I often say I’ve lived many lifetimes within this one - and I can tell you with certainty that I never imagined that this would be my vocation! Below is a sped-up synopsis of how I got here.

If we rewind to 2009, you’d find me as a rose-colored-glasses-wearing, angel-loving college student, splitting my time between classes, parties, and angel conferences. At the time, I was majoring in journalism, following my dream to become a magazine editor in New York City.

After graduating, I moved to New York and landed an internship at my dream magazine. I gave it everything and soon after received opportunities to write for the magazine, traveling internationally on press trips, and once even test-drove Bentleys through the Spanish countryside. From the outside, it looked glamorous. Lavish, even...a total dream opportunity. In many ways, it was! And yet, something in me started to feel subtly, persistently off.

I remember imagining 5 years into the future… 10 years into the future… doing the same thing. And my heart asked a question I couldn’t unhear: How is this actually helping anyone?

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In the midst of that time, behind the scenes, my favorite thing to do was attend angel conferences and read books about angels. I called on them often, secretly attributing every opportunity to their presence. It felt like having unseen friends and guides who wanted the best for me. Still: I never imagined this would become part of my life’s work.

After leaving the magazine (and turning towards angels in private) I hired a life coach who helped reroute the trajectory of my life. Maybe it was always meant to unfold this way - yet it wasn’t anything I could have planned. She encouraged me to apply to the University of Santa Monica, where I later earned my master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology. That choice brought me to Los Angeles, and into a season I now affectionately call The Nunnery.

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My life took on a monastic quality - I was waking at 4 a.m., meditating for hours, praying constantly to be of service, asking to be guided in ways I could easily recognize and understand.

And then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the words Angelic Breath Healing arose in my consciousness. I saw myself offering breathwork classes with an invitation to connect with angels. I spent most of 2014 preparing, and on January 13, 2015, I taught my first public class. For the next few years, I taught weekly breathwork classes and offered 1:1 sessions rooted in my spiritual psychology training.

And after about two years of this, a reckoning arrived. I had been studying with a spiritual teacher for years when I realized - behind the scenes - that the values behind the stage no longer aligned with my own. Leaving that community and world felt devastating. It initiated what felt like a dark night of the soul (or more accurately: dark night for the ego!)

Even as I continued teaching, the ground I had been standing on began to shift, to fall, to crumble beneath me.

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The clarity I once trusted began to waver. The structures I had leaned on no longer held in the same way. I found myself in a space that felt disorienting and deeply honest - where I could no longer bypass my own knowing in favor of someone else’s voice… or follow external teachings that mapped out exactly how to do life.

It may sound obvious that it was time to walk away - yet for me, there was grief and profound loss in this - of certainty, of identity, of belonging. At times, it was agonizing.

From there, I grew increasingly disillusioned with New Age spirituality and stepped away from ways of being that dismissed the body and the human experience. I began to see how easily it could slip into spiritual bypassing - reaching for light while turning away from what was real, tender, unresolved. There was an undercurrent of harmful beliefs: that challenge was a sign of misalignment, that difficult emotions needed to be transcended rather than tended, that the body could be overridden in the name of “higher” truth.

Over time, I could feel the cost of this. The ways it disconnected me from myself, from my instincts, from the very places within that were asking to be met with care.

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Body first, Earth first. This shift wasn’t a rejection of spirit, it felt like a truer integration of it. While I continued to teach Angelic Breath Healing classes, the center of my work began to change, orienting more toward somatic care, herbalism, and dreamwork.

Through every threshold I’ve crossed, my relationship with the Divine has remained central. To me, the Divine is synonymous with the spirit of our hearts. I honor that each of us holds a personal relationship to what the Divine means - some shaped by disillusionment with organized religion, others by disappointment within New Age spirituality… some perhaps a weaving of both.

As the Sufi poet Rumi once wrote,
there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground!

My spirituality is deeply animistic. I honor the divine expression woven through plants, trees, saints, you, and me. I relate to them as vibrant expressions of Spirit.

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And yet, looking back, I can see how my soul wove the way.

Amid all the change, centering Spirit has been my constant. What has evolved over the years is the shape of my work - and the depth of my discernment.

I’ve found that fulfillment comes from living in harmony with what is stirring within. The most miraculous unfoldings in my life have come from following that subtle yet persistent inner guidance.

I remain a devoted student of life - and 11 years into this vocation, I still hold a beginner’s mind and can also acknowledge that this isn’t my first rodeo! It is satisfying to feel seasoned in my work.

I look toward the days, months, & moons ahead with humility and wonder.

Madeline

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