Earth Day Reflections: Mapping the Medicine Within Through Energy, Embodiment and Essential Oils
A Soul-Mapped Journey of Healing and Earth-Honoring Remembrance
Earth Day. NASA 2020
Use the tools you have to get the tools you need.
That phrase lives true in me. Because it’s how I roll.
And on this Earth Day, I want to take you on a journey- one that maps the pivotal waypoints of my own healing, and the tools that arrived, sometimes mysteriously, exactly when I needed them. Trust the process.
The Beginning: From Mapping to Massage and the Language of the Body
My career started in Geospatial Technology in 2001 - I’ll spare the details here - aside from I felt like a caged animal in an office environment always trying to plot my escape to freedom, which I would eventually do - 13 years later. That inner unrest led me to massage therapy school in 2005- my first gateway into the living map of the body.
Touch, intuition, presence. It opened something. For one, I realized what Thomas Meyers says is so true “Touch is food, and we live in a starving culture.”
Massage opened the door and yoga carried me through.
In 2010, I became fascinated with the process of uniting the mind, body, and soul through asana and meditation. Truth be told- I was a mess on the inside and the yoga mat and hot room was a place that helped me sweat out and sort through some serious inner turmoil.
As I experienced more breath, I felt more space.
More truth began erupting.
Literally. My body started erupting with all kinds of symptoms. My intuition spoke loud.
Find an acupuncturist.
I listened.
I learned.
The only way out is through…
Acupuncture and the Shift into Energy Medicine
I worked closely with a gifted acupuncturist/shaman from 2011 to 2018. She didn’t just help me manage symptoms- she helped me unravel energy and heal at the root. Not just physical symptoms, but deep energetic patterns I didn’t even know were shaping me.
Our work together literally woke up dormant energies in me. It cleared stagnant pockets from the subconscious backlog, unblocking stories I had long buried.
As we cleared deep channels where the body stores what they mind can’t fully process, truths and memories began to surface that I hadn’t been ready to face before. I began connecting the dots of the movie of my life. Fitting because I spent 13 years connecting literal dots building mapping systems and creating maps. It’s like that was my training ground for what was to come.
I didn’t have the language for it then, but now I see - I was catapulted into new timelines- new ways of being that stripped away everything I thought I knew.
This was one of the most uncomfortable seasons of my life. Not because something was wrong- but because so much was rising to be released. It was messy, raw, and often intense.
I was fascinated by the process.
Every week, I returned- because I could feel something real shifting inside of me. My time with her helped me see what I was finally ready to receive and embody: Everything is energy. And all of the health issues I was experiencing… were messengers. They weren’t random (nothing is) - they were the result of layers of unprocessed emotion, outdated beliefs, and unconscious choices I was making on every level of my being.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
Chinese medicine arrived as that teacher. It changed how I viewed health and healing on every level. It was a departure from the Western, reductionist map of health I’d grown up with- where symptoms are treated in isolation- and opened me to a new way of seeing: through a holistic, vibrational lens.
Let me be clear: I appreciate and value conventional medicine when it’s needed. I absolutely do. But I could see- clearly- how we’ve overburdened a system that was never designed to keep us well. It was designed to intervene, not to empower. And I was ready to reclaim my own power.
I went from:
Treating symptoms → Mapping systems
Fixing the body → Understanding energy flow and cause and effect
Repressing emotions → Feeling where energy got stuck and beginning the process of clearing the backlog of muck
People used to ask me all the time, “Why do you go to acupuncture so often?”
At first, it was to treat the physical symptoms. But over time, I realized I wasn’t going for treatment- I was going for vibrational healing.
I’d say, “It’s how I keep my instrument tuned.”
A return to resonance. Yes, and, the truth is- It was helping me begin the slow, sacred process of shedding everything that wasn’t truly me. A homecoming.
Marked by the Mystery. A soul portal. 2018. This was taken after a powerful shamanic journey session. I will always remember her assistant’s words as I was ushered into an integration space wrapped in a blanket and handed some tea. “Don’t try to figure it out, just embrace the mystery.”
