Broken — From Broken to Shaman — The Real Story

SOUL JOURNEY EXPERIENCE

Broken

From Broken to Shaman — The Real Story

From conception, I was getting smoked out. Virginia Slims Menthol Lights, a pack of Marlboros, and my mother's obsession with spicy food didn't sit well with a developing fetus.

Nobody's perfect. But the box does have a warning label.

Let's just say feeling unwanted got an early start in my life.

In the Womb

Before I ever took a breath outside my mother, I was already drowning — in her misery, her smoke, her unspoken rage at a life she didn't want. I didn't choose that inheritance. I was simply born into it, cell by cell, breath by breath. Combine that with a violent, abrupt Italian father, and I had my work cut out for me in this lifetime.

I often wondered, and asked: “Why did you have me if you don't like me or want to play with me?”

The Window

I used to hit baseballs over the house for fun — find the ball, hit it back over. Occasionally through a window. Oops. Let's just say I was training to be a breakthrough master at a young age. God was preparing me. That was my excuse. It was met with a lot of disbelief.

Until now. Now people come to see me for exactly that — breakthroughs.

But there was one window I didn't break. I was five years old, standing there, dumbfounded, staring at it — I could see myself in the glass, and see straight through it. Then my father appeared behind the window, with the look of death on his face.

Boom. His image of me became my image of me. His perception became mine.

After that, when I looked in a mirror, I saw him. When I spoke, my inner voice became his spoken voice — a voice of judgment, criticism, a thousand ways to be wrong, and him always right, all while he denied his own son the one thing he actually wanted. It didn't take long before shame became a motivating factor for me. More on that later.

What the Body Already Knew

I was born ill. Two years of colic. Constant asthma. Breathing infections, sinus infections, tonsil surgery, ear surgery, sinus surgery, tumors — all of it traced back to smoke inhalation in a house that never stopped. A tumor the size of an orange near my ear and skull. According to my mentors, the emotional root was “rage against my mother.” No shit, I replied.

My parents had a unique interpretation of me: What the hell is wrong with this kid? Why can't he just sit still, behave, be seen and not heard?

Uh — because I don't want to be happy and enjoyable like you? Was that sassy, or just honest? Maybe I was just scared of you and your misery. But that conversation was never allowed.

Suddenly, Leave It to Beaver was a show I enjoyed.

Meanwhile the answer was sitting right in front of them, in a cloud they refused to move. When I couldn't breathe, when my body kept breaking down trying to survive them, the response was simple: “Why should I smoke somewhere else? This is my house. You don't like it, tough shit, you can leave.”

The Words That Became My Voice

My father had a method. Make them wrong. Remind them they're a failure. Tell them they can't do anything right — and call it making them better.

“You're always causing me problems.”

“God damn you” — then he'd hit me.

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

“You're the problem. You're making messes.”

At nine years old: “You don't like it here, leave.”

My mother had her own lines. “I wish I had never had you.” “I'll have peace when you leave this house.” “I wish you were not born.”

I was nine. I didn't have anywhere else to go. I just had somewhere else to want.

Win and Still Lose

I funneled my shame into sports. Baseball, mainly. I got really good — MVP, Most Valuable Defensive Player, All-Star selections, and later, scholarships.

I pitched a perfect game and struck out 14 of 18 batters. My father thanked everyone on the team — everyone but me. I was so angry, I went out and pitched another perfect game. This time, striking out 17 of 18.

We got in the car afterward. He looked at me and said, “You think you're all that, don't you.”

In basketball, we won the championship. I scored nineteen points, including a half-court shot to end the first quarter. At the trophy ceremony, in front of the whole room, he went player by player, acknowledging each one — their character, their heart, what made them who they were.

Then he got to me. “Usually he's my wife's son. When he does something wrong, he's my son. But today — today he's my boy.”

Not one word about me. It was about him, start to finish, while every other kid in that room got to be seen for who they actually were.

My anger grew. So did my performance. It's a strange kind of fuel — the kind that helps you win and starves you at the same time.

How much can I perform, at that age, just to win one real word of approval?

Where I Went Instead

I channeled more and more energy into sports, into caretaking, into anywhere that wasn't home. I took care of elderly people. I had an early vision of becoming a doctor — I read CPR manuals, first aid books, watched televised operations on the Learning Channel, fascinated by the idea of fixing what was broken.

