Meet Aaron

I didn't read
about this work. I survived it.

Marine. Father. PTSD survivor. Cult escapee. I've been medicated, burned out, broken open, and rebuilt, and I found healing in places no doctor ever pointed me toward. Now I help others find it faster than I did.

Aaron, Souls On Fire

The system told me my wounds were permanent. The jungle told me otherwise.

Aaron standing post in Iraq
Chapter 01

My life started the way
most of yours did.

Traumatically. I won't belabor the details. You probably recognize the shape of it anyway. Childhood leaves marks. The question is what you do with them.

What I did with mine was carry them forward, collecting more weight along the way. I grew up in a Christian cult. Lost my faith when I left it, and spent years looking for something solid to stand on. I found the Marines. I found combat. I found a family, a career, a home for a king, and inside all of it, constant turmoil.

I was burning myself out. Working on stimulants just to function. Taking enough medication to sedate something considerably larger than me. And still, the symptoms only got worse.

"Fifteen years in the VA system. Every SSRI. Every sleeping med. Every anti-psychotic on the list. When I was told that more medication might help, I decided it was time to find healing somewhere else."

Chapter 02

The answers were in
the Amazon jungle.

In 2017, I traveled to the Amazon for an Ayahuasca vision quest. I didn't go because I had a plan. I went because I had run out of other options.

What I found there wasn't magic. It was clarity. For the first time in my life, I looked at myself without the filters, the defenses, or the medications blunting the signal. Decades of wounds, the kind I'd been managing and medicating and running from, became visible.

And visible things can be healed.

The beliefs formed in childhood. The patterns running on autopilot. The shadow that had been writing my story without my permission. It was all in there. It always was. We've had the answers the whole time. We just needed to know where to look.

Chapter 03

Healing became
the mission.

After the Amazon, I rebuilt. Divorced after 18 years of marriage. Raised three kids. Found God again, not the version I was handed as a child, but the real thing, at my lowest point. And through all of it, one thing became undeniable:

The chains are not permanent. The patterns can be interrupted. The triggers can be dismantled. The story can be rewritten by you, not by your past. I am living proof of that.

Souls On Fire exists because I couldn't keep that discovery to myself. The coaching, the ceremonies, the app, the journal: all of it is the work that changed my life, translated into something you can actually use. Before the clock runs out.

How I Work

I ask the questions
other people are
too polite to ask.

Shadow work is not comfortable. People come expecting to feel better quickly and instead find themselves feeling things they've been successfully avoiding for years. That's not a side effect. That's the mechanism.

I will poke at your programming. I'll notice the patterns you can't see because you're standing too close to them. I'll say things that land hard, not to be cruel, but because the uncomfortable observation is exactly what opens the door.

My goal isn't your daily checklist. It isn't your productivity. It isn't making you a better partner or employee or version of yourself on the surface. My goal is to give you a better relationship with your past, because that's what actually unlocks everything else.

Honesty over comfort

I'll tell you what I actually see. Not what's easiest to hear, what's most useful. That's the value of a guide who has no stake in your ego staying intact.

Perspective over prescription

I'm not handing you a ten-step program. I'm helping you see your own situation differently. The insight changes the behavior, never the other way around.

Response over reaction

The goal is a different choice in the moments that used to hijack you completely. Not suppression. Not management. Actual freedom from the loop.

Earned, not studied

I didn't learn this from a certification program. I learned it from a childhood wound, a combat tour, fifteen years of failed treatment, and a vision quest in the Amazon. I coach from the other side of the fire.

Full Disclosure

So we're both on
the same page.

You're about to do deep personal work with someone. You should know who that person actually is, not the curated version.

🦅

United States Marine Corps Combat Veteran. The discipline, the brotherhood, and the specific flavor of damage that comes with combat. All of it is in this work.

✝️

Grew up in a Christian cult. Read the Bible daily as a child. Rejected dogmatic and bad tanslations, and God found me at my lowest point. Deeply spiritual, never religious.

🧠

Computer nerd since before I could talk. All platforms. Lifelong gamer. I have overclocked AMD processors and played StarCraft while other teenagers were getting into more conventional trouble.

🌿

Healed in the Amazon jungle. After 15 years and every medication the VA had to offer, I found the answers I was looking for in 2017, in the middle of the jungle. That experience is the foundation of everything here.

👨‍👧‍👦

Father of three. Divorced after 18 years.Sometimes good things fall apart. Decades of learning and growing from mistakes have provided deep wisdom and conviction.

🔥

If you can hurt my feelings, I'll probably thank you. Hurt feelings are clues to unhealed wounds. I've done enough of my own work to mean that. And I'm the funniest person I know, as far as I know.

You've read the story.
Now let's write yours.

The first call is a conversation. No commitment, no pressure. Just an honest look at where you are and whether working together makes sense.