I'm Rev. Dr. Ahriana Platten.
My life has been one long lesson in paradox, and I mean that in the most useful way possible.
I'm a spiritual anthropologist and transformative business leader, someone who spends her days helping visionaries move from achievement to impact, though titles like that only tell you what I do, not how I've come to do it.
Paradox is what happens when two things that look like opposites sit down at the same table and discover they were never really separate. Sacred and ordinary. Dormant and blooming. Tradition and evolution. I've spent thirty-five years living inside that tension, not trying to resolve it, but learning to let it teach me, and the teachers and mentors who walked beside me over those decades left me with something I now hold as bedrock: the places that feel like contradictions are almost always the places where the real work is done.
I live and teach inside the paradox the way you live inside a house you built with your own hands. I know every corner. I know the places the light falls strange, and the ones that hold a memory I'd never trade. That kind of intimacy with the work, the lived-in, worn-soft familiarity of it, is what I bring to the people I sit with.
So here is what I want you to know before anything else, because it matters more than any credential I could list.
The sacred is real, and the dishes still pile up. Real transformation doesn't arrive in a single peak moment and then stay, tidy and finished. It moves through the body slowly, quietly rearranging things you didn't even 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 holding it together. That doesn't mean the path isn't working. More often than not, it means it's working in the best and most life-enhancing ways.
I've spent more than three decades helping people understand that truth in their own lives, and I wouldn't trade a single complicated moment of it.
How I Actually Got Here
I wish I could tell you I was always wise and sure-footed. I wasn't.
I was pulled into this work the way water eventually finds its way through stone, slow and unglamorous, but unstoppable. Yes, I have credentials. Ordained Minister. Third-Degree High Priestess in two lineages. Reiki Master Teacher. Sonic Meditation Facilitator. Transpersonal Hypnotherapist. A Ph.D. in Pastoral Counseling Psychology. Along the way I've written books that found their way onto bestseller lists, which still surprises me a little. I hold all of it and honor what it represents, but none of it was ever the whole story, and anyone who tells you a title is the whole story hasn't done the work yet.
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. I've listened, really listened, to wisdom keepers in Mongolia, India, Egypt, Turkey, and Brazil, and received ancient messages in Ireland, Hungary, Italy, Vietnam, Portugal, and China. Each new place was a threshold, and I arrived at each one carrying my whole self: my questions, my wounds, my wonder, and usually a little too much luggage. I left changed every single time.
Through all of it, I learned something almost embarrassingly simple. Truth is everywhere. Every tradition, every culture, 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 helping people claim that power, not as a concept to admire from a distance, but as a living, breathing, daily reality they can actually stand inside.
What I Do Now
I help you stop performing your spirituality and start living it, so you can make a difference.
Talking about transformation and actually being transformed are different things. I've met plenty of people who can speak beautifully about the sacred and are quietly starving for it underneath. The work I do crosses that gap, and it takes a few different shapes depending on who's sitting across from me: retreat design and facilitation, regenerative living, ecotourism, mentoring, midlife passage work, and interfaith advocacy, all of it rooted in the same conviction. It's not about acquiring more wisdom. You likely have plenty already. It's about learning to inhabit what you, on some level, already know.
For Seekers
I walk with 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 away. They're thresholds, and thresholds deserve a guide who has actually stood at them, more than once, in the dark, without a flashlight. I've walked every one of these passages myself, sometimes with grace and sometimes without a shred of it, 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, because those two things belong together, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't spent thirty years building and consulting across five continents like I have. Sacred work deserves to succeed. It can, and it doesn't require selling your soul to get there.
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, and how to build communities that genuinely nourish the people in them, including you. Especially you.
What I'm known For
My books: Rites and Rituals: Harnessing the Power of Sacred Ceremony, Sacred Menopause: A Woman's Guide to Sovereignty, and The Changing Story, a children’s book that makes change fun. I’m also known for my writing on Substack, my contributions to the documentary series Time of the Sixth Sun, and five years of service as an Ambassador to the Parliament of the World's Religions (2014-2019).
But honestly, the work I treasure most happens in the quiet, away from any of that. It happens in the moment a woman realizes she isn't broken. She's in the middle of an initiation, stepping into something her old self didn't yet have language for. I've watched it happen more times than I can count, and it never once stops feeling like witnessing a small miracle. I don't think I'll ever get used to it, and I hope it always moves me to soft tears.
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 actually 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 whole 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, without flinching and without rushing you out of it. I'll show you, again and again if I need to, how the mystical and the practical draw from the same source, because they do, and knowing that changes how you move through absolutely 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, usually with coffee in hand and dignity somewhat intact. That's what sits across from you when we work together: someone who's actually been there, not someone quoting a book about it. Real wisdom shows up in jeans. I'm proof of that, most days in my favorite pair.
Who I am Beyond the Titles
I'm sixty-five, and I’m deeply, genuinely at home in my own life. That didn't come easily, and yet, it came. It will come for you too.
I've lived through childhood sexual assault, domestic violence, divorce, menopause, building a blended family from scratch, a life-threatening illness, more than one professional reinvention, and the kind of long dark nights that make you wonder whether anything you believed about yourself was ever true to begin with. I emerged from every one of those passages more fully myself than I was before. I believe that's possible for you too, not as a reassuring thing I say to make you feel better, but because I've watched it happen, in my own life and in the lives of hundreds of people I've had the honor of walking with.
I’ve been partnered with my husband, Mark, for 27 years . 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 we love fiercely.
I love sweet coffee, honest conversation, and the way sunrise and sunset prove opposites are meant to collaborate. And I've found that if you watch closely enough, you’ll see the world keeps handing you the same question in different light.
Love is always the answer.
The Reason I Do This
There was a time when I felt so alone. I looked for a lighthouse. A steady voice. Someone who could simply say this is hard and you're going to find your way through it. No one came. So I followed the relentless pull of my own soul into a wild, disorienting dark, and for a while it genuinely felt like I might not find my way back out.
A few wise women emerged. They didn't clean me up or hand me a tissue to dry my tears. They simply stayed, which turned out to be such a generous thing, and they said, you're still in there. I see you. Those few words called me into my body and my life and in a new way.
Those few moment are 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 yourself. I tell you the truth about the path ahead, even when it's uneven, because you deserve honesty far 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 in the moments you can't see it yourself. To protect your pace, whatever pace that turns out to be. To stay, as you move through change.
Most of all, I promise this. I will always call you toward your highest expression, and I mean the real thing, not a polished performance of it.Â
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, not just look good from the outside. If you've been doing the spiritual work for years and you're finally ready for a guide who meets you at the depth you've already reached, without flinching from it, I’m here to hold a torch while you explore the path ahead.
LET'S TALK30 Days of Simple Ceremonies
Sacred living often begins with small, meaningful gestures
This complimentary offering invites you to weave reflection and intention into everyday moments, reminding you that transformation rarely requires grandeur.