Soul Warrior

Discussion Questions

• Angela hears Melissa's voice and feels compelled to write a eulogy she didn't know she was going to write. Have you ever experienced a knowing, a voice, a pull, an undeniable sense, that came from somewhere beyond your logical mind? What did you do with it?
• Angela had been clairaudient, clairsentient, clairvoyant, and claircognizant her entire life. She simply didn't have words for it until she was fifty. What parts of yourself have you always known to be true but lacked a container or vocabulary for?
• She writes: "I often learn more from the unknown, which takes trust." Western culture tends to privilege what can be proven. How has that shaped your own relationship to intuition, inner knowing, or spiritual sensitivity?
• Angela felt a "hula hoop" of energy pulling her to Tony's hospital bedside, and his kidneys recovered. Whether or not you share Angela's beliefs about mediumship, what do you believe about the relationship between intention, energy, and physical healing?
• The medium's message from Tony was: "It's right under your nose, Ang." That truth had been there for thirteen years. Why do you think we sometimes need the most time to receive the most obvious truths about ourselves?
• Mediumship is a gift Angela kept private for many years. Are there gifts, sensitivities, or ways of perceiving that you've kept hidden, out of fear of judgment, or simply because no one gave you permission to claim them?

Personal Reflection

• Is there a calling right under your nose, something your life has been pointing you toward that you've been slow to acknowledge?
• What childhood abilities or sensitivities went unmirrored, and how have they found ways to surface in your adult life anyway?

Discussion Questions

• Angela knew not to go on that trip. Doug felt it, she felt it, and she chose to go anyway. Have you ever overridden a clear inner knowing and paid the price? What stopped you from listening?
• In the moment of crisis, Angela dropped backward while Doug ran forward. Then she looked Alanna in the eyes and held space "for her fear and mine, in silence." What does it look like to be present in the middle of catastrophe?
• "For four years, I gave myself away, because that's what I knew how to do." Can you identify moments in your own life when crisis became a justification, or a hiding place, for self-erasure?
• Angela writes that accepting what happened was "the only way to actually move forward." What is the difference between acceptance and resignation? Where have you experienced true acceptance of something you did not choose?
• Emily appears as the turning point, someone who saw Angela at her core and reflected it back to her. Have you had an Emily? Someone whose witnessing of you changed what you believed was possible for yourself?

Personal Reflection

• Where in your life are you still playing the what-if game instead of accepting what is?
• Who has given you the gift of being truly seen, and what did that make possible in you?

Discussion Questions

• Angela's core wound, "I did not matter. My voice didn't matter," came from a moment that might look small from the outside. How does Gabor Maté's definition of trauma change the way you understand your own history?
• The four-year-old Angela, sent to the boiler room, escaped into imagination. The child Angela, ages four to seven, spoke with guides on a white sphere above her bedroom window. What resources did you develop as a child to survive what felt unsafe or unseen?
• In the EMDR session, Angela sees herself leave her body to comfort her mother. She says compassion was born from that moment. How has the way you coped with pain shaped what you've become?
• Angela identifies fawn and freeze as her trauma responses, tending to others so she wouldn't feel abandoned, going still so she wouldn't be seen. Do you recognize yourself in any of these responses? How have they shown up in your adult relationships?
• Angela's mother's wounding was passed to her generationally. Her mother also was not seen in her own moments of need. What patterns in your family of origin do you see being replicated, or interrupted, in your own life?

Personal Reflection

• What is the implicit belief that was written in your most vulnerable childhood moment, the story your nervous system told itself to survive?
• Where in your body do you feel the echo of that old wound today?

Discussion Questions

• Angela was so invisible that she wasn't confronted even when caught doing what got Tony in trouble. What does it mean to be so quiet, so "good," that you effectively disappear? Have you experienced this kind of erasure, or enacted it?
• A cop car arrives for her brother. Angela sits numb. She had learned to witness crisis from behind glass. How does early and repeated exposure to family crisis train a child's emotional responses?
• Family therapy where Angela never spoke, a space designed for truth that reinforced silence. Have you been in relationships or environments where speaking was technically "allowed" but effectively prohibited?
• Her grandmother's death cracked open the question of what death means, and sent her to work with dying children at UC Davis. What losses in your life have cracked you open into bigger questions about life and meaning?
• Angela was always witnessing others but had learned to disassociate from witnessing herself. What does it feel like to turn the compassionate gaze inward, to become a non-judgmental observer of your own experience?

Personal Reflection

• Whose pain have you been a lifelong witness to, and when did you last witness your own with equal compassion?
• What have you been numb to within yourself, and what has begun to thaw it?

Discussion Questions

• Angela knew at fourteen that Doug was her husband, and then waited eight years to meet him. Have you experienced a knowing about a person, a path, or a purpose that preceded the actual arrival? How did you hold that certainty?
• The marital dynamic: Doug absorbed in work, Angela absorbed in caregiving, each coping in their own way. How does our deepest wounding shape the unconscious roles we play in our closest relationships?
• Angela renewed her vows in Maui after twenty-five years, "finally done her way." What does it mean to reclaim an experience you didn't know how to claim the first time? Have you done something like this in any area of your life?
• The book notes that 80% of marriages end in divorce after a catastrophic event. Angela and Doug have been married thirty-four years. What do you believe allows a relationship to survive, and transform through, catastrophic loss?

