There were always two separate parts of me:

the writer and the spiritual seeker.

Writing was my public face, the identity I wore out in the world.

As a kid, it started with storytelling. I’d often see movies playing out in my mind — a flood of images and color and narrative that I’d share with my siblings for entertainment before I knew how to read or write. Once I learned how to put a pencil to paper, writing became the medium. I wrote letters and stories and felt like could paint with words. It was something I did constantly.

As an adult, I spent nearly two decades working as a journalist and editor. I built a career predicated on asking questions and on understanding how to read people. I learned about the structure and form of narrative, and the process of creating something physical that people could hold and experience on a weekly or monthly basis. On a deeper level, I learned about the power of words. The power of voice. How something written, something spoken, something rendered with language could effect physical change. A lot of this happened amid the breakneck pace of a newsroom. There was precision and pacing and timing always folded into the mix.

When I eventually found my way to screenwriting, the “movie mind” of my childhood that had long since gone dormant started waking up again. “Oh, I remember how to do this,” I thought to myself. With the natural ability there in the field of my awareness, I went on to spend thousands of pages and thousands of hours mastering the craft. I threw myself into a bootcamp of understanding character development, backstory, timing, framing, the fusion of image and sound as language, and how all of the pieces could coalesce into this bigger, heavy-hitting thing.

Spirituality was the part of me I kept private.

For as long as I can remember, I had an ability to see a person and immediately sense their vastness. As a kid, I would see adults moving through the world in a way that reduced the bigness of what I knew to be true within them, and the restrictedness I perceived rocked me to my core. It was the source of many temper tantrums.

Within me there was an innate understanding that each person was powered by a soul that was boundless, I just didn’t have the proof. I also didn’t quite have the words. I asked questions but never seemed to get the kind of answers that could help me make sense of what I was feeling in any sort of logical way. Underlying everything was this nagging feeling that there was more to the story of who I was and why I was here — of who we all are and why we are here. But at some point, this stuff got tucked under the rug.

After a series of events in my early twenties, I started feeling the hum of wanting to understand myself on a spiritual and energetic level. Though I never quite articulated it in this way: I was wanting to understand what I was made of and why I was here. I was starting to ask the kinds of questions I’d asked as a kid, only I didn’t know those questions were going to lead to a much bigger process.

Over the course of a decade, I set out to understand the prismatic rubik’s cube that spirituality felt like to me. The journalist in me went where I was pulled and collected information: Hospice training and end-of-life care; year long seminars understanding death through the lens of different faiths; anything I could get my hands on tied to past lives, myth and archetype, origin stories, and different faiths.

If there was a spiritual modality, there I was: trying to understand it. I traveled the world in search of answers. I took courses that explored the human body on levels physical and esoteric, and spent years spiraling into epigenetics and what we inherit through bloodlines over the course of time. I went down the rabbit hole of investigating what people even meant when they spoke about channeling.

I questioned everything and stopped at nothing to understand the information and myself along the way. And though I found value in so many different things, I also found restriction. Beneath surface there was still that nagging hum of: “I’m missing information. There’s more to the story.”

Throughout all of the searching and questioning, I did not perceive myself as having any kind of gifts or any kind of role to play in helping others understand themselves. I showed up to all of the work as the journalistic observer on the outskirts. “I don’t have what they have but I am desperate to understand it,” was the general school of thought.

Then life did what it sometimes does: it completely flipped the script on me.

Discovering intuition was like someone turning the lights on inside of a house I had not realized had even been dark inside. Understanding that I had an innate ability to read light (information) in a highly precise and scientific way felt like coming back “online” in a way I hadn’t known was possible, and yet somehow had known all along.

Sometimes who we are is there beneath the surface, wearing many different disguises that keep it hidden in plain sight. For all of the books I read, I did not know that I could read energy like a book. For all the ways I had re-awakened my movie mind, I did not know that what I was seeing was part of my intuition — and only the very start of it. I had no idea that everything from magazine internships in test kitchens to assisting on photo shoots was covertly tied to aspects of my intuitive abilities.

Each person’s intuition is as unique as their DNA. Mastering mine in tandem with living and breathing the spiritual, scientific, and energetic laws of this universe has been at the epicenter of my world for the past few years. It has been a process through which I’ve found myself waking up into the me who was always there: the Brooke who could always see the biggest version of a person and the Brooke who knew that the stories we tell have the power to shape reality itself.

The work I do here fuses it all together into one.