Athena’s life has been characterized by deep mental pain and immense loss. Growing up she was constantly outcasted and shadowed with a deep loneliness, struggling with depression and anxiety. At 17 she experienced sexual abuse, and at 18 her mom had a stroke the day she moved into college, and died three weeks later. This thrust Athena into a path of learning life lessons alone and through deep emotional pain from the very beginning of adulthood. Graduating 4 years later, magna cum laude with a degree in Digital Media & Design — but barely hanging on emotionally — she began working as a broadcast news videographer, and was hired by ABCNews San Diego after only 10 months in the industry. To most, this seemed like the pinnacle of success at such a young age — and in a male-dominated profession — but severe burnout and repressed trauma forced her to leave ABCNews soon after arriving, with no follow-up plan.

During this time she finally discovered she was neurodivergent (autistic + ADHD), and suddenly understood why she had always felt outcasted, always felt like everyone had a rulebook to life that she didn’t. She began a deep dive to learn the entire structural patterns behind autistic + ADHD thinking, emotional processing, etc. so that she could build new strategies for managing life and attaining her goals. (This eventually led to the development of her Neurodivergent Alchemy program, currently available within her school, The Secret Garden.)

Being forced to leave her very first post-college job due to burnout, Athena’s entire life suddenly became one big question mark. It was in this dark mental void space that she began perceiving communication from the universe, leading her to soon convert from atheist into a full blown spiritualist and psychic. The spiritual path is not one she chose or ever saw modeled in her family, but rather one that was thrust onto her completely unexpectedly. She sold almost all her belongings, bought a backpack, and God led her on her own intuitive ‘Eat Pray Love’ journey abroad for almost 2 years. A solo female traveler, she has lived in Costa Rica, Panama, Peru — while sitting with ayahuasca in ceremony — Italy, Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand — her home away from home for over a year. While in Thailand she also stayed in a Buddhist monastery and studied Vipassana meditation with monks, meditating for over 80 hours within a 10 day period.

During this time, she received her coaching certification and began to guide others through their own life path, but Athena is one to practice what she preaches, and her own first client was always herself. She spent years confronting her own negative mental patterns, developing her psychic channel, and challenging her anxiety and fear through her own mental resilience frameworks. Her overarching philosophy was that in this lifetime she was meant to test every limit within her mind to unlock her highest potential, and any challenge overcome became medicine to bring to her clients, allowing her to guide them through their own difficult and pressurized situations. This insatiable drive for self development resulted in transforming herself into a completely different identity over time — literally, as her original name was Heather, but such a deep transformation in consciousness eventually warranted a name change to her soul’s name, Athena.

Such deep mental rewiring work and prolonged traveling abroad eventually exhausted her physical body, and she then returned to the US in deep energy debt. Her mystery illness and chronic fatigue progressed, shutting down her body until she was eventually bedbound. She failed her tilt table test at the hospital, with a result of only 7 minutes standing before her heart rate and blood pressure dropped and she had to be reclined. She could barely sit up for a week after this, and felt on the brink of death. Now armed with an official dysautonomia diagnosis and a bottle of medication from a cardiologist at the ripe age of 25, she returned to her bed — a prison — with little will to live, but her psychic intuition told her not to take the medication, that there would be a spiritual way out of this condition, and that she would never know the power of the alternative method that would deliver her if she took medication and believed that pills were the cure.

After two weeks of faith and barely being able to walk around the house, she began receiving magic ritual information through her meditation practice. The first energy activation cured her dysautonomia overnight. Now able to stand and sit up normally again, she began to perceive the underlying energetic effects of human life and how they had manifested her illness. She also began to perceive otherworldly energies, and her spirit guides directly presented themselves, sharing various healing techniques and tools to use in the astral realm to continue to revive herself. She further attuned her energy body through many energy clearings, facilitating her own soul retrieval, and deep communion with her spirit guides, who eventually granted their blessing in her facilitation of this work on others to revive their own energy and deepen their spiritual path. In native traditions this is the initiation of a shaman, referred to as being “struck by lightning”—a direct call from the spirit world for a path of service after experiencing either a near-death experience or severe chronic illness.

Athena returns from that experience with a deep reverence for the wisdom born of that darkest time in her life, and a call to share this miracle that was granted her with others. She has seen the depths of darkness in her own life and mind, and yet from it have been born potent magic and miracles like most have not had the privilege to experience in this lifetime. This is the energy she brings into her work and every life endeavor. She is able to hold emotional space for an incredibly high amount of mental turmoil and alchemize it into gold.

Athena has a published memoir about the beginning of her spiritual journey in San Diego, a published poetry book, and a vibrant online community. She is an artistic polymath, a savant in the realm of mental patterning and reprogramming the subconscious, and now uses her psychic and channeling abilities to not only aid clients on their own path, but to progress her own artistic pursuits in multiple areas, including music and poetry.