Intro to Shadow Work
In 2020, COVID reshaped the world and I experienced a profound—and traumatic—liberation experience (which I share more fully in Sweet Piggy’s Jump and First Breath: A Memoir. I shifted from performance, comedy, drag, and creating collaborative music to making collaborative videos. I had never made video work before. I learned everything from scratch—editing, composing, script writing, storytelling. These videos became a vehicle for something deeper than art: they became a process of shadow work—of unveiling layers of the psyche that had long been hidden from view by systemic conditioning and survival mechanisms.
Although this part of my project didn’t "succeed" in a capitalist sense (I wasn’t able to make the videos profitable), the creative and psychospiritual process of revealing, grieving, and transforming internalized stories was profoundly successful. The process itself was medicine. Storytelling became a tool for integration.
✿ Sweet Piggies Jump
This is the story of a threshold—of confronting 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 again.
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.
✿ 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. 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.
✿ 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.
