Answering the Call

My Journey to Becoming a Movement Maker

From as early as I can remember, I felt that something larger than myself was moving through me. Even when I didn’t have words for it, there was a force guiding me, shaping me, and pushing me into situations that would one day become the blueprint of my purpose.

The first time I remember being connected to that Source was in fourth grade when I went to my parents and asked to see a therapist. I knew it instinctively at nine years old, on some deep soul level, that I was to be the cycle breaker of trauma in my family and the light of my lineage.

When they laughed and asked me why I said, “Because it ends with me.” To pay for those sessions, I began walking dogs around my neighborhood. Looking back, I see that this was the moment I began my hero’s journey and started turning my pain into power.

A Thunderbolt in Guatemala

After college, I spent fifteen years drifting through corporate ed tech, burning out and quitting every few months. Cubicles with fluorescent lights, micromanaging bosses, and endless scripts left me feeling like a caged animal. While others called it the American Dream, I could feel my soul withering. I began to think something was deeply wrong with me — until I realized I wasn’t broken. I simply wasn’t built for capitalism’s cage.

On a much-needed vacation in Guatemala, a thunderbolt of truth struck as I sat on the beach watching the waves. I turned to my boyfriend and said, “I’m going to find my dream job in the next five days.” He laughed, but I knew.

Three days later, back home, the first posting I saw on LinkedIn was from a documentary film studio. They were seeking a Producer of Character Day, a global day where people hosted their own film premieres and discussed how to instill more kindness, humility, and justice in the world. I didn’t have any of the listed qualifications, but I wrote a cover letter anyway, explaining that what I lacked in experience, I made up for in devotion. Five minutes later, the founder replied that my letter had blown her away and she hired me on the spot.

Stepping into Movement Building

For three years, I helped grow Character Day into a global movement that reached over five million people in 125 countries, partnering with the California Department of Education, U.S. Embassies around the world, and tech giants like Facebook and Twitter. We were featured in TIME Magazine and NPR, and I built a global ambassador network with thousands hosting screenings and conversations worldwide.

It was the best apprenticeship in movement building I could have ever imagined — learning how to design campaigns, mobilize millions, train champions, forge coalitions, and generate press. Looking back, I see it wasn’t Character Day I was meant to lead, but that the skills I gained were preparing me for my karmic assignment ahead.

The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Shadows of Power

The next threshold was stepping into the psychedelic renaissance. I joined a school training psychedelic guides, led by a fully embodied female staff I could believe in. Rooted in the lineage of Maria Sabina and the Mazatec healers, it felt like home.

Meetings began with ritual, strategy was guided by nature and plant allies, a BIPOC council shaped decisions, and leadership flowed in circles rather than hierarchies. For the first time, I saw what it meant to build an organization with ancient wisdom at its center, and I believed it could transform humanity.

And then the shadow emerged. Allegations of sexual abuse against the founder’s family surfaced. A crisis PR firm was brought in to “manage” the story, as I pleaded for us to meet the shadow head-on. Instead, the choice was made to bury it, and the school crumbled soon after.

I was absolutely devastated. In my therapist’s office, I wept. He looked at me and surprisingly said, “Aren’t you lucky? You’ve just been given a front-row seat to one of the biggest scandals in psychedelic history. You are witnessing what happens when leaders either walk their talk — or don’t.”

His words reframed the pain. That experience was an initiation into the complexities of ethics and power, and it taught me that beauty and shadow are often inseparable. Both had something to teach me.

The Cracks in the Temple

I eventually went deeper into ceremonial life, traveling to Mexico to work with Zapotec elders and journeying into the Amazon jungle to sit with Shipibo healers. I was suffering from debilitating chronic fatigue and was in search of some answers.

Around this time, I entered a two-year seminary training program to become an Entheogenic Minister. I also began working for this Church alongside the visionary leader, and together, we grew the church to more than eighty ministers and cultivated community.

However, red flags began to surface within the organization, and the more I looked, the harder they became to ignore. What had once felt like a sanctuary began to reveal cracks that ran deep. The supposed “church” looked less like a sacred vessel and more like a cleverly disguised pyramid scheme, offering tax shelters for the wealthy rather than a true path of healing.

