Hi! I’m Joya and I LOVE people.

According to the box statistics put me in, I shouldn’t be who I am today. Thankfully, I tore up the box I came in.

I am a 9 on the ACES score. It’s a measurement of childhood adverse experiences that says I was highly likely to end up in prison, on drugs, chronically ill or not alive for very long. This study is PROOF that trauma gets stored in the body and leads to disease. That was almost true. I survived a suicide attempt at age 21 and in that experience I was gifted to hear The Music of the Spheres. I was shown my purpose: to use sound to help people heal. But first, I had a LOT of self-healing to do.

I now know that my incredibly difficult childhood rife with abuses of every kind, abandonments and rejections, and living on the streets as a teenage runaway and being thrown in and out of group homes and foster homes, were the training ground for who I am today. Those experiences gave me tremendous compassion, curiosity, resiliency, insight, strength, self-efficacy and a tenacity that never quits. I have also been gifted with Imagination and Spiritual Insight, and have had many mystical experiences. I now absolutely believe that my soul chose this mission for this lifetime. My Soul told me it was for the purpose of having a “full-spectrum human experience in one lifetime” so that I can hold emotional, loving, healing space for anything, with anyone. And I can. My compassion and empathy run deep.

But before my ability to experience the post-traumatic growth, I suffered deeply. I was numbed out. I was fake and felt like an outsider. My experiences in life and the circles I was now in didn’t line up with everyone else’s life experiences. I lived a lie, pretending to have it all together on the outside while being riddled with shame, horrible self-talk and a feeling of worthlessness and purposelessness on the inside. I had no close relationships. I was manipulative and selfish. I was a manager in corporate America. I played the part well. When I became a mom in my thirties, these feelings and thoughts only worsened - and now I could FEEL because I fell in love with my children. I parented in complete fear of being like my mom, and the constant voice that told me I wasn’t good enough, now told me I was a terrible mother, and that my kids deserved a better mom than me.

From this belief system I created my reality. I experienced a stress-induced nervous breakdown in 2009 that led to me a divorce and only being with my children half the time. I began to totally fall apart, I was living my own self-fulfilled prophecy. I started drinking a LOT. During ALL of these years I read incessantly, went to personal development seminars and tried to do all I could to change myself through my mindset. Thankfully, the disaster I was becoming was intervened with my discovery of mindfulness. I attended an 8 week MBSR training and then Mindfulness based self-compassion training…which utterly changed my life. I became very aware of the voice in my head and faithfully practiced meditation, even though I hated it. I studied mindfulness at UCLA. I wanted to know about the science. After about a year of practicing metta-meditation - a loving kindness meditation, one day, the voice in my head changed and during a stressful event said “it’s OK sweetheart….” my own inner voice called me sweetheart, autimatically! I sobbed. This moment of sobbing lead to many more days of sobbing, releasing the pain of my divorce and how desperately I missed my children when they weren’t with me for all of these years, and the truth that I had been the one who created all of this pain through my own belief systems rooted in self-judgment and unworthiness. Self-Forgiveness played in a big part in my healing.

Years later, I was doing MUCH better and had experienced a spiritual awakening…but something strange was happening. I was happy, had a great new marriage now, good friends, a close relationship with my kids and myself, a career I LOVE…and yet every time something great would happen…I would self-sabotage myself, either through binge eating or binge drinking. I was stuck in a cycle I couldn’t seem to get out of and I could not for the life of me understand why.

Then on December 6th, 2021, after a wonderful morning photo-shoot, I was out self-sabotaging yet again. What began as a brunch ended up with me extremely drunk from drinking all day, and my higher self took me out of my body. I was in a space of pure observation at my own drunken state, where I was, the people I was with. I could see all the energetic vibrations of everyone and the place, with zero judgment, just pure witnessing, and I was asked “what vibration of consciousness do you want animating the body?” And I popped back into my body. This question sent me on a quest to answer it.

After two more episodes of binge drinking in 2022, I had had enough and again, I was baffled at the self-destructive pattern. I noticed that they happened when something super amazing was happening in my life. It made no sense. It seemed that something else took over my mind and body. A self I had no control over. Then the question popped into my mind: “What if it’s not a mindset problem? What if your unconscious mind is your whole body?” BOOM. I discovered a talk by Dr. Candace Pert called “Your Body Is Your Unconscious Mind.” And I began doing deeper embodiment practices. I had already been using sound and vibration and the power of intention, and now I incorporated muscle tensing & releasing, breath work, and intuitive and expressive movement into my own healing.

In July 2022, I literally felt a missing piece of myself pop back into my body. It was a fragment of my consciousness that left when I was only three years old and was being sexually abused by my grandfather on my Dad’s side. I remember the moment I said, “Oh, I’m not this body and I don’t have to be here.” And part of me left. And the other part made agreements to keep me safe: TO HIDE and PLAY SMALL. Which I did. In so many ways, for so many years. I had projected all that I was capable of doing for myself onto other people, and rocketed them to where they wanted to go! I did this for many people, companies, bosses and partners. Telling myself the story that I like being the person behind the scenes.

Well, now I know that we are NOT HERE to play small, to hide our magnificence because we are all expressions of Universal Intelligence, Life Source Energy.

Today, I am a product of my work. Yay! I no longer drink to get drunk or eat to get numb. Weight is falling off of me. I walk my talk and I do my own practices. Hypocrisy has left the house. I live in alignment with my Higher Self - the consciousness that animates my body. I am becoming more and more fully embodied and continue to awaken to more and more and more of what Spirit wants to express through me: FREEDOM and LOVE. I am becoming free of shame and unworthiness. I love my life. I love the impact I have. I love sharing the tools I have discovered to transform my life.

I literally spent 30 years healing myself of my childhood traumas - and then the traumas I put myself through. I healed so that others can heal easier and faster. This is the 100th monkey effect and I am SO overjoyed to be that monkey.

I am PASSIONATE about human potential, and know that it’s not a place that ever gets reached…but is a life-force energy that we live into and keep expressing and expanding as long as we are alive in this body.

I absolutely love to hold space and NOTHING makes my heart burst with humility, reverence and grace more than watching someone else transform their consciousness.

And, I am SO grateful to be ALIVE.