For as long as I can remember, my experience of life has flowed between two states:
On May 8th, 1983, I was born into the world in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My parents had elected to have a home birth, the first of many less-than-ordinary choices that I would be brought up under. After 2 years of living in Cambridge, my mother, father, older half-sister Gretchen and I moved to a self-sufficient farm in Maine, and after a few short months, my family left farm life and moved to a small, sweet, coastal town called Belfast.
Our home was three blocks up from the sea upon a hill, and I can remember viewing the ocean and appreciating the curves of the bay below from a young age. I remember the breeze, feeling like I was naturally a part of it, allowing my psyche to meld and travel within it though I didn't have the vocabulary to express such things at age 5.
My parents had two more children, my sister Shaile, and younger brother, Michio. My memories from this time are vivid - the sound of snow crunching beneath my boots, the feeling of cold window panes against my nose, watching my mother make handmade dolls, being taken outside by my father to stargaze, my attraction to fun, bright, colorful clothing and how much I enjoyed scouring the shores for blue glass and unique stones.
At age eight, very much against my wishes, my parents decided to relocate us to Albany, NY, so that my father could attend medical school. My parents fought often, and money was the recurring spark of their arguments. With her oppressive Roman Catholic upbringing, my mother's personality was almost violently anti-establishment; nothing was to be trusted - the Western medical profession, commercialism, public education, etc. To protect her "chickadees," as she called us, she homeschooled my younger siblings and I to keep us away from the general bullying and personality morphing that can occur within the American school system. This left it to my father to be the primary financial provider while attempting to put himself through medical school.
By trade, my father is a Rolfer and a very skilled practitioner with over 40 years of experience under his belt. Although it was challenging for him to be a provider in the classical sense, his understanding of the interconnectedness of energy, body tissues, tensions, etc., allowed me to become aware of the nuances of physical and emotional transformations and of the greater energetic bodies at large from a very young age.
My mother was also quite expansive in her own right, but because of her religious upbringing, words like "God" or "spirituality" weren't words I remember her using. "Energy," "intention," and "vigilance" were more frequent. When I was a girl, I remember looking at her while she was sitting in the living room with her eyes closed and sensing that she wasn't meditating so much as exploring the realms, edges, and dimensions of her psyche.
Despite their respective awareness, they announced their divorce when I was a pre-teen. "It's about time," I thought. Despite my recognition that, in some ways, it was for the best, that moment was etched into my emotional memory as the first of many, many heartbreaks. My first soul fracture occurred at age 11.
When I was fourteen, I chose to go to High School because I felt like I should understand how structures outside of my home life operated. Albany High was a High school where you could feel the hostility and violence brewing in the hallways. It was ghetto. There, I learned how to "disappear" when I needed to. Compared to my memories and the natural beauty of Maine, it was hard living in Albany - The air felt of stagnation and lethargy, and the character of the city felt like a wanna-be gangster that had peaked in the 1950s and hadn't much evolved since. As an adolescent, there was little for me to do; my peers spent their time drinking, going to bad house parties, or taking on generic archetypes such as theater kids, jocks, goths, and the like. I spent most of my time driving around at night with my high-school boyfriend, listening to alternative college radio stations.
As a teenager, music became the directing force in my life – There were enough 16+ punk shows and raves that I usually had something on the horizon to look forward to. After graduating from Albany High, I applied to one school - The Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. 50% of that choice was based on liking to design clothes. The other half was that, in my mind, NYC had all the outlets, DJs, and parties I had been seeking as a cooped-up 18-year-old.
My vision of life in New York City versus what it actually was like was very different. I moved to NYC two weeks before the WTC was hit in 2001, and for several months, NYC felt like a more intensified version of Albany High - the levels of stress and anxiety in the city during that time was both unreal and surreal at the same time. Despite that, I made it through year one without too much PTSD, some very respectable grades, and a class schedule that allowed me to go out dancing to drum and bass in Alphabet City on Monday nights. After a year, I had found my rhythm and stride in school and the city.
In early 2002 when I was 19, my mom gave me a book by Jane Roberts called "The Nature of Personal Reality." My intuition and foresight started to develop rapidly as I began reading about reality creation, other dimensions, higher (non-physical) aspects of oneself, and the mechanical workings of the universe. I was able to "see" things more frequently, including seeing that my mother was going to pass before she could return to Maine and spend time there again. It was a lot to be aware of at that young age, and I didn't know how to handle the information. After several months I received a call from my older sister asking if I had heard about Mom. "Here we go…" I thought.
