what's it like?
The first session I had with Susan was over a decade ago and it still lives on in me as one of the most powerful spiritual experiences I’ve ever had.
The first session I had with Susan was over a decade ago and it still lives on in me as one of the most powerful spiritual experiences I’ve ever had.
That first session was an in-person spirit journey to address questions I was having around my life path. She noticed the energy of my hands and placed two black stones in them — this calmed me. I laid down comfortably with a blanket over me — I remember the weight of it was a comfort — and she began to play the drum. Some tug in my core responded to the drum and I felt myself move into a different kind of consciousness. What I remember most about that time on the floor, as Susan drummed and sang beside me, was a clear sense of my spirit guides— a tribe of women gathered in a circle around me — wolves at their sides. This image of wolves circling to protect and women reaching out to guide me has stayed with me for the past 10+ years — it’s the place I go when I am too frightened to function and it’s the place that often serves as the passageway to the intuitive guidance of my higher self. Susan created the space for me to meet my guides.
Susan emerged from the space she had entered into and placed two pens in my hands and told me to write. Writever: to write, no matter what — wisdom that still guides me today.
That first session was an in-person spirit journey to address questions I was having around my life path. She noticed the energy of my hands and placed two black stones in them — this calmed me. I laid down comfortably with a blanket over me — I remember the weight of it was a comfort — and she began to play the drum. Some tug in my core responded to the drum and I felt myself move into a different kind of consciousness. What I remember most about that time on the floor, as Susan drummed and sang beside me, was a clear sense of my spirit guides— a tribe of women gathered in a circle around me — wolves at their sides. This image of wolves circling to protect and women reaching out to guide me has stayed with me for the past 10+ years — it’s the place I go when I am too frightened to function and it’s the place that often serves as the passageway to the intuitive guidance of my higher self. Susan created the space for me to meet my guides.
Susan emerged from the space she had entered into and placed two pens in my hands and told me to write. Writever: to write, no matter what — wisdom that still guides me today.
My most recent session was a remote soul retrieval.
I didn’t know what, exactly, I had even wanted our session to be about — I just knew I was confused and unhappy and stuck and had been drawn strongly to do a session. I wrote and wrote to try and name the question I wanted to explore, and Susan welcomed my long meanderings, and from it, distilled my searching into a comprehensible question. Even just that, before the journey began, was a real gift: that Susan was able to, in a sense, sort the wheat from the chaff and draw out a core concern that I hadn’t been able to fully name.
I was in my room in Portland and Susan was on Vashon Island. I sat in my chair, looking outside, and just as I had when I was in the same room as Susan, I felt myself responding to the drum and moving into a different consciousness. I went on my own journey that felt somehow in dialogue with the one Susan was on — and I moved into and out of great darkness and a nourishing light. I met my own fear, I saw visions I couldn’t fully explain with my rational mind, but somewhere beyond the reach of language, they made a perfect kind of sense.
I emerged buzzing with light, the air soft around me, and I felt clean and loved. Susan wrote soon after, saying she sensed my eagerness to know what she had experienced. I read her journey narrative rapt, finding surprising (and yet not) resonances with my journey. Reading, most of all, I felt a sense of unparalleled understanding and relief around a relationship that had been, in some ways, holding me hostage for years.
Susan is joyful and generous and surprising when she comes back from the spirit world with news for you about your soul, about your path, about what your heart aches for. Her journey reports aren’t cryptic messages from an ethereal realm — they are real, vivid, and specific — and often laugh-out-loud funny. One of Susan’s greatest gifts is her ability to articulate you to yourself in a way that you can not only hear and accept, but really rejoice in.
So often, we walk through our days in a trance — the heart work buried under obligations, duty, and the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are. Susan disrupts that trance — the force of her spirit demands you pay attention to your own soul’s imperatives — and the compassion with which she reintroduces you to yourself is rare and disarming, a gift.
A journey with Susan is not just an experience — I think of it as a sacred text, too, a scroll of yourself to be studied and reconsidered and revisited again and again. The depth and scope of the work is too much to live in just the hour or two it takes for Susan to make her journey and come back to tell you what she’s discovered. It will unfold within you over time with new layers of resonance, truth, and discovery.
— Caitlin, Portland OR