About Christina
I was born in Romania, before the Iron Curtain fell. Fortunately, my parents had the courage to find their way West when I was young. I came to Canada at 6. Through the amazing risks my parents took and my own diverse and wild journey, I’ve learned that so much of our collective experience as people on this planet is frought with upset, divisiveness, cultural misunderstanding, bad actors and such. While at the same time there is so much precious beauty, commonality, kindness, playfulness, and a creative spark from which divides can be mended, hurts can be healed, and positive futures can become reality.
My Interest, Concern, and Journey with AI
Science has been a thread throughout my life. In grade 6 I won my school, area, and regional science fair with a project on the Seebeck Effect. I couldn’t go on to the Nationals because I was one year too young. I had a secret crush on Star Trek’s Data when I was 12 😉 I went on to study Microbiology and Immunology at McGill University. I have been following the Singularity buzz for the last 15 years.
A few years ago, I became quite concerned with the coming ramifications of AI and immersed myself in communities and project to try and help.
I co-founded the Futurism Working Group at NEXUS (A community of ultra-high net worth individuals and social entrepreneurs who come together to find solutions and make positive impact on the world stage.) The yearly global conference was at the UN and I facilitated events, moderated panels, and supported leading world experts on emerging exponential technologies.
I was aware that the way in which we hold the issue of AI will be very important. Knowing that it would stir up a lot of fear which would then lean towards bad outcomes, I founded The Institute for Human and AI Partnership. This was an attempt to foster a language and stance where AI was not scary but something we could interact on an even keel with. My thinking changed and I let that project go although I did enjoy hosting a session at Singularity University’s annual conference on the topic.
I was on the IEEE’s AI Ethics Panel and also participated in conferences on AI Governance. The experience was quite disconcerting at the time as leading international academics, government officials, ethicists all could agree that we were hurtling towards a real problem, but no one could wrap their minds around or offer solutions.
My Opening into Love, Understanding, Support of People and Discovery of Deep Intelligence
I started off as an atheist science nerd. If I couldn’t see it, measure it, replicate it, it wasn’t real.
I’ve ended up a proponent of generative fields of consciousness that give us coaches, therapists and practitioners of many sorts a boundless playground to connect with and draw the magic and mystery out from our clients’ world to help them heal and succeed in their visions.
I’d say I’m agnostic now 😉
Although I love science, I realized pretty early on in my University days that my gifts lie with people. I embarked on a decades-long pursuit of learning. Through research in psychology, trainings in therapy and coaching, and experiential studies with various indigenous wisdom traditions, I’ve developed my skills and craft in this domain, along with an embodied understanding of what I refer to as Deep Intelligence.
Living in a Research Community
My journey started with an interest in psychology and therapy but quickly landed me living in a warehouse with 50 people, no walls or privacy, researching what people do when they intentionally decide to experiment with social norms and conditioning and finding out through experimenting, what they really like and how they really are.
In this setting, my body and nervous system were experiencing A LOT more intensity than I believed possible and the magic of limbic resonance (the way we regulate our bodies to feel what others around us are feeling) became a fundamental truth of mammalian life that I was now an expert in.
I also became an expert on people. The 5 years spent there taught me so much about who people are in so many situations: from the moments people spent watching TV to how they coped and handled stress, secrets, fears, sex, money, desires, betrayal, and the rest. It was all on display, processed, and experimented with. It was living in a science experiment.
Generative Trance
After standard coaching training with the Coaches Training Institute, I kept looking for more. It was not touching the depths of work that I knew was possible.
Everything changed for me in 2010 when my partner introduced me to the work of Stephen Gilligan, one of Milton Erickson’s closest students. His next-generation Generative Trance work was exactly what I was looking for. I already knew about limbic resonance from my training in relationships and sexuality. This was limbic resonance on steroids. And applied to healing, spiritual, and personal development. I had found a powerful way into Deep Intelligence.
