ABOUT

How I got here

I was excelling in the Air Force—winning awards & doing it all—but I broke down in 2014.

I began to feel numb on the job. I imagined a big, exciting life for myself, but it felt so far away; I still had two years of service. The timing was synchronistic; they began rolling out personnel cuts, meaning I could separate early. After breaking down crying on the phone with my mom, unable to rationalize my decision, I said yes to leaving. This went against what everyone (including my mind) was telling me I should do. But my heart was whispering, “your life waits for you on the other side.” So I stepped off the beaten path & set out to find myself. The journey would be filled with struggle and bliss; passion and pain.

Then in 2015 my dad passed away, right before I started a year-long counseling/coaching training. You guessed it—I was a mess. I realized I had a lot of healing to do before I could meet people where they were in their journey. Good thing I received counseling while practicing during this time! It was here that I started to face my pain. I looked at my father wounds, reclaimed my sexuality, & learned so much about other people’s struggles.

I received my bachelors from a progressive institute in SF a year later, where I began stripping away ideas that limit my being in the world. Ideas like my worth is attached to having a prestigious career, & if we’re not being productive then we don’t have value.

My life has been a series of swinging back & forth to extremes: from growing up around all women to being in a male-dominated field in the Air Force, from the conservative military to liberal San Francisco, from searching for answers outside of myself to trusting my own intuition, from being independent to being really needy in relationships. I’ve learned that I am full of contradictions and this is okay. I can hold the complexity and come back to balance when I honor what is real & true in my life.

I’ve discovered over the past 10 years that my searching for who I truly am, where I belong, what I’m meant to do, and why I’m here is a way of running away from myself. Quite ironic. The answers I seek are here. My over-achieving quality leaked over into my personal development and spiritual growth. I now have practices that ground me. I am living with my emotions, instead of trying to fix myself. I trust that what I need to know will come to me when it does. What’s really exciting is when I love myself deeply (see that I don’t need to change anything or become anyone to be okay, to feel joy, to get my needs met) then I can be open to life in a deeper way. This is coming back home to yourself. Here I find life is fluttering all around me. I see beauty is all things—beauty that touches the divine.

Education & Credentials

-Whole Person Certified Coach from Coach Training World (accredited by the ICF-International Coaching Federation) (2020)

-Counseling Certificate from a year-long counseling training (2017)

-B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies at California Institute of Integral Studies (2017)

-In Progress: M.A. in Depth Psychology concentration in Jungian and Archetypal Studies

My Foundational Values

• Preventative Health & Wellbeing: I believe we should do our best to practice preventative health instead of reactive treatment. We shouldn’t wait until our emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing are completely broken until we care for them. Preventative wellbeing picks up on and tends the subtle symptoms before they snowball into something that requires treatment.

• Self Integrity & Flexibility: As a part of personal growth, I value the process of becoming a complex human being. This includes shedding what isn’t you, reclaiming what has been shamed or disowned, and unleashing the potential within. As we go through growth and decay, we learn how to hold the complexity of our lives. I value integrity in one’s values while being flexible in the face of new information.

• Conscious Relationships: Relationships are the very foundation of our existence. We carry our early relationships, however good or bad, in our psyches. We even have relationships with places, with organizations, with countries, with cultures, and with previous selves. I believe we each must do our part in healing our past hurts, taking responsibility for our problems, communicating effectively, creating boundaries, tolerating differences, and honoring our deep need for each other (including the natural world). 

• Vocation: Religion is losing (or should I say has lost) its ability to speak to the hearts, minds, and souls of modern folk. While searching for answers in spiritual practices around the world runs the risk of disowning our own heritage and appropriating others’, at the same time, we need to worship something. We need to have a real connection with something larger than ourselves. The idea of vocation – having a calling in life – holds this vital psychological need. A calling can be imagined through work, community (human and/or the natural world), relationships (with humans, animals, nature, a God), and even hobbies. When you have a personal relationship with some value, purpose, intention, or passion, it fuels you to wake up and proceed throughout your day. 

• Sustainable Living: An incessant longing for more in our culture drives unsustainable practices: more money, more influence, more power, more pleasure, more growth. This desire for more is all about the questions, what can I get or where can I go, instead of, what can I give or how can I support? I believe the key to shifting out of a culture that says our value depends on consumerism or productivity lies in shifting the beliefs underneath. The idea that we are inherently valuable just for being alive is a good start. Further, after remembering we live in an interconnected world, it is our duty to care and give just as much as we are supported and provided for by others (including the earth).

• Symbolic/ Poetic Language: The language we use affects how we see and experience the world. And there is a richness to life that can’t be accessed through the rational/ logical part of the brain, a richness that makes life worth living. To tap into this richness requires one to experience life through metaphoric language. The basic simile—it was as if—drops us into a different way of looking. While we wouldn’t survive without logic in our modern day, we can’t thrive without poetry.

• Humor & Play: Life is not worth living if you can’t enjoy it. Of course, life is challenging and we all suffer, but can we find humor and play in between our struggles, in between the seriousness of our circumstances? Take a minute to stop and smell the roses. Also, I am a huge believer in be childlike, not childish. What kind of play can you get into? What can you laugh at?

Hope to meet you personally,

kristina