In 2000, Artexpo named me Artist of the Millennium. I sold art to a baseball legend, opened a gallery, and earned a creative living. I also used hypnosis to help people recover from trauma, abuse, anxiety, depression, anorexia, PTSD and more.

I backpacked across India to chant with Sai Baba and shivered in the Himalayas on a 10 day silent Vipassana Meditation training. When I got home, I recorded 5 albums with The Winterlings, charted at #6 and moved to Seattle. Later, stressful shows spiraled into a year of severe arrhythmia, fueled by fear. I learned to embrace it and it faded. But my arrhythmia was about to be replaced...

COVID fear, a harrowing drive to Missouri and my cousin’s death catalyzed my constant, chronic pain. Sitting was unbearable; I had to strap myself to a futon in my van so my partner could drive me to the hospital. I was desperate for the medical system to fix my pain, but each doctor made me more afraid. 

One doctor pointed out that on the McGill Scale, my pain ranked higher than childbirth and amputation. Another diagnosed me with “the suicide disease.”

I developed gastritis and had a four-hour panic attack that felt like slipping off the edge of the Grand Canyon again and again. Over months of relentless attacks, I refined a technique that eventually gave me wings.

Then my father died, and my nervous system was running so hot that a naturopath’s needle paralyzed my leg and plunged me into the abyss. My life shrank from a planet to a pea.

I stopped all medical treatments and started studying neuroplastic pain science, which gave me a spark of hope:

My brain had “learned” pain and I could unlearn it! Pain was just "protection" coming from my unconscious mind. But knowledge wasn't enough. I had to practice, to train my mind to keep walking through hell.

And life kept raging: I found my neighbor impaled on a post, my aunt died and my romantic relationship collapsed.

But breath by breath, I kept recovering. I finished my 5th intensive RRT training and refined my recovery strategy by enhancing techniques from pain science with the hypnotic power of RRT. And that was the ultimate key: communicating directly with my unconscious mind. 

As winter hit, I packed my box trailer, bought new tires, and said goodbye to my partner, my home and my tribe in one night. I walked from door to door, weeping. I had loved them all for over a decade. 

My brother flew to Seattle and helped drive me a staggering 3122 miles over the Cascades and across America with God’s sunshine in our eyes. The trailer electrical cable crumbled, but we made it safe to Florida and I began my resurrection, kayaking with gators, hiking at the Enchanted Forest and roaring forward as my pain faded. I rewired the trailer cable as I rewired my mind.

Healing is an odyssey in which you learn to turn the flames of pain into a light that reclaims every inch you thought you had lost to darkness. On my walk through hell, I became a human flame, ready to guide you through the fire to a new life.