Catholic Lawyer to Shamanic Priestess: Mellissa's Journey

In 1999, I was living a contented life as a Stanford-educated lawyer and a practicing Catholic.  Today, I’m living an ecstatic life as a practicing shamanic priestess: shaman, healer, psychic, and channel.  How did it happen? Here’s my story.

I’ve always been intuitive.  As a child, my pediatrician, who was also a child psychiatrist, lovingly characterized me as super-imaginative and gifted.  I moved the toothpaste across the counter once with a thought. Scared the heck out of me.  Didn’t tell anyone.  I saw lions in the bushes that no one else saw.  I knew they were real.

My faith life was always nurtured and strong in the Catholic Church.  God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary were always accessible to me.  I talked to them often, and always felt the warmth and acceptance of Divine Grace.

I heard God talk with words for the first time when I was seven.  I was in the mountains at church camp, alone in a meadow, chasing frogs around a pond.  I was overcome by a strong Wind that did not move the trees or the grass – but it moved my heart.  I felt completely loved, and I also felt an overwhelming sense of awe.  I heard God call me by my name.  I answered, asking what God wanted me to do.  God said “Just Love.”  After that day, I never felt out of contact with God.  And the contact was always stronger outside in nature than anywhere else.  It always seemed to me that God lived outside in the trees and the sky.  Church felt comfortable for group prayer and ritual, and it held its own beauty in tradition, but when I wanted to really talk personally with God, I went outside.

I loved being the Campus Minister of my Catholic high school.  I led retreats.  I planned liturgies.  I spoke freely about my relationship with God, and my deep love and admiration for Christ.  I studied the Catholic Church.  I learned to constantly explore my Faith using my whole self – my intellect, my reason, and my intuition.  I was an extraordinarily happy and involved Catholic.

At Stanford where I went to college, I studied other religions and traditions, lived in a co-operative house, and started practicing meditation and doing improvisational theatre.  I began finding God everywhere!

After college, I went back to San Diego where I got involved in my local Catholic Church again, and entered law school.  I met my husband and began planning a family.  I founded and ran an improvisational theatre, teaching and performing improv with San Diego Theatresports and the California Center for the Improvisational Arts.

After law school, I was a mess.  I felt de-feminized, hardened and resentful.  Feminine ways of negotiating, of communicating, and of acting were not encouraged in law school.  I was suffering with chronic and severe yeast infections and bladder infections that kept me in pain.  My doctors – all intelligent specialists – were stumped.  They offered only that I could go on anti-yeast medications for the rest of my life.