Personal Reflection

• Where in your most important relationship are you showing up from conditioning rather than choice?
• What would it look like to renew your most important commitment, to a person, a calling, or yourself, on your own terms?

Discussion Questions

• The closet. Angela says: "I had never allowed myself to break, ever, in my entire life." What does it take to finally let yourself break? What made that moment the one?
• "Being a mother was, by choice, my full-time job. While a choice, it was also a way I unconsciously lost myself." How do the roles we love and choose also become the places we disappear? Have you experienced this paradox?
• Seventy-five minutes each way, twice a week, plus Saturdays, for three years. Where in your life has compassion asked everything of you? What did that level of giving cost, and what did it also reveal about who you are?
• Doug stands in the doorway, holding space without fixing. He has been described by Angela as witnessing her like a "terrified little girl" on the zip line, and holding space in the closet. What makes witnessing without fixing so rare, and why is it so powerful?
• Maria's panic attacks surface six years after the accident. The body stores what the mind cannot hold. How does trauma ripple through a family, not just through the person directly affected?

Personal Reflection

• What role in your life has been both a source of love and a source of self-erasure, and what would it mean to hold both truths simultaneously?
• When is the last time you let yourself break? What became possible afterward?

Discussion Questions

• Angela finds her purpose at fifty, as Maria graduates high school and moves toward independence. What does this timing reveal about the relationship between the end of one role and the beginning of the truest self?
• "I am innately drawn towards transforming pain into joy and aliveness." Can you name the thread, the through-line, of your own deepest nature? What have you always moved toward, even when life tried to pull you away?
• Angela's superpower is listening, and her original wounding was not being listened to. "Instead of mimicking the manner in which I was raised, I learned to listen to most everything and everyone." How have your deepest wounds become the seeds of your greatest gifts?
• She names four foundational qualities that her soul requires: care, trust, connection, engagement. When these are absent, she says something goes "communicatively awry." What are your four? What conditions does your soul need to thrive?
• Angela writes: "I stepped into the call of being a medium when I had a platform, or an acceptable container." Are there aspects of yourself, gifts, truths, ways of being, that are waiting for an acceptable container? What would that need to look like?
• Her mother says: "You've become the person you're meant to be." Angela calls this "generational healing." What would it mean, for you, for someone who shaped you to one day witness you as fully yourself?

Personal Reflection

• If you could name where you are in your journey with a single word, the way each chapter is named by its action, what word would it be right now?
• What are you still in the process of becoming?

Connection: Trust, Vulnerability, Courage, Compassion

• Angela writes: "The very thing that kept me from myself was the very thing I needed to catapult me into my truest self." What has been the unexpected catalyst for your own deeper self-connection?
• She describes Giving Spirit Form, a monthly circle, as the space where vulnerability became possible. What containers in your own life have made it safe enough to be seen?
• Angela identifies as an Enneagram Five, someone for whom isolation feels safer than connection. Do you recognize your own structure of self-protection? What does real connection cost you, and what does it give you in return?
• "Anxiety is the resistance to trusting." Where in your life is anxiety the signal that you're fighting the unknown rather than leaning into it?
• Angela says she was given the unspoken permission to trust herself through Emily seeing her. Have you ever been given that kind of permission, and what changed when you received it?

Self-Care: Mind, Body, Heart

• Angela describes her body's signal, a burning in her shoulder blades, as her nervous system's marker for anticipatory fear. What is your body's signature for stress, anxiety, or old wounding? How well have you learned to read it?
• A shamanic practitioner discovered Angela being burned at the stake in another lifetime for speaking her truth, and afterward, the throat sensation Angela had been experiencing disappeared. Whether or not this framework resonates with you, what in your body might be the echo of an old fear of being seen or heard?
• Angela writes: "The mind is properly cared for by allowing and noticing when it is in the present moment." How do you personally practice caring for your mind, not distracting it, but genuinely tending to it?
• "Aside from keeping us alive, the purpose of the heart-space is to receive." How easy is it for you to receive, care, compliments, help, love? What closes that receiving?

Reflection, Acceptance, Presence

• Angela distinguishes between reflecting on the past and being imprisoned by it. She uses reflection to remember her truth, not to dwell in shame. How do you personally practice reflection without rumination?
• The zip line: on the fifth and fastest line, Angela made a conscious choice to be present and take it all in. "I felt liberated." When have you made a conscious pivot from fear to presence in the middle of something that frightened you?
• Byron Katie: "Reality is always kinder than the story we tell about it." What story are you telling about a current situation in your life — and what might reality actually be if you set the story down?
• Angela writes about the anger she housed over Alanna's injury, "it did nothing but drain me." At what point did acceptance become available to you around something you deeply did not want to accept?

Practice and Sacred Space

• In a Reiki session in Mexico, Angela discovered an unconscious belief: "I cannot be successful without betraying my mother." What implicit belief might be quietly limiting your own potential — one you haven't fully named yet?
• Angela says her sacred space is "contacting the quiet stillness inside of myself in order to counteract the speed at which the world may be going by." What is your sacred space, internal or external?
• The Enneagram's nine lost childhood messages. As you read them, which lands most deeply in your body: "You are good." / "You are wanted." / "You are loved for yourself." / "You are seen for who you are." / "Your needs are not a problem." / "You are safe." / "You will be taken care of." / "You will not be betrayed." / "Your presence matters."