Firebird Rise

REBIRTH: IT'S NOT JUST FOR MYSTICS ANYMORE

I believe this world needs your light. For real. Like right now. I’ve risen from the ashes, and you can too.

Chris Clark is a soulful transformation coach and tarot reader specializing in life transitions, mindfulness, purpose & calling, self awareness, and spirituality. So consider me a midwife to your soul: empathetic, but also downright magical. From mindfulness exercises to tarot cards, I draw from a range of pragmatic and intuitive tools to help you move through resistance, fear, uncertainty, and se

lf-sabotage. On a tactical level, my approach to coaching is guided by strategic thinking, insightful questions, creativity, kindness, and humor. You can count on me to be direct and sensible, with a dash of punk rock priestess for good measure. Together we’ll create a results-oriented process for transformation and growth that is uniquely yours. Let’s turn up your light, and birth the life you were meant for. I know rebirth is possible because I’ve lived it. Not so long ago I was suffocating inside the wrong life. From the outside it appeared like I’d “made it”: driven, high achieving, and professionally accomplished. But on the inside it was a 24/7 festival of shame, anxiety, self-judgement, unrealized dreams, and pain. Until fate forced a reckoning. On the cusp of my 40th birthday my husband walked out, my illusions were shattered, and everything I thought I knew burned to the ground. In these pivotal moments we either harden, or we soften. I decided to break myself wide open. To dare greatly. Rising from those ashes, I bushwhacked my way toward the life I was meant for. One change at a time, until everything looked different. Turns out growth isn’t a straight line, it’s a spiral that takes us ever deeper into discovering the truth about who we are. With each revolution/revelation, our sense of what is possible expands. With enough determination anyone can bushwhack without a map, but we go farther, faster with the right tools and support. If you’re ready to birth some form of change in your life and would like a tactical partner to support you in that process, let’s light it up together. The best journeys always begin with a leap of faith.

01/01/2026

I love choosing a word of the year. Not only for the opportunity to consider what I want to create in my life, but for the arc of perspective it brings.

Looking back, what I *think* a word means nearly always reveals itself to be quite different as I live into it over the following 12 months. Some years, it’s a touchstone. Others, it’s a challenge—like finding “Joy” in the year my marriage came to an end.

My word for 2025 — Dignity — proved to be a compass, asking me to change patterns and thoughts and behaviors to align with what dignity demands. Such a potent lesson.

I’m just starting to play with 2026 ideas, and while there’s not a frontrunner yet my sense is it is likely to have a gentle quality. Maybe.

Lionhearted, Devotion, and Dignity asked big things of me, and I’m thinking it’s time for more air, more lightness, more whimsy. But who knows? I don’t actually choose the word—it chooses me.

Here’s to a world that’s kinder, safer, and more just for all. May your 2026 be filled with all that feeds and nourishes you. ♥️

12/28/2025

So I did a thing. I let love in.

Enter Peach, and suddenly my house is a home again. Family. My sweet girl is not yet three, and had spent the past year of her young life in an animal shelter. Like my Marley boy before her, she’s a wonderful animal that got bounced around far too many times early on.

I’ve learned through a series of bounces in my own life just how much we all need a place to call home, where we can fully decompress and exhale. Day by day, I’m watching that happen for her. A beautiful thing.

It’s such a gift for me too — to build this bond, introduce her to new experiences (the beach, OMG!!!), and of course let her sleep on any soft surface she likes. She’s teaching me so much about adaptability, resilience, and keeping our hearts open and available — even when life deals us a series of tough hands.

For all its sparkle, the holiday season can be a difficult or painful time for so many reasons. May we all be held with patience and care, and have soft places to land. ❤️

08/09/2025

Last year, I set out on a roadtrip holding a question in my heart: “what is HOME?” And while the answer didn’t turn out to be a geographical point on the map, this sweet sanctuary that I’ve built over time sure did come to mind on many days and in many ways while I was out there on the road.

It’s with so much gratitude and appreciation that I sink into the simple joys of my garden, anam cara friendships, and community. Like Dorothy returning back to Kansas after her life altering pilgrimage through the land of Oz.

What I’ve learned is that nothing unmakes us. No person, situation or event. The life I’d been weaving all these years didn’t unravel with my divorce. As the dust settles, I see so clearly now that my magic never left me. (Though on many, many days it sure felt like it had.) It remains. Alongside sky and air and sea.

I remain.

Intact, undaunted, and with a heart as sweet and open and true as it ever was. Maybe even moreso now for all ita breaking and remaking.