I blocked my parents out as much as I could and poured the hurt, the shame, the anger into performance — until one day, I couldn't hold it anymore.

The One Place I Was Alive

My grandmother was my intuitive source. My compassion. The one place I could just be who I was, without translation, without performance.

When I was with her, I had no anxiety. No ADD. No OCD. No depression. I was alive. I loved school. I loved myself. Coaches, parents, friends — people showed up and built me up, in her orbit, in a way that never once happened in my own house.

I used to cry myself to sleep wishing I'd wake up somewhere else. Most nights, “somewhere else” just meant her house.

The Years Between

When I graduated high school, I was gone as soon as possible. In my twenties, I built a soaring coaching practice — still holding on to my rage. Married a few times. That went well.

I soared high, then low. Higher the next time, then even lower — until I just couldn't take it anymore.

Eventually I had nowhere left to turn. So I stopped doing all things. And listened.

The idea, then the dream, of Mother Ayahuasca came. When it did, I didn't hesitate to answer the call. Two weeks after the dreams, and a phone call with a friend named Alain, I was in the jungle.

The Jungle

In 2020 and 2022, my mom and dad both passed away. A few months later, I landed in the jungle for a six-week shaman training program under my Maestro, Alfredo. I struggled for four weeks to sing.

It was hell. Going through the dark night of the soul. Confronting. Letting go. All the pain that had been taken out on me.

But I could not graduate, could not become a shaman, if I could not sing. The magic of the icaro — sacred medicine songs of the soul, learned only through embodiment.

Every time I tried, all I heard was my father's vicious voice, reminding me I was nothing. The shame lodged in my throat. My lymph nodes swelled. I hated the sound of my own voice trying to come out.

I couldn't let go — until my Maestro grabbed my hand and said, “Just sing the first lyric. The icaro is already inside you.” And then, one day, I finally did — and what came through was ecstasy. My ancestors. My soul. And for the first time, Pierce was accepted. As I am.

That Was the Day I Found Acceptance

Over the course of my life, I finally felt like enough. It was never going to come from my parents — only through God and my ancestors. My family was never my source.

Broken Into Pieces, Into Pierce

I was in pieces throughout my life. But not spiritually. I lived life holding it all together — fighting with everything I had to keep my mom and dad's perception of me from coming true.

The fact is, I couldn't overcome a false interpretation — someone else's opinion of me. I was made by God, conceived by Mom and Dad, delivered by them. Made by God. Did I say that twice? Good. It's worth repeating.

That's the whole story, if you want it in one word: broken. Generational trauma, crashing down on me — then stuck and entangled inside me.

But broken into pieces is just the beginning of the sentence. Pierce was already hiding inside it, waiting for me to spell it out right.

The Parents I Wished I Didn't Have Were My Teachers in Disguise

My mother was psychic — a dark-witch type, sharp and shadowed. My grandmother was the angel, the “I love Ginny witch” of light. I inherited my grandmother's gift outright, and I alchemized my mother's into something else: intuitive psychic navigation, the ability to walk straight into someone's darkness without flinching.

My father, it turned out — I only learned in the weeks before he died — was an empath. More intuitive than either of us ever realized while he was alive to show it. The trauma inflicted on them in childhood became who they were. It landed on me — the black sheep who broke the mold. My purpose revealed itself through suffering and trauma.

I didn't survive my parents by accident. I picked the exact two people equipped to teach me how to navigate pain, shame, and trauma all the way back to wholeness — back to I AM. That is what makes me masterful with others now.

Both Ends of the Spectrum

I literally became my parents' suppression. Both ends of it. Their darkness and their shame. Their light and their love — buried, unused, wasted while they were alive.

I didn't just survive what they suppressed. I became the place where both ends of it finally got to live. Where my parents could not become, I became — magically disguised as: “This is why God brought me back. To suffer with grace, and to serve others who are.”

What Survived Anyway

Compassion. Empathy. Qualities that had no home anywhere in my family, in my environment, in the house I grew up in — and I kept them anyway.

My intuitive self, the thing they shunned, the gift I learned to protect instead of betray, even when everyone around me made betrayal the safer choice.

That gift is the exact thing people travel across the country to sit in a room with me for now.

I was never broken beyond repair.

I was broken into exactly the pieces I needed to become whole.