Ancient tools. Modern life.

I was based in Bangkok. The apartment was a penthouse. I wished I could enjoy it.

The travel made me sick. The antibiotics I kept taking to keep working made me sick in different ways. I was exhausted in a way sleep no longer touched. My body had been trying to tell me something for a long time, and I had been refusing to hear it.

For 25 years I had worked in global justice. War crimes tribunals. Post-conflict reform. Human trafficking. Gender-based violence response. Crisis intervention in places where the language for what people had survived did not yet exist.

The war crimes work carried me across continents. Cambodia. Rwanda. Sierra Leone. The Balkans. Work that tried to put a frame around what should never have happened.

I was good at my work. I am an empath. I did not have the word for it then. I absorbed what was in the room. I felt other people's pain in my body long after they left it. I sensed shifts before anyone spoke. That sensitivity made me good at what I did. It was also slowly destroying me.

I did not find the tools after the breakdown. I had them the whole time. For years I collected crystals, drawn to them without knowing why, knowing little more than their names. I kept them close for years before I understood what they were already doing.

Then the body won. I left Bangkok, and for the first time I stopped instead of moving on to the next thing. In 2017, I quit simply collecting the stones and started using them.

I was no longer content to be drawn to them without knowing why. I wanted to understand the energy I had always felt. I earned certifications in Reiki, trained in the Netherlands and Thailand, then in Pranic Healing, crystal healing, and essential oils, with further training in energy protection for empaths and in business energetics.

I wore crystals in my bra into high-stakes rooms. My colleagues thought the ones on my wrist were just bracelets. They did not know the Black Tourmaline was programmed to keep the heaviness off me, or that I carried Tiger's Eye in my pocket so I could see clearly when I walked into rooms where the decision had already been made before I arrived.

I am a lawyer. I am trained to trust evidence, to test a claim before I believe it. And I reached for these tools anyway, quietly, because I could not always explain them and did not need to. I was not alone. I watched people whose entire careers were built on evidence and argument reach for palo santo and burning resin to clear a room, then never say a word about it. We all practiced in secret. KUPONYA is me no longer hiding it, and holding the door for everyone still there.

I also turned to essential oils, not for fragrance, but for healing. Lavender to quiet the noise and invite sleep back. Frankincense, the mother of oils, to calm my nervous system and protect my energy. Orange, because citrus always lifted me back toward the light.

These tools are ancient, and they came from specific peoples in specific lands. Obsidian, which the Mexica polished into mirrors for divination. Frankincense, which the peoples of the Horn of Africa have harvested and burned as sacred for thousands of years.

Then grief came.

Within two years I lost five people I loved deeply. My brother. My nephew. One of my closest girlfriends. A woman who had been like a mother to me. My father. Grief had me in a chokehold.

I held Apache tears, the small, dark obsidian stones named for a settler-era legend of grieving women, not by the Apache themselves. I did not know that then. They held me anyway. They did not take the grief away. Nothing could. They were what I clung to when nothing else held.

I learned later that Myrrh has been the resin of grief for thousands of years. I diffused it night and day, something steady beside me while I carried it.

KUPONYA, to heal in Swahili, is where my justice work and my healing work finally meet.

I write from the Netherlands. I serve the world.

If you are doing hard work in the world, holding what should not be held, or running on empty in rooms that reward feeling nothing, KUPONYA is for you.

The healing never ends. It only needs to begin.

I am done hiding.

Come in.

Ancient tools. Modern life. Become your own healer.