EssenceEdge

10/16/2026

Fourteen years ago, yesterday Justin passed from this physical world… There are moments in life that change everything we thought we understood about existence. His death was one of those moments for me.

I couldn’t have known then how profoundly my understanding of life would change. I knew grief… I knew pain… I knew the future I had imagined was no longer the one I would live.

What I didn’t know was that his passing would become the catalyst for one of the greatest awakenings of my life… and that it would be only the beginning.

Over these fourteen years, I’ve experienced awakening after awakening. Dark nights of the soul that took me into places within myself I didn’t know existed. Each time I thought I understood something, another layer would reveal itself. Another belief questioned… Another identity dismantled… Another uncomfortable truth asking me to look deeper…

And I kept going…

My curiosity about the unseen opened doors into energy, intuition, metaphysics, astrology, consciousness, and the nature of reality itself. But as my understanding of the world expanded, so did my curiosity about the consciousness through which I was experiencing it. My perceptions… My conditioning.. My fears.. The stories I told myself… The ways I projected my experiences onto others… Even the spiritual understandings I’d gathered along the way eventually became something to examine.

There is something fascinating about reaching a new level of awareness only to discover that the very awareness you were standing in had its own limitations. I’ve witnessed so many people awaken over these years, and what continues to intrigue me is how deeply personal the process is.

Some awaken through questioning the structures around them. Religion, authority, societal conditioning, the systems we’ve inherited. Others through intuition, spiritual experiences, love, or profound loss. Some develop extraordinary awareness of the external world, recognizing patterns and connections others may overlook. Others find themselves drawn into the depths of their own consciousness, questioning not only what they perceive, but how and why they perceive it.

And some move through all of these realms, discovering that each opens into another. But awareness itself doesn’t always mean we’ve examined the person doing the observing. We can become exceptionally skilled at recognizing conditioning in society while remaining unaware of the conditioning influencing our own thoughts. We can recognize projection in others without questioning what our own emotional responses might be revealing. Even our spiritual beliefs can become another structure we unconsciously protect.

I’ve encountered that within myself over and over. Which brings me back to death… I wonder whether grief, particularly the kind of loss that dismantles the life we thought we knew, has a unique capacity to turn our awareness inward. Because death confronts us with something we cannot change, fix, or reason our way out of. It can challenge our understanding of control, identity, attachment, and everything we assumed was certain.

And perhaps for some of us, those questions never really stop. I’ve come to recognize how many forms of death I’ve experienced since Justin’s passing. The physical loss of those I’ve loved, but also the deaths of identities, relationships, attachments, belief systems, and versions of myself I once thought were permanent.

Some endings arrived gently… Others dismantled me in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. Even this past summer, I experienced another profound awakening. The months leading into Saturn’s retrograde seemed to carry their own foreshadowing. Illusions I hadn’t realized I was still holding began falling away, and once again I found myself entering deeper realms of my own consciousness.

Fourteen years into this journey, still discovering parts of myself I hadn’t fully seen. And I find myself wondering if there really is any final destination to awakening. Or if the more aware we become, the more capable we are of recognizing the limitations of our own awareness.

Yesterday, I felt Justin’s presence throughout the day. Peter dreamed of him, and when I look at Jack now at sixteen, there are moments when I see so much of his dad. Fourteen years have passed, yet his presence continues to weave through our lives.

I often contemplate the souls we encounter, the awareness they carry, and how profoundly our lives can influence one another. Whether certain connections open us to experiences and realms of consciousness we might never have explored otherwise.

I don’t pretend to know…

If anything, fourteen years of questioning, studying, experiencing, healing, and repeatedly facing myself have made me increasingly comfortable with how much I don’t know.

I would give anything for Justin to have had more years here with his boys. And I can still recognize how profoundly his life, his death, and the love that remains have shaped the woman I’ve become… Both truths live within me…

Fourteen years ago, death opened a doorway I never knew existed and all these years later, I’m still discovering just how deep it goes.

10/15/2026

I’m excited to introduce another familiar face joining us at Essence Edge! 🖤

Meet Stacy!

Some friendships have a way of moving through life with us… years can pass, paths can wander in different directions, and somehow when they cross again, it feels as though no time has passed at all.

Stacy and I have been friends since we were teenagers. We’ve watched each other move through different chapters of life, each finding our own way, yet there’s always been a connection that remains.

There’s something pretty special about having someone who knew you long before you became who you are today, now stepping into a space that represents so much of that becoming.

Life has an interesting way of bringing people back into one another’s worlds at just the right time.

Stacy will be joining us on Thursdays, helping around the shop and getting to know the wonderful community that’s grown here.

