ABOUT THE BOOK

Some journeys begin long before we know we have taken the first step.
Dancing with My Inner Genie grew from that kind of journey.
It was born from a life that did not always unfold according to plan—from love and loss, unexpected beginnings, questions without immediate answers, moments of extraordinary beauty, and the quiet realization that even in our most uncertain seasons, something within us continues to know the way forward.

I wasn't certain I wanted to write a book.

There is something very different about living through the intimate passages of a life and choosing to place them on a page for strangers to read. Some stories feel deeply personal because they are. They carry the people we have loved, the choices we have made, the places where we have fallen, and the sometimes difficult paths by which we found our way back to ourselves.
For a long time, I wasn't sure those stories needed to belong to anyone but me.

Sonia Choquette saw it differently.
She encouraged me to understand that sharing my story wasn't really about telling people what had happened to me. She believed that by sharing it honestly, my story could help countless others recognize something within their own lives.
That changed something for me.

I began to understand that a personal story can become a lantern.
Not because one person's path provides a map for someone else's life. We each have our own terrain to cross—our own loves and losses, questions and choices, beginnings and unexpected turns.
But sometimes seeing how another person moved through something difficult allows us to imagine that another outcome might also be possible for us.

Perhaps healing doesn't always mean returning to who we were before something happened.
Perhaps it means discovering who we can become because we have walked through it.

None of this happens quickly, neatly, or in a straight line. My own road unfolded over years, often long before I understood where it was taking me.
Eventually, I  realized that some of what I had gathered along the way might be worth sharing.
And so writing this book became, for me, an act of love.

What We Carry

As we move through life, we gather things without always realizing how valuable they may someday become.

Memories. Laughter. Lessons. Love. Courage. Wonder.

We tuck them into that invisible bag we carry through life, a little like the first backpack we ever loved—the one we could fill with our treasures, zip closed, throw over our shoulders, and somehow feel ready to go anywhere.
It was ours.
It went into the closet and under the bed. It came along on adventures. It carried things no one else even needed to know were there.
And somewhere along the way, it became almost a part of us.

I think we do something very similar throughout our lives.
We collect moments we may not recognize as treasures when they happen.

Someone who believed in us.
A kindness we never forgot.
A time we were braver than we knew.
Something we survived.
A place where we felt completely ourselves.
A ridiculous moment that can still make us laugh years later.
An unexpected experience of beauty, grace, or wonder.

Then one day something—a story, a person, a familiar song, a photograph, an unexpected memory—reminds us to reach inside.
And there it is.
Something we had almost forgotten we carried.

That is one of my deepest hopes for Dancing with My Inner Genie.
That somewhere within my stories, something might awaken within yours.
Not because my answers are your answers.
Not because my road should become your road.
But because sometimes another person's story helps us remember something valuable in our own.
And when life is difficult, those remembered treasures can remind us of what else is true.

When life is beautiful, they can help us be present enough to recognize it, receive it, and perhaps create a little more of it.

The Inner Genie

At the center of the book is something I came to know as my Inner Genie.
Not a magical being waiting to grant wishes.
And not something outside of us.
The Inner Genie is our spirit—our uniquely personal spark of love, desire, compassion, imagination, creativity, wonder, and possibility.
It is the part of us that can listen beneath the noise.
The part that notices connections our conscious mind may not yet understand.
The part that can hold our deepest desires while remaining in conversation with something greater than ourselves.

I have come to think of it almost like the conductor of a symphony.
The music is already there.
The instruments are already there.
But something must listen to the whole—to know when to move, when to wait, what needs to become quieter, and what is finally ready to rise.

The Inner Genie doesn't grant our wishes.
It invites us to become conscious co-creators of our lives.
My book became a conversation with that part of myself.

And eventually, a dance.
There were moments when I led.
There were many more when life did.

The Road Continues

Along the way came teachers and strangers, laughter and heartbreak, unexpected friendships, synchronicities that seemed almost impossible, and the small everyday miracles we sometimes recognize only after we have learned to pay attention.
Eventually, the road carried me toward another journey:
The Camino de Santiago.

I could not yet know what awaited me there.
Perhaps none of us ever really knows what waits beyond the next bend.
Sometimes we simply arrive at a place where something inside says:
Go.
And so we take a step.
Then another.

Somewhere between where we began and where we thought we were going, the landscape around us can quietly become a landscape within us.
There were mountains and ancient pathways, exhaustion and wonder, enormous skies and long stretches of silence.

And there were the horses.
Beautiful  and magificent against the landscape, they seemed to embody something I had been learning for years but had not quite found the words to say:
Freedom is not always about escaping something.
Sometimes it is about remembering who we were before we learned to hold ourselves back.

Perhaps that is what Dancing with My Inner Genie has always been about.
Not my answers.
Not a prescription for how another life should be lived.

An invitation to become curious about your own.
To notice the coincidences.
To listen beneath the noise.
To wonder whether something you have dismissed as impossible might simply be something whose path you cannot see yet.
And to recognize that the extraordinary does not always arrive with trumpets and fireworks.
Sometimes it arrives as a stranger.
A road.
A loss that changes us.
A horse on a distant hillside.
A feeling we cannot quite explain.
Or a whisper from somewhere deep within:
There is more.

The pages of my book eventually came to an end.
The conversation did not.
There have been many roads, adventures, teachers, surprises, and moments of grace since the final words of Dancing with My Inner Genie were written.
Perhaps there are more stories still waiting to be told.

For now, this one remains an invitation:
Not to follow my journey—
but to become a little more curious about your own.