✦ a note before you wander in
This one is real, and it holds some heavy things.
This is a true story, and somewhere in its middle it passes through addiction, the loss of a parent, and grief. It is also, somehow, a story about magic. You stay in charge of how you read it: step in gently, skip ahead to the bright part, or wander back another day. There is no wrong way through, and you never have to read a single word.
Trolls, fairies, and little elementals live on this page. They are friendly. Tap them.
✦ andie-land · a true story, told on her behalf
She couldn't change what happened.
So she changed the story.
How a girl turned the loss of her father into a studio full of fireflies, trolls, and second chances. This is the long way around. Wander at your own pace.
Andie ✦
scroll, if you're ready ↓
where the story has landed
Before the hard part, here is where it all landed: a soft, firefly-drenched room on Main St where people come to grieve, rest, repair, reconnect, disappear for an hour, take a nap, snuggle the studio dog, and simply be.
That room is KUUMA, and Andie built it. She is a licensed Neurosculpting® facilitator, psychology-trained and trauma-informed, and as of 2025 the sole owner, which makes KUUMA a 100% women-owned business in Moncton. She did not arrive here by way of a tidy plan. She arrived the long way, carrying one of the heaviest things a person can carry. This is the story of how she carried it, and then, in time, how she learned to set it down somewhere beautiful.
the part you can skip
The hard middle of it
This part holds addiction, an overdose, and grief. You can read it, or you can skip it. The magic that comes later does not ask you to walk through this first. You choose.
In 2011, Andie's father died of a heroin overdose. She was 21, in the final semester of a psychology degree, enrolled, of all things, in a course called Death and Grieving. She was studying it on paper and living it in her body in the very same week.
It landed as relational trauma, the kind that takes years to find a way back from. In her own words, it was as though every worst fear came true in a single moment, with nothing she could do to stop it. There is no tidy sentence for a thing like that, so we will not pretend to hand you one.
If you opened this, take a breath here. You can close it again whenever you like.
what she did with it (at first)
She didn't know what to do, so she just kept moving.
She graduated anyway. That same year, Crandall University named her its first-ever student ambassador, for the faith and perseverance she showed in the middle of all of it. Even while grieving, she kept showing up: vice president of student affairs, a make-shift varsity soccer player (purely because the team was short on bodies), and a data-entry clerk in the registrar's office to keep the rent paid.
There was one anchor she had carried since childhood: summer camp. One week every summer in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, dropped off to be gloriously, usefully wild, by the fire, screaming campfire songs, learning ropes and archery. She loved it so much that she grew into it: senior counsellor, programs director, tractor driver, toilet cleaner, builder of crab castles and sandcastles alike.
It was from camp that she slipped away one Friday to attend her father's funeral. They could not bury him in the February cold, so the ceremony waited for the summer, and the grief came up all over again. Right around then, an email arrived: a university in British Columbia was still waiting on the rest of her application for a masters in marriage and family therapy.
On less than three weeks' notice, she packed her car and pointed it at Vancouver. One semester in, everything she had stuffed down rose up to meet her, and she understood that she needed to stop and actually feel it. So she drove. South for Christmas through Washington and Oregon, a couple of slow months in San Francisco, down to San Diego, east to Florida, and then all the way up the east coast, stopping for friends in North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Maine. A long lap around a country, which is sometimes exactly what processing looks like.
the studio that grew out of it
When she came home to Moncton, she finished her education degree, and then she built a room.
She will tell you the truth of it: running a business looks glorious from the outside and quietly becomes 80-hour weeks with no paycheque, real overhead, and real weight. The pandemic years she never asked for handed her the one thing she badly needed anyway, rest, and a slow recovery from burnout. That gentle re-start is the only reason there is anything left to grow. These days she teaches fewer classes and pours most of herself into KOULU, and she guards her play (zouk, travel, making things) on purpose, so the burnout never gets a second turn.
and then, the doorway
In the autumn of 2025, she flew to Mexico for Día de los Muertos, and she carried her father's ashes with her.
When she arrived, she could not bring herself to scatter them. They were the last of him. On the phone, a friend offered her a different thought: you don't have to let him go. You could simply take your pops on a sick vacation instead. Something turned. It was as though her life were a film, and for the first time she could watch herself from a different camera angle. It was almost startling, how far a single sentence can move a person.