A handful of months later, and after my mother had passed, I tried to "turn off" my intuition. I didn't want to "see" any longer because the only things I saw were painful. I spent ages 22-26 entirely divorced from myself, from my feelings in general, and was trying to portray myself as a "happy, normal person" by hiding that I was in no way, shape, or form a "happy, normal person." By the age of 26, I felt so beat up by life that I'd begun seeing a therapist and had attracted into my life a good man - one who I knew wasn't my life-mate, but who would take care of me in the ways I needed at that time.
At the age of 30, after living together with my partner for several years, therapy 2x a week, shuffling from one uninspiring job to another, some self-help books, Bikram yoga, and becoming comfortable with my own meaning of the word "God," I had rehabilitated and reconnected with myself enough to "see" that the version of life I had been living was not the one that I ultimately wanted. For four months, I tried to avoid the knowledge that I would need to scrap everything so I could begin to build a new life for myself. In September 2013, I couldn't deny this knowledge any longer…my future life was at stake.
For about 3 to 4 weeks, I went through an intense period of spiritual experiences, including feeling overwhelming waves of love and forgiveness towards my father, seeing green dream-catchers in lucid states, having my first cosmic sexual experiences, and so forth. Even though I knew that surrendering everything I had would be excruciatingly painful, I knew that I had no time to lose, God was providing an unseen safety net for me, and that I was strong enough to go through whatever I needed to.
And so I gave up my Brooklyn apartment in an affluent neighborhood, the bonds I had with our dog, Bodhi, and Sophie, our cat, and the closest thing to a home life I had known since leaving home at 17.
Within a month, life began occurring in Technicolor and Surround Sound. My emotional spectrum was magnified. I got to live by myself for the first time. Instead of sitting in my old kitchen, being surprised that I was alive enough to have a favorite song, I began to go out dancing again. I started saying yes to almost anything and everything that came my way. Road trips, silent discos, new jobs, new communities, new life styles, new …. everything. Within months my friend group quintupled; I was working at Victoria Secret's Corporate as a technical designer; I was enjoying my own home and the feeling that I was beginning to "see" a future that I actually wanted.
At the age of 30, in 2013, after rebooting "Rael's Cosmic Reality" I spent three and a half years indulging in fantastic adventures. I explored the earthly and cosmic realms, moved in and around NYC 12 times, spent time with beautiful friends, helped build a fashion and accessories line, and embarked on the journey to know and love myself as both a human being and an eternal soul form.
In late 2016, after doing Ayahuasca, I knew another major round of shifts in my life was necessary. I had finished inundating myself with everything NYC had to offer that I had been too depressed to experience during my 20s. My test to see if I could survive outside New York, my home of 16 years, occurred in the spring of 2017 on the luscious island of Bali. I spent a month there and was able to keep business afloat at home. I barely made it, but I made it.
" WHAT'S NEXT?"
After returning from Indonesia, at the age of 34, I found myself sitting alone in a cafe after selling back the equity of the fashion company I helped to start. "...What's next?" I mulled, looking into a white porcelain coffee cup. "I don't know... but it's time to go."
And so, I left NYC to roam my internal and external landscapes, spend time on different continents, and experience our planet's richness. I was driven by a relentless need for exploration, a desire to mend the broken parts of myself, and to uncover what I learned was called "The Beauty Way."
I spent 30 months traveling continuously through different parts of the globe, searching for a new place to call home and places that felt "safe."
I became a guest of many cultures, learning their symbols, rituals, ceremonies, and different healing modalities along the way.
Most of my jewelry designs were born during this time of exploration; the collections being inspired by the different facets of conscious that I encountered symbols of time and time again.
After searching for a place to call home for about three years, circumstances created one for me. In 2020, a long-expected global catalyst occurred, and everything stopped. Three days before the national lockdown occurred, I came home to roost with my older sister, Gretchen, in Denver, Colorado.
Family comes in many forms, full-blooded, half-relatives, and friendships.
Colorado has felt like a gracious layover. The people are kind, supportive, and helpful, and the weather is stunningly beautiful and dramatic. Being here has afforded me the chance to create a brand centered around sharing the symbols and frequencies I encountered on my journey with you.
There is another set of life shifts is on the horizon; one that I am tempted to stave off, but one that I know will lead yield the next chapter of my story.
I am grateful to have stepped firmly into the space of faith over the last seven years. There have been countless moments of assistance, synchronicity, and magic to know that whatever the next transition yields, it will be rewarding and beautiful despite the pain. My hope for you is to know that God provides an unseen safety net for us all - and that you, wherever you are in life's path, are also strong enough to go through whatever is before you.
As I step further into my future, I'm curating my life around building a self-sufficient business, sharing the beauty I've found with others, my continual pursuit of spiritual expansion and understanding, existing more nimbly within the quantum realm, strengthening the bonds I have cultivated thus far, forming new ones, and finding where I can shine my light in brighter ways.
Thank you for reading my story. I hope some part of it touched you in a meaningful way.
