Returning to Egypt - September 27 through October 14, 2026
I AM RETURNING TO EGYPT ✨🇪🇬
A little travel notice for my clients and community. I will be unavailable September 27 through October 14 as I return to Egypt.
My first journey to Egypt was in 2019 with my family. I shared very little of that trip publicly because the experience felt sacred to me. It was deeply personal, and something I wanted, for a time, to keep for myself.
When I reflect on who I was back then, I realize now that Egypt marked the beginning of a profound transformation in my life. I had been single for two years, and I was lost in ways I did not fully understand at the time. I had received a message from the Goddess that I was meant to do something great. But I didn't know what it meant or how it was going to happen. I was too thin, not taking care of myself in the way I should have been, and living a life that increasingly felt too small for the person I sensed I was supposed to become.
I knew I was supposed to meet the love of my life. I also had a persistent sense that I was about to enter a period of deep study with a “new teacher.” At the time, I imagined an individual teacher would appear like many other energy teachers I had before. I had no idea that this calling would eventually lead me into graduate school, through a master’s degree, and ultimately into a PhD devoted to mythology and depth psychology.
Then I went to Egypt.
Egypt awakened something in me wholeheartedly. It brought together my love of myth, archaeology, history, spirituality, and the extraordinary power of belief. Ancient stories were never simply things I wanted to read about. I wanted to feel the very myths human beings have told for thousands of years, to experience the power of sacred images, and to understand why certain places and symbols can awaken something within us that reason alone cannot always explain. I wanted to encounter what Rudolf Otto called the numinous, that mysterious sense of awe and presence that arises when we find ourselves before something greater than ourselves.
One of the most personal moments of that first journey happened at Karnak.
There is a sacred scarab there, and I was told of a Bedouin tradition surrounding it. Walk around the scarab 7 times, and you will meet the love of your life. Walk around it 9 times, and you will not only meet that person, but one day have a child together.
I walked around that scarab 9 times and made my wish.
I wished for Dary, although I did not know his name yet.
Two months later, I met him.
Looking back seven years later, I can see how much of what I sensed then was already beginning to unfold. The love I knew I was waiting for came into my life. The “new teacher” I sensed was coming became something far larger than I could have imagined. What began as a feeling that I needed to study eventually became years devoted to mythology, religion, depth psychology, and the mystery of creation itself.
Egypt did not create those parts of me. They were already there. But Egypt brought them together. It gave me a place where mythology, history, spirituality, archaeology, and lived experience seemed to speak to one another.
I have been trying to return ever since.
Over the years, plans were made and cancelled more than once. First came the pandemic. Later, conflict and instability in the region made travel uncertain. On another occasion, someone very dear to me was facing cancer, and there were simply more important places for me to be.
Now, in my 40th year, I am finally returning as a very different woman from the one who first stood before those temples.
I found the love I knew I was waiting for. I followed the call into deep study. I have finished writing my dissertation and am awaiting news of when I will defend it. I have experienced extraordinary joy and devastating loss. I have watched one version of my life disappear and another emerge in its place.
Somehow, Egypt stands at both ends of that transformation.
Now I am going back!
Of all the places awaiting me, perhaps the most meaningful will be standing before Sekhmet in her sanctuary at the Temple of Ptah at Karnak.
My relationship with Sekhmet began long before my first journey to Egypt. I was fourteen years old when I was initiated into Sekhem. My teacher, Val Richards, introduced me to Sekhmet and her healing powers, and she has remained a presence in my spiritual life ever since.
When I traveled to Egypt in 2019, I brought home a statue of Sekhmet.
Six years later, when the fires of 2025 destroyed my home, that statue was the only thing from my home that survived.
I have spent much of my life exploring the extraordinary experiences that exist at the edges of what we can easily explain, both through my work as a healer and through my scholarship in mythology and depth psychology. Finding Sekhmet still standing among the remains of my home was one of those experiences. I do not feel the need to explain it away. I understand it as part of the continuing relationship I have had with her since I was fourteen.
Sekhmet embodies a mystery that has become deeply meaningful to me. She carries within her both destruction and healing. She is the force that can bring devastation, but she is also the healer who restores what has been wounded. After the fire, that paradox was no longer something I understood only through mythology. I had lived it.
In many ways, it is Sekhmet who has guided me through the destruction and into this new life.
When I enter her sanctuary at Karnak, I know I will pay homage to her. I also know I will feel her presence. For me, those two things are not separate. Scholarship gives me a language for understanding the ancient image, while spiritual practice allows me to encounter what that image continues to hold.
This is perhaps the work I feel increasingly called to do: to give language to the extraordinary without diminishing its mystery.
That same intersection between scholarship and spiritual experience is part of what draws me so powerfully to another location called Abydos.
Much like Omm Sety, who believed she had lived a previous life as a priestess at Abydos, I carry my own deep knowing that I have served as a priestess in this sacred landscape before. Interestingly, it is not the Temple of Seti I that calls to me most strongly. It is what lies below and behind it: the Osireion.
This is where the journey feels as though it comes full circle with my scholarship.
My dissertation has taken me deeply into creation myths and, in particular, into the mystery of what exists before creation. I have spent years studying the primordial state and the first movement from formlessness into form, from darkness into light, from undifferentiated possibility into an ordered world.
The Osireion gives architectural form to that mystery.
Its central stone platform can be understood as an evocation of the primordial mound, the first land to emerge from the waters at the beginning of creation. The water surrounding it recalls Nu, the limitless primordial waters that existed before the ordered cosmos.
Here, creation mythology is not merely written upon a temple wall.
You enter it.
You stand inside the cosmology.
Perhaps this is why I feel such an extraordinary pull toward the Osireion. I have spent years studying stories in which something emerges from the primordial state, in which the first differentiation occurs and land, light, consciousness, and order begin to arise.
At Abydos, that ancient mystery becomes space, stone, darkness, and water.
Our journey includes a private visit to the Osireion, normally closed to tourists.
I have spent years writing about the beginning of creation. Soon, I will have the privilege of stepping inside an ancient Egyptian embodiment of it.
When I think about returning to Egypt now, I cannot help but think about the woman who stood there in 2019 and wonder what she would think if she could see where that journey would lead her.
She walked around a sacred scarab and wished for a love she had not yet met.
She felt a teacher coming without knowing that the teacher would become years of study.
She stood among temples and monuments feeling the power of myth without knowing that one day she would write a dissertation devoted to understanding some of humanity’s oldest stories about the beginning of existence.
She brought Sekhmet home without knowing that six years later, after fire destroyed her home, Sekhmet would still be standing.
I think she would understand why I have been trying so hard to return.
I am going back to Egypt. ✨
So all of this to say, I will be unavailable September 27 through October 14 and will return to my regular schedule after my journey.
You can come see me at the Sages & Scholars Conference in Pasadena, CA on Oct 17th when I return!
