Here at Shine Fearlessly we take into account all aspects of gender exploration and transition. We understand that there are many parts of you: spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and social. We strive to support you as you work through and find your most authentic selves in each of these areas. We blend health and wellness, spiritual practices, with emotional processing and mentoring. We are also here to support your physical transition and the fears that come with moving forward, coming out, and being seen. Ultimately, we are driven to create a safe, inclusive community of authentic, real humans that are working to embody their highest selves, have fun, and support each other.

I am Travis Arnold and I have lived in many closets in my life: the lesbian closet, the trans closet, the spiritual closet, and the hardest one, I’ll call it the authenticity closet.

I have a lot of experience with breaking out of the closet and courageously facing my fears time and time again. But the hardest closet for me has been allowing myself to live out loud, to be seen for my truest self. Reflecting back its all been one big self-love journey.

My biggest struggle has always been the lack of support and acceptance from my family, which in turn created a deep feeling that being my truest self out-loud was unacceptable. It is something I struggled with well into my 30’s. I always felt love was only available to me if I lived within the guide rails of what others wanted from me. Breaking free of these constraints feels like my biggest accomplishment and the single thing most important thing I want help others overcome.

Here’s a little bit of my journey.

I realized my attraction to women at 15 years old and struggled greatly with self-acceptance and coming out. Ultimately, I knew it was just part of me and it could not be denied. The struggle with my family was difficult and affected my relationship with myself. I spent my early adulthood in a lesbian relationship, but still felt something wasn’t quite right.

After starting therapy and tuning into my inner thoughts, I had the realization of “I’m a man.” It came to me like a voice that didn’t quite sound like mine. I have come to recognize that voice inside of me as the voice of my highest self. It breaks through the noise when its time for me to make a difficult decision and change. I started processing my realization at 28 years old. It took me 2 years of processing my own fears and biases before I threw that closet door open and stepped into the world as Travis. The physical changes came slow and steady, life continued to reveal its magical plan to me and I kept showing up, doing the internal work that came along with it all.

Three years after my transition started, I met my beautiful wife who opened up a whole new world of acceptance, spirituality, inner power, & entrepreneurship. Raised in traditional religion, I always felt like there was something even bigger, accepting and magical out there, everything she brought to my life spoke to me. It wasn’t until recently that I came out of the spiritual closet. It was a lot easier to have my beliefs in private than to share them with the world. But as I embraced my empathic gifts and realized through my reiki training how much healing I could bring to the world, I started to own it and throw that closet door open too.

It is from all these experiences that Shine Fearlessly was born. A need for tapping into our innate personal power and unique differences, to be loved and supported as we are, to see the magic of the universe and that we all are here for a purpose. We were all put here to Shine Fearlessly. Each. Of. US.