My Story: Learning to Walk My Own Path
This is the second post in the Welcome to The Golden Age series.
I left home at 15.
Not because I was adventurous or ready. I left because I had to. The stress and trauma at home had reached a point where staying wasn’t really an option. A school friend and her family took me in. What was supposed to be a couple of months turned into five years.
They were a good family in many ways. Strict Lutheran, athletic, achieving. Her father was an engineer, a calm and steady man I genuinely admired. He was the reason I got interested in college. Her mother ran a tight household with strong beliefs and not much room for anything outside them.
I became an athlete because they were athletes. Her sisters were state champions. I was always a step behind, which, looking back, probably told me something. I was still performing someone else’s version of a life, just a different family’s version now.
But something real happened in that Lutheran church.
My parents were atheists. My grandmother was a devout churchgoer, Southern Baptist. I was very young when I attended church with my grandmother. I remember the stories from Sunday school being very scary. I had grown up in a limited spiritual framework that was punitive, not loving.
So when I sat in that church one Sunday and felt something move through me so powerfully that I started to cry, I had no category for it. I just knew it was real. I was connecting with the risen Christ, and it was genuine, not inherited, not performed. For the first time, something in me recognized something larger than itself.
That experience planted a seed I wouldn’t fully understand for decades.
The other real thing that happened in those years was my first love.
My girlfriend and I fell into something neither of us had a map for. It was teenage love, confusing and tender and true in the way first love always is. We became intimate for about a year before her mother found out.
The reaction was immediate and total. I was called the devil incarnate. Accused of moving in with their family specifically to corrupt her daughter. Everything I owned that was still at their house, furniture, personal belongings, all of it was thrown out while I was away at the University of Arizona, where I had gone for a year, along with two of her sisters.
I was 20 years old, in Tucson, with almost nothing.
Terri and I stayed in touch that year. But she and her sister eventually moved back home. She couldn’t hold the estrangement from her family. I understood it, even as I watched her choose them over what we had. She moved toward them. I was left standing in the desert, starting over.
I found a good job. A good apartment. But I was lonely in the particular way you get lonely when you’re young and far from everything familiar.
I was 21 when I finally made it back to Portland and enrolled at PSU.
Standing there at that starting line, I did something I had never done before. I looked at my life honestly and realized that everything I thought I knew about myself had come from someone else. My parents. My foster family. Their beliefs, their preferences, their ideas about who I should be.
I made a decision. I would follow my own attention from that point forward. Whatever genuinely drew me, spiritual or practical or completely mundane, I would follow it. Not because anyone told me to. Because it was mine.
That decision changed everything.
Three years later, at 24, while still attending Portland State University, I experienced a traumatic sexual assault by someone I thought was a friend.
Some experiences don’t just hurt you. They reorganize you.
I got rid of most of my belongings and moved to Mt. Hood. My dream, unlikely as it sounds, was to fight forest fires. I wanted something physical, elemental, real. Something that had nothing to do with the world I had been moving through.
I didn’t find the teachings. They found me.
It was 1985. I was living on Mt. Hood, working toward my dream of fighting forest fires, still carrying more than I could name from the years behind me. One afternoon, I wandered into the tiny local bookstore in town, not looking for anything in particular.
A book fell off the shelf.
I picked it up. It was called Medicine Woman by Lynn Andrews. I started reading it and couldn’t stop. Andrews had spent decades studying with shamanic women on four continents, and something in her writing reached into me and wouldn’t let go. I read everything she had written.
Then I found out she was coming to Portland.
I drove down for the gathering. She spoke at a conference center, answered questions, and somewhere in the middle of it, something in me broke open. By the time people were filing out, I was standing there in tears, barely able to hold myself together.
A woman approached me. Her name was Macy Brader.
I didn’t know yet who she was. I didn’t know that she and her partner, Patricia Spradling, had just been honored as Sandy’s Citizens of the Year for founding Mt. Hood Hospice, the first state-accredited hospice in Oregon. I didn’t know they had organized the very event I had just attended. I just knew that she was looking at me with genuine concern and asking how I was doing.
I could hardly speak.
They invited me to meet with them privately at their center. Wy’East Healing Center, named for the Multnomah people’s name for the mountain itself. I went. They helped me see, with clarity and kindness, how scattered I was emotionally, and how much of myself I was still missing.
