I became a mental health professional because I felt how strongly the crisis of disconnection was impacting the world. After spending two decades leading nonprofit mental health, addictions, and homeless service organizations, I realized I could not bring about the kind of transformational change I longed for through institutions that were limited by their own scarcities and crises. 

Overwhelmed by the scale of the problems I was trying to address, and the limitations of what traditional talk-therapy approaches could achieve, I realized I could never hope to make the kind of change I knew was needed from within systems that themselves, were broken. Exhausted, burnt out, and stripped of my purpose and meaning, I found myself feeling alone and rudderless. 

It was the tail end of the COVID pandemic. When I looked back over the past twenty years, I could count many personal and professional achievements: yet, I felt empty.

 I had just entered my fifties and something on the inside just didn’t feel right anymore. I knew that whenever I went outside — the tightness in my chest loosened, I could breathe a full breath, and that childhood feeling of wonderment would begin in sneak color into my grey world. 

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I had a deep longing for wildness in my soul.

Triggered by those inklings sparked in nature,  I felt profound call to take a long walk in nature. I walked away from the boxes that were confining and constraining me, and set out on a modern-day pilgrimage. 

Over the next months I hiked and backpacked in Colorado’s mountains, camped out under the stars in the Utah desert, and eventually went to Spain and walked the Camino Primitivo (“The Original Way” - an ancient pilgrimage through the mountains of northern Spain). 

During this time I walked away from the husk of a person I’d become, and back to my true self.  It wasn’t instant liberation: I found myself facing difficult feelings, hard truths, and recognizing how far my life had drifted away from my core purpose. As a pilgrim I walked through my Dark Night of the Soul, encountering the grief of times when I had shrunk away from my calling, ignored my intuition, and ended up betraying the part of myself that wanted to remain open and trusting of experience and expression. 

On the the Camino,  I also met my ancestors, and felt in my very footsteps how my experience was connected to experiences people have been having for hundreds if not thousands of years. 

I came to understand that the process of walking out your demons is another version of the natural process of death and rebirth that repeats itself throughout the natural world. As I wore out shoe leather I also gently pushed seeds into the ground, planting the garden that has now grown into the Rewild Your Soul program. 

I dedicate my work to the soul pilgrims who are ready to set a course towards their fullness as humans. I truly believe that, as we engage with nature, we’ll gain the tools to navigate the great challenges of our time, and become agents of repair in a world that so desperately needs healers, wild souls, and deep truthtellers. 

I’ll be walking this path for the rest of my life: join me.