Día de los Muertos is colourful and reverent and playful, entirely unafraid of death. Its rituals, frankly, healed her. She began bringing her dad to dinner, setting a place for him at the table. The waitstaff, this being Mexico, this being the Day of the Dead, understood completely. They would bring him a beer. Ask what he felt like eating. And just like that, Andie was on vacation with her father, spending real, easy, unhurried time together, perhaps for the first time ever.
the 4 Elements · and the little trolls who run it
A few nights later, on 38th Ave in Playa del Carmen, she found a colourful outdoor bistro called the 4 Elements.
Hundreds of bright ribbons and trinkets knotted into the trees, string lights, live music. Her server asked whether she had ever heard of the Aluxes. Now, some context is required: Andie has a vast troll collection. The 90s Russ trolls, hundreds of them, scattered all through KUUMA, small totems of her relationship with her own inner child. So when a waiter in Mexico begins talking about trolls, every hair on her arms stands up.
The Aluxes, he explained, are Mayan trolls: mischievous protectors of the Riviera Maya, the jungle, the cenotes, guardians against anyone who would abuse the land. He asked her to choose an element from the Aluxes' house. She chose water. And then he invited her into the four rituals woven through the restaurant. She returned three nights in a row to perform them. You can perform them here too.
Tap each element to make your offering ✦
The Aluxes have seen you.
Andie offered every tiny, shiny thing in her bag, three nights running, on the Day of the Dead, in Mexico, at dinner with her late father. And something inside her was quietly, completely rearranging.
the seal
She designed a troll tattoo: half modern Russ troll, half Mayan Alux.
The next day, walking down 5th Ave, she stepped into a tattoo shop and made it real: a small troll holding a crystal. Into the ink of that crystal, the artist mixed some of her father's ashes. He is, quite literally, part of it now. Then she gave the whole thing a name. Her father's name was Drew, but Mayan has no sound for the "dr" at the beginning. So the Mayan name for her dad became Truu. He travels under it now.
A little troll, a crystal, and some of her dad mixed into the ink for good.
what was actually happening, underneath
None of this was an accident. It was Neurosculpting®, live, in five steps. Tap each one.
Neurosculpting® is a registered method created by Lisa Wimberger of the Neurosculpting® Institute, and Andie is a licensed facilitator. Here is how she ran the entire protocol on herself, without ever meaning to, in a colourful bistro in Mexico.
and then she met Avion
She returned a few months later for ZoukMX, the dance intensive and festival, and the 4 Elements saw a great deal more of her.
All week, with friends, she kept going back, offering shiny magical things to the Aluxes, playing inside their small enchanted world. On the final night, the bistro let the group in on a secret: the big Aluxes, the ones carved by local shamans, the ones that quietly migrated around the restaurant each day, were for sale. Andie knew at once that she needed one. That is the night she met Avion Alux.
Avion has a passport now, more or less. Four countries in under a year, starting with the one he came from:
the part she takes on stage
You can't change the past. But you can change your relationship with it, and the way you tell the story now.
This is what Andie took to the stage at KNOWN, Natalie Davison's live community event, twice. Once on the nervous system and the breath, and once, in November 2025, on the neuroscience of authorship and autonomy: how Neurosculpting® helped her heal after losing her dad. Storytelling, neuroplasticity, somatics, breath, all of it in service of a single idea. You are the author.
You always hold the power to tell the story through a different lens. Add a detail. Remove one. Edit it gently. Or change it entirely. Try it on the lines below. Flip the lens.
My dad died of an overdose in 2011. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and there was nothing I could do.
My dad and I go on vacations now. There's a beer waiting for him at every table, he has a Mayan name, Truu, and he rides along in the ink on my arm.
All I had left of him was a small box of ashes, and I was terrified to let any of it go.
I didn't have to let him go at all. I just took my pops on a sick vacation instead, and brought a little of him home inside a crystal.
Grief is a thing that happens to you, and all you can do is survive it.
Grief is a thing you can author. Trolls, ribbons, a tattoo, a new name. You get to decide what it becomes.
Sad about your dad, who died of an overdose? Take his ashes on a luxury vacation and tattoo them into your skin. Is that a little unhinged? Maybe. But sometimes it takes a big, wild, real experience to make the lesson land in the body. You can change any pattern, any program you are running. You really only need the willingness to begin. The rest, as it turns out, is yet to come.
This is the power of agency, autonomy, and authorship.
Protect everything.
Hate nothing. Create relentlessly.
That is andie-land. Now you know why the studio is full of trolls and fairies and small glowing things. They were never decoration. They are how she found her way here. And every soft, strange, firefly-lit corner of KUUMA is, in some quiet way, built for him, and for anyone still learning to carry what they love.
