About Tierra Liminal

Carmen is a bilingual Peruvian-born multidimensional guide, counselor, forest therapy guide, and lifelong traveler whose work explores the meeting place of human consciousness, sacred landscape, nature, mythology, and healing. Born to a Peruvian mother and Mexican father, with Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, and Indigenous ancestry, Carmen grew up moving between cultures and has traveled extensively throughout South, Central, and North America, Europe, and Africa. From an early age, these encounters awakened a fascination with the human psyche and with the remarkably different ways cultures understand nature, adversity, spirit, community, and the mysteries of being alive.

Life brought her into proximity with periods of political upheaval, natural disaster, and profound cultural change. Experiences surrounding conflicts in Latin America and the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake deepened her interest in how people find meaning, resilience, creativity, and inner resources in moments when ordinary structures fall away. Rather than viewing crisis only as disruption, Carmen became interested in the hidden capacities that can emerge at thresholds—the intuition, imagination, courage, empathy, and expanded perception that often remain dormant until life asks us to see differently.

Carmen holds an MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and brings her understanding of psychology, emotional intelligence, existential-humanistic thought, and resilience into her work with individuals and groups. Her counseling background provides an important foundation for sacred travel: an understanding that encounters with powerful landscapes, ancestral stories, dreams, ritual, and unfamiliar cultures can evoke profound personal material. Carmen approaches these experiences with curiosity, emotional attunement, discernment, and respect for each participant's individual process.

Her relationship with the natural world is equally central to her work. As a Certified Forest Therapy Guide through the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy, Carmen invites people to slow down and cultivate what Tierra Liminal calls reciprocal attention—a way of being with forests, stones, waters, animals, and sacred landscapes that emphasizes listening rather than extracting. Forest bathing, contemplative walking, sensory awareness, silence, journaling, dreamwork, and gentle earth-based practices become ways of restoring a felt relationship with the more-than-human world.

For many years Carmen has also studied shamanism, energy healing, stone medicine, ancestral and systemic work, dreamwork, and subtle-energy traditions. Her studies have included Core Shamanism, Andean and Q'ero-informed practices, Toltec/Nahual traditions, Hawaiian shamanism, Reiki, Quantum Touch, Akashic studies, stone medicine, Biogeometry, animal communication, Jungian approaches to creativity and imagination, and Family Constellation work. She approaches these traditions as an ongoing student and practitioner, honoring her teachers and cultural lineages.

Sacred travel brings these strands together. Carmen is passionate about visiting places where landscape, mythology, astronomy, history, and human imagination intersect—stone circles, mountains, temples, pilgrimage routes, forests, holy wells, ancient burial landscapes, and places that generations of people have understood as thresholds between ordinary and sacred experience. Along the way she seeks out local guides, storytellers, land stewards, scholars, and tradition keepers whose knowledge helps reveal the many layers of a place.

Her extensive international experience is an important part of her approach to guiding. Carmen is comfortable moving between cultures while remaining attentive to local customs, history, language, and different ways of understanding the world. She does not approach sacred places as objects to consume or as sources of “energy” to acquire. Instead, she encourages travelers to listen before interpreting, remain curious without abandoning discernment, and allow a landscape to challenge their assumptions.

Through Tierra Liminal, Carmen creates journeys and workshops designed to help people explore the threshold between the visible and invisible, psyche and landscape, ancient story and present experience. Practices may include contemplative walking, forest bathing, breath and rhythm, dream journaling, symbolic and mythological inquiry, stone work, meditation, and carefully held group reflection.

Her interest in what she calls latent codes grows from this work. Rather than something supernatural being implanted from outside, these “codes” can be understood as capacities already present within us but often underused: intuition, creativity, emotional intelligence, courage, ecological sensitivity, ancestral awareness, imagination, discernment, and our ability to perceive relationship and meaning. Sacred landscapes can become mirrors through which those capacities are remembered and strengthened.

Carmen now lives in the quiet northwestern hills of Massachusetts, surrounded by rivers and streams and forests of birch, oak, hemlock, and white pine. Her work begins from the belief that transformation does not require escaping the ordinary world. Sometimes it begins by learning to encounter that world—and ourselves—with deeper attention.

Studies, Training & Certifications

Psychology & Human Development: Smith School of Social Work (2024); MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, Merrimack College (2026); Family/Systemic Constellation training; Jungian studies; ongoing Biodynamic Craniosacral training.

Nature & Earth-Based Practice: Certified Forest Therapy Guide, Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (2024); Stone Medicine studies through Upper Clarity; Biogeometry studies.

Shamanic & Ancestral Studies: studies with Sandra Ingerman, Dory Cote, Hank Wesselman, Joan Wilcox and Q'ero-informed Andean traditions, Sergio Magaña's teachings in Toltec/Nahual traditions, and related earth-based and dream practices.

Energy, Dream & Intuitive Studies: Usui Reiki Master; Quantum Touch; Akashic Records training; Egyptian dreamwork; crystal and gemstone studies; animal communication; additional workshops in voice, subtle perception, and integrative healing.

Shamanism is one of humanity’s most ancient spiritual practices, rooted in the deep remembrance that all of life is interconnected. Far from a religion or belief system, it is a path of direct revelation—a sacred way of seeing and engaging with the world through the heart, soul, and spirit. Shamans are individuals—regardless of gender—who journey beyond the veil of ordinary reality into hidden realms to access healing, wisdom, and guidance. They work in partnership with compassionate helping spirits to restore balance, retrieve lost soul parts, remove energetic blockages, and support both individual and collective well-being.

Restoring our roots and soul through shamanic practice is a deep, sacred journey that reconnects us to our ancestry, spirit, and earth-based wisdom. Through rituals, offerings, and ancestral altars, we begin to build a relationship with those who came before us. Shamanic journeying can reveal unresolved wounds passed down through generations (abandonment, war, shame, oppression). We become the ones to transform this pain into wisdom. By witnessing and healing ancestral patterns, we reweave the soul-thread of our family line, often bringing peace to generations past and future.

Central to shamanic practice is the understanding that everything—plants, animals, stones, winds, and stars—has spirit. We live within a vast web of life, and the illusion of separation is the root of much suffering. The shaman serves as a bridge between human consciousness and the forces of nature, tending to harmony between seen and unseen worlds.

One of the primary tools of the shaman is the shamanic journey, often entered through rhythmic drumming or rattling. These repetitive sounds shift brainwave patterns from active beta to meditative alpha and visionary theta states, allowing the soul to travel into non-ordinary reality—known as Dreamtime, the Otherworld, or parallel dimensions in various traditions.

Each shaman’s journey is unique, yet all are held by the same sacred truth: the Earth is alive, the spirits are near, and healing is available. Shamanism reminds us of our sacred place within the great web of life—and invites us to remember who we truly are.