Bright Lights: R.G. Shore Helps Others Heal Their Trauma

R.G. Shore founded Northwest Wisdom, a nonprofit center for spirituality and healing in the Pacific Northwest, with one goal in mind: to help marginalized people heal their wounds, particularly around racial and spiritual trauma. That work began with healing his own.

Born in India and adopted as an infant by a white couple in Oregon, Shore’s struggle with identity and racial trauma began long before he spent 29 months in prison.

“My wounds were unchecked and unaddressed,” he says. “If you don’t transform your pain, you just transmute it. I imagine that’s what I was doing without knowing it. I was projecting whatever unconscious wounds I had onto other people, and there were consequences for it.”

At his sentencing in 2018, Shore took responsibility for his actions and vowed to continue growing and healing.

“I hope I can be a resource for others” in prison, he told a local news reporter at the time, adding that he also planned to be “an integral part of the community” after he was released.

He has kept those promises.

Shore, who has both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, agreed to serve as a “prison attorney,” using self-taught legal knowledge to assist other adults in custody—including white supremacists who verbally and physically assaulted him—by drafting motions, filing appeals, and navigating other legal procedures. He later earned his paralegal certification while still in prison.

After his incarceration, Shore became a certified spiritual counselor and Reiki practitioner and continued his legal work at a criminal defense law firm. Through Northwest Wisdom, he and his wife Jess offer spiritual counseling, yoga, meditation, Reiki, contemplative hiking, and more, helping clients learn to listen to their bodies to allow healing.

“The spiritual patterns repeat themselves until we discover them, learn to sit with them, and allow ourselves a space for healing.”

Unconscious Wounds

Shore, now 37, struggled being brown in a predominantly white, Christian town, but especially so after 9/11. He was just 13 when Saudi nationals hijacked and crashed planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000.

“How do I, as a 13-year-old, handle that people are now calling me a terrorist and I’m just worried about teenage things?” he questions. “I was always aware that as a person of color, I just didn’t fit in and that was very lonely for me.”

He believes loneliness led him to get involved with a 17-year-old when he was 27. The two worked as counselors at a summer camp—he says he knew she was a college student but was not aware she was just 17 at the beginning of their relationship. He says he later found out she was one month shy of her eighteenth birthday.

“We were both unhealed people and connected in unhealthy ways,” he says. “I was the adult, and I should have known better.”

When Shore tried to end the relationship, he says the woman threatened to harm herself. He went to her parents, he says, “because I felt that was the right thing to do.” Seven months later, he was arrested at his parents’ house.

“The police told my dad they were arresting me for distributing alcohol to minors and that my parents could pick me up in a couple hours. But the police had no intention of releasing me,” he says. “I was taken to the jail and put in a holding cell for 13 hours. They didn’t tell me anything until they pulled me out of the cell around 2:30 in the morning for fingerprints and mugshots.”

When he took a plea deal, half the charges were dismissed. He was convicted of three counts of sexual abuse, which stemmed from engaging in sexual activities with a minor.

“I regret putting her in that position. I can say my intention was never to hurt anyone, but I ended up hurting people in the process. I wish I would’ve sought therapy a long time ago,” Shore says.

In addition to being sent to prison for three and a half years, Shore, who had been an elementary school teacher at the time of his arrest, lost his Oregon educator license.

Healing Journey Leads to Book

In prison, Shore, who majored in religious studies in college, came to see that the experience was part of his spiritual evolution.

“The spiritual patterns repeat themselves until we discover them, learn to sit with them, and allow ourselves a space for healing,” he explains. “It’s almost as if the Divine had me go through what I went through to prepare me for the real work that would come after. The Divine is a part of all things, including the mess.”

Shore began meditating at a young age and turned to it again in prison. With cheap headphones on and a transistor radio turned to static, he sat on his prison bunk to evolve his meditation practice. Those meditations not only drowned out the constant noise and racial slurs that swirled around him, but also led him to connect with his younger self, befriend his shadow side, and begin the journey of healing.

Shore chronicles his spiritual awakening and journey toward redemption in his memoir, The Ocean Inside Me: A Spiritual Memoir on Healing Racial Trauma. The book, which he self-published under Northwest Wisdom Publications in March 2024, offers readers a mirror to contemplate their own healing journey. The memoir has garnered widespread acclaim, including being listed among Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2024 and winning the 2024 Nautilus Book Gold Award in the memoir and personal journey category.

The book’s message, he says, is “You’re never just one thing, and whatever divinity or spiritual light you’re looking for is within you. It’s a letting go of what you thought you were to begin to see what you’ve always been, which is held and loved and enough.”

A New Name

After serving his time, Shore was forced to live with his parents. Despite having a master’s degree, no one was willing to hire him or rent to him because he was a felon. When he did find a place to rent, he met the previous tenant: Jess, his future wife. When they married, they both took the last name “Shore.”

“When I think about who I was before prison, it’s like looking through a veil and seeing someone I used to know,” says Shore, formerly Rohan Cordy. “There was something spiritually symbolic about choosing a new name with Jess. We wanted to come up with something that represented us. We were ready to start this new chapter and to create our own story together.”

His dream, he says, is to build a small retreat center on a piece of land where they can help people do “the hard spiritual work that needs to be done to move past the labels, the guilt and the shame, release the trauma, and learn to accept all parts of themselves so they can learn to play again.”

“I’m likely going to be actively helping heal the people that nobody else wants to take the time to help heal,” he adds. “I want to create a space that’s safe enough where people can realize whatever they need is within them. I’m not doing the healing for them; I’m just creating a space where I’m a mirror for whatever internal work they are already doing.”

This article appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of Spirituality & Health^®: A Unity Publication. Subscribe now.