I was four years old when I looked in the mirror and felt the floor give way.
Not literally. But something in me recognized that the child staring back was not the whole story; not the beginning, not even close to the end. I felt the weight of time I couldn’t name, a dizziness that wasn’t illness, and a vastness that had no business visiting a four-year-old in the South Bronx. I stopped looking in the mirror, but I never stopped asking.
That question, who am I, really, beneath this particular body and this particular life, became the framework for everything that followed.
I grew up in a tenement on streets where, in the 1950s, buildings caught fire (arson) and burned before the fire trucks could reach them. The rubble became a playground. It was also, without anyone quite saying so, a landscape of loss: broken walls, dead trees, abandoned animals, the casual violence of disenfranchisement. Other children played there. I explored. I wanted to understand what the buildings had been like. Even then, I wanted to make them whole.
I did not leave. I didn’t flee from difficulty in search of softer ground. I moved toward it, slowly, eyes open, trying to read what it was telling me. I do not leave the powerless or the helpless, neither then nor now. This is not a philosophical position. It is something closer to a physical law within me, an internal roar that does not quiet simply because the odds are poor or the resources are thin. I have spent a lifetime feeling the full weight of what is needed, the vastness of it, the sheer scale of suffering that calls out to be met, while working most days with what amounts to a few hand tools. That gap between the size of the wound and the size of what I can bring to it has never stopped haunting me. It has also never stopped me. I remain. I show up. I do what I can with what I have, which, in the end, is what courage looks like when you strip away the mythology.
Years later, I dreamed of a white bull, majestic and unhurried, flying low over the rubble. His horns cast light. Everything dead, including the animals, trees, and broken stone, came back to life. Buildings rose. Gardens appeared. A brook ran where wreckage had been. I woke knowing it wasn’t just a dream. It was a memory and a mandate.
This is the inner life I carry into every reading, session, and essay.
I am not a spiritual practitioner who approaches the soul’s questions from a place of comfort. I arrived from the South Bronx, the child of immigrant parents, with a childhood fluent in both Spanish and the harder grammar of survival. I understand despair not in theory but as something I watched extinguish people I knew, and as something I quietly and stubbornly refused to let extinguish me. I also understand, with equal precision, what it looks like when someone in terrible circumstances chooses dignity over despair. I’ve studied that choice my entire life.
My path has been anything but linear. An English degree. Opera and theater. A stint as a high school English teacher. Graduating with honors from the Denver Paralegal Institute, followed by years working alongside lawyers in corporate and securities law, taking companies public, writing investor relations copy, and learning to speak precisely about complex matters for people who needed clarity. These are not footnotes to my spiritual work. They are its foundation. I know how to read a structure. I know how language either carries truth or quietly buries it.
I have studied astrology since the mid-1980s, with a particular devotion to both traditional Western astrology and the empirical research of Michel Gauquelin, which I treat not as mysticism but as methodology. For more than fourteen years, I have offered Human Design readings. I am certified in Human Design, transformational coaching, past-life and between-lives regression, hypnosis, Reiki, and the Quantum Alignment System™. I have conducted readings and counseling sessions for more than thirty years. The Journey of Your Soul, by Shepherd Hoodwin, is one of the books I return to again and again, not for comfort, but for its architecture.
In this way, I am both a pragmatist and a spiritualist, and I do not see them as opposites. I believe the soul is real, that it continues, evolves, and chooses its incarnations with intention. I also believe that holding this belief does not excuse me from doing the work. I still have to show up, create plans, take action, and keep body and soul together. The spiritual is not an escape from the practical. It is the deeper reason the practical matters.
What I cannot abide is ignorance, the kind that hardens into certainty without evidence, curdles into prejudice, and assigns lesser value to human lives based on ethnicity, gender, religion, or the accident of birth. I have watched what that thinking costs. I grew up surrounded by the people it harms most. It does not make me bitter. It makes me precise. I have no patience for arrogance, cronyism, or the ancient and tiresome conviction held by certain men that women exist primarily in relation to their needs. I have seen too much, lived too close to the consequences, to treat these as abstract political positions. They are failures of the soul to recognize itself in others. That is what they are, and that is what I call them.
I take people seriously when the questions they ask are genuinely profound. But I am not cold, not remote, not sealed behind credentials and certifications. I want to know who you are — not your performance, not the biography you hand to strangers, but the pattern beneath. The soul behind the story. The real answer to the question I first asked in front of a mirror in the Bronx seventy years ago and have been refining ever since.
Each of us arrives with agreements already in place, not as fixed commands but as flexible arrangements meant to create opportunities, keep us on our path, and provide what we need to learn. Every life has an overarching intention, and there is ample room within it. Nothing is set in stone. Agreements don’t always unfold as expected, and we can’t predict future outcomes. What you can cultivate is a willingness to be creative with detours and delays, to understand that deviation is often the instruction, and to trust that the soul’s design is more resilient than any single setback.
The questions I hear most often are also the oldest: How do I discover my purpose? How do I navigate what’s in my way? I have spent more than thirty years helping people find their footing in response to exactly these questions, drawing on everything I know about the soul’s journey, its architecture, its agreements, and its long patience with us.
I work with people in what I call the trenches. The trenches are not metaphorical; they are the real circumstances that bring a person to their knees: the death of someone beloved, betrayal by those you trusted, the loss of a job, a home, a marriage, a financial foundation, and the exhaustion of having to make critical decisions without sufficient energy or resources. In these moments, it is easy to believe that nothing will change, that the hole is too deep, and that this is simply where you will remain.
It is not true. The hole is never too deep. What determines what you can achieve is not the depth of your fall but your willingness to stand up for your life and take the necessary steps. Your life is not an accident. It is a gift with intention and purpose, with many purposes, expressible in many forms. The most sacred of them is life itself.
What I offer is neither judgment nor rescue. It is partnership. A guide who has been in the trenches, knows the terrain, and believes in you without requiring you to have it together before we begin. When you understand who you are at the soul level — when your choices reflect your true nature rather than your fears — you stop pushing against the current and start moving with it. Opportunities appear. The right teachers arrive. The path, which was always there, becomes visible.
This is what it means to live from your essence.
—
I live in Taos County, New Mexico, with my cats, Lorenzo and GrayBoy, who have never read a word I’ve written and love me anyway.
Visit my Services page to learn about what I offer and how I can help.
Very Meaningful Activities
Cat rescuer (TNR, rehabilitation, and rehoming), Animal Shelter Volunteer, Homeless Pets Foster Parent, Board of Directors for a Non-Profit.
Data
Gloria is a 1/3 Emotional Projector with Scorpio rising, an Aries Sun, and a Capricorn Moon. Michael Teachings: Old Sage, Honorary Priest.
Readings are not therapy or medical, legal, or other professional advice, and do not diagnose or treat any disorder or disease. I would recommend that clients seek appropriate professional guidance when needed.