Colleen is a transpersonal psychologist, a certified breathwork facilitator, and the author of Essence Merging — a book that just earned Distinguished Favorite honors in the Mind, Body, Spirit category at the 2026 NYC Big Book Awards.

She's also survived two near-death experiences and the loss of her brother. She has spent real time surrounded by death energy, and what she brought back isn't despair. It's clarity.

One of the threads we pulled on is timing. Both Hindu and Aztec traditions carry predictions of a great awakening beginning in the winter of 2019 — the same season COVID reached the world.

Colleen doesn't offer that as a coincidence to marvel at and move past. She offers it as a frame: discomfort is often the doorway growth walks through.

If that's true, then the peas aren't a sign something's wrong. They might be the awakening doing its work.

That reframe runs through everything else we discussed. Letting go of attachment to outcome, she says, is really just letting go of suffering — the two are the same motion.

She calls 2026 a "love squeeze," a season that presses on us specifically to see whether we can hold abundance in our hearts independent of what our eyes are showing us. It's a hard ask. It's also, she'd argue, the whole point.

We are energy bodies having a material experience — a line that could sound abstract until Colleen makes it physical.

Chakras, she explains, aren't metaphysical decoration. They're energy centers, nerve bundles, small brains distributed through the body.

Breathwork — the slow, circular kind — is how we actually talk to them. Done right, she says, it stops feeling like exercise and starts feeling cosmic.

She also opened up about her own daily architecture: red light, a breath practice, and a single intention set before the day gets its hands on her.

And she walked us through the twin flame concept and the idea at the center of her book — essence merging — the felt sense of union that shows up physically as something close to bliss.

DMT, released naturally in the body, is part of that chemistry. But the deeper point isn't the molecule. It's that the spiritual and the physical were never actually separate. They're the same event, seen from two sides.

Near the end, Colleen returned to something simple: we all want to feel whole. Not more accomplished, not more certain — whole.

Her own path there ran through Costa Rica, through breathwork, through grief, through two brushes with death that could have hardened her and instead opened her.

Listen to the full episode of Intuitive Wisdom, and find Colleen's book, Essence Merging, at essencemerging.com.

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