Reverend Krysta Kalapana: Born of the Fire, Reborn in Breath
I am Krysta. From Kalapana.
I am the Eldest Daughter of my mother’s 11 children.
I was born into chaos and trained by survival. Raised by my stepfather, a white supremacist pedophile and violent psychopath, who named himself after a god - who demanded control, obedience, and silence. He took my siblings away, turned my mother and everyone I knew against me, and tried to taint the memory of my dead father. He wrapped himself in spiritual language, but behind it was violence.
And then there was my black grandmother, whose quiet love offered something like safety. She gave me roots when I had none. She taught me how to listen to the wind, to pray without words. She couldn’t protect me from everything, but she planted something evergreen in me. Something true, something holy - a knowing that I belonged to more than the pain.
I am fire. I am breath. I am truth.
My Spiritual Path
I found God in darkness. Hiding from a real life monster, I prayed into the abyss for something to save me. I knew the adults in my life didn’t have the answers, but I knew God had to, so I started searching. I first started seeking when my father was killed in a sudden accident and never made it home a week before Christmas. I never stopped searching. My life became a Spiritual Pilgrimage at the tender age of two.
I found God in the grief. In the jungle. On the coral reefs. In the forest with my ancestors and aumakua. In the chanting of Hawaiian pule, the prayer of Hula, and the night sky. In the moments I chose not to die.
I am a daughter of many worlds - African, Mongolian, and European by blood, Hawaiian by spirit, American by birth, and universal by Calling.
My life has been a spiritual pilgrimage, and so we start with the lands that raised me.
The Lands That Raised Me
My body remembers what my soul signed up for. Each place I’ve lived left a mark. These are the lands that broke me open, buried me, raised me, and anointed me. I didn’t just travel through them. I became them.
Before I was Reverend Krysta Kalapana, I was a girl with fire in my bones and nowhere safe to burn. I’ve lived many lives in one body - and each land I’ve walked has shaped me, taught me, and blessed me.
I was born in San Diego - on the edge of empire - where as an adult I learned the codes of whiteness, how to survive, and how to win in systems that were never built for my becoming. But it was Hawai’i that raised me.
The Big Island is where my bones remembered. Pele called me into the fire and into truth. Her lava flowed through my lineage, burning away what colonization tried to bury. I learned to walk barefoot on hot lava rock, to breathe as prayer, to listen with my skin. This is where I came home to root - aina as teacher, ‘Ohana as altar, spirit as law.
Kaua’i was my refuge and my return. The island of grandmothers. She softened and schooled me. There, I studied yoga, meditation, quantum mechanics, and the sacred architecture of the mind. In her rivers and mountains, I remembered that mana lives in thought, that stillness is a gateway, and that the unseen world governs the seen.
Then came Mendocino. The redwoods remembered me. The ocean rocked me into ministry. The Pacific baptized me in fog and silence. There, I met love again - not just in the body of a man I had known since childhood, but within. I listened to the forest, I walked through grief, and I said yes to the long becoming. This land held me through my initiations, through the quiet rebuild, through the shaman’s initiation.
These lands - San Diego, Kauai, Hawaii, and Mendocino - are not just places I’ve lived. They are ancestors. They shaped me, stripped me, raised me. Each one gave me a language, a medicine, a remembering.
I carry them in my walk, in my altar, in every breath I offer back.
When the global initiation of COVID began, I started breaking down. I had always known this world was illusion, and it was then that everyone else started to catch on and it was terrifying. I cracked and then I retreated. Then I reconnected with the only safe man I’d ever known and things got darker. All of a sudden I was given permission to unravel and unravel I did!
I washed up on the shores of Mendocino Country in 2020, frail, disillusioned, and desperate.
