Intro to Shadow Work
In 2020, when COVID reshaped the world, I experienced a profound—and traumatic—liberation process (which I share more fully in Sweet Piggy’s Jump and First Breath: A Memoir). I shifted from performance, comedy, drag, and collaborative music into creating collaborative videos. I had never made video work before, so I learned everything from scratch: editing, composing, script writing, and storytelling.
What began as art quickly deepened into shadow work. These videos revealed layers of the psyche long hidden by systemic conditioning and survival mechanisms. The process of unveiling, grieving, and transforming internalized stories became medicine. Multimedia storytelling emerged as a tool for integration.
Through this creative and psychospiritual practice, each project became a mirror:
Pandemic Players: reckoning with racism and evil
Drag: exploring gender and sexuality
Boxed: confronting constricting relationships with land and one another
The Monetary System: examining patterns of exploitation and ownership
Wheel & SWIC: questioning obsession with productivity and cultural appropriation
For deeper exploration of shadow work, see the Seven Realms of Reconnection. I would like to thank Kai Cheng Thom as one of my mentors in shadow work, and Elena Glotova as a companion in the shadow realms.
After making these films, I also engaged in deep shadow work around money with Cleo Matlou. I struggle with the way the current monetary system is structured, especially its toxic aspects. All bodies carry stories about money, value, and worth, and currency exchange is an essential part of being human. I now believe in a healthy, abundant exchange for all bodies, rooted in honoring both the body and the Earth as sacred.
This embodied shadow work became a vital part of creating the 🌅 First Breath Framework (FBF).
✿ Sweet Piggies Jump
This is the story of a threshold—of confronting evil, something not of this world, something deeply harmful, and finding the power to say no. To walk away.
Sweet Piggies Jump marks the moment I left an oppressive relationship for good. In this piece, I explore how adolescent consciousness fights what it cannot yet name. And how adult consciousness learns to say no, turn away, and begin anew.
This was a personal experience of pattern breaking, reflecting what is now unfolding at a collective level. The video is a collaborative performance work created with Penélope Baquero, Michael Beers, and Jason Forges. The four of us formed a creative pod during the pandemic, called Pandemic Players, making storytelling films together and co-facilitating workshops through Rooted Global Village. I also worked through some racist patterning in this process, by listening.
✿ Drag
These two drag videos were created with Kelly River and me. Emily Lynn collaborated as videographer. Together, we explored gender through story, dance, and music. Each piece reflects aspects of our lived experience, layered with humor, shadow, and self-expression.
For me, drag has been both art form and initiation. My exploration began when I returned to Missoula about seven years ago and saw Ace of Hearts perform — I instantly fell in love with drag as transformative art. I performed locally and produced several drag shows with House of Mysteries. Through these performances, I examined my relationship to gender, culture, and sexuality, as well as the shadow material that lives in appropriation, repression, and inherited stories. One of my past drag characters, which carried cultural appropriation, has now been laid to rest. That ending was a very important part of my healing journey.
I hold deep gratitude for Ace, Lexi, Pup, Das, Billy, Tides, Charley, Lynsey, Bobbi, Kelly, and all my queer and trans friends whose healing support has carried me on this path. Big gratitude for all of our queer, kinky, poly, and trans ancestors who continue to teach us how to live with more pride, courage, love, and fluidity. Today, my drag persona is BB Mystery, and in kink spaces I go by BB Fluid — both genderqueer and gender fluid, pointing toward the exploration that is still unfolding.
✿ Box and Labeled
With Kristina Boyd, we explored the constraining stories of gender, professionalism, and social expectation. We asked: What roles have we been cast in? What could happen if we broke free? This video emerged from hours of storytelling, laughter, inquiry, and work. It is a yearning. For the letting go of so many labels.
✿ Exploitation 1 & 2 and Scarcity–Ownership
These three videos form a trilogy of inquiry into the internal expressions of external systems—the ways scarcity, control, and fear get embedded in our psyches and relationships.
For these videos, I traveled to Hawai’i to collaborate with Naga Nataka at Kumakahi Village on the Big Island. Mahalo to the ancestors and peoples of this land, and to Pelé.
Together, we examined the invisible scripts we’ve inherited—how systemic exploitation teaches us to exploit ourselves and each other. We spent hours in dialogue and reflection, naming the subtle ways power, survival, and manipulation play out in our bodies and behaviors. We honored the ancestors of the land and acknowledged the deep wounds of colonialism that still echo. We asked: What would it take to stop reenacting those patterns?
Scarcity–Ownership continues the thread. This piece looks more closely at where our profound need for control may come from. It’s an inquiry on loosening our grip. On imagining what could become possible if we were no longer ruled by the belief that there isn’t enough.
These videos are both personal and systemic, spiritual and relational. They invite us to feel the discomfort of looking directly at our complicity—and to practice letting go of the tools of domination that perhaps were never ours to begin with.
✿ Spiritual Wellness Industrial Complex &
Wheel of Capitalism
In these pieces, Erin Gael and I turn inward to examine our shadows as white-bodied women shaped by capitalism.
We sat in the discomfort of the toxic shame that fuels our disconnection from land, earth rituals, and rest. We grieved. And we honored our deep, often unspoken need for a different kind of culture—one rooted in truth, reverence, and collective care.
These videos reveal how systems of spiritual bypass, consumerism, perfectionism, and performance have distorted our yearning for belonging. By feeling what’s hollow, we begin to remember what’s sacred.