I’m emerging slowly now, out from under wraps. Protective cocoon that’s swaddling me is peeling off strip by strip. The land I love has done its healing work.

Creativity is starting to flow once more, and with it some juicy new offerings are taking shape. Tarot and ritual and rites of passage, oh my!

Stay tuned. 😍

07/04/2025

My travels over the past two years have made one thing abundantly clear: this land is where I belong. The rivers, mountains, and prairies sing a song that’s as old as time, and they are calling for my soul-deep commitment to all we are and might yet become.

What my American-ness has taught me is that there is no escaping our fragile and imperfect humanity, only contribution. And so I return again and again, hoping to contribute my one small note to a much larger song. The song of life: love, longing, freedom, possibility, mistakes, shadows, accountability, hope, repair, and connection.

May you be connected to what inspires and fills you today.

To the freedom of all beings, everywhere. Always and in all the ways.

05/19/2025

430 days, more than 10,000 miles, and I’ve laid my head more places than I can remember or count at this point. Road-tripping across the US and Ireland, an old school walkup apartment in Philadelphia, petsitting and more petsitting, two deaths, and about twenty rebirths. Loves won and lost, sunrises and sunsets, transcendence and epic failures. A lifetime of lessons, and two new tattoos etched into my skin so I may never forget it.

Pilgrimage officially ends today. Oh, how I have missed HOME!

03/11/2025

Burning and rising can be a messy and painful business. After nearly a year unteathered and shapeshifting, I’m starting to recognize my own face in the mirror again. And at the same time, my sense of self is itself utterly transformed.

When it comes to traversing the identity shifts that come on the heels of loss or change (divorce, bereavement, job loss, empty nest, retirement, and so on) THIS is the part we don’t talk about as much.

How painful it is. Or how slow the process can be.

Everybody loves the idea of a phoenix reborn. But what it takes to burn, die, and smolder in the ashes before the new self is birthed? Oof, it’s messy.

Recently, I was losing heart. Not sure if I could hold the vision. Not sure who I actually am in this place between identities.

Thankfully, the one thing I HAVE learned is I don’t need to sit in those moments of confusion and uncertainty alone. I called in support, and a couple dear friends remindeded me of what I had momentarily forgotten. I suspect we all forget sometimes.

You are so brave.
You have a huge heart.
You know exactly what you’re doing.
I believe in you.
Keep going.
You are not alone.
You are loved.

02/24/2025

Made my first meme y’all!

And seriously. Beyond the headlines, we need to be talking about the human (and other-than-human) stories and impacts of what happens when billionaires are given free rein with no check and balance oversight.

The world they want for us is ugly, and will not lead to happiness or prosperity.

Jeff Bezos has said: “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified.”

I don’t want a boss like that. You?

Elon Musk calls people he disagrees with “retarded”.

What are we, five years old?

He also says: “You just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week.”

Noobody I know who works that much seems very happy, or has a life I want.

I want what most people say on their death bed is most important in the final analysis: love, connection, and relationships.

Is the Trump/Musk vision actually why human beings came together to create society and culture? So the majority can live a form of indentured servitude, cowering in fear and scrambling to meet basic needs?

All simply so a few people can get super rich - and also super mean in the process?

Are you tired of the rat race? I am. And I know better than to think these bros will improve our quality of life on any scale that matters.

If you’re ready to decolonize your mind, let’s talk. It’s the work I have been called to do, however imperfectly.

This is why I left my career in nonprofit leadership five years ago to become a coach, earth-based ritualist, and shamanic practitioner. Because this life is killing us.

Change begins in the mind, and power comes from how we hold our energy. A different world is possible, beyond the supremacist systems and structures they would impose upon us. But to create it, we must first believe it is so.

02/18/2025

There are so many balls flying right now, so many issues of concern to track. I want to call attention to just one today that I imagine pretty much every American I am connected to here has a personal interest in - our public lands.

During the pandemic, I found my solid ground in the woods. While there, I witnessed so many people discovering or reengaging with nature. The parks provided refuge, a place for respite, and entertainment for families when everything else had shut down or failed us.

Slashing the parks workforce is not a net savings for taxpayers, and doesn’t make our government “more efficient”. It will be a sh*tshow (and already is, as thousands of federal employees lost their jobs overnight without due process).

This paves the way for what the uber wealthy elite actually want: to plunder our shared lands for resource extraction. By their logic, a few people will get a little richer while the rest of us lose. Once you start cutting and digging and drilling up protected landscapes, there’s no unringing that bell.

