How Karen got here
There's a moment I return to sometimes — sitting in a car on a farm in Michigan, phone in my hand, unable to dial. My ex-husband had just threatened my life. I was paralyzed. Not from lack of desire to act, but from years of having my sense of agency slowly, methodically taken apart. That stillness in the car was the bottom of something I didn't yet have words for.
I grew up in Detroit, always a misfit, always seeking something I couldn't locate inside the structures I was handed. I went to college, traveled, eventually found myself farming — organic fruit and vegetables in Michigan, feeding urban Chicago. It was good work, real work. But I was also in a marriage that was quietly dismantling me: my friendships blocked, my finances controlled, my family unreachable. I didn't know the words gaslighting or coercive control then. I just knew I couldn't move.
What finally broke it open was a federal prison sentence — seven months in West Virginia, the result of grant fraud my ex had orchestrated and put in my name. I pled guilty. It's all my fault and I'm sorry was the only script I knew.
But inside that place, something unexpected happened. Everything was stripped away — clothes, routine, identity, the whole accumulated shell of a life. What I found underneath was quieter and steadier than I expected. I read. I learned to meditate. I began, slowly, to remember who I was beneath everything that had been layered over me.
I came out whole in a way I hadn't been going in. Not fixed — whole. The difference matters.
From there I found my way into the contemplative and mystical traditions, trained as a Forest Therapy guide, and learned to channel what I call Source: a collective, unconditionally loving energy that meets people exactly where they are, without hierarchy or prescription.
What I offer now comes directly from what I've moved through. I know involuntary surrender. I know what it's like to lose everything and find out you're still there.
I work with people who are in that dissolution — who've lost the thread of themselves through hardship, abuse, grief, or awakening — and I sit with them in it, without rushing toward resolution, until they can feel their own knowing again.