The Far East: Thai Massage, Forrest Yoga, and Listening Deeper
That stop on the map led me to the Far East—to Thailand—for a 10-week Thai Massage certification.
But before I arrived, I had a stopover in France, where I attended a yoga retreat in Nice led by a teacher I deeply respect, Ben Sears.
It was there that I was introduced to the teachings of Ana Forrest, a pioneer in the yoga world and the creatrix of Forrest Yoga—a powerful practice that awakened me to the somatic roots of emotion, the fascia, the breath, and the stories the body holds. And how to nourish and call your Spirit back.
Ana introduced me to the work of author and medical intuitive Caroline Myss and one line that’s never left me: “Your biology is your biography.”
When I returned from Thailand it was sort of a bumpy re-entry. I tried to rekindle with my husband in Amsterdam on the way home, but I was way out of sorts. I felt as if I was just getting accustomed to life in Thailand and then Bali which is so different than life in the States, then it was time to return home.
Upon my return I would quit my job with the US Army and cross the ocean again to train directly with Ana in the UK, where I experienced one of the most transformational initiations of my life. The Forrest Yoga teacher training is intense and not for the faint of heart. It is designed to build vitality, discernment, and the capacity to heal. It shapes you to identify and break through facades, find your voice, speak from your breath, and live with fierce integrity. Every day was themed to support your personal evolution. And it prepared me in ways no other classroom could, to hold space for others on their own healing path.
The Whisper: The Gifts of the Earth, Essential Oils, Enter the Chat
And then in December of 2014- a voice. I call it a God voice. A soul tap on the shoulder.
One day, clear as anything, I heard:
“Call Pam. Ask her about essential oils.”
So I did. And I ordered doTERRA’s Natural Solutions Kit.
And everything changed. The oils dropped into my life- like they’d been waiting for the space I created when I quit my job. They arrived as so much more than a box of products. They felt like a warm hug. Like home.
They became a bridge. A living transmission.From the physical to the energetic. From the emotional to the soul. The tools that would help me integrate everything more smoothly. They took me deeper into my own naturalness, my own knowing. They make life more simple and beautiful.
I see the oils and doTERRA specifically as Vehicles for Connection and Expanding Consciousness.
This connection led me into the most profound personal and professional development:
Ancestral healing – inner child wounds, lack, abandonment, money wounds, betrayal
Energy Medicine & Nervous System Rewiring
Emotional Intelligence Coaching
A deep, reverent study of plant intelligence
And ultimately, they led me to Tiffany Carole - a gifted Chinese Medicine practitioner, teacher, and soul doula whose presence and work have impacted me in the sweetest ways. When I hear her speak it is like truth that lives in my bones awakens. Thats how I knew I was supposed to learn from and with her.
Tiffany had over two decades in clinical acupuncture practice before opening her body of work to a more multidimensional space. Since 2021, I’ve been in deep study with her- through money healing, rewriting wealth stories, reclaiming worth, and working with the oils as vehicles for consciousness evolution.
And this fall, I have the honor of carrying the torch forward. I’m one of 19 practitioners she’s entrusted to carry her seminal body of work -AromaPoint Mastery.
Essential Oils as Navigation Tools
Over a decade of daily practice with the oils has led me to understand them in a way not many others do. I love their inner nature and energetic qualities. I see them as a personal navigation system. A vibrational map back to wholeness, clarity, and inner harmony.
And now- I teach others how to access that same system for themselves. AromaPoint Mastery is a soul-deep journey. It’s about working with essential oils not just as remedies, but as resonant allies—to regulate, to remember, to evolve.
The story doesn’t end here. In many ways, I feel like it’s just beginning. I’m in my emergent unfolding era, laying down new tracks - not retracing the old.
This isn’t replication. It’s reclamation. A quiet, personal/cultural revolution.
I’m not just the mapmaker. I am the map. I am the territory. I am the traveler.
And … so are you.
Not just walking a path - but creating it. Not just following a map - but remembering you’ve carried it all along.
It’s as if something ancient has awakened.
