my story

A woman outdoors wearing a gray hat, a blue denim jacket, and a tan vest, smiling with her hand on her chest.

Before I Knew How to Listen

I was good at building things. Careers, curricula, communities. I knew how to work hard inside systems — and eventually, I knew I needed to leave them. But leaving was never easy or obvious. It was terrifying every time.

I left the tenure track. I left organized religion. I founded a community for 15,000 women navigating ambition, identity, and belonging in a tradition that didn't always make room for them. I wrote. I researched. I taught. I advised. I started over more than once.

What I understand now is that my body knew before my brain caught up. Every transition, every toxic environment, every moment of misalignment — my body was tracking all of it, sending signals I didn't yet have the skills to read. It was speaking the whole time. I just didn't know how to listen.

The Story My Body Held

For a long time I didn't recognize what my body was doing. The tightness. The tension I carried everywhere. The way I braced myself just to show up in certain rooms.

Then came the anxiety attack — arriving not during the church service itself, but in the days after, when I realized I had to go back. My body had been patient with me for a long time. That day it stopped.

What I understand now is that my body had been holding the weight of systems that were never designed for all of me. Systems that asked me to shrink, perform, and produce and questioned my worth. My body absorbed so many of those messages. And while my body held, my mind looped, circling the same stories, the same doubts, unable to land anywhere beside where it hadn’t already been.

Eventually the body runs out of room. It either erupts or shuts down. Mine did both, at different times, in different seasons. And it wasn't until I was forced to stop — truly stop — that I began to understand what it had been carrying all along.

Tall giant redwood trees in a forest with green foliage and clear blue sky.

The Source of Wisdom: The Ocean, The Sequoia, and The Circle

Years after leaving my tenure-track academic position and organized religion—and following a period of deep personal trauma—I finally confessed to my therapist: I am utterly exhausted. The pain was too much to carry alone, but I couldn't bear to hold it any longer.

She asked me: "What can you do with this pain right now?"

I closed my eyes, and the answer arrived as a vision. I let the ocean hold me and scream all that pain into its dark, deep abyss, visualizing the earth absorbing every bit of it. A wave then carried me to a giant sequoia, a scar on its trunk, an opening. Enveloped by that great tree, I felt safe and warm. As the water nourished its roots, I merged with its trunk, becoming part of its enduring strength.

I then saw myself standing tall in a large circle of sequoias. Our branches swayed, nodding in recognition of our similar journeys. We stood in counsel, in solidarity. Collectively strong.

That vision became the foundation of everything I've built since.

what i built from it

That vision didn't just give me a name. It gave me a direction. I began doing the work I had been avoiding — returning to my body, learning to trust it, building the skills I never had. I trained in somatics, breathwork, yoga, and forest therapy. I completed my mind-body coaching certification through The Embody Lab. I brought two decades of research, teaching, and instructional expertise into conversation with everything my body had been trying to teach me.

The Sequoia Circle is what emerged. Not a methodology I invented, but a practice I lived my way into.

An individual standing near a campfire at night, with sparse bushes and trees around and a starry sky overhead.

Credentials and Qualifications

Logo for The Forest Therapy School with the words 'Certified Guide' on a green background.
Open book titled "Champions of Change" showing illustrated women, with one woman featured in a portrait on the right page. The woman in the portrait is identified as Fanny Brooks.