My name is Marisa Caroline Franco—a name that etymologically carries the meaning of a strong, free woman with a song of happiness to sing from the sea. I am the daughter of Maria and Gary, of Cuban, Irish, African, and Spanish descent. I grew up in New Jersey, just outside of New York City, shaped early on by art, culture, and contrast of living.

In my twenties, I lived between Los Angeles and New York City, moving through many industries and careers. At the time, it felt like restlessness or confusion; only later did I understand I was investigating—through direct experience—what worked, what didn’t, and what felt like a hollowness in my own body and spirit.

In my late twenties, I held a quiet but sincere prayer in my heart: that I would be shown another way of living because the conventional one was not working for me. Modernity and the American rhythm of life, that dream, did not suit my poetic nature, and I longed for something more relational, reverent, and alive.

Within days of that prayer, I met my current partner, who had already been traveling the world working with indigenous communities. Together, we traveled around the world, intentionally, for six years. During that time, I unraveled, met my edges, crossed many thresholds, a lot of identity shifts, and was shaped by life outside of familiarity and comfort.

I sat and worked—traditionally—with many plant medicines, learning from them as allies in the necessary decomposition that precedes true blooming. I began serving psilocybin, with permission from my Mazatec teacher, Alejandrina, supporting war veterans, first responders, and people navigating profound transitions.

Alongside this work, I lived on and off within traditional communities and village life, where I experienced firsthand that human beings have always lived in connection and kinship. Seeing life organized around relationship—rather than isolation—made it clear to me how deeply the modern, nuclear, and separatist way of living contributes to suffering and disorientation. This understanding has shaped my work profoundly. I do not receive people as “clients,” but as family—because this is what the elders teach, and what I carry in my sacred bundle.

Another dream eventually led me to Gabon, West Africa, where I was welcomed into a small family village and traditionally initiated into Bwiti and Iboga, a master plant. This included a traditional four-day rite of passage—an initiatory experience designed to strip you of what you think you are, testing you mentally, physically, psychically, and emotionally, and pushing you beyond your known edge into maturity, reverence, and respect for life.

For a long time, I struggled to understand what my “gift” was. My experiences were vast, varied, and difficult to organize into a single identity, role or job description. I often say I soaked in confusion tea for many years.

Slowly, the pieces began to fall into place.

I came to see that my life had consistently brought me into thresholds—moments of collapse, transition, initiation, and reorientation. And I learned that it is only through direct experience that a true gift reveals itself. This is why I place such emphasis on looking toward one’s wound, struggle, or repeated pattern—not as a flaw, but as the gateway to strength, wisdom, and capacity.

Through this understanding, it became clear that I am designed to support people through their own threshold crossings—times when identity shifts, old ways of relating no longer work, and something truer is trying to emerge.

I now work as a spiritual integration guide, threshold doula, and facilitator, walking alongside individuals during transitions, initiations, spiritual awakenings, relational changes, and moments of deep questioning. Rather than always offering answers, I help make these passages livable—so clarity, orientation, and coherence can arise in their own timing and from their own wisdom.

My work is relational, embodied, and non-hierarchical. I believe we can only guide what we have personally wandered through. What I offer is not doctrine or hierarchy, but something forged through lived experience and offered back in service. We are in the same boat of life, meeting one another in shared humanity and mutual becoming.

I work somatically by listening to the body—to sensation, impulse, memory, and subtle response. I carry an understanding that we are made of many bodies—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and etheric—and that when one is touched, they all respond. The work often moves like a gentle tug on a single thread, creating ripples across the whole system.

I draw from Gene Keys wisdom and Human Design as subtle tuning instruments, listening for the movement from shadow into gift, contraction into radiance, and fragmentation into wholeness. My approach weaves together somatic practices, nervous system attunement, guided visualization, re-wiring techniques, quantum healing, and—when appropriate—sacred plant medicine contexts.

Over the years, I have built a trusted circle of healers and practitioners from many walks of life and modalities. When it serves the work, I call them in for additional support. Those who step into this space are received not as clients, but as family, held within a wider field of care—which is often nourishing in itself.