and ours.

Over the next 10 years, life gave me a mix of blessings (like the birth of both of my daughters) and a whole lot of challenges (like feeling disconnected from the jungle, the deaths of both my parents, and becoming a single mom after a high-conflict divorce).

I developed Mindset Repatterning, ELS Letters, and The Essential Life Story to get me through the hard times.

I’ve spent thousands of hours refining these methods, so anyone can receive the same kinds of life-changing benefits as I did, in a fraction of the time. Those results include overcoming the trauma from childhood abuse, finishing my book, creating a successful business doing what I love, and becoming my own best friend instead of my own worst enemy.

I know what it’s like to be trapped inside of your own mind, thinking thoughts you wish you wouldn’t and acting in ways you wish you didn’t.

The methods I use can work for anyone, and I especially love working with artists because they have the greatest potential to positively impact the world.