When I began naming the dissonance aloud, the Founder dismissed me with a patronizing eye roll. Soon after, he told me he had “run out of money to keep me on staff.”

The Call from Spirit

As graduation approached, I was still bound to the seminary, even after being let go. That second year of training at the Trinity House cracked me wide open. During our first retreat, my mother called to tell me she had stage four lung cancer, and four months later, she was gone.

At graduation, I carried her ashes and scattered them beneath the redwood outside, in the very same place she had first told me she was sick. That same weekend, my father passed away. The timing was almost spooky as it felt as though their lives had become the bookends of this passage, their final act to usher me across this sacred threshold.

On my first night at the Trinity House, I awoke at exactly 3:33 a.m., feeling my father’s breath on my ear and hearing him whisper, “Kenz.” Shaken, I later looked up the meaning: “Once you answer the call from Spirit and step onto your karmic path, everything will be revealed. All the support you need will flow to you.”

At graduation, we were asked to commune with the mushroom and inquire if we were ready to guide. The medicine showed me visions of Martin Luther King, Jesus, Greta Thunberg, and AOC, then a river with people drowning. I was lifted upstream to the dam itself and shown that my work was not to guide individuals alone, but to carry ancient wisdom forward and steward systemic change.

In the final ritual, we were asked to cross an imagined river as a symbol of stepping into ministry. As others walked forward, I dropped to my knees, trembling and in tears. I knew I could not cross with them — to do so would be a betrayal of my soul. Instead, I knelt in terror, face to face with the question of whether I would dare to step fully into my own power.

With a trembling breath and a vow whispered to Spirit, I rose and crossed — not into the institution I was leaving, but into the uncharted territory of my true calling.

Grief and Ancestral Healing

After losing both of my parents and walking away from the church, I entered a long season of suspended grief, as if time itself had stalled. In that stillness, I felt called back to Cleveland, my hometown, as though my ancestors were summoning me home to remember.

There, I rooted more deeply into my lineage and began to enter a new and cosmic dialogue. My parents appeared not as the wounded beings I had known, but as luminous guides. I felt my grandfather as an ally in my entrepreneurial path, his legacy of building and selling empires humming in my veins. And beyond them, I felt the presence of undistorted ancestors, those who carried the original songs before the fractures of history.

Their burdens became my teachers and their mistakes my maps. I realized I could draw upon the wisdom encoded in my blood without being crushed by their wounds. Instead of inheriting only their pain, I was learning to inherit their power.

The Birth of Movement Maker

When I returned to the Bay, a friend from HeartMath asked me to help envision a campaign that could transform their work into a global movement. When we got on the call, the vision poured through me as if Spirit itself was speaking. When I finished, he wept. He told me that what I had given him in forty-five minutes was the vision they had been struggling to find for forty years.

His tears pierced right through me. They were a sacred mirror reflecting the power I had been running from, the abilities I had been shrinking away from, and the sacred promise to Spirit I had not yet fulfilled. In that moment, I could no longer deny what lived inside me, and the seed of the Movement Maker Incubator was planted.

With trembling hands, I began weaving together everything I had learned: the strategy of movement building, the power of storytelling, the wisdom of the Enneagram, the lessons of plant medicine, the teachings of ancestry, the wounds of failed leadership, and the blueprints of resilient community.

I saw clearly that every heartbreak, every job, every initiation had been preparing me for this. I had learned what leadership is by witnessing what it is not. I had learned how to manage energy because my body forced me to. I had learned how to sit with grief because my parents’ deaths left me no choice.

I now know that my purpose is not simply to build movements, but to help others hear and answer their own call from spirit. Because the truth is this: if your calling feels too big for you, that is because it most likely is. You were never meant to carry it alone.

And remember…the universe will give you a vision only if you are meant and able to steward it. Trust the thunderstorms of redirection. Trust the grief, the failures, and the moments that make no sense, for they are shaping you and molding you right beneath the surface.

Everything is not happening to you. It is happening for you…only if you pay attention and bow to the lessons right in front of you and take the next step forward.