I’m Ahriana Platten.
My life has been one long lesson in paradox, and I mean that in the most useful way possible.
Paradox is what happens when two things that look like opposites sit down at the same table and reveal that they were never really separate.
Sacred and ordinary. Dormant and blooming. Lost in a way that was actually a form of being found. I’ve spent thirty-five years living inside that tension, not trying to resolve it, but learning how to let it be instructive. The teachers and mentors I’ve walked with over those decades have taught me something I now hold as bedrock: the places that feel like contradictions are almost always the places where the real work lives.
I live and teach inside the paradox, the way you live inside a house you’ve built with your own hands, knowing every corner, every place the light falls strange, every spot that holds a memory. That intimacy with the work is what I bring to you.
It matters to me that you know…
The sacred is real, and the dishes still pile up.
Real transformation doesn’t arrive in a moment of peak experience and then stay. It moves through the body slowly, rearranging things you didn’t know needed rearranging. You can be genuinely initiated and still have a hard week. You can be walking a deeply spiritual path and feel, some mornings, like you’re barely keeping it together. That doesn’t mean the path isn’t working. It often means it’s working most of all.
I’ve been helping people understand that truth for more than three decades, and I wouldn’t trade a single complicated moment of it.
How I Actually Got Here
I didn’t float in on a lotus flower. I wish I could tell you I was always luminous and sure-footed. I wasn’t.
I was pulled into this work the way water eventually finds its way through stone. Yes, I have credentials: Interfaith Minister. Unity Minister. Third-Degree High Priestess in two lineages. Reiki Master Teacher. Sonic Meditation Facilitator.
Transpersonal Hypnotherapist. A Ph.D. focused on Pastoral Counseling Psychology. I hold them and honor what they represent, but they were never the whole story.
The real education happened on sacred ground all over the world. I’ve gathered with elders from more than 250 spiritual traditions. I’ve prayed in temples in South Korea, Spain, and Bali, listened to wisdom keepers in Mongolia, India, Egypt, Turkey and Brazil, and received ancient teachings in Ireland, Hungary, Italy, Vietnam, Portugal, and China. Those weren’t study trips. They were thresholds to new understanding, and I arrived at each one carrying my whole self, my questions, my wounds, my wonder. I left changed every time. Through all of it, I learned something embarrassingly simple; Truth is everywhere.Â
Every tradition, every people, every lineage is holding a piece of it. And human beings are far more powerful than the world tends to tell us. My life’s work has been to help people claim that power, not as a concept, but as a living, breathing, daily reality.
What I Do Now
I help you stop performing your spirituality and start living it.
There’s a difference between knowing the language of transformation and actually being transformed. I’ve met people who can speak beautifully about the sacred and are quietly starving for it. The work I do crosses that gap. It’s not about acquiring more wisdom. It’s about inhabiting what you already, on some level, know.
For Seekers
I guide you through the initiations that break you open and remake you. Midlife. Grief. Menopause. The slow unraveling of an identity you’ve outgrown. These aren’t problems to be managed. They’re thresholds, and thresholds deserve a guide who has actually stood at them. I’ve walked every one of these passages, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not at all gracefully, and I know where the gold is hidden, even when it’s buried deep.
For Spiritual Business Owners & Visionaries
I help you build work that’s spiritually alive and financially sustainable. Those two things belong together, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t spent thirty years building and consulting across five continents. Sacred work deserves to succeed, and it can, without selling your soul to do it.
For Practitioners & Leaders
I teach you how to hold transformative space without losing yourself inside it. How to lead from wisdom rather than unhealed wounds. How to build communities that genuinely nourish the people in them, including you.
What I'm known For
Books like Rites and Rituals, Sacred Menopause: A Woman’s Guide to Sovereignty, and The Changing Story. My essays on Substack
My contribution to the documentary Time of the Sixth Sun. Serving as an Ambassador to the Parliament of the World’s Religions.
But the work I treasure most happens in the quiet. In the moment when a woman realizes she isn’t broken. She’s in the middle of an initiation. She’s becoming something her old self didn’t have language for yet. I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count, and it never stops feeling like witnessing a small miracle.
Why People Work with Me
Because I don’t offer spiritual shortcuts, and I’m not interested in making the hard parts sound prettier than they are.
I won’t hand you a five-step framework for enlightenment. I won’t smile warmly and tell you to trust the universe while your world is coming apart at the seams. What I will do is tell you the truth, with all the compassion I have, and I have a lot of it. I’ll hold steady while you move through the mess. I’ll show you, again and again, how the mystical and the practical draw from the same source, because they do, and knowing that changes how you move through everything.
I bring thirty-five years of lived experience to this work. Not borrowed words. Not a framework I built from someone else’s map. A path I’ve walked, fallen on, gotten back up from, and walked some more. That’s what sits across from you when we work together.
Real wisdom shows up in jeans. I’m proof.
Who I am Beyond the Titles
I’m sixty-five, and I am deeply, genuinely at home in my own life. That didn’t come easily, and I won’t pretend it did.
I’ve lived through divorce, menopause, building a blended family, a life-threatening illness, more than one professional reinvention, and the kind of long dark nights that make you wonder whether any of what you believed about yourself is actually true. I emerged from every one of those passages not just intact, but more fully myself than I was before. I believe that’s possible for you too, not as a reassuring thing to say, but because I’ve seen it happen, in my own life and in hundreds of others.
I live in Colorado with my husband, Mark. He works mostly with men. I work mostly with women. There are always exceptions to that. Together we lead retreats around the world and walk beside people through the passages that unmake and remake a life. We have what we call a “yours, mine, ours, and somebody else’s” family full of adult children and grandchildren I love fiercely.
I also love good coffee, honest conversation, and the particular joy of watching someone decide, finally, to stop making themselves small.
The Reason I Do This
There was a time when I couldn’t find anyone to walk with me through the moments that split my life open. I looked for a lighthouse. A steady voice. Someone who could say this is hard and it makes sense and you’re going to find your way through. No one came. So I followed the relentless pull of my own soul into a wild, disorienting dark, and for a while it felt like I might not find my way back.
Then a few wise women reached toward me.
They didn’t fix me. They didn’t clean me up or hand me a program. They simply stayed, and they said: you’re still in there. I see you. And slowly, across more time than I wanted it to take, I saw myself again.
That moment is why I do this work.
I hold a lamp while you find your footing. I stand beside you as your old stories fall away, the ones that were never fully true to begin with. I remind you of your power during the stretches when you can’t feel it. I tell the truth about the path ahead, even when it’s uneven, because you deserve honesty more than you need comfort. And I promise, with my whole blazing heart, to honor the sacredness of your transformation. To see your beauty even when you can’t. To protect your pace. To stay.
Most of all, I promise this: I will always call you toward your highest expression. Not a performance of it. The real thing.
If You're Ready...
If you’re in a transition that feels like a holy undoing. If you’re building something that matters and you need it to actually work. If you’ve been doing the spiritual work for years and you’re ready for a guide who meets you at the depth you’ve already reached.