I know this territory.
I’ve lived every step of it.
Meet Joan
I gave it everything I had, because I loved it.
I spent 50 years inside the Catholic Church, teaching, serving, believing with my whole heart. I taught progressive theology. I gave my time, my love, my intellect, my loyalty, my prayers, my energy. Giving wasn't a sacrifice. It was fuel.
Life within the Church was filled with sacred moments, real, raw people I was privileged to journey with. Brief seasons of someone else's life that are still etched on my heart. I suspect you know exactly what I mean.
But before the advanced degrees, and before I fully understood why I needed them, something happened that changed everything.
I came back from the other side knowing something I couldn't unknow.
When I was 23, I died. Briefly. And what I came back with changed everything.
I came back knowing something I couldn't unknow, seven simple truths, implanted not in my brain, but in the marrow of my being. Which was fortunate, because my brain had cerebral edema and couldn't retain much of anything for nearly two years.
What I knew, I knew in my bones. Not because I'd studied it. Because I'd been shown it. I’m not going to be dramatic about it, mostly because what happened on the other side was so far beyond dramatic that any words I use will understate it.
What I can tell you is this: I encountered something I can only call Mama God. Unconditional love so complete, so luminous, so wildly different from the God I’d been taught, that I came back laughing.
Actually laughing. Because we got it so wrong.
There is no rejection. No judgment. No scorecard. No one keeping track of which Mass you attended or whether you said the rosary. What I experienced was pure, unbounded, slightly ridiculous love, the kind that makes you wonder why we ever made it so complicated.
And so I went back. Carrying what I knew. Hoping the Church could hold it.
That knowledge is the foundation of everything I do.
I spent the next 25 years inside the Church trying to make two things merge: what I'd been shown on the other side, and what the institution taught. I pursued theology. I pursued spiritual psychology. I kept hoping the gap would close.
It never did.
The gap between what I knew and what I was being asked to believe kept widening.
Until the smoldering resentment started to build.
When I found myself feeling more anger than peace, I had to pay attention. This wasn't the anger of a child; it was the anger of witnessing injustice and knowing things could be different, and understanding they never would be. The institution overlooked us women and handed leadership to the men. (I know. I know. But somebody had to say it.)
Before I could leave, I had to try everything, every angle, every argument, every attempt to fit back into a space I had long outgrown. My anger was telling me the truth: I no longer fit. Slowly, and then all at once, I couldn't stay anymore.
Then came the part nobody talks about.
The part where you're out, and you have no idea who you are anymore.
I lost family members. I lost friends. I lost the respect of people whose respect had mattered to me for decades. For 50 years, my life had moved in rhythm with the Liturgical Year: Advent, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time, and then, suddenly, it was gone. I felt completely, overwhelmingly alone.
What I didn't know then, what I know now, is that I wasn't leaving God. I was leaving a container that had become too small for the Divine who had already revealed Herself to me.
I didn't know what to do on Sunday mornings. I could pray on my own, but I missed Mass, missed communal prayer far more than I expected. Nothing else filled that space. Not even close. I didn't know how to explain myself to people I loved, or how to stop defending a decision I knew in my bones was right.
I was unmoored in a way I hadn't expected. Not from the Divine. I could still feel Her presence. But from everything that had given my life its shape, rhythm, and language.
What I didn't have was a guide. Someone who had walked it and come out the other side, not just surviving, but genuinely more free, more alive, more connected to the Divine than she had ever been inside the institution.
And then there’s the rest of me.
I sometimes speak more directly than people are prepared for. I’ve been told I’m ‘a lot.’ I consider this a feature, not a bug.
I also change my mind when you give me a good reason to. I love learning more than I love being right, which, if you knew how much I love being right, tells you something.
I see the sacred in all of it. The demanding cat. The coffee. The messy, hilarious, grief-soaked, wonder-filled experience of being human. All of it holy. All of it is worth showing up for.
I’ve been married for 30 years to a man who has somehow survived my particular brand of bluntness. We have two children, one straight, one gloriously queer, and I will tell you honestly that when my child first asked me to use ‘they/them’ pronouns, my initial response was “Oh shoot, that’s the hard one.”
And then: “But of course I can learn.”
That’s pretty much how I operate. Honest first. Loving always. Willing to be wrong.
I work out at Orange Theory, currently in last place in an 8-week team competition, and completely at peace with that. I love coffee, Joe Dispenza workshops, animals, and nature. I have a sweet dog, and an alarm clock in the form of a cat who thinks she’s the reason I exist. I am her minion.
My Qualifications … or… Why I Can’t Stay Out of School
• BA in Nursing , 20 years as a Registered Nurse in hospital settings, learning how to hold people in crisis with steadiness and care
• BA and MA in Theology, nearly 8 years of study, including time teaching progressive theology
• MA in Spiritual Psychology with an Emphasis in Health, Healing, and Consciousness
• Clinical and Spiritual Hypnotherapy Training - 1000 hours of clinical, medical support, spiritual hypnotherapy, and trauma-informed group facilitation, because I had to find out how we can break through the limiting beliefs that confine us.
• ICF-Certified Life Coach
• 50 years inside the Catholic Church, because it took me that long to accept it was not going to change in my lifetime.
• Many coaching certifications: Soul-Centered Coach, Transformation Coach, Creative Grief Coach, and Wellness Coach
• A Near-Death Experience that gave me direct, unmediated knowledge of what these women are reaching toward, and an unshakeable certainty that it's real, and it's waiting for them.
Everything I bring, the theology, the nursing, the hypnotherapy training, the Spiritual Psychology, the coaching credentials, the NDE, and my own lived experience of leaving, is in service of one thing: walking with you through this, until you find your footing and, in time, the wonder and gift of this transformation.
I had to find my own way through.
That took longer than it needed to.
It doesn't have to take that long for you.
I built Awaken to Wonder for women like me,
who listened to their heart and chose their own lives,
not yet knowing they were stepping toward something
far more expansive than what they left behind.