Kellyrose Matthews

When her hopes to study music and performance in college didn’t come through, she chose the University of Michigan. She wanted to love it, but it was too big and too traditional. By her second year she couldn’t find anything that mattered.

Slipping into a deep depression, she remembered an idea she’d put on the shelf: a semester with the National Outdoor Leadership School. It was as if something grabbed her and pointed a way out of the box she’d found herself in. In the Baja wilderness she lived simply and moved her body every day. It was the first thing that had felt right in a long time.

So did the haze she’d been carrying for years.

With some distance from “the box,” she realized she didn’t want the traditional success she’d grown up in. She was accepted at Brown, but turned it down. It might just be another box. So she found the most unorthodox college she could, tucked away in the Pacific Northwest. She wasn’t trying to get away. She was trying to find her own way.

At Evergreen she studied American society, culture and globalism, and loved stretching the limits of thought. She could see so much of what was wrong, and she longed to create change. What to do about it was another question.

After graduating, that same thing that grabbed her before now pointed her toward the healing arts. Maybe change didn’t start with the world.

It led her to a job at a wellness center, and to the staff MD, a former president of the American Holistic Medical Association. One day she got a strong feeling to ask him where she could really study energy work, not just dabble. When he said “the Barbara Brennan School of Healing,” she knew.

The four years she spent at Brennan were as much about her own wounds and shadow as about technique. She realized there that the more clearly she could see herself, the more she could help others see.

A few years into her private practice, she found herself in another box. This time it was inside her: fear and doubt kept her from expanding into her vision.

And once again, something grabbed her and pointed the way: energy cultivation and Eastern thought. She spent the next sixteen years working with those practices to move beyond her own patterns. What she learned became a body of work of her own:

Once you can see them, you can set out on your path to become truly free — and do what you came here to do.

She uses it in her work now, where it helps people connect to their true self and to something greater. The longing to sing and the longing to create change had become one.

With her husband, Lion, she created The Connected Human, a way of sharing what got them out of their own boxes with those who are ready. They live with their daughter in the Columbia River Gorge, outside Portland, Oregon, where the natural world still sets her right.