Deanna began a journey in 1984 to heal herself from a near-fatal fall down El Diente Peak, a fourteener in the Wilson range in Western Colorado. To heal she set herself on a journey to find alternative ways to help body, mind, and soul. She was enamored and within a ten-year period after the fall, she had organized and opened The Healing Arts Center in Grand Junction, Colorado. She found many friendships in women’s circles and healing and simultaneously ran a bicycle shop. She started her healing practice after her daughter was born, in 1986.

 

The Healing Arts Cooperative helped many people become certified massage therapists. Her early teachers included Mary Golden, Lomi Lomi Hawaiian Massage, Rosita Arvigo and Mayan women in Belize, Chris Smith of Trauma Touch Therapy, Dr. Yao of Chinese Acupressure, and others. She learned many other healing modalities that kickstarted a successful massage therapy practice.

 

In the 1990s, Deanna visited Mexico, Central, and South America and found teachers. Studying the medicine wheel with Alberto Villodo from 1994 to 1996, experiencing Andean and Amazonian healers and sacred plant medicine with John Perkins in Ecuador, and delving into Plant Spirit Medicine with Eliot Cowan, all contributed to her shamanic patchwork. Cowan became her spiritual guide until his death in 2022.  

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“Place cornstalks at your altar,” Deanna's teacher told her.

“You will learn everything from corn.”  Corn became her teacher.  

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Deanna was initiated as a weather worker in 1997 by don Lucio Campos, of Nepapaulco, Mexico. The Nahua tradition of greeting and making friends with the weather became the foundation of  her Huichol shamanic apprenticeship. She had two successful initiations in 2003 and 2004, and has been recognized as a Mara’akame, translated as "One Who Knows" the Mara’akame is a healer, community and ritual leader.  She was called to learn funerary rites and was initiated to do this in 1999. Her work with soul retrieval and other methods of healing began in 2002. 
 

As Deanna sat at her altar, a wind blew through the room and she heard: “To be a shaman you must have a community.”

 

In that moment Deanna learned that a shaman is not self-declared but one who has been given authority by the people, and acknowledged by the community as a healer and spiritual guide.  

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Today, Deanna serves as a healer, spiritual consultant, community and ritual leader, elder and is an initiated fire keeper. She has held seats on elder councils, and has been ritual leader for young women's initiation for over 15 years. In addition to Deanna's training in the Huichol tradition, she is also an ordained ministerial cleric.

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From those initiatory years over thirty years ago, Deanna has actively walked the path of healer, consult, shaman, and guide. 
 

She is a founding member of Mesa Life Community in Colorado, where she led the recent completion of two off-grid homesteads.