I would plunge into the darkest period of my life’ story in the summer of 2021. I was living alone on the coast in a trailer, completely isolated except for my landlord and coworkers. I had no friends, no family, no social network to speak of. I became a minister as a last ditch effort to save my life. What happened after that looked and felt very much like losing my mind, because it was. I lost my mind. In the year and a half between that dark summer and when I got pregnant with my son, I would call the suicide hotline twice, and regularly contemplated taking my leave from this realm. I was having conversations with younger versions of myself, visions of Christ and my ancestors, and boxing it out with my demons.
But eventually I gained my soul. The first three years after COVID were spent dying. The last two have been learning how to live, and the last six months have been learning to fly.
In the last two years, the breaking became a doorway. I turned toward the fire. I had become a minister to teach people how I made it back from the edge of death.
I visited my hometown on the Big Island and continued to suffer what modern society would call breakdowns, but which I know now were spiritual breakthroughs. After ending up in the hospital as a result of my visions, I fasted, prayed, screamed, wept, and surrendered. I walked barefoot on sacred ground, sat in ceremony with plant teachers…
…and remembered who I am…
I Am Reverend Krysta Kalapana.
Forged in Tutu Peles fires, I’ve burned down the false altars. I’ve walked through the lava fields of survival. And now, I carry that fire with sacred responsibility. I am a mystic, modern shaman, medicine woman, and pain alchemist.
I am the Rainbow Bridge.
My trauma fed forged my discernment, my mercy birthed my ministry.
I walk between worlds: black and white, Spirit and Science; between orphanhood and leadership.
Named for the lava fields that raised me, Kalapana is where the fire meets the sea. Where destruction and creation are one. I carry that energy in my bones.
I am here to build a bridge between spirit and body, heaven and earth, and trauma and truth.
This is the mission of The Rainbow Bridge Church.
I founded this church as a sanctuary for those who have been silenced, forgotten, or forsaken. A home for the wild-hearted, the broken open, a dated acred rebels. It is a place of remembrance - for our bodies, our lineages, and our divinity.
My Purpose
I was born a Mother. I serve the children. I serve the women who carry whole worlds in their wombs. I serve the land and the ancestors who never left. I serve the truth - even when it costs me everything.
My Dharma is to awaken the body, resurrect the soul, and restore the sacred through ceremony, movement, and community. This church is not a building. It is a living, breathing altar made of breath, tears, laughter, rage, devotion, and love.
“What tried to kill me, trained me. I do not flinch.”
My Promises: Personal Vows
I promise to walk in truth, even when my voice shakes.
To speak what others silence, and hold space for what others discard.
To remember the children - always - and build spaces worthy of their trust.
I promise to weave spirit with science with reverence.
To question what I’ve been taught while honoring the wisdom of the ancestors.
To prayer with my breath, my hands, my movement, and my work.
I promise to honor the land and the people who came before me.
To name harms, tend wounds, and build something better.
To remember that sacred doesn’t mean perfect - it means honest.
I promise to teach what I learn, and to say a student of the Mystery.
To honor my elders, uplift the next generation, and protect the flame of those still awakening.
I promise to carry my grandmother’s love, my community’s hope, and the fire of those who never got the chance to be heard.
These are my vows as a minister, mystic, mother, and daughter of earth, breath, and blood.
A Dedication: A Prayer for the Children
To the children of the world -
Those held in arms, and those crying alone in rubble.
Those sleeping under stars, and those buried beneath them.
Those whose innocence has been stolen by war, greed, and silence.
And those still daring to dream.
To the children of Palestine - We see you.
We carry your names in our hearts.
We feel your absence as a wound in the body of humanity.
May your lives be more than a headlines.
May your grief never go unheard.
May the world repent for its apathy.
And may we rise, in your name, to build what should have been.
To all children -
We promise to remember.
To protect.
To tell the truth.
To build safe spaces in your honor,
And to guard the sacred fire of your future.
This ministry, this church, this body of work -
It is for you.
A prayer in motion.
A promise we intend to keep.
Amen. Aloha. Ameen. Ashe.