About
Carla

I began singing professionally with a band at sixteen, and by thirty I was touring nationally as a solo act. When Dan and I married, he took over my booking, and together we drove thousands of miles across the country, building an audience as I went. I recorded seven albums, won a songwriting fellowship, toured Europe, and moved to a beautiful home in the mountains. From the outside, life was unfolding perfectly.

But life has a way of whispering to us long before it becomes impossible to ignore.

That same summer, a close friend was diagnosed with cancer. Around the same time I developed incapacitating vertigo and was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease. Between my friend’s suffering and my own body spinning out of control, I fell into a profound depression, and an eating disorder that had been lurking since my teens surfaced alongside it. Healing began slowly, through therapy, a naturopath, and the rooms of a 12-step program. The latter is where the deepest healing began and where I first claimed the spiritual path I had probably been walking all my life without fully naming it.

A few years later our daughter Chloe was born. She traveled with us on tour for a while, but once she turned two the road became too hard on her. Dan and Chloe stayed home, and I began touring alone. What had once felt exhilarating became lonely and stressful. Every departure was hard on Chloe, and hard on me. And still I kept going, because this was who I was. A touring, recording, solo folk singer-songwriter. A mother. A woman determined to make it work.

And then one ordinary day at home with Chloe, I heard a voice.

“You are more than just a folksinger.”

The words startled me so deeply I sat down hard on the bed. Music had been my identity for nearly half my life. What could possibly exist beyond that? The thought frightened me enough that I pushed it away.

But something in me had already begun to stir. Around that same time, a song began to come through me unlike any I had written before. Nakedly honest, deeply spiritual, six months in the making. Eventually I sang it for a panel of folk radio DJs at an industry conference. When I finished, the room fell quiet. One person said he did not think he could play it on his show.

I can see now what I could not see then. The Muse was trying to lead me out of the box, and the box did what boxes do. It rejected what did not fit.

A few months later, after a miscarriage and a series of hard inner reckonings, I realized the life I was pursuing was no longer the life I wanted. I found myself at a pay phone in the freezing sleet on the New York Turnpike, sobbing to Dan: “Fire them all. The agent, the publicist. Tell the record company. I am done.”

And that was the end of touring.

What followed looked, at first, like failure. In truth it was the beginning of a much deeper life. Almost as soon as I stopped traveling I became pregnant again, and I was able to be a very present mother to Chloe and our second child Rafa. I kept healing. I rediscovered my Jewish roots and found a spiritual home in synagogue life. I studied healing modalities. I continued writing songs. And little by little I came to understand something that changed everything.

Music was not a profession I had failed at. It was a language of my soul.

What had failed was the box.

For years I still tried to force myself into new ones — musician, healer, writer, good wife, good mother, good seeker. But life kept teaching me that healing doesn’t happen by compressing ourselves into a shape that no longer fits. It happens when we begin listening again.

That truth came into even sharper focus during the pandemic. My mother died, we moved into a new neighborhood, and the world shut down all at once. One afternoon, sitting on the couch playing music to console myself, I wondered how other people were getting through that strange and lonely time without live music to tend their hearts. So I offered outdoor concerts in our driveway. People came.

Then I began offering online sessions to help people with fear and stress. At first there were two a week. Soon there were six. And slowly, everything I had lived and learned began to weave together: music, healing, spiritual practice, recovery, coaching, intuition. That weaving became the foundation of my work today.

My practice is called Doorway Coaching and Healing because I believe that almost any moment can become a doorway. We do not always need the two-by-four. Sometimes what changes a life is a whisper. A small shift in perspective that opens an entirely different future.

I work especially with sensitive, creative people who sense that the life they have been living no longer quite fits, or who feel a longing they don’t yet know how to name or bring into being. I know that terrain intimately. I know what it is to abandon your inner guidance to keep following the instructions on the box. I also know what becomes possible when you begin to trust that guidance again.

Because this is what I know now: there is no box. Life is not in the box. Life is in the opening, in the moment something no longer fits and a truer shape begins to emerge.

Life is in the doorway.

If something in you is stirring as you read this, you may already be standing in one of those moments.

And perhaps this is your invitation to step through.