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BIO

A bit more about me.

carla me.jpg

I was born and raised in New York City to immigrant parents. My father, a jazz musician and Maritime lawyer escaped from the Gdynia-Gdansk shipyard region of Poland in the 1960’s, spent time in refugee camps and ended up working on Canadian Merchant Marine ships in the Arctic circle for 7 years before moving to Montreal and then, New York.  My mother was raised deep in the Peruvian Amazon Jungle on a tributary of the Ucayali river between the Shipibo and Kampa tribes. My grandfather, a Mason, ran a sort of jungle farm there which supplied passing vessels with basic goods.  My grandmother was a traditional healer. Most of my family is now spread out between Iquitos, Pucallpa, and Puerto Bermudez.

My early life was a series of contrasts. The mystical backdrop of the Amazon Jungle ruled in my house. Talks of herbs, ghosts, the dead, or astral travel were daily occurrences. When we were sick, we had eggs rolled over us and sulphur sticks would crackle, we drank a million concoctions. From that backdrop, we took frequent trips to family in communist Poland. At the same time, I grew up during the massively creative 80’s, in club culture while surrounded by the crack mood of New York at the time. I was connected to personalities in the early Queens rap world and the Native Tongues movement simply because of my neighbourhood experiences and my sister’s involvement in that. At the same time, we were shipped off to Swiss boarding schools when any of our surroundings started to take prominence in our lives. 

I went to a college that had twin campuses in Santa Fe, NM as well as Annapolis, MD where I studied the Great Books. We basically had the academic dream experience of sitting around in small classes of 10 people reading and discussing the foundational primary texts of Western civilisation. We started by translating Plato from Ancient Greek and continued chronologically to reading Einstein. After four years, I graduated from St. John’s College with a dual degree in Philosophy and the History of Math and Science.

After college I followed a passion and lived in Seville, Spain where I immersed myself in Gypsy culture and honed my skill as a flamenco dancer.

 

On returning to the USA, after a stint at a Columbia University research institute and a certain corporate headquarters, I went back to school for a Post-Baccalaureate Premed program at Columbia University.  I went on to study Naturopathic Medicine and Classical Chinese Medicine at NUNM, in Portland, Oregon where I earned a Doctorate and Masters simultaneously.

I’ve always had a penchant for the sciences. I find them unendingly beautiful. Organic chemistry, Biochemistry and theoretical physics were my loves. At one point in my training, I prepared cadavers for cadaver lab. I worked at dual diagnosis clinics. I taught Human Physiology at a Master’s degree program in New York.  I was credentialed at NYU Lutheran Hospital in the Stroke as well as Labor and Delivery departments. I worked at various upscale boutique wellness centres in New York and Washington, DC. At the moment, I’m eagerly learning some astrophysics and geophysics in order to answer a burning question I have in the archeoastronomy of Classical Chinese Medicine. I’m collaborating with a lovely gentleman from NASA on this.

I got into Natural Tripping through Focusing. Focusing is what you might call a meta-process. It can be applied to any other discipline and will deepen the experience of it by incorporating a sensory aspect that is at the boundary of emotion / thought and kinaesthetic perception. I found that  with my particular style of doing Focusing sessions, they eventually started to take on very visual characteristics with my clients.  I had some clients who had experience with psychedelics and they immediately recognised the experience as tripping.  

I suspect that the evolution of my particular style of Focusing has to do, in part, with my own spiritual experiences over the years. Given my upbringing with the Amazon Jungle background, and the epigenetic influences of that, I have a bit of a natural ability in the realm of the unseen. 

 

It might be the reason why I’ve been lucky enough to have multiple spontaneous psilocybin and DMT-like transcendental moments, even just walking down the street.  Over time, I've learned to direct these experiences for myself and now I slowly bring people to experience them for themselves. While I might have some natural ability in this arena, I wholeheartedly believe that we all can do this and the spiritual benefits are worth trying it. 

Ironically, it is this same ability that draws me to the sciences. I experience the sciences as a concretisation and mathematical annotation of the unseen. I don’t know if this is true for most people drawn to the sciences, but, for me, a truth is intuitively felt as a vague unknown sensation before it reveals the details of its composition and the precise scientific proof eventually arises.  That manifestation from vague sensation to mathematical accuracy is very satisfying and not terribly unlike the sensation of composing a dance or a musical piece.  It’s not so much a feeling of directing, but rather, a feeling of discovering and uncovering that brings joy. There’s a moment when it’s finally right, and, at least in the moment, irrefutable. It's very gratifying.

I love the mountains of Italy, where I currently live, but I adore the ocean most of all, and have a deep love for my native New York coast.  Whenever I can, I take a stab at rock climbing or surfing, whichever is available to me at the time.  If Salsa music is playing, I will dance to it…every…time. 

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