Janice Sullivan

[Note: Awakin Call followed by a 1-week Living & Dying Pod.] 

"Life, however, became my greatest teacher." That is how Janice Sullivan, Ph.D. describes the years after 2015. She trained as an architect in Bogotá, Colombia, then built a career in higher education, and now serves as a college dean. In between, life had other lessons in store: a life-threatening illness, a string of losses, and a healing she still struggles to put into words.

She earned her architecture degree in Colombia, and was teaching in higher education there, before she moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. The transition was not smooth. A program director told her he did not understand why people from "third-world countries" belonged in American universities, and suggested she go home.

She went home in tears, ready to give up. Then her husband, Mike, told her, "Never doubt your dreams or your ability to achieve them. Don't allow someone else's words to define your future."

She stayed, finished her doctorate with honors, and built a career as dean of community engagement at San Jacinto College. She stays alert to students carrying the fears she once did: multilingual learners, immigrants, first-generation college-goers, like the petrochemical engineer from Colombia she talked out of settling for retail work, who went on to earn a certification in aerospace engineering.

In 2015, at forty-two, an emergency room doctor found a five-centimeter tumor in her pancreas. In her words, it was "a life-threatening health crisis" that led to major surgery and "a deep reexamination of what it means to heal and live with purpose." Until then, she saw herself as healthy and strong, a yoga teacher in control of her body. "In a matter of minutes," she has written, "everything I believed about myself seemed to disappear."

Loss followed loss: her father, her Newfoundland dog Maximus, and in 2020, her husband Mike. Vertigo, seizures, and fainting arrived alongside the grief, symptoms no doctor could explain. By December 2024, collapsing unconscious in a parking lot while visiting her mother in Colombia, she reached what she calls the bottom: "I cannot continue living this way. Something has to change."

That decision led her, in 2025, to a weeklong retreat in Denver with Dr. Joe Dispenza, a meditation researcher whose website "kept showing up" everywhere. She applied to be a "healee." During the coherence healing session, she felt "lightning coming through my stomach," her body moving in what she called pure geometry, beings of light working alongside the healers. A deviated septum that once needed surgery cleared on its own. The seizures never returned.

The HeartMath Institute, which monitored the retreat, later included her results in what Dispenza has shared publicly. Sullivan calls what came out of it "a bridge between science and spirituality, evidence-based practices and lived wisdom." She has channeled that into Yogabrella, the wellness practice she founded, where she now teaches Qigong at senior centers alongside her work in higher education.

Join us in conversation with this architect turned dean turned healer, who has spent a lifetime building bridges -- between countries, between disciplines, and now, between the measurable and the mysterious.