A Long Listening
My life has been a long listening - through the body, food, plants, land, horses, and nervous system healing.
Brain injury did not create this path. It revealed the cost of living disconnected from it, and asked me to come home more completely.
This is not a traditional About Me page.
It is the story of a life gradually learning to listen to the intelligence moving through every part of experience. Nothing here is separate. Each threshold belongs to the whole, and each has become part of the healing field from which this work now emerges.
ABOUT PEGGY
It all belongs…
Long before Congruence had a name, life was already moving me toward this work. Not in a straight line. Not through one awakening or one clear moment of knowing. More like a spiral. A series of invitations I did not always understand at the time.
I began in the world of numbers, business, and achievement. I was trained as a CPA and came of age in a culture that valued efficiency, production, and forward motion. I learned how to function. How to organize. How to build. How to keep going.
There was intelligence in that world, and there was also a cost. I did not yet know how deeply the body keeps the record of what has not been felt, what has not been safe, what has been adapted to for the sake of belonging.
My body kept speaking. My mind kept overriding.
The first lesson of motherhood
When my first daughter was young, her body reacted strongly to food dyes, preservatives, and medications. The responses were real and immediate, yet the care available to us at the time focused mostly on managing the symptoms. There were chronic ear infections, antibiotics, tubes, and a growing sense that something deeper was asking to be seen.
We were eventually guided to the Feingold Association. When we removed food dyes and preservatives, her body changed. She healed quickly. That opened another doorway — to homeopathy, to the intelligence of the immune system, and to a way of caring for the body that looked beyond symptoms alone. From there, we never looked back.
That experience opened something in me that never closed.
I began to understand that what enters the body matters. What we eat matters. What we breathe matters. What touches our skin matters. What surrounds us matters. The body is not separate from the world around it. It is in constant conversation.
That knowing became a foundation.
The olive trees calling me home
What began as a business became a doorway. I entered the world of olive oil — sourcing it, tasting it, learning its history, its medicine, its relationship to land and climate and care. I began educating people about what they put into their bodies. I began to see food not only as nourishment, but as relationship. Soil, tree, harvest, body, table, community.
The olive trees taught me slowly.
They taught me about patience. About roots. About resilience. About the ancient intelligence of plants that have survived drought, wind, fire, pruning, and time.
Then lavender arrived.
A grower called with thousands of lavender plants, and another door opened. I began distilling essential oil. The scent, the steam, the plant matter, the transformation of flower into essence — it changed me. Lavender brought me deeper into the plant kingdom. I began studying aromatherapy, herbal medicine, and the way plants speak through chemistry, scent, texture, and presence.
The olive trees introduced me to the body through nourishment.
Lavender introduced me to the body through the senses.
The plant world began to feel less like something outside of me and more like a language I had always known but had forgotten how to hear.
I was walking toward healing while still organized around survival.
I was devoted to beauty and still be moving too fast to feel it.
I was called by the living world and still not knowing how to let it change the structure of my life
In seconds I became a stranger to myself
Three days after signing papers for a major investment that would have taken my olive oil company into a much larger global expression, I was in a car accident and sustained a traumatic brain injury.
At first, I tried to get back. But brain injury does not negotiate with the identity that existed before it.
It changed everything. It changed how I thought, how I processed, how I remembered, how I oriented, and how I tolerated sound, light, movement, and stress. It changed my relationship to effort. It changed my relationship to time. It changed my relationship to myself.
Early in that journey, I was blessed to find a neuropsychologist who became one of the first true guides on my path. He helped me understand that healing was not only happening in the brain. It was happening through the body, the nervous system, and the way my whole system was trying to reorganize after injury.
That understanding changed something in me.
It gave language to what I was living. It helped me stop treating my symptoms as personal failure. It helped me begin to see that my body was not betraying me. It was protecting me, adapting, and asking for a different way of being met.
The brain injury did not begin my healing journey, but it changed the pace and the stakes.
The body was no longer whispering. The mind no longer had the ability to override.
To ashes we will return
Not long after the accident, another threshold arrived. I woke in the night to the Tubbs Lane fire.
There was no time to gather a life. No time to make meaning. I left with my dogs, no shoes, no phone, just the body’s ancient intelligence taking over: move, survive, get my family out.
The wildfire deepened the rupture that the brain injury had already opened.
I could not return to my home. The outer landscape and the inner landscape were both disrupted. What had once felt familiar was no longer available in the same way. My nervous system, my identity, my sense of place, and my sense of future were all being reorganized.
Fire has a way of revealing what cannot be carried forward.
For a long time, I thought healing meant finding my way back to the life I had known. But after the accident and then the fire, “back” was no longer a place I could return to.
Something else was asking to emerge.
The healing power of water
After the fire, I was guided to Santa Barbara — to the water, to my grown children, and to a different rhythm of healing.
I did not understand the symbolism at the time. I only knew I needed to be near something that could hold what fire had opened. The ocean became a counterpoint to ash: movement, rhythm, breath, and return.
