Growing up, I felt like an alien. Following that thread that began in childhood still informs my work to date. But much of it, is much bigger than myself and begins long before I was born.
Core elements of this practice and the way I work and move through the world date back to the lineage and the family I was born to.
I was born to a 4500+ year old unbroken lineage, yet growing up in a religious household felt deeply restricting, and I walked away from religion when I was very young, only to find a deep connection to its essence years later and on my own terms.
Then there’s my famously large happy family. I am one of 6, my parents are grandparents of 33 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren. Between the 58 (godbless!!) people in my immediate family from my parents onwards, there is only love, zero drama. Drama-free living is a practice that I very much bring into my work.

While growing in a happy family, I felt like I was on the wrong planet. I was NOT a kid seeing ghosts. I just had an unshakable feeling that my brain operated differently than everyone I knew. It was as though I was connected to a knowing greater than myself, which allowed me to intuitively know things I had no business knowing. That ongoing experience was perplexing at best and isolating at worst. As I matured it faded. When I arrived at Junior high, bored out of my mind with the school system, that “access” was nowhere to be found. Determined to graduate ahead of my class and get the bleep out of dodge, I had to understand how my brain operated, reframe my ADD and learn how to learn.

The experience of unlocking flow allowed me to graduate high school with Honors at the ripe age of 15 - three years ahead of time. It paved my way into Wharton School of Business and its learnings are still alive in me today.

Shortly after graduating high school at 15, I met my first love - a fellow alien! I was out of school and free to explore life and had a fellow “alien” to do it with. When David Bowie died people said Bowie made it cool to be different. This was the effect Gedaliah had on my life. For the first time, life made sense. Then, when I was eighteen, he suddenly died, and all sense was lost.

Following the loss of my first love, I became so severely dissociated that I was unable to speak or understand language. That was the initiation that sent me onto my path. It wasn’t long before my healing path brought me to altered states. Working with mushrooms, specifically, for the first time, evoked a deep sense of familiarity and knowing, like arriving somewhere for the first time but feeling like I was from there. I found a new framework with which to explore life, one that offered direct access to deeper answers than any one person, book, or methodology could provide. Not only did I heal my trauma over time, I could for the first time since childhood, revisit the connection to a knowing much greater than myself. While this connection does not replace 3D learning, I find it to be instrumental when working with altered states. Herein began a 20+ year exploration that continues to this day.

Discovering altered states was not a happy end by no means. It was a beginning. The first few years of adult life were perplexing as I tried to follow familial and societal expectations and programming, pursuing a business career with the belief that once I found an intellectual challenge, I would find my purpose and settle down. After graduating from Wharton, I moved to NYC where I pursued a career in business and technology, but my heart was not in it.

Alongside my career, I began more intently traveling the world and my inner landscape, studying the human condition and immersing myself in various modalities and practices, from Internal Family System (IFS) to Ayahuasca, from flow coaching to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). While living in NYC, to the request of a growing circle of friends and family, I began sharing my time informally holding space for a growing number of friends and family. For many years, I lived what felt like two parallel lives – working to pay the bills in what felt like purposeless jobs, and being in service in a way which felt very much ON PURPOSE but not making any income doing so.

My creative expression as a dancer and an artist at heart brought me to Burning Man, an experience that resembled my first experience with mushrooms in just how familiar that first time had felt. In Burning Man, I found not only a soul family of like-minded individuals but a larger community that gathers around deeply shared values that very much inform my life and work to this day - from Leave No Trace to Radical Self Expression, Burning Man principles are woven into my day-to-day. Much like medicine work, Burning man stands for what is possible.

In January 2017, following a breakup, I left NYC to CA to take a job running a family office. I moved out west for a job and there I found my purpose. The job turned out to not be what it promised to be, and by the grace of that trauma, shortly after said move, I left my former career to dedicate my life to this work full-time. I have never looked back. What initially felt like a trust fall became the opportunity for me to spread my wings and fly.

Applying myself to this work has not been a linear path, but a strong sense of purpose was the North Star that allowed me to navigate through darker times. Growing and mastering different methods, I dedicated myself to my own personal work, and in time, my decade-old hobby and side practice became my sole focus. My path as a student of consciousness was largely informed by months’ long personal volunteering missions, ranging from stints in Pediatric ICUs to war zones. In recent years, I have been working with ever more specialized groups of individuals, including teenagers and children, leaders and recovering addicts, to name a few. Through following the thread of this work, 42 was born.