From Side Quest to Sacred Mission

In the early 1990s, Susan founded Sixth Sense Fitness, bringing workshops and wellness services to businesses in the New York metropolitan area. A difficult divorce in those years cracked things open, and her sensitivity, which had always been pulling past the edges of conventional wellness, took the lead. She found her way to her teacher Kate, who guided her back to herself through a system of body alignment and breath. From that very first meeting, that first glimpse of the breath, it was love at first sight: the recognition of something she had lost and found again. She landed in her heart, in her Source, and found a home there. She has made it home every day since.

What followed was a steady deepening, personally and professionally, though for Susan those have never really been separate things. She sat in circle with other mothers at the National Association of Mothers’ Centers, where she was trained in the circle way. She offered meditation and energy healing from her home, brought meditation into cardiac rehabilitation, and developed body-centered work in a spa. She deepened her experience in the circle way again in her 650-hour Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy training. Sixth Sense Fitness evolved into Sixth Sense Journeys, reflecting what the work had always been becoming: not fitness but integration, not wellness but wholeness.

Through all of it, the breath was her silent companion, carrying her through heartbreak, loss, single parenthood, financial challenge, and the day-to-day stressors of this modern chaotic life. The training she holds closest to her heart is her training as a spiritual healer and energy healer. Everything else grew around that root.

In 2015, she brought that root to Columbia University’s Teachers College and its Spirituality Mind Body Institute, for her Master’s in Clinical Psychology. There she guided graduate students through their own heroic journeys as they completed their master’s work, and, long before they were partners, trained Cassidy in the art of online facilitation.

More recently, another teacher arrived: Kathleen, whose Restorative Breathwork drew Susan back into what she calls the Rumi-like trance of the breath, reminding her that the relationship with the breath is always new, always evolving, always revealing, always supporting, and that it is always possible to fall more deeply in love.

Susan is a Threshold Guardian who could live permanently in liminal space; she can perceive what is forming but not yet formed. Her gift, as those closest to her describe it, is the ability to see what’s actually happening beneath the surface, strip it down into a few words, and then say the thing which creates the conditions for someone to reassemble themselves in alignment with their own truth. Her offering, most of all, is her Presence.

She is most inspired by movements of Love and the dance of relationship, and most at home in nature, in quiet intimate settings, and with animals. Her creative outlets include cooking, mixed media art, and living life itself as a dance and art process. She lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia with her partner of twenty years and her cats, Dominic and Dawson.

Through her guardianship at Robes of Light, she hopes her presence promotes the evolution and fulfillment of the soul, both yours and hers.

Cassidy was a rigorous straight-A honors student who became disenchanted with education in college. She sat in lecture halls watching students pay thousands of dollars to scroll Facebook and learn nothing, while people raised an eyebrow at her liberal arts degree and asked what she was going to “do” with that. Then another student at Virginia Tech introduced her to Sir Ken Robinson’s advocacy for creativity and the arts in schools by way of his talk Changing Education Paradigms — which changed the trajectory of her life.

She won an Odyssey Fellowship and set out on a quest across the country and around the world to ask educators, researchers, and politicians one question: what is the purpose of education? The best answer she came across was sitting with teachers on a boat bar in Finland, when someone said their purpose was to “prepare students for humanity” (a very different answer from “prepare students to compete in the global economy”).

Further fellowships took her to the inaugural Presidential Global Scholars program in Switzerland, where she trained in exigency, that which you cannot remain silent about, and to a summer creative writing program at Oxford. By her senior year she had met Sir Ken Robinson in person, and written her own theory of language and consciousness in a doctoral rhetoric seminar.

At the height of her academic success, a dark night of the soul cracked open into psychic awakening, and the return of spirituality to the forefront of her life, as it had been when she was a girl. She turned down a nomination to apply for a Rhodes scholarship and went soul-seeking instead, taking a gap year in Istanbul, teaching creativity at Turkey’s Gifted Education Institute.

She moved to New York for a Master’s in International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she studied curriculum and pedagogy and transpersonal psychology — and took a course on how to build a school. There she was trained in the circle way through Linda Lantieri’s Schools with Spirit practicum, and has been building curriculum on circle process ever since.

At the same time, her mystical path was accelerating: ceremonial work with a maestro curandero of the Peruvian Amazon, baptism into the Magdalene Heart Path at the confluence of rivers in southern France, a daily kundalini yoga practice, and Argentine tango training (a somatic practicum, she would say, in the mystical dance between the feminine and masculine).

At the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the two currents, academic and mystical, converged. Her thesis explored the heroic journey as a design framework for curriculum. It was in graduate school, too, that she discovered her training in story — archetype, symbol, and meaning — paired with her natural intuition, made her ideally suited for cartomancy: reading cards as a mirror for the soul’s current curriculum.

After Columbia she worked as a writer, writing coach, and curriculum designer, and founded The Lightwriters Project, helping emerging adults articulate their purpose through the heroic journey.

In 2019, a Zoom tarot reading led to an unexpected partnership (and eventually a marriage). Together she and her husband built and piloted a program in conscious business leadership around The Pythia Template, a body of teachings on integrity that came through her. The cohort ranged from Juilliard dancers and naturopathic doctors to yoga instructors and Wall Street investment bankers. Then they set the program aside when Cassidy was asked to help lay the groundwork for a hybrid university built on kundalini yoga.

It was then that she first imagined the heroic journey as an academic calendar. That project ended, but the idea carried over; after reconnecting with Susan, she recognized that the container she had been preparing to build was Robes of Light.

During her scholar-activist twenties, Cassidy thought she wanted to fix education. What she eventually recognized was that she had been mourning her own disconnection from authentic creative expression and from the devotional life she had known as a child. She had gone around the world looking for the purpose of education, only to discover the real education wasn’t within the walls of a school but in life itself. The years of studying education and the heroic journey weren’t only preparation for building a school. They were the path back to herself.

These days she writes the Solar Story Post and designs the school’s curriculum. She wrote the Waymaker guides postpartum, rocking her newborn. Every other week she leads Now, Write, her workshop on exigency: what you cannot remain silent about. She is building the Lunar Praxis as a digital bullet journal, so that bujo lovers have the option to put that energy toward their inner work instead of grocery lists, chores, and appointments.

Creativity is her shamanism. Her journey allowed her to reclaim her devotional heart and her artistry — and through Robes of Light she invites others to reclaim theirs, as well. The invitation is that intuition and creativity are as significant as intellectual acuity, and that the impulse to understand how magic works can be an act of worship.

A lifelong journaler, she keeps a notebook within reach for the latest insight, prayer, or doodle (though since becoming a mother she holds a pen less often than she’d like). She enjoys long walks through the woods, singing and dancing around the house, and lives with her husband, daughter, and two Siberian cats wherever the Mystery leads them.