Cindie White
Author · Elder · Death Midwife
I was born wild.
A nature child raised by a young single mother in the 1960s, I spent my early years close to the earth — in creeks and orchards and open fields, deeply connected to animals, seasons, and the particular magic that lives at the edge of wild places. I didn’t know then that this was something I would later have to fight to reclaim.
Everything changed when I was eleven.
My mother married an affluent man who adopted me, and within months I found myself in a new town, a new school, a new social world with rules I didn’t know and a clan I desperately wanted to belong to. I learned quickly. I watched carefully. I became very good at shapeshifting — adjusting my edges, softening my wildness, performing the version of myself that would be accepted and admired.
I was so good at it that I didn’t stop for decades.
I went on to build a life that looked, from the outside, like everything a woman could want. An MBA. A corporate career. Marriage to a prominent Silicon Valley CEO. A beautiful home, a family, an address that meant something in the world I had learned to navigate so fluently.
And I was good at that life too. I want to be honest about that — it wasn’t all suffering. There was real beauty in it, real love, real moments of joy. But there was also a growing distance between the woman the world saw and the woman I actually was. The performance that had saved me at eleven had become a cage by fifty.
I passed through some very dark passages during those years. I don’t say that for sympathy — I say it because I know I am not alone in having lived a life that looked fine from the outside while something inside was quietly going out. Many women know that particular loneliness. Most of us never speak it aloud because no one wants to hear that a woman with everything isn’t happy.
What saved me, strangely, was a bone.
On a visit to a ranch in Montana, I was compelled to dig for a buffalo bone trapped in the sediment of an ancient animal graveyard. When I finally unearthed it and held it in my hands, electricity moved through my body. Something long dormant ignited.
What followed was years of following that current — gathering bones, learning the old arts of restoration, studying animal anatomy and symbolism, tracking wolves, encountering lions, building a barn full of animal spirits on a ranch in Portola Valley. A secret sacred practice that the world around me found strange and I found more real than almost anything else in my life.
The animal kingdom was calling me back to my original nature. Bone by bone, I came home to myself.
I wrote about all of it in my memoir, Confessions of a Bone Woman — a book that took enormous courage to publish and that has since found its way to women all over the world who recognized something in it that they hadn’t been able to name in their own lives.
I am in the last third of my life now. After thirty-two years of marriage I chose divorce — one of the hardest and most necessary things I have ever done. I left California, where I had lived my entire life, and moved to Boulder, Colorado, to begin again in a place where no one knew my name or my history.
That is what I mean when I say I have lived what I write about. I am not describing transformation from a safe distance. I am still in it.
In Boulder I have found what I always find — people gravitating toward something they sense but can’t quite name. Conversations that go deeper than expected. Invitations to speak on spirituality, consciousness, and the art of living. Young women who find their way to my door. Elders in the making who recognize an elder when they see one.
I am also a death midwife. I sit with people and animals who are dying and with those who love them, holding space for the passage to be as conscious and sacred as it can be. This work does not feel separate from everything else I do — it is the fullest expression of it. To sit with a being at the threshold of their life and help them cross with dignity and peace is, to me, the most profound form of presence I know.
What People Say About Being With Me
I have never been easy to categorize. I am not a coach with a curriculum or a therapist with a framework. I am a woman who has spent over forty years in rigorous, unrelenting inner work — before there was language for it, before there were apps for it, long before it was a cultural trend.
What I have developed is the ability to be fully present with another person. To listen without judgment and without needing to fix or direct. To see what is actually happening beneath the story someone is telling themselves. And occasionally — when the moment is right — to say the thing that opens a door.
People who spend time with me tend to feel seen. Heard. Welcomed into their own fullness without apology. Lifted, sometimes, in ways they didn’t expect. Not because I am performing wisdom but because I have genuinely lived it, genuinely paid attention, and genuinely care about the interior lives of the people I meet.
I elevate, I’m told. I lift the room simply by being in it.
I don’t say that boastfully. I say it because it took me a very long time to stop apologizing for it.
If you want to know me more fully before we ever meet, read the book.
Confessions of a Bone Woman: A Memoir for Every Woman Who Has Forgotten Her Own Nature is available on Amazon and Audible (read by me). It is the truest thing I have made.
I am available for unhurried conversation — in person in Boulder or by video — for those who feel called to go deeper. There is no program, no intake form, no package to purchase. Just two people in honest conversation, for as long as it serves you.
If something on this page has moved or intrigued you, I’d love to hear from you.
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