My Story

For as long as I can remember, my experience of life has flowed between two states; one of experiencing beauty, and one of experiencing pain.

 

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 the age of 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 the age of eight, very much against my wishes, my parents decided to relocate 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 chose to homeschool 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 understandings 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 at 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 ones that 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 own psyche. 

 

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. It was there that 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 had 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 that I as a cooped up 18-year-old had been seeking.

 

My vision of what life in New York City was going to be like 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 or so I was able to find my rhythm and stride in both 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 eventually seeing that my mother was going to pass before she would be able to return to Maine and spend time there again. It was a lot to be aware of at that young of an age, and I truly 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,  after my mom 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 completely 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 subconsciously wasn’t my life-mate, but who would take care of me in the ways I needed at that time.

 

At the age 30 after living together with my partner for a number of 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 sense 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 was going to have to scrap everything so that I could begin to build a new life for myself.. In September of 2013 I was not able to 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 was going to be excruciatingly painful, I had no time to lose, that 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 that I had known since leaving home at the age of 17.

 

Within a month life began occurring in Technicolor and surround sound. My emotional spectrum 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 began saying yes to almost anything and everything that came my way. Road trips, silent discos, new jobs, 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.

 

Since that period of awakening in 2013, the expansion of my life experiences has been more incredible and richer than I ever knew possible. It has been difficult, and rewarding. I am in love with the spectrum of experiences available - both the beauty and the pain. After rebooting “Rael’s Cosmic Reality” I indulged in a period of fantastic adventures, 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 ultimately have gotten to know and love who I am as both a human being and an eternal soul form.

 

In late 2016, after having done Ayahuasca for the first time, I knew that another major round of shifts in my life was necessary. I had finished inundating myself with all the experiences 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, which had been my home for 16 years occurred in Bali. I spent a month there and was able to keep business afloat at home. I barely made it, but I made it. That gave me enough confidence to leave New York in the summer of 2017 at the age of 34. After having worked 11 years in the fashion industry, I sold back the equity from the company I helped to build, giving myself a runway to explore other countries and additional ways of supporting myself.

 

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 the guest of many cultures, learning of symbols, rituals, ceremonies and different healing modalities along the way.

 

After searching for a place to call home for a few years, circumstances created one for me. In 2020, a long expected global catalyst occurred. Everything changed. Hopefully in the long run things will change for the better. A handful of days before a rampant virus began mutating the way people lived their lives, I came back to roost with my older sister, Gretchen, in Denver, Colorado. Family comes in many forms, full blooded, half-relatives and friendships.

 

I have been in Colorado for just about three years, and once again, I feel another set of life shifts on the horizon. I am grateful to have stepped firmly into the space of faith over the last 6 years. There have been countless moments of assistance, synchronicity and magic, to know that whatever this next transition yields will be rewarding and beautiful, despite the pain.

 

As I step further into my future, I’m centering myself 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 and forming new ones, and beginning to find where I can shine my light in greater ways.

 

Thank you for reading my story. I hope some part of it touches you in a meaningful way.

 

Follow The Beauty Way.

RAEL