My journey

I was born with a ‘magical’ nature. I spoke with animals and had a deep relationship with several trees near our home in the suburbs of Long Island. Every Halloween, I opted to be a fairy princess, complete with a magic wand and wings. (I haven’t changed much since!)

In the summer, our family moved to a log cabin on the shore of Lake Tiorati in Bear Mountain, New York, where my father was a camp director. I spent several childhood summers whizzing through the forest on my bicycle, exploring – and inventing – worlds. I have always had vivid and colorful dreams. I have always been intuitive, with an uncanny knack for knowing the phone was about to ring and for thinking of a person just before bumping into them.

But my intuition was underdeveloped. I didn’t know anything about it then. No one talked about such things in our house.  Honestly, I just thought everyone could do what I could do – so I didn’t feel special or different because of it.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I started to realize that this thing that came so naturally to me wasn’t available to everyone. I began to talk with my friend, Susan, about it. Susan was interested in metaphysics – a word (and a world) I’d never heard of before then. Through her, and others I met along the way, I began hearing about people who’d developed their intuition much more than I had.

In the 1980s – I took a class called DMA with my brother-in-law Roger.  DMA was taught in people’s homes by teachers who’d attended a teacher training. I loved it and went on to become a teacher.

At the time, I was a Systems Analyst – challenging work that I loved. I wore expensive, finely tailored navy blue suits. I dined on an expense account. I was helping to change the world – installing the first desktop computers on every desk in New York’s Financial District. I was teaching corporate America how to use their first PCs! Exciting times….

Still, when I was offered a job with DMA’s New York office, I leapt. At the time, I knew nothing about the new age movement. As I plunged into the work of DMA founder, Robert Fritz, receiving advanced training in the patterns and systems of human consciousness, I was also meeting other DMA teachers who’d flow through our office.

Many of them had workshops and programs of their own. Through them, I received a crash course in: Past Life Regression Therapy; the energy anatomy of the human body and the planet; Ayurvedic and Herbal medicine; Crystal Healing and Aromatherapy.

In a workshop called ‘Starchild Evolution’ (don’t you love that name!!) I did my first ‘channeling’ and, though I didn’t know what in the world I was doing, I was astonished at the way that imagery and words flowed to me.

During this time, I also learned to read tarot cards, again amazing myself at how easily and accurately I could do this. When I accurately predicted a very private matter for the top manager of my company (she was about to resign and no one knew about it) I left her office shaking with wonder.

One day, while I was leading a section of the teacher training, a student asked me a very complex question, something that I could have answered with prepared text. (We were all very well trained in how to deal with sticky spiritual issues.) But I found myself stammering, hesitant. I am only 25 years old, I thought. This man is twice my age. How dare I pretend to know the answer to his question? I told him the truth, that I did not know the answer. He sat down and I moved to the next part of the workshop.

It was around this time that I began to be able to perceive, hovering over the heads of 200 meditating students, a blanket of undulating white light. I was seeing energy – with my eyes! (I tie these events together because they both signify the awakening of self-awareness and a deep desire to be of authentic service.)

During this time, many other changes were taking place in my life: I got married, and my husband and I began trying to have a baby. But after two years of trying, nothing had happened. I had a desperate need to be a mother, a deep soul ache that I believed could only be filled by having a child.

Desperate and sad, I consulted a psychic named M.B. Dykshoorn. Everyone in the DMA community was raving about him – and when I arrived, I learned why. The walls of his office were decorated with commendations from police departments all over the U.S. His wife, serving as receptionist, welcomed me into their lovely penthouse apartment with a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his remarkable gift.

When it was my turn to enter his office, I had one question: Will I ever have a baby? But as I walked in, Dykshoorn greeted me, “Ah, you’re a writer…”

I stumbled. “Well, actually, I’m not. I’m a teacher, I…”

“No,” he said. “You’re a writer. You come from a long line of writers – with the gift of imagery. Your grandmother was surrounded by books. Your mother has the gift too, but she is blocked and cannot bring it through. Until now, no one has been able to manifest it. You will. ”

I wasn’t surprised or stunned or honestly, very interested in this at the time. I filed it away, and asked my burning question.

“You will have a baby, yes,” he assured me. “You will have a boy and then a girl.” He told me much more that day, much of which I only came to actualize years later.

All that mattered then was, that by following his advice, my husband and I conceived our son in three weeks.

1990s -

As Dykshoorn predicted, I had a boy, Max, and a girl, Katie – my two greatest teachers. Looking into the eyes of my own children, holding them in my arms, against my heart, was the most profoundly spiritual experience I have ever had.

We joined a Waldorf School community where I became deeply involved in community building; joining committees, study groups and after a few years, I was elected as chair of the PTO. At the time, as a staff member at Sunbridge College – where Waldorf teachers are trained – I began to explore the work of Rudolf Steiner. It was then that I began my study of ‘Biographical Counseling’ – the foundation on which I later built my own Sacred Biography work.

2000s -

In 1998, after ten years as a stay-at-home mom, I got a job as a features editor at a top-selling women’s magazine. For about six years, I read all the reader mail and wrote stories about family reunions, heirloom jewelry, handed-down recipes, and holiday traditions. I also wrote stories about women who’d overcome incredible adversity – life-threatening illness, car accidents, terrible loss – and gone on to lives filled with purpose and meaning.

I took to keeping a box of tissues on my desk for interviews – these conversations moved me deeply. But something else was happening, too. Each time I spoke with one of these inspiring women, I’d feel a ‘space’ opening in my mind’s eye – a kind of ‘room’ where the story would begin to assemble itself. This intrigued me and, each time it happened, I’d feel a part of myself separate to observe the process. How was I doing this? What was happening?

I began to think about my visit with M.B. Dykshoorn years earlier:  ”You have the gift of imagery,” he’d told me. A baffling statement that I hadn’t understood. “Your mother had it, as did her mother,” he said. I still remember the way he’d cocked his head to the side as he looked at me – looked inside of me.

Was this strange ability to ‘out-picture’ a story, the ‘gift of imagery’ Dykshoorