About Fire Opal
Healing & Wellness
Own Your Dark to Reveal Your Light
For the past 30+ years, I’ve been on a journey to turn my post-traumatic stress to post-traumatic growth. I have done it, and I can help you do it, too, in far less time than it took me.
I know what it is to feel hopelessly stuck. I was flung into profound darkness at a tender age, and I got stuck for decades: in rage, bitterness, and feeling forever ruined and helpless to do anything to get my self-worth and any semblance of a life back. And I have emerged from the darkness with dignity, power, purity of heart, endless possibility, hopefulness, loving purpose, and joy.
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About Me
I’ve been there. I know what it’s like.
Having grown up an only child of a single mother, my home broken by alcoholism and abuse, vulnerable, lonely, and too frequently alone in my suffering, I know alienation and emotional pain. Having been victim of a violent sexual crime at a formative age and subjected to the very worst the criminal justice system had to mete out to survivors of such outrage in the late '80s, I know forsakenness and public humiliation and shame, the kind that colors a psyche for a lifetime.
Raised in fractured, dysfunctional Christianity, confirmed Roman Catholic, disillusioned, having taken refuge in Tibetan Buddhism, and finally returned home to Roman Catholicism, my spiritual journey has been ranging and rich. And it has often been painfully lonely. I know what it is to wander psychologically and spiritually wounded. And I know what it is to face fearsome past experience with curiosity and tenderness and to forge a life and identity through strength of character and hard work.
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For over three decades, I have endeavored to bring healing into the world through my work in whatever form it has taken. I have been a Reiki practitioner at the ART/master level since 2013 and a professional chaplain since 2018. In addition to my spiritual healing and coaching practice, I work as a hospice chaplain in rural North Dakota.
Fire Opal Healing & Wellness is the fruit of my spiritual journey and healing over the past 30+ years, joined to my lifelong drive to be of service to the world.
My call to study and offer Reiki healing arose directly from my spiritual practice. In 2011, as I neared a milestone in my Buddhist practice, I experienced a spontaneous upwelling of what felt like an electrical current coursing through my body. In that moment, I understood the tingling, effervescent sensation to be healing of my trauma and sense of irreparable brokenness. I felt a deep yearning and call to cultivate and use this spirit energy to heal others who have suffered as I have. And, most significantly, I realized that it is through my own woundedness that I am to accomplish this and so turn my deepest, most intransigent grief and anguish to profound healing and benefit for all I can reach.
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