I began inserting these modalities into all of my offerings. I ran Eye-Gazing parties. I had a research team with students of mine exploring the possibilities of using trance states with other practices to learn what else the human mind and body can do. And, I began teaching Trance training workshops with my partner.
Indigenous Wisdom Traditions
At this point, my curiosity and explorations had taken me in the direction of spirituality. It was no longer possible to deny that there is a core, ineffable experience that all spiritual traditions ultimately point at. Like spokes on a wheel, no matter which you follow, you ultimately end up at the same center.
I was fortunate to be invited to experience the rites of the Native American Church.
In one of the most powerful experiences of my life – I sat in the open, alone, on a mountain for 4 days with no food or water in the Lakota tradition on a Vision Quest with a Taino tribe that invited me in. Everything fell away from my constructed ego identity on the mountain. It is the only true rite of passage I have ever experienced. And it led to the same center of the wheel.
This is a pic of the 10 of us who went up the hill that year, along with Chief Roman Redhawk in the center, gathering to prepare ourselves and the land the weekend before.
Bringing it All Together
After 15+ years of concurrent and parallel studies in somatic practices, Generative Trance, and the shamanic world, I came to know their similiarities. They facilitate ways of dropping into the deep fields of the unconscious mind, experiencing personal healing and spiritual transcendence, and expanding and connecting our awareness into the wider fields of collective consciousness. They allow us to connect under the roots of where our patterns are born, in a way where we move from our ego-minds, back to the substrate of consciousness itself. From there, we can skillfully create wonderful new realities for ourselves personally, and collectively. This is what the tree in our logo represents.
With more and more of this work coming into my coaching, my clients and apprentices noticed more profound and lasting success and change. So much so, that they began asking me for specific training in my synthesis of the skills and ways of Deep Intelligence. The Deep Coaching Mastery Program was born. I began holding weekly Soul Space sessions for the public to guide them into their Deep Intelligence. A year and a half in, and they are becoming more and more popular and are now one of the main gathering places for the community here and ways to infuse your life with some of your inner wisdom magic.
With the advent of ChatGPT and the all-of-a-sudden mass adoption and awareness that the mainstream has, the issue of AI became central again. From which the big AHA came – A way to use my well-honed natural gifts to support the long-held cause that I’ve been concerned with for a long time!
And voila – the Center for Deep Intelligence.
My hope is that you enjoy your explorations here into your own humanity, the nature of your own mind, create beautiful real-world outcomes for yourself, and are able to protect, prepare, and steward your mind and consciousness into the incredible Age of AI.
Other things you might like to know about me:
- I had spinal surgery when I was 12 and thought it was the coolest thing ever – doctors rock my world. I have yet to meet someone who can beat me at a “longest scar” contest. I am bionic.
- When I did research on stress hormones, part of my job was stressing women out. That’s where I learned to put away my “nice girl” act and realized that our identities are fluid.
- I’m blind in one eye, so I can’t see 3D. Tackling stairs is comical.
- I’m writing a book on Deep Intelligence.
- I’m a total science geek and an optimist, so I have hope that we’ll find a way through humanity’s current growth spurt.
- I sat on a mountain for 4 days without food or water on a Vision Quest with a local Native American tribe to find out what I’m made of and what is most important to me – what I’m here for. I have a deep reverence for rites of passage.
- I dance a mean tango.
- I used to be a lifeguard. I’m afraid of deep water.
- I used to love literature. Then, since social-media, I couldn’t finish a book for 20 years. Now … I have my attention back and LOVE the literary journeys I get to take part in again. So I know that if yours has also dwindled, you can get it back!
- The pandemic lockdowns brought me a beautiful gift – the discovery that I am an artist. I’ve sprinkled my art throughout the Center. I hope you enjoy feeling what it evokes in you.
- I truly believe that people are incredible and I am constantly amazed by their courage, strength and beauty. I feel truly blessed to get to devote my days to empowering them and watching them shine. I am a lucky woman.