If you happen to stop in, make sure to say hello and give her a warm welcome! I’m excited for you all to get to know her. 🖤

10/14/2026

TIME…

We spend so much of our lives measuring something we rarely stop to question. Seconds become minutes, minutes become hours, hours become days, and before we know it, we’ve organized an entire existence around a system designed to tell us where we are in time.

But what exactly are we measuring?

Think about how you experienced time as a child. Summers seemed to stretch endlessly. A year felt like an eternity. The distance between birthdays was almost unbearable.

Now think about how quickly those same twelve months seem to pass as we age. Sixty minutes haven’t changed… Yet our experience of those sixty minutes certainly has. Time has always held a fascination to me… there’s a difference between measuring time and experiencing it.

The ancient Greeks gave us two concepts worth exploring. Chronos is sequential time… Minutes, hours, calendars, deadlines, aging. The measurable progression of one moment into the next. Kairos is qualitative time… The significance of a moment. The experience of something arriving when we’re ready to recognize it, regardless of how much chronological time has passed.

One measures duration… The other speaks to meaning, opportunity, and the quality of an experience. And we move between these understandings constantly, often without recognizing it.

An hour spent waiting can feel endless. An hour spent completely immersed in something can disappear. A single conversation can alter the trajectory of a life, while years of repetition may leave us feeling as though very little has changed.

Our consciousness doesn’t experience time with the same consistency that our clocks measure it. Even neuroscience has explored how attention, emotion, novelty, and memory influence our perception of duration. The brain doesn’t simply record time like a stopwatch. It constructs our experience of it.

Which raises an interesting question…

If our experience of time changes according to our state of consciousness, how much of what we call reality is shaped by the way we’re perceiving it?!

Then we have astrology…

For thousands of years, humanity has looked toward the heavens to understand timing. The movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets became ways of observing cycles, recognizing patterns, and orienting ourselves within something much larger than our individual lives.

A lunar cycle… A solar return… A Saturn return… Planetary periods that unfold across decades, sometimes longer than a human lifetime. Astrology offers a fascinating symbolic language for time because it asks us to consider something beyond the calendar.

What does it mean to return to a familiar point in a cycle when we are no longer the person who experienced it the first time? A planet returns to a degree it occupied years ago, but everything we’ve lived between those moments has changed our relationship with the experience.

The pattern repeats… Our awareness of it evolves. And perhaps that’s one reason cyclical understandings of time have remained so meaningful across cultures. Nature doesn’t recognize January 1st as a beginning. The Earth moves through seasons, the Moon waxes and wanes, living things emerge, decay, and return to the systems that sustain them.

We created calendars to organize these movements, but the movements existed long before our measurements. Even physics complicates our familiar understanding of time. Einstein’s relativity demonstrated that elapsed time isn’t identical for every observer. Motion and gravity (😎) affect how clocks measure its passage.

That doesn’t mean our everyday perception of time is the same phenomenon as relativistic time dilation. But it does challenge the old assumption that time is one universal rhythm experienced identically everywhere. And when we consider the age of the Earth, the history of humanity, and the relatively brief period in which we’ve been recording our existence, our perspective shifts again.

What we call ancient history is remarkably recent on a planetary scale. An entire human lifetime, with all its grief, love, growth, discoveries, and transformations, occupies only the smallest fraction of that larger story. Yet from within that lifetime, a single moment can contain more meaning than years.

This is where I become especially interested in the energetic experience of time. The moments when everything seems to slow… When we’re so fully present that we’re no longer aware of the passing hours… When an experience feels strangely familiar, or when something we’ve understood intellectually for years suddenly becomes something we can feel and embody.

In those moments, we’re relating to time differently. We’re sensing the quality of an experience rather than measuring its length. And I wonder how much of our relationship with time is really a relationship with control.

We want to know when something will happen… How long healing should take… Whether we’re ahead or behind… If we’re running out of time, wasting time, making up for lost time. We even speak about time as something we can possess.

My time… Your time… Borrowed time… Lost time… As though it were something we could hold in our hands.

I’ve carried a broken clock tattoo on my arm for years. It was part of a sleeve I began during a profound period of transition, when I was questioning so much of what I’d previously understood about life and existence. Somewhere along the way, that clock became a symbol of something I still explore today…

Time isn’t necessarily what we think it is…

And perhaps the invitation isn’t to escape time, or deny its existence, but to become more curious about the different ways we inhabit it. Because a clock can tell us how many minutes have passed. It cannot tell us how deeply we experienced them.

And an entire lifetime can be measured in years… while the meaning of that lifetime unfolds in moments that were never really about the clock at all…

10/13/2026

There is something fascinating about how we can spend our entire lives getting to know ourselves, only to discover how much of our own nature we have yet to understand.

We recognize patterns, become familiar with our tendencies, develop stories around why we are the way we are… and sometimes those stories become so deeply woven into our identity that we stop questioning them.

