I’m Cassandra. I was born in Phoenix, Arizona to Michigan born adventurous parents who met in Texas. My mother Janel was a maid/housekeeper and Dad was a mechanic/truck driver.

I joined the adventure in 1983 and my brother Shane joined us in 1986. We moved around a lot and I went to schools in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and New York before graduating high school in 2001.

In 1992 I was told Mom was sick and she would be dying “in two weeks.” She ended up living a year and a half although I didn’t get to be around her much.

When we lost her my world fell apart. I had to grow up too fast at age 10 and I turned to music and dance to find comfort.

After seeing the music video “7” by Prince and the New Power Generation, and starring his muse Mayte Garcia, I became an admirer of his music and Mayte’s dancing.

It helped me navigate the difficult feelings I was dealing with and gave me hope.

I started to take dance classes at SUNY Potsdam when I was 14 because there were no dance schools in my town. There I met my first bellydance teacher and to this day that’s the form of dance I have studied the most.

I also discovered astrology, tarot and crystals at this age. I felt disconnected from my roots having lost my mother and I needed a way to feel at home with myself again.

At Paisley Park on December 18, 1999 I got to live my dream of dancing onstage with Prince. Also on stage were legends George Clinton from Parliament/Funkadelic and Maceo Parker from James Brown’s band.

You can watch it on the Rave Un2 the Year 2000 DVD.

I went on to dance onstage with Prince two more times: June 2001 and July 2004. In June 2001 I was able to thank him for helping me get over the death of Mom standing in the Atrium at Paisley Park.

Since losing my mother at such a young age I felt lonely and turned to the internet to find people with similar interests as me. I was an avid writer on LiveJournal and met some online friends who lived in Los Angeles.

I had always dreamt of living in California so I found a college and moved out there, sight unseen, to study web design.

Dreams come true.

Unfortunately my unresolved trauma caught up with me and I turned to drugs and alcohol to deal with the grief the childhood me wasn’t able to process. I was very angry and took my anger out on myself. It was also affecting my life and career, I had fulfilled another dream of working on designs for the entertainment industry, and I didn’t want to ruin it.

It was when I turned 32 in 2015, the age my mother never go to reach as she died at age 31, I quit alcohol and realized I had decades of emotions to process. I decided I needed to figure out the negative parts of my personality, find out where they came from and fix them.

I turned to the the ways I healed myself as a child: dance, journaling, crystals and tarot cards.

While I was in the middle of that process we learned of the death of Prince. His death sent me into a dark spiral that landed me in therapy. I couldn’t turn to my old vices.

There I learned the questions to ask myself in order to get to the root of a problem. I did EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) to work through traumatic childhood memories, including my mother’s death and the aftermath.

EMDR helped me learn to reframe any negative experience so negative emotions no longer control me.

More recently I have moved back to my parents’ home state of Michigan with my cat Max. I’m studying to be a Pilates instructor to add to my repertoire so I can offer movement healing practices as well.

I’m also writing a memoir about Mom. You can learn more about it on my blog on Substack.

Stay tuned….