2011-2018: an impressive tenure in community building at Yelp gives way to a meteoric professional trajectory in brand/marketing in tech. On some random day in mid-2017, my then COO pulls me aside:

”Rachel, your strategy work is absolutely out of this world, but I need you to slow down a bit in stakeholder presentations – you’re forgetting that not everyone is gifted like you are.”

Gifted? The word reverberated through my body like some cosmic somatic space-time gong.

I’m indebted to him for his use of the word, however, because “gifted” was the missing link, the hidden skeleton key that helped me (re)connect with my inner world, my unseen differences, and my distinct experience and expression of being human.

I didn’t know it then, but at the time I was navigating an intense nervous system/body burnout and a massive positive disintegration. The more I fought to hold it together, the worse it got.

Why was I so increasingly miserable and frustrated? Why did the newer, shiner gig or the external mile markers of success not register? Why was I experiencing these weird, nebulous physical symptoms that specialists and scans couldn’t diagnose?

I’d never experienced such melty-ness, such a “lost in the sauce-ness” in my entire life. First answers came by way of that taboo word: “gifted” (and the exploration of neurodivergence in the form of clinical psychology, experts, labels, and diagnoses. These provided temporary relief and stabilization, which opened the doors to… more doors and more questions.)

I had forgotten I was a “gifted” kid – the weird one in the cohort. By eighth grade, “gifted stuff” was over and AP was the name of the game. An incredibly smart but sensitive kid who struggled through puberty without much guidance or support, I fell through the cracks.

Gifted, they said, and exceptionally/profoundly so… some meta-meta type-thinker. Autistic, many agreed. ADHD too, so now, AuDHD. Other flavors included CPTSD, a penchant for depersonalization, dissociation, and representational intelligence as safe zone. Aphantasia, synesthesia. PDA. “Everything everywhere all at once on the inside” meeting force dynamics, a Cartesian disconnect, and an exquisitely sublimated sensitivity. Your labs look good, though. Two years of intense medical engagement and turns out, my blood sugar a little high. Fibromyalgia? Sure. Relationship/map of the sensing body? Null set.

A lifelong self-guided learner and deep thinker, it was clear that I was (finally) going to have to turn all that curiosity and inquiry toward the most personal subject of them all: myself (and as a corporeal form with physiology and the agency to explore the living psyche as embodied, because who else is doing this?)

What does it mean to be gifted, AuDHD, neurodivergent, beyond identity? Beyond immutability? Beyond clinical labels, boxes, and behaviors, what are the very foundations of this way of being? How does the bodymind really work, and can I learn to relate with own processing, my unique phenomenology, differently?

Questions led to more questions and meta questions and depth led to deeper depths. I learned to dive into and explore my own sub- and unconscious, doing experiments and learning how to restore and open the physical-existential connections of embodied intelligence one slow, non-linear step at a time. (I am so grateful to have had a small handful of teachers during this process!)

Neurodivergence (neurocomplexity) in the context of embodied neurodiversity was the missing lens through which the rest of my experience could be viewed, explored, and understood in proper non-dual context. Identity and personal, direct experience became accessible through the embodied metaframes I had created. I began to engage my sensing body AND representational intelligence while cultivating meta-awareness.

During this rebirth process, a previously hidden talent emerged: an incredible capacity and facility in journeying into the liminal territory between direct experience and representation with other humans. Zooming out, the entire experience showed me what my work in the world truly is: I’m in the “business” of nurturing and engaging a fuller spectrum of human intelligence – one that is common, different, and completely distinct – in individuals and in the collective, at once.

My work is category-defining and meta, focused on the living nature of human intelligence and our relationship with our own. I work with maps of meaning, with direct experience, with metacognitive expansion, and with the structural psyche. Together my clients and I explore, play, and work in the spaces where known and the unknown meet seen and unseen.

My foundations go beyond reductionism into holistic inclusion, honoring reciprocity and interplay, mutual influence and the influence of the subjective – the importance of truly embodied learning. My focus is on the relationships between story, state, and meta-awareness, on how humans operate and co-create with themselves and each other.

I’m a guide and unconventional coach, consultant, facilitator, and educator who walks with her clients to create more flexibility of perception, and to deepen and strengthen embodied cognition while tackling challenges and opportunities in growth, expansion, strategy, and choice. I’m at my best as a thought partner and collaborator to neurodivergents, AuDHDers, H+Gifted folks (special emphasis on exceptional-profound giftedness), leaders, visionaries, high-achievers, creatives, and polymathic types.