This is one of the reasons astrology continues to fascinate me. Our natal charts hold so many layers… planetary placements, houses, aspects, cycles, and the intricate relationships between them. Each offering another perspective into our nature, our experiences, and the potential that exists within us.

What I find especially interesting is how two people can share the same planetary placement yet experience its expression entirely differently. Our environment, relationships, awareness, and lived experiences all influence how those energies manifest. And as we move through life, our understanding of our own chart can evolve right alongside us.

When I sit with someone’s chart, I love exploring those connections, weaving astrological knowledge with my intuitive abilities, allowing the patterns and symbolism to unfold into something personal and meaningful.

Sometimes it brings language to something we’ve always felt but couldn’t quite explain. Other times it opens a perspective we hadn’t considered before. Perhaps that’s what I appreciate most about astrology… another way to explore the complexity of being human, with room to question, reflect, and discover.

For those newer to Essence Edge, I offer personalized Intuitive Astrology Readings, completed privately and delivered as a written digital reading that you can return to whenever you feel called. These are available on our website!

✨ www.essenceedge.org

10/09/2026

How often do we confuse what feels familiar with what actually brings us peace?

We spend years learning how to navigate life, our emotions, our relationships, the environments we surround ourselves with… finding ways to manage discomfort, avoid certain situations, maintain some sense of control.

Eventually, we become so accustomed to the world we’ve created that we may not even recognize how much of our comfort depends on everything remaining familiar.

And then there’s peace itself… What does peace actually feel like?

We spend so much time searching for it, imagining it will feel extraordinary, magical, like some permanent state of happiness where nothing ever disturbs us.

Yet when life becomes quiet, when there’s nothing to fix, no chaos demanding our attention, no emotional intensity to navigate… how often do we become restless?

We begin looking for what’s wrong. Questioning what’s missing. Anticipating problems that haven’t happened. Sometimes creating the very disruption we thought we wanted to escape.

Or perhaps we’ve become so comfortable within the little world we’ve created that anything unfamiliar feels threatening, even when it might be something good.

A change in routine, a new opportunity, a different way of being treated… An experience that challenges what we’ve always believed about ourselves. And suddenly we’re noticing reactions we didn’t realize were still there.

Which makes me wonder how often we mistake being comfortable for being at peace… How often do we call something healing simply because we’ve learned how to manage it?

And how much of our growth begins when we become curious about the things that make us uncomfortable, rather than immediately trying to escape them?

Do we genuinely recognize peace when it’s present… or have we simply become very good at living within what’s familiar?

10/08/2026

Our first Introduction to Astrology & the Alchemy Within gathering is officially sold out. And almost immediately I started hearing from those of you who missed a spot asking if there will be another one.

Yes!

This was always meant to become an ongoing gathering, not a one-night class. A place to begin learning the language of astrology slowly… through the Moon, the planets, the rhythm of time, the transits, the cycles, and the ways we begin recognizing all of it within our own lives.

So if you didn’t get into the first gathering, you didn’t miss your chance. I’ll be adding another date soon.

I’ve also had quite a few people reach out about the retail position, which has been really beautiful to see. If you’re interested, stop into the shop and grab an application!

I’ll be looking through them carefully because I want to be thoughtful about who steps into that role and into the space. And for those who apply but don’t end up filling this particular position, I hope that isn’t the end of the connection.

There are so many ways I can see this community growing… through gatherings, classes, collaborations, practitioners, creatives, readers, makers, teaching, events, and things I probably haven’t even imagined yet.

So even if this specific opportunity isn’t yours, I hope you still find something here that is.

A place to learn…
A place to offer…
A place to connect…
A place to belong for a little while…

For those who have reached out sharing your gifts & practices, I’m working on getting back to each of you!

It feels like Essence Edge is opening up in a new way. And I’m really excited to see who and what begins finding its way in.

💜

10/07/2026

I’ve been listening…

To the people who walk into the shop and look around at the crystals, the herbs, the tarot decks, the books, the ritual tools… and eventually say some version of the same thing.

“I don’t even know where to begin”… Sometimes they don’t say it at all… I can just feel it. That feeling of being drawn toward something before you have language for what it is.

Curious about energy… Curious about astrology… About tarot… Herbs… Healing… Witchcraft… The body… The unseen… The old ways… The parts of yourself that seem to know something before your mind catches up.

There has been a shift happening collectively for a while now. More people questioning… More people feeling… More people noticing patterns they used to dismiss… More people being pulled toward practices, teachings and tools they may not have understood a few years ago… More people awakening!

I’ve been observing it quietly… waiting for that inner shift that says, it’s time…

It’s TIME

So we’re beginning something new at Essence Edge… Gatherings

Nights to come together and be introduced to this realm without needing to already know the language.