If this bothers you, I hope you’ll take one minute to sign the petition. It may not feel like much, but what’s the alternative?

Inaction IS action. If we don’t raise our collective voices and speak up about everything that’s troubling us in this critical moment, we’ll be living in a very different reality in the not so distant future.

Defacto President Musk’s vision is not representative of the world I want to live in. You?

02/11/2025

Everyday advocacy is far easier than I thought, and has integrated seamlessly into my morning rituals. Tea? Check. Tarot? Check. Journaling? You bet.

Take five to call my senators and let them know what’s important to me and how I’d like them to show up and get busy? 💯

And my friends, it’s not going unnoticed. Congress is reporting a 40% higher call volume over the past several weeks than usual. They all seem to care more about getting re-elected than anything else, so let’s let them know what’s required to earn those seats.

Why am I talking about this so much? Because creating a better world - one where all people can thrive - is why I do what I do. As a coach. As a ritualist. As a mentor and teacher. Healing and growth aren’t solo endeavors. We cannot thrive inside oppressive systems on a planet in crisis.

I make these calls because of love, and I infuse my voice with that love when I leave the messages (or - rarity of rarities- get an actual staffer on the line!) Love of humanity, and for the other than humans with whom we share this planet.

Any coach or healer who is not tracking the larger context in which our clients exist is perhaps missing the point entirely. But hey, that’s just how I see it.

02/09/2025

The way knows the way.

But what the actual f does that mean in practice? It’s a question I’ve been walking with since my most recent trip to Ireland last fall. I was chewing on a series of insights and inspirations that I had no clear idea what to do with or how to implement, when one of my teachers made that simple statement.

The way knows the way.

It felt true, but also puzzling. How do I do the things I’m being called to do? How do I live into and become what’s being asked of me next? What’s The Plan? Because by god, I always gotta have A Plan.

The fact of it is uncharted terrain has no maps. You just need to f**k around and find out.

It’s not so different from what I have learned from the practice of coaching, and what I do with every one of my clients.

1: Clarify where you’re headed.

2: Orient over and over toward that steady North Star.

3: Take the next right step.

4: At every fork in the road, ask: is this choice taking me closer to, or farther from, where I’m headed?

We can’t ever really know what’s around the next bend. Our minds can attempt to map it, we can navigate as if we know how it should all unfold. But the reality is there’s only the next right step.

When I’m thrashing around in overwhelm or uncertainty (which, not gonna lie, been doing a fair amount of lately), I remind myself to sink back into trust. Trust in the path. Trust in myself. Trust in the way.

02/04/2025

Whether the disasters that befall us in this world are personal or communal, the way is always made easier when we walk through the fire together. The human animal was not designed to go it alone – we need each other.

As a stranger who’s traversed many strange lands over this past year, let me assure you: how we show up matters. Your smile, a kind word, that check in text to a friend. All those micro-moments of connection are love embodied and made real. And those are the very threads that stitch together the fabric of our world.

So wherever you’re at today, I hope you’ll connect with who and what has heart and meaning to you. Play with the dog. Hug a loved one just a few beats longer than usual. Make eye contact at the grocery store. Complement someone you don’t know. Share what’s beautiful and true within your heart, if only for a moment.

Because a moment is literally all it takes to reap the rewards. According to psychology researcher Barbara Frederickson, the positive emotions generated from these seemingly small exchanges are exceedingly good for both our physical health and mental wellbeing. A tangible gift we can give ourselves and others that takes less than a minute to enact.

“Be the change you wish to see” is not just for people whose stories will be told in the history books. It dwells inside every friendly heart, and is a form of activism we can all participate in on the daily.

02/03/2025

Taking a much needed breather from the doom scrolling to source joy. Remembering what’s worth fighting for.

Find the wonder, my friends. Full hearts are formidable warriors.

(And if I haven’t made it absolutely clear, this is a time for warriorship. Let’s say what we stand for - and what we will not stand for - plain.

I stand for equity. Environmental protection. Accessible healthcare. A check on capitalism, entitlement and greed run amok. Compassion. A society that attends to the needs of the many rather than the few. A deconstruction of the billionaire class. Dismantling white supremacy. The restoration of earth-honoring ways. Reciprocity. Mutual care.

So it, so may it be.)

Address

Port Townsend, WA

Website

http://www.firebirdrise.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Firebird Rise posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Firebird Rise:

Shortcuts

Want your business to be the top-listed Health & Beauty Business in Port Townsend?