About Rachel Rumi
I have been a lifelong student of consciousness. By some form of grace, I always maintained some hope for a joyful life, even throughout extraordinary early-life challenges. At times I feared that this tiny light of hope might be extinguished. I was a girl with a big heart and big dreams. Like many children who grew up in the 1980’s I was blessedly unsupervised in the hours outside of school. I roved the woods behind our house in the suburbs of Kansas City with my best friend, where we created a world of our own imaginations- a world that for me was sweet solace from the intense atmosphere of emotional anguish that enveloped my family life. Though blunted by crushing depression, there was always a sensitivity and awareness present inside of me. I looked into my pupils in the mirror and saw something ancient, deep, and watchful, a loving curiosity about the soulful child reflected there.
There were gifts that sustained me. Despite the harmful religious ideology that was a part of my upbringing, I had a quite personal resonance with the life and teachings of Jesus. He was a breakthrough invitation from behind the veil into an orientation of consciousness towards Spirit, to be followed later in life by other beautiful influences from Buddhism, Hinduism, and shamanism. Another gift was music. At a grade school assembly the music teacher demonstrated all of the instruments to recruit students for the orchestra. When he got to the violin, something adamant inside me said “that’s it." I began playing at the age of nine years old. Violin became a portal into a dimension where beauty triumphed over sadness. It would also provide a pathway towards a life of my own making. I studied in college and graduate school, completing a master’s degree in music. I taught violin and played in small orchestras professionally through my early twenties.
While in college I took an introduction to world religions class. My professor was a kind and ethical man who was the first adult in my life with whom it felt safe to be fully ‘me.’ Even when he came across me on the quad nervously smoking cigarettes between classes, he stopped to have a thoughtful conversation, in full validation of my humanity, despite all of the obvious emblems of my woundedness. I became his teaching assistant and added comparative religious studies to my major, along with music. The professor drove groups of us to visit the magnificent Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City to study Asian art. I was enamored by a large statue of Guanyin of the Southern Sea, a gorgeous fusion of masculine and feminine divinity, grace, and opulence. Though my physical reality was laden with suffering in the form of eating disorders, addictions, fraught personal relationships, and extraordinarily difficult mood issues, the universe was always sending me encouraging messages like this from Source.
In my mid-twenties I finally found the strength to begin active pursuit of trauma recovery. It was an arduous and tenuous journey, with long periods of years of heavy labor to reverse what seemed at times like insurmountable damage. I lived for seven years in the San Francisco Bay Area and was influenced by the West Coast ethos of healthy living. I spent a chapter of life exploring the various 12-step programs. I learned how to cook nutritious food and went for long runs amongst the magnificent redwood trees of Muir Woods. I began a new career in non-profit fundraising that gave me a platform for exploring manifestation of abundance, though it would ultimately be a very slow climb out of the deprivation thinking around money etched in my ancestry and finances were often of troubling concern.
I was fortunate to begin studying with my brilliant mentor Susan Reintjes, who initiated me into the intuitive gifts that naturally develop with deep inner work on family-of-origin issues. My work to consciously process feelings involved an intensification of symptoms: very difficult somatic flashbacks, relationship reenactments, and disordered eating. I’m so grateful to Susan for believing in my recovery even while I was holding on to a very thin strand of hope. During this time, I became certified to teach yoga and continued to develop my fundraising career. I took several trips overseas to visit the ancient archeological and spiritual sites of the world, such as Machu Picchu and the Paleolithic cave paintings in Southern France. I craved understanding of non-ordinary reality. I learned how to decode the language of my dreams and worked actively to clear old energies from my system.
In 2019 I moved to New York, just eight months before the onset of the Covid pandemic. I entered into the most potent relationship reenactment to date, which abruptly came to an end in early 2022. This event launched me into a profound Dark Night of the Soul experience that rocked me to my core. For almost two years I practiced deep surrender as Spirit burned everything unneeded in my psyche down to ash. At the end of 2022 I got Covid myself. It was a mild case, but I was left with a baffling issue with my vision that made it difficult for me to see. I had light sensitivity and a strange tic that affected my eyes, nose and cheeks. Concurrently, my Cinderella complex in my job was reaching an unbearable pitch and I was pressured to heal more deeply than ever before to resolve the abusiveness of my past.
In 2023 my vision difficulties prompted me to begin studying shamanism. By practicing shamanic journeying, I began to experience full relief from PTSD symptoms. Shamanism and yoga are currently my primary spiritual practices. Spiritual study and practice are my highest priorities, though I of course experience episodes of resistance at times. It is so important that we practice compassion with ourselves! My ongoing dharma is to convert my wounds into the medicine that heals myself and the world.
We alchemize and imprint our pain and fear with our unique and beautiful expressions of empowerment and creativity, fashioning ourselves out of the clay of trauma into sovereign creators. I encourage anyone who has experienced major suffering and loss that it is possible to fully embody the energies of love, beauty, fulfillment, and deep joy. It is your birthright.
Lots of love,
Rachel