The oils have activated an embodied understanding of my personal medicine- a resonance I didn’t fully understand at first, but one I’m now embracing,
In many traditions, personal medicine is known as power—not force or control, but the innate purpose, and soul gifts that each of us carries to heal, contribute, and support the collective. As I followed the threads of breath, body, plant, and presence, I began to uncover my own gifts.
Not just skills- but as an extension of the essence of what I am (Love).
And when we uncover that medicine and begin to live it- we become more ourselves than ever before. That’s when our contribution becomes clearest. That’s when we begin to use our energy wisely and more masterfully. That’s when our presence becomes medicine for others.
The oils were the tools I needed at just the right time to bring me back home to myself. And through them, I learned how to activate energies- subtle, precise, powerful- like I had first experienced through acupuncture years earlier.
And my medicine? My medicine is the ability to navigate the inner terrain- to sense where energy is out of rhythm, to listen, feel and sense what’s unspoken, to guide others back into a healthy relationship with totality and flow.
It’s a fusion of somatic healing, essential oils, emotional clarity, and energetic recalibration. But it’s all in service to your empowerment and creating a love you truly love to live.
It’s presence that creates space. Language that brings resonance. Touch, scent, and breath that return us to wholeness.
This is the medicine I carry. Not theoretical. Not borrowed. But lived. Remembered. Mine.
And now I am having fun weaving it all together as my offerings.
Not as a cookie cutter one size fits all formula. Not as a copy of someone else’s path. But as a transmission that only I can give- because no one does what I can do. Because no one is me.
I hope you can see this holds true for you and your medicine gifts.
No one else carries this particular tapestry of experience, this web of wisdom woven through years of practice, personal healing, devotion to soul refinement. And the truth is - the greatest gift you can give the world is learning how to be fully, authentically yourself.
When we do that, when we stop hiding, stop contorting, stop editing, leading less from ego and more from our soul, we become a living permission slip for others to do the same.
That’s what I offer. Not just healing. But homecoming.
This Earth Day, I’m Reflecting on the Map I Walked…
From maps to massage table to meditation cushion. From subconscious unraveling to soul-level alignment. From seeking to remembering…
Because this path of life is about remembrance. Of who you are. Of what’s possible. Of how deeply connected you are already to the intelligence of Mother Earth herself. So I arrive back to where I started this piece…
Use the Tools You Have to Get the Tools You Need
That phrase lives in me- because I’ve lived it. Every tool and teacher I’ve learned from along the way- massage, yoga, acupuncture, energy work, essential oils, coaching, ceremony- was a stepping stone that led me deeper. They met me where I was and they opened the door to what was next.
The same is possible for you. xo
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Ways to Work With Me
If you’re feeling the pull—your next layer of healing, embodiment, or expansionI I would be honored to support you through:
Free Energy Checklist- Your energy is your foundation. When you take charge of it, everything shifts.
Private Yoga & Somatic Aromatherapy & Essential Meditation Sessions - personalized, energetic attunement using yoga, meditation and the plants
The Meditation Map - Clear the mental noise. Anchor in clarity. Know Your Layers. Elevate your life.
Five Meditations. Five Essential Oils. 25 Days to Transform Your Life.
AromaTouch Technique- a light-touch essential oil application designed to calm the nervous system, boost immunity, and restore balance using a sequence of therapeutic-grade essential oils along the spine and feet.
Aroma Point Therapy - AromaPoint Therapy Tune-Up A 60-minute session combining mini Emotions Mentor® style coaching inquiry, essential oil acupoint therapy, and C & G tuning forks to support full-body recalibration.
Energetic Coaching & Inner Mapping - mind body activation to identify & release old patterns, embody your truth
Essential Oil Classes - where plant medicine meets emotional, physical, and spiritual healing
doTERRA Business Mentorship - for leaders ready to turn embodiment into overflow
AromaPoint Mastery - a 9-month evolutionary healing journey with essential oils, launching October 2025 (waitlist now open)
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The Tools You Need? They’re Already Near.
You just have to choose to use what calls you in the moment - And act upon it and trust what opens next. You are the map, territory, and traveller - all you need is a good guide. https://www.emilypolonus.com/booking
This is my medicine. Artists of Possiblity Retreat. Alghero, Sardinia 2024. Photo: Mary Gardella
