Austin Vangelena, M.D.

One afternoon during my clinical training, I sat down next to a patient in a quiet corner of the hospital floor while the hallway outside buzzed with the usual noise of monitors, carts, and staff moving between rooms. He had come in for what looked like a fairly routine medical problem. From a clinical standpoint it wasn’t complicated. But once we started talking, it became clear that the real weight he was carrying had very little to do with the diagnosis itself.

He told me he felt overwhelmed — work stress, family responsibilities, the quiet pressure of trying to hold everything together. What struck me most was when he said that no one had really asked how he was doing in a long time.

We talked for a while, longer than the schedule probably allowed. When he stood up to leave, he paused and said something simple: he felt lighter just being able to say those things out loud.

That moment stayed with me. It reminded me that people rarely walk into a room carrying just one problem. They bring their whole lives with them.

My path into healthcare began with undergraduate studies in Health Services Administration, followed by medical school where I earned my medical degree with highest honors. After graduating, I spent two years in postgraduate clinical training in international hospital settings across internal medicine, emergency care, and surgical services. Those experiences exposed me to many different healthcare environments, but the most meaningful lessons always came from moments like that one—when you realize how powerful it can be for someone simply to feel understood.

Over time, that perspective naturally drew me toward integrative and mindful approaches to care that recognize the connection between emotional wellbeing and physical health. Writing has also been an outlet for me, and I’ve published work that reflects on the intersection of medicine, reflection, and the human experience.

When the team invited me to serve as a board member, I felt genuinely grateful. I admire the thoughtful and compassionate work this organization is doing.

If there’s one thing my training has taught me, it’s that people rarely need perfect answers as much as they need a place where they can be heard honestly and without judgment. Supporting an organization that helps create that kind of space is something I’m proud to be part of.

Austin has over 8 years of experience in medicine and mental health care.  Austin specializes in working with underserved populations, minority groups, LGBTQ, religious trauma, and spiritual guidance.

Currently Accepting new clients

I offer this testament as one who has traversed the thin veil between heaven and earth. I write this as an ancestor of tomorrow, believing that our most vital responsibility is to the generations we will never meet. For too long, our spiritual traditions have suffered from a kind of scriptural stagnation. We have often treated faith as a sealed container, a finished story, rather than a living, breathing encounter. Religion has become like being a fish in a fishbowl, when our souls are made for the vastness of the ocean. Nothing grows in stagnant water. This is why I have chosen to share these visions. Oral storytelling, and the written testimony that flows from it, allows the water of revelation to move continuously from one generation to the next. It leaves room for the Spirit to breathe. To help you on this journey, I want to invite you to see this book not just as a story to be read, but as a meal to be shared. Imagine that you and I are seated at a great table, with God as our host. The visions and revelations contained in these pages are the courses of this sacred meal. I am merely the waiter, presenting to you what I was so graciously given. My role is to serve each course, to describe its nature—both its sweetness and its bitterness—and then to give you the space to savor it for yourself. At the end of each chapter, you will find a section called "A Pause at the Table." This is your moment. It is an invitation to reflect on the course you have just received and connect it to the landscape of your own soul. You will find that the spiritual life is a fluid dance between light and shadow. We will be asked to hold both, to find the mercy in the darkness and the lesson in the light. The "work" we must do is to learn how to blend our Faith with our Trust. Think of them like the ocean: Faith is the water, the vast reality of God's presence. Trust is the salt, the lived, active, sometimes gritty surrender that makes it real for us. One cannot exist without the other. This is the work of healing the parts of us that feel unworthy, of welcoming our own inner child to the table, so that we can see ourselves as God sees us—as His beloved children, always and forever worthy of His love. I encourage you to keep a journal nearby, to engage in this dialogue with God, the text, and your own heart. This is not a story about a man who saw God. It is an invitation to realize that God sees you. May my journey through light and shadow awaken your own voice, inspiring your generation to record and share what you have seen and heard, so the waters may never cease to flow.