Our minds create the universe of our potential.
This is your invitation to explore the luminous path, where the journey is a profound destination. As we navigate the intricate tapestry of experience, we are constantly presented with choices, each one a potential portal to a fresh perspective, a new experience. In each moment, we are manifesting; with each choice, we are either strengthening our positive mindset, or shrinking into stagnation; cultivating peace or stirring discord; tearing open new portals or dragging ourselves through the same stale mire. How are you transforming? Let’s nurture a world that honors our creativity, where the curious mind discovers its power as a Phoenix, and where the fearless heart ventures unperturbed into uncharted territories. Navigating the flow of our Life River, choices unfold before us like boulders in the rapids or sunny sand bars, providing opportunities to learn creativity, curiosity, and courage for a truly fulfilling journey. Follow the nomad star to where intention meets manifestation, and own the liberation of your creative mind.
Inspiration
Meet Amanda
I am a student of meaning, a practitioner into presence, and a lifelong student of subject matter expertise into the convergence of mind and spirit, intuition and body, and intention and manifestation. My formal training includes a BA in Communication and Culture, an MA in Social Science, a second MA in Metaphysical Sciences, and a PhD in Holistic Counseling. I have also studied Ashtanga Yoga at the Ananda Meditation Center in Northern California, at the Himalayan Institute in Pennsylvania, through Northern California’s Church of Heart Consciousness, and at World Peace Yoga in Ohio where I am currently finishing my 300HR Yoga Certification.
Through these studies, I’ve explored how as humans, we create order from our suffering, our dreams, and our longing. My learning path has taken me through academic classrooms, and into the more underground laboratories of the body, the breath, and the natural world. I have followed it across borders of many constructs: natural and man-made, and emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual.
Following the Nomad Star is where these threads converge. It is a space for reflective inquiry, eco-spiritual literacy, and gentle intellectual mischief. It is a place for readers who enjoy footnotes and forest paths, who trust both peer-reviewed research and lived experience, and who suspect that wisdom is less about certainty and more about attunement.
I write for fellow wanderers with curiosity, and a sense of humor; for those of us who know that Life is not a destination, but a way of traveling.
Black Hills, USA, 2025
A Word on the Use of AI
We live in the flow of a divided timeline. On one hand, our creative potential is nearly unlimited. The culmination of 5000 years of human knowledge is available to us in microseconds to organize and rearrange as content. On the other hand, all this creative potential generates garbage information and single-serving content designed for immediate and shallow consumption. My intention for the content on Following the Nomad Star is to contribute to a body of research into what I am calling intentional manifestation. This includes tools and resources into the practice of positive psychology, psychological alchemy, conscious travel and pilgrimage, mindfulness and Yoga, plant and earth-based healing techniques, and other layered concepts. I use AI in a basic way as I write each blog post. I may generate a rough outline or use it to organize my initial thoughts. I may also use it to improve on the final draft to adjust tone or to shift language. Each post, however, is researched, credible, and includes significant human time in its composition. Additionally, several of the featured blog post images are AI generated. I appreciate the freedom to create unique, “on-brand” images that help shape the emotive quality of the post. However, many of the images are also photos that I have captured and edited. In closing, I use AI as a creative support to enhance my work, but if AI vanished tomorrow, I would still generate the same quality of meaningful content. It would just take me much longer.
Statement of Equity and Allyship
My intention for Following the Nomad Star is to create space for all beings to manifest peace and healing within the interdependence of their relationships with others and within their own experience; but peace is more difficult when cultivated from a violent soil. I acknowledge that the land upon which I run and love is stolen from indigenous people who lived as part of the ecosystem for many thousands of years prior to European colonization and conquest. I acknowledge that the genocide has not been widely recognized, and that repatriation of sacred artifacts, sacred lands, and place names is necessary to restore balance. I further acknowledge that historic inequities within the justice system and other structural institutions continue to exist which promote wealth-generating privileges for people of European descent, including myself. I have been afforded much freedom to wander America and the planet, with one of the world’s most powerful passports in my hand.
My practice attempts to consciously reflect this awareness. Symbols, ideas, representations, meaning, and archetypes from multiple cultures are integrated into any future or current workshop, retreat, and experience, and their sources of knowledge are credited for their contribution to the space. I explore and share narratives from within many cultural traditions, including lessons from indigenous shamanism; practices from Buddhist Tibet and Vedic India; mythologies from pre-Roman European folk; archetypes from the metaphysical Hermetic Sciences of Ancient Greece; and case studies from humanistic psychology of 21st century America. I am sensitive to cultural appropriation and give respect to the wisdom of preserving these sources of knowledge. It is true that there is no ethical consumption of capitalism, and I am committed to living a life that is as much within the cooperative anarchist framework of social ecology as possible.
Following the Nomad Star 