I wanted to be a medicine woman. That didn’t seem to be on offer, certainly not to a white woman in America, and I wasn’t wrong to wonder.

Nobody in my life did anything like this. There was no one to ask.

I had the clairs from childhood, though I had no word for them then, and by my early teens I was working with the guide I still work with now.

So when I read Clan of the Cave Bear as a teenager, I wasn’t discovering anything. I was recognizing it. Ayla teaching herself which plants did what, with nobody to teach her, in a world that had no place for it. And the night she took the datura and the root and ended up somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be able to go. I knew that too. I started studying herbs after that and never stopped.

None of it was a career. So I took the ones that were.

I studied biochemistry and chemistry, then a master’s in computer science. I spent fifteen years as an analyst, reading patterns in systems too large to hold in your head, looking for the thing underneath that explained the rest.

For a long time I thought I’d gone the wrong way. I hadn’t. Biochemistry taught me the body. Fifteen years of analysis taught me how to read a system and find what’s actually driving it. Those are the two halves of what I do now.

The medicine woman kept surfacing anyway. The gifts got stronger instead of quieter. The journeys went deeper. At some point the questions stopped being the kind you can answer by reading more.

The children came alongside all of this. The longer I was a parent, the more I caught myself doing the exact things I had sworn I would never do with my own. How do I become a better person for them, and how do I keep from handing down what was handed to me. Those two questions pulled me deeper into this work than anything before them, and they’re still underneath a great deal of what I do with clients.

The decade

I know how to heal a body, because I’ve done it in mine. I’ve healed two physical illnesses that modern medicine says can’t be healed, only cut out or managed with medication.

Then, in a seven-year stretch immediately after, I lost my husband, my mother, my grandfather, and many of the animals I loved.

That walk was far harder than the physical conditions ever were. It’s also what took me all the way into this work, because nothing I already knew was enough for it. Grief that size doesn’t respond to understanding. It doesn’t care what you’ve read. It sat in my body for years and I had to learn, slowly and badly, how to be with something that wasn’t going to resolve.

Everything I do with clients came out of that stretch. Not from the books. From having nowhere to put something, and finding out what actually helps.

I was selective about the medical treatment I accepted, and I combined what I chose with herbs and a great deal of inner work.

Which avenue you take is yours. What I want you to know is that healing is possible, in the body and in the parts of a life that break. Most of what we hear runs the other way. The odds get repeated and the recoveries don’t.

That isn’t a promise about you, and it isn’t a test. People who don’t get well haven’t failed at anything. It’s about finding the right door, sometimes several doors, and doing what feels right for you.

What it costs and where the power comes from

This work found me. I steered away from it for years, deliberately, and it called me back anyway.

I love it. I also won’t pretend it’s light. Helping someone is the beautiful part. The brutal part is that you can’t do it from the outside. It asks you to stay open the whole time, with nothing between you and what’s in the room, and you do that again with every person. My own work is the part that never finishes, and knowing more doesn’t make it easier.

The power I have came from doing that work on myself. None of it comes from you. I’m not here to be needed, and a session that leaves you more dependent on me is a session I did badly.

What I’m like to work with

I don’t practice one methodology. I use many, combined in ways that make each one stronger and cover more ground than any of them manages alone.

So I’m not going to hand you a protocol, and I’m not going to explain your life to you. I ask questions, I pay very close attention, and I work with what actually shows up rather than what either of us expected.

Nothing surprises me and nothing intimidates me. A client who has worked with me for years put it this way:

“Most practitioners can only walk so far with me before they must turn back. It gets too deep, too dark, too powerful, too much. This is not so with Sheila. She is not afraid. She can hold the space.”

That’s the part I’d want you to know before deciding whether to bring me the thing you haven’t said out loud.

I hold the certifications and I’ve read the books. Neither is what makes me useful to you. I can’t tell you what will happen in your session, because every session is different, as is every person. What I can do is walk with whatever shows up, hold it, and not flinch.

What I’ve studied

The studies are long and they aren’t tidy.

I don’t study passively. I take a thing apart, question it, turn it upside down, and carry it to my guides, my teachers, and occasionally the medicine, until I understand where it’s right and where it’s wrong.

Indigenous and shamanic traditions, including Somé, Sarangerel, and Buenaflor. Villoldo, Shutan, Pratt, and Foor. Archetypes, from Jung through Myss and most of what sits between them, though what I took from Myss was as much about healing as about archetypes. Daoism, Chinese medicine, Buddhism, Christianity. Astrology, human design, the I Ching. Sacred geometry. Herbalism, which came first and is still running.

Stone and crystal medicine with Sarah Thomas, who trained under Jeffrey Yuen, an 88th-generation Daoist priest. I’ve worked with him directly.

And the science, which matters as much as the rest of it. Van der Kolk, Levine, Maté, Wolynn.

That’s the short list. There are far too many to name.

I don’t belong to one school. That was never a strategy, it’s just what happens when you keep following the thing that works.

The formal credentials are below, and they’re the smallest part of this.

• ✦QHHT^® Level 2 Practitioner, Dolores Cannon method
• ✦Archetypal Consultant, Sacred Contracts, Caroline Myss’ CMED Institute
• ✦Breathwork Facilitator, Alchemy of Breath, 400 hours
• ✦Reiki Master and Teacher, Usui Ryoho, Shinpiden
• ✦Munay-Ki Practitioner, The Four Winds Society
• ✦SomaEnergetics Sound Therapy, Phase One
• ✦Ordained Minister
• ✦Traditional shamanism, herbalism and stone medicine

About the words

I’m not claiming a lineage. I haven’t been initiated into an indigenous line and I don’t hold anyone’s tradition. Both “medicine woman” and “shaman” have been used about me by other people, and I don’t lean on either. What I’m claiming is purpose, and the work of a life.

What I practice isn’t any one tradition. I’ve studied inside several and I owe all of them. What I do is what was actually given to me, through my guides, through the plants, and through a life that taught it the slow way.

Where the work happens

If you want to read more

• ✦The Story I Tell About Myself — on the version of ourselves we keep repeating, and what it’s for.
• ✦Heal Thyself — what the phrase actually meant, and what I think a practitioner is for.