At age ten, I heard about the Amazon rainforest for the first time and knew I wanted to visit the heart of the Earth. Little did I know the plants were summoning me. Ten years later, I returned to the jungle and began a decade-long immersion in Amazonian traditional knowledge systems, including 27 months of intensive field experience in the Peruvian rainforest.

In 2019, I was invited to pursue formal apprenticeship with a leading Kichwa maestro, becoming his first female student. Through rigorous dieta protocols with some of the strongest plants of the Amazon, ceremony, and isolation in the deep jungle, I learned to commune with plant intelligence the way the maestros have for generations.

My academic training in cultural anthropology and cross-culture psychology provides the research backbone. My direct apprenticeship offers the lived understanding that can't be learned in universities. This synthesis informs my practice: research, strategy, ceremony.

Fellow International of The Explorers Club. Doctoral research on inter-species communication in Amazonian traditional knowledge systems.