Megan Marini is a Wounded Healer
Photos: Stephanie C. Olsen
By Megan Marini
I never really fit in. I grew up as much in the wilderness as I did in Quincy, MA.
Every October, when other girls were shopping for back-to-school sweaters, my family packed up and headed ten minutes from the Canadian border. During hunting season we didn’t stay in a cute cabin in the woods. We were in a tent. For a month. My mother, my father, my siblings, the dogs. Frost on the zipper. Our breath, visible at sunrise, and no heat.
I’d wake up freezing, but matched my pink earrings to my shoes to go out and pluck birds and harvest herbs. I wish I were home talking about cute boys.
But my childhood wasn’t just cold, it was unconventional. My mother was an herbalist and homeopath. My father was an atheist–Buddhist–anti-capitalist who served in the military, drove a Harley, and was a survivalist. Mom practiced energy work in a deeply Italian-Irish Catholic town. While other kids were watching MTV, I was learning about subtle energy fields.
My mother hadn’t always been “woo.” She grew up in urban Roslindale, MA and suburban Squantum, a little peninsula neighborhood just south of Boston. In the city, her parents owned an ice cream shop that the Kennedys frequented. As an adult, she became a mother to three. Then, she was given three months to live following a severe colitis diagnosis. She refused to accept it. She turned to alternative medicine, discovered the power of herbs, homeopathy, and started practicing meditation.
And she survived.
She became a skilled homeopath and herbalist. As you might imagine, I was hooked. I grew up following her everywhere, sitting quietly on the floor watching shamans and healers. Eventually, one of them let me on to their table. I received the healing too. Talk about imprinting.
I continued learning and studying. And, while I always had a blast socially, but would carry what I was learning close to me, rarely telling other kids what I knew and what I did.
***
At fifteen, I was knocked unconscious in a car accident. I was supposed to wear a neck brace. I didn’t. No one followed up on the brain trauma. Years later, when I told my primary care doctor I had experienced a TBI, he didn’t know the acronym, Traumatic Brain Injury.
I knew something was off. My ability to tell a story in sequential order became difficult. My stress response changed. I felt a heightened response to small stress after the accident. I couldn’t retain information the way I once had. This would affect my life. I completed three full years of a master’s program in Philosophy in Switzerland, surrounded by some of the world's most brilliant minds, but I could not write my thesis. I could not organize my thoughts. I still have hope of writing that paper.
***
Eventually, neurological testing confirmed what I felt: my brain was firing in the opposite direction it should when under stress; An overactive amygdala and an underactive pre-frontal cortex. A nervous system on high alert. I received a PTSD diagnosis, not from one traumatic event, but from layers of coping after the injury and linked trauma.
That diagnosis changed my work forever. It’s why I rarely suggest meditation first for trauma. Stillness can be too violent when our body doesn’t feel safe. I couldn’t transcend trauma. I had to come home to my body first, then my mind.
I learned that my spirit must be aligned, too. I had a strong spiritual practice, but I was clear that I didn’t want to open the realms. I didn’t want to know if my Grandmother, who had passed away when I was 13, would see me. I mean, I don’t want her to see me having sex, right?!
I went to Colorado in 2003 to study Dance Therapy and Somatics. After working full-time as a yoga teacher, I was certain my trauma was stuck in the body. I jumped right into the philosophy course while still finishing my bachelor's degree. It was a lot, but I was driven.
***
That year, my father’s cancer returned. I had three months with him. Three sacred months.
After he died, I dissolved into guilt. Not soft guilt; invasive, cellular guilt. I should have moved home sooner. I should have cooked more. I should have known.
I pulled an angel card that read, “Someone on the other side who wants you to release your guilt.” I nearly collapsed in tears.
Then this happened: I booked a hypnotherapy session for business, and went in with a list of goals: three new clients, better SEO, more systems. Classic entrepreneur. As I dropped into theta brain waves, the hypnotherapist paused and said, “There’s someone here,” she said. “He has a huge smile. Ear-to-ear. A big head of thick black hair.”
I crumbled. That was my dad.
She described him in detail. The grin. The posture. The exact energy of him. Her voice shifted, into his cadence. His phrases, his words.
He said he was sorry he couldn’t always show up emotionally the way I needed when I was little. He said I did not need to carry guilt anymore. He was fine. Everything was perfect where he was.
And something that had been clenched in me since his passing unclenched in that moment. I left that session a different person. I finally understood something essential: I cannot build a life from guilt. I must build from abundance, connection, and the truth that I am a spiritual being.
I deepened my work with Shamanism. I expanded my spiritual practice to working with angels, and the other side. But I was not ready to share this with the world or try to explain it to my corporate leadership clients. A narrative that I wasn’t ready to navigate.
Then COVID hit, and the world shut down.
In one week, two people I loved reached out to me repeatedly. One struggled with chronic pain linked to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange. He had a beautiful family and a prescription for Oxycodone. He called several times. I remember thinking, What could I possibly say that would help?
He died a week later.
Then, my dear friend’s mother landed in the hospital. I planned to visit, but the lockdown stopped visitors that day. She passed away the next week.
I was stunned, and I sat still for three days. Could I have said something that might have helped? I should have just been there for them. I knew I would never be the same. I knew I had to use my challenges to help people with more serious ailments.
***
Today, I do past life regression, I prepare people to pass, I do shamanic healing, energy work, and somatic therapy. I’m still building. After working with hundreds of women, one pattern became clear: When a woman operates from scarcity, emotional or financial, it bleeds into everything. Her relationships. Her nervous system. Her decisions. If she worries, she’s building that vision into existence. Same with disease. Same with relationships.
I’m teaching her to harness her power to create health, wealth, and inner peace.
I’ve been practicing manifesting alongside my daily spiritual practice and my life keeps catapulting to new levels of abundance and I want to share this recipe.
My forthcoming book, Tools of Light: Human Technology and the Future of Medicine, explores this same bridge, between the seen and unseen, the nervous system and the soul, modern medicine and ancient wisdom, and then the recipe for abundance and working with the universe to create.
And if you can handle on more curve ball - recently, in a mediumship reading, my father came through again with one simple directive:
Work with horses. So I am. Something I wanted to do since I was little. The equine therapy program launches in Spring 2026.
The wounded healer doesn’t stop evolving. And you don’t need to.
But here’s the truth no one glamorizes: Your daily practice is what primes you for good work. You’re responsible for your energy, your openness, and doing the work so you can honestly support those who come to you. Otherwise it’s lip service. If I am going to hold space for women unraveling trauma, grief, shame, financial fear, I must be steady. I must tend to my own nervous system. I must be clear.
And if my life has taught me anything, from frozen tents in New Hampshire to that ear-to-ear grin in a hypnotherapist’s office, it’s that we are not here to live small. And I believe healing ourselves is the most radical act in a political world led by greed.
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Have you heard of the wounded healer?
She’s the one who has been cracked open by life, by tragedy, by illness, by guilt, by grief. And instead of shrinking or worse, hardening, she chooses to stay soft, open, and believes. She does the work. She goes first and tries her luck in the unknown. And one day, without announcing it, she becomes the woman others come to when they are breaking.
No one sets out to become her, but many of us have been through unbearable things and follow the calling to use our experience to help others.
On the verge of my book release, I created Her Cash, a social club for women to work on investing and manifesting. A space where women learn through connection and empowerment.
My focus has been on the healing arts and not enough on saving money. Now that my savings has grown, I want to share what I’m learning with other women. I don’t want to retire alone; I need my girls alongside me! Let’s get ready for retirement, ladies! Visit
Visit MeganMarini.com