Astrology…
Crystals…
Tarot…
Energy…
Herbs…
Witchcraft…
Healing…
Metaphysics…
The body…
The cycles moving around us and within us…

But I also want this to become a place for deeper study. Because part of this journey is learning… and part of it is deconstructing. Recognizing the identities, beliefs, fears and patterns we inherited from family, culture, religion, society and the systems that shaped us.

Looking at where we learned to perform… Where we learned to fear… Where we learned obedience before discernment… Where someone else’s truth quietly became our own without ever being examined. And then learning how to question without immediately reaching for another system to tell us what to believe.

I don’t want us to tear down one belief structure just to build another cage in its place. I want there to be room here for curiosity… For contradiction… For uncertainty… For changing our minds… For studying the things that sit at the edges of accepted conversation.

Over time we’ll go deeper.

Into occult teachings… Religion and its histories.
Symbolism… Consciousness… Ancient and modern metaphysical thought… The uncomfortable places where spirituality, power, culture and control intersect… The theories and questions most spaces avoid because they don’t fit neatly inside one accepted version of reality.

Not because we need to believe everything we explore. Because learning how to sit with an idea without immediately worshipping it or rejecting it is part of developing discernment too.

Whether you are walking into this world for the first time or have been studying it for years, I want there to be something here that opens another door.

And I want these nights to feel alive!

To touch the herbs…
Hold the stones…
Pull the cards…
Look at the sky…
Notice what happens in your body…
Ask questions…
Talk about what you’re experiencing…

Learn enough of the language that the things you have already been sensing begin to make a little more sense.

I have spent years studying, practicing, teaching and living inside these subjects. But I am not interested in standing at the front of the room telling you what to believe. I want to hold the space while you learn how to recognize, question, experience and discern it for yourself.

Because so many of you are already standing at the doorway… Essence Edge is where you begin.

Our first gathering will be Wednesday, November 4th.

Link in the comments to register!

10/07/2026

I’m looking for a little help at Essence Edge!

But more than that… I’m looking for people who feel like they could become part of this awakening community.

Practitioners…
Readers…
Creatives…
Teachers…
Makers…

People with something thoughtful to offer.
People who are grounded in what they do and interested in growing alongside something rather than simply renting space inside it.

As Essence Edge begins opening into more gatherings, deeper study, classes, events, client work and community again, I’m realizing I can’t be in every role at once.

So I’m starting here.

I’m looking for someone to help with retail Wednesdays and Fridays from 11–6 through the holiday season.

Someone warm, reliable, curious, comfortable talking with people, helping them find what they need, learning the shop and caring for the space while I’m still here working with clients, creating, teaching and handling the other thousand little things that happen behind the scenes.

But I’m also putting the larger call out.

If you are a practitioner, reader, artist, herbalist, maker, teacher, healer, intuitive, creative, or someone working within one of the many worlds that overlap with Essence Edge… I’d love to hear from you.

I’m interested in meeting people who may want to offer sessions, teach, collaborate, create, bring something new into the shop, or simply begin a conversation about what could fit here.

I’m not looking to fill the space with people for the sake of filling it.

I’m looking for alignment.

People who care about what they do…
People who are still learning…
People who can hold curiosity without needing to have every answer…
People who understand that community is something we build together…

Essence Edge is growing into something that feels much more alive again, and I’d really love to know who else is out there feeling the pull toward it.

If this sounds like you, send me a message (218-850-8739) and tell me a little about yourself, what you do, and what kind of role or offering you’d be interested in exploring.

Tonya 💜

10/06/2026

10/06/2026

I have been thinking about dragonfly medicine since this little one landed on my hand yesterday. We don’t need another symbol for transformation! Everything becomes transformation eventually… right?!

Every hard season…
Every ending…
Every animal encounter…
Every retrograde…
Every threshold…

But looking at the dragonfly, what I kept thinking about was perception… How differently a creature might move through the world if it could see more than what was directly in front of it. And how much of being human is the opposite.

We see one angle and call it truth… One feeling and call it reality… One wound and build an entire story around what must be happening…

One version of another person…
One version of ourselves…
One version of the past…

Then we defend that angle as though changing our mind would mean betraying ourselves. What if dragonfly medicine is not asking us to become anything… Maybe it is asking us to look again.

From here…
And here…
And here too…

Because perspective changes everything. A dragonfly can hover in one place without being stuck. It can move sideways without being lost. It can reverse direction without having failed. There is something in that I keep coming back to. We have been taught to understand growth as forward motion…

Progress…
Certainty…
Decisions…
Answers…

But nature doesn’t seem nearly as obsessed with straight lines as we are.

Sometimes the intelligence is in hovering long enough to notice what we missed… Sometimes the sideways movement reveals more than another ten steps forward… Sometimes going back is how we finally see the thing clearly.

💜