After two sessions, they invited me to work with them at no charge.
I stayed for the better part of two years.
Those years became the ground I stood on while everything else in my life was still finding its shape. Not shamanism in the path-of-the-healer sense. Something more personal than that. Wisdom Teachings. The slow, unglamorous work of learning who I actually was.
It wasn’t a perfect fit in every way. I had no desire to become a shaman. That wasn’t my path, and I knew it, even if I couldn’t yet say what my path was. When your teachers point to a destination you don’t want, it creates a loneliness hard to name. I was grateful for the teachings and disconnected from the direction at the same time.
A lot of that time was spent on healing. Soul retrieval work. Healing from trauma, layer by layer. The slow work of getting enough of myself back so I could actually know what I thought, what I felt, what I wanted.
You can’t walk your own path if you’re still scattered across the landscape of other people’s choices.
If you know, you know.
Towards the end of my time with the Wy’east Healing Center, I got hired onto the Mt Hood Zig Zag Hotshot crew. It took me a year to get enough firefighting experience on a beginner crew before I could convince the leader, Paul Gleason, to hire me.
For the next four years, I fought wildland fires across the West, from the Cascades to the Rockies. It was hard, physical, elemental work, and that was exactly what I needed. The forest and Mother Earth healed things in me that needed healing.
Working a fire line alongside a crew, carrying weight, doing something real with my body and my hands, burned through a great deal of the anger I was still carrying from what had happened at Portland State and in Tucson.
I wasn't processing it consciously. I was just living hard enough that there wasn't room for it to fester. But during the quiet times I spent alone in the woods, I had life-changing spiritual moments. I connected in real life with the spirit animals I met while exploring myself with Macy and Patricia: the black-tailed buck, the pileated woodpecker, and the great-horned owl. I learned about connection and systems by studying the forest ecology of old-growth Douglas Fir forests. I learned about abundance by watching nature through the seasons.
After the firefighting years, I finished my degree, spent time cruising timber, and poured three years into a project I thought was my calling: an educational series on the ecology of Pacific Northwest forests. I built a team, reached out to the Discovery Channel, and came close. But somewhere near the end, I realized that what I had wanted to share couldn’t be packaged. My connection with the forest was mine to cherish, not mine to teach. I let it go, filed for bankruptcy, and changed course entirely.
For the next decade, I was searching in the most practical sense: careers, places, income, survival. The inner thread was still there. I was reading constantly, writing in my journals, drawn to the same territory I had always been drawn to. I just didn’t yet have a framework that fit.
That changed when I found Jim Self and Mastering Alchemy.
For the first time, I didn't just know I was on a spiritual path. I knew what I actually wanted to learn. The teachings landed in me like something remembered rather than discovered.
That eventually led to the Gnosis and The Law book, the teachings of the Ascended Masters and Archangels, and to the work I continue today with my Pathway of Light group.
In the last decade, something shifted on a larger scale. The planet began to wake up. I started finding more and more people with the capacity to truly understand me, people who were genuinely curious about the same territory I had been walking privately for so long. After decades of carrying this alone, that was extraordinary.
I got involved with a worldwide spiritual organization. I deepened my work with my group. And I started to feel that what I had been studying and living quietly for 40 years was ready to be shared.
“After 40 years of walking a private spiritual path, I finally feel like I know myself enough to share. The Golden Age is where I get to speak freely and tell the whole story.”
Both organizations I worked with had guidelines about what could be shared publicly. I understood the reasons. But there was more I wanted to say. Material I had studied deeply that didn’t fit inside anyone else’s boundaries.
That tension is what created The Golden Age.
This publication is for people who sense that something larger is unfolding and are looking for a guide who has actually walked the territory. Not someone who read about it. Someone who lived it, stumbled through it, and came out the other side with something real to offer.
In the next post, I’ll share the other half of my story: how a woman who barely knew herself at 21 ended up building a mid-six-figure crypto portfolio, retiring early, and spending 15 years helping people navigate their finances.
Turns out the inner path and the financial path have more in common than you’d think.
Kelly Sunshawl
Fascinating story Kelly, I had no idea. We each have a path that is deep and nuanced and makes us who we are. Congratulations on following yours and always looking to understand and choose to walk it, even when it is hard.