"The same tools that help us unearth ancient artifacts help us excavate our own buried capacities."
From the Andes to the inner landscape
I didn't find this work. It found me—on the side of a mountain in Peru, staring at 3,000-year-old rock art, wondering why ancient people carved the same symbols of transformation that I was desperately avoiding in my own life.
I spent years as a landscape archaeologist and iconographer, studying how ancient civilizations in Peru, the Amazon, and Belize encoded meaning into stone—symbols of transition, power, and the relationship between seen and unseen worlds. I documented rock art at more than 20 sites in the Central Andes. I co-directed international research projects. I published in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal.
But somewhere between the academic papers and the fieldwork, I realized: I was excavating everything except myself. The avoidance patterns I studied in cultures—the way societies encoded pain into ritual and story—were the same patterns running my own nervous system.
That's when the real excavation began.