Laura Cristina Genao

I didn't find this work in a classroom. I found it in survival. For over ten years I worked in corporate marketing...and I was good at it. But good at something and alive in something are two very different things. I was dissociative more days than I wasn't. Sleeping under my desk. Showing up perfectly on paper while something inside me was quietly going offline. And it wasn't just the job. I was also moving through a season of my personal life that I didn't have words for yet — in relationships that felt like love because I didn't know what else to call it, carrying weight that had been mine since childhood, and somewhere underneath all of it, deeply, quietly depressed. I tried everything that was supposed to work. Medication. Therapy. The things that help other people — and I don't say that to dismiss any of it, because I still believe in integrative care. But I kept hitting a wall. My body was holding something that none of it could reach. And the exhausting part wasn't the darkness. It was performing like everything was fine while the darkness was winning.

The turning point wasn't dramatic. It was quiet. In the middle of the chaos — finally alone, finally mine — I started making things. Candles. Jewelry. Room sprays. I needed to create because creating felt like the only proof I was still here. That's when I found Reiki. And something shifted that I didn't have language for yet. People at work — coworkers who had no idea what I was going through — would pull me aside and say you have really good energy. I was falling apart on the inside and somehow my energy was the thing people felt first. That told me something. I got my Reiki certification. Then massage therapy. Then a studio of my own in 2022. And somewhere in that spiral, I stopped asking why is this happening to me and started asking what did I learn that nobody else could have taught me? I realized that from the time I was a child, I had been scanning rooms, reading people, feeling everything — what I thought was hypervigilance was actually a gift being forged in pressure. Nothing was wasted. Not the corporate years. Not the dark years. Not even the moments I was most ashamed of.

That realization became what Gaja Bohème is today.

I don't love the word healer — it implies a hierarchy that doesn't exist here. You are not broken and I am not fixing you. What I know is that I can feel what people carry. Maybe it's clairsentience. Maybe it's a lifetime of hypervigilance finally turned into something useful. Maybe it's both. But I know what it feels like to be functional and empty at the same time. To look fine from the outside while something inside is begging to be heard. To try the things that work for everyone else and wonder what's wrong with you when they don't. Nothing is wrong with you. Your body has just been holding something that hasn't had a safe place to land yet. I want you to walk in and feel peace. To feel heard. To be reminded that everything you've moved through was making you into something.

That's what an Alchemist does. And you already are one.