There, functional medicine became another important doorway. It changed the direction of my healing in a significant way. My capacity began to return. My cognition improved. The outside world became less overwhelming. I was not “back,” and I was not fully healed, but something in my system had begun to reorganize. Relative to where I had been, the shift was profound.
I became a yoga teacher, something I had never planned to do. Yoga helped me inhabit myself again. Not all at once. Not as a performance. But breath by breath, sensation by sensation, through the humility of returning to the body I had once tried so hard to manage.
I was making real strides in my healing, but I was still in a threshold place. My life had not yet reorganized. I was still learning how to stand in a body and a life that had been profoundly changed.
The high desert call
And another form of grace appeared.
My sister and brother-in-law invited me to live with them in the Eastern Sierra.
That time with them was deeply healing. I was held by their kindness, their steadiness, and the quiet generosity of being welcomed into their home when I could not yet fully find my own ground. It is a blessing I will treasure forever.
At the time, the move did not feel romantic or exciting. It felt like another surrender. I was going to a place that felt remote and unfamiliar, far from the life I had known. I did not yet understand that the land was preparing another doorway.
On the drive there, I spoke out loud to the Higher Power that had been carrying me through it all.
I said, in my own way: I will do this. I will keep going. But I need a horse. I need a horse to see me through this next passage.
An answered prayer
It wasn’t much after I set foot in the high desert that my threshold guide appeared - a striking warmblood mare, Roxy.
Roxy was not an idea.
She was not a symbol.
She was not a tool for my healing.
She was a horse with her own history, her own protection, her own intelligence, her own boundaries, her own way of moving through the world.
Our relationship did not begin in ease.
I was carrying the invisible burden of brain injury, trauma, and a nervous system that no longer knew how to trust itself. Roxy was carrying her own patterns of activation and survival. Neither of us arrived as some calm, healed being ready to guide the other.
We met inside the truth of where we were.
There was no performance in that. No technique that could replace presence. No way to rush the slow work of becoming safe.
With Roxy, I began to learn a language underneath language.
The shift in breath.
The softening of the eye.
The turn of the head.
The moment a body chooses to stay.
The moment a body needs more space.
The difference between compliance and consent.
The difference between control and relationship.
She did not ask me to be better than I was.
She asked me to be honest.
And in her presence, I began to understand that healing does not happen through force. It happens when life feels safe enough to reorganize from within.
Roxy did not fix me.
She met me.
And in being met, something in me began to remember how to meet myself.
We did not train our way out of dysregulation. We regulated together.
Over time, the space between us became a place of learning. Not only for me, and not only for her, but for the relationship itself. We learned through rupture and repair. Through activation and settling. Through missed cues and clearer listening. Through the quiet discipline of returning again and again to presence.
Walking each other home
Not back to the beings we had been before. Not back to the lives we had before everything changed. And not into some idealized version of who we were supposed to become.
We walked each other home to the body.
To relationship.
To the intelligence of the nervous system.
To the land.
To the quiet language beneath words.
To the possibility that safety can return through presence, patience, and repair.
To the part of each of us that had never stopped belonging, even when we had forgotten how to feel it.
Committing to the low desert
After many months held within the healing field of Roxy, my sister, my brother-in-law, and the land of the Eastern Sierras, I was ready to return to life on my own.
I came to Tucson only to explore. I did not know the low desert. I did not imagine it as the place I would settle. My life, my family, my history, and so much of what I had known were still rooted in California.
But the first property I saw brought me to tears.
I did not want it to be true. It felt far-fetched, impractical, and far from the life I had known. But something in my body knew. The land spoke before my mind could make sense of it.
Within days, I had purchased the property.
It was not yet a sanctuary. It needed to be cleared, stripped back, tended, and prepared for what it was becoming. But that part I knew.
That ability had always lived in my body: the ability to enter a space and feel what was still true beneath what had been layered over it. To strip away what did not belong. To restore its original beauty. To add only what was in alignment with the energy and spirit of the place.
I had known this through old homes. Through empty stores. Through spaces that others may have seen as worn, abandoned, or ordinary, but that I could feel still carried something intact beneath the surface.
The injury had taken many things from me, but it had not taken that.
It had not taken my capacity to feel the soul of a place.
It had not taken my hands.
It had not taken my devotion to creating spaces where life could return.
The sanctuary takes form
— not as a concept imposed onto the land, but as a place slowly revealed through relationship, listening, and the daily work of tending what wanted to live here.
Over time, Congruence has been shaped by this place and by the questions it continues to ask.
What happens when humans, horses, land, and the wider living world are allowed to participate in one another’s healing?
What happens when symptoms are not treated as problems to conquer, but as signals from a system that has been trying to protect life?
What happens when there is enough safety for what has been held in protection to soften, reconnect, and begin to integrate?
What becomes possible when we begin living in greater congruence—with ourselves, with one another, and with the living world?
Shaped by everything that came before
If you have felt called to stay with this story to the end, I am honored.
I have written it as much for you as for the universe — a testimony to over six decades of rupture and return, a bow to all that has shaped the work I offer today, and an expression of gratitude for the unseen grace that has held me throughout this journey.
May it also be a prayer for all beings to keep listening when life calls us back to the body, to relationship, and to the living world.
