Soon after, my fourth great-grandmother came through in a reading with a medium. She told us she had been an herbalist and medicine woman, and that when I was born she pressed a star of light into my third eye to mark me with the gift of sight. When I asked if I should follow her path, she said: “That’s not for me to decide. You must choose for yourself.” Not long after, shamanism found me. The ease and vividness of my first journey made it clear—my love of crystals and nature made sense. I wasn’t lost. I was returning.
Still, I clung to what I thought I was supposed to do. Eventually another corporate role drained me until Spirit intervened. At a desperate breaking point, I quit without a plan—the first time I had ever chosen myself over security. The only steady thing left was the quiet project I had been secretly nurturing for years: High Light. At first, it was only a concept, a private sanctuary of high-vibration objects that reflected the balanced and mystical life I longed for. I thought it was a creative bridge between who I was and who I wanted to be. But it was never the bridge.
Donnie's story
of healing, High Light, and the sacred return to Self
Donnie Soddu, Founder & Shamanic Practitioner
For a long time, I thought I knew what success looked like. I earned my degree at the University of Pennsylvania, continued postgraduate study at Cambridge, built a reputable marketing career, and had a life that, on paper, checked every box. But a quiet truth kept rising in me: I wasn’t living in alignment. Inside, I felt numb, anxious, and deeply misaligned. Like I was constantly performing a version of myself that wasn’t real.
Then motherhood cracked me open. With my son, I felt called to spend as much time in nature as possible—drawn to the forest, to the primal and the spiritual. With the birth of my daughter, named after my grandmother, the presence of my maternal ancestors grew undeniable. Their spirit came in dreams, to the intuitives I sought for my own healing, and in the crystals and plants I was compelled to gather. Giving birth to her awakened a connection to the female healers in my lineage in a way nothing else had, and it became the catalyst for transforming how I lived.
Shamanism found me.
High Light was the portal.
A door gifted by Spirit. A way into the life I hadn’t let myself imagine: one led by intuition, service, and connection to something greater.
Since then, I’ve continued to train, to deepen, and to live this work every day as a mother, as a practitioner, as a guide. My practice is rooted in shamanism, energy work, and ancestral wisdom, but also in my lived experience of navigating the high-pressure modern world. My work isn’t about escaping life—it’s about learning how to be fully alive inside it.
Through my work, the most important thing I can offer you is permission. Permission to step into your own path, even if it doesn’t make sense yet. Permission to stop contorting yourself into something you’re not. Permission to trust your timing. And the space to remember that you already know who you are.
This is what I’ve been given by the helping spirits, and now it's what I strive to give. You don’t need to have it all figured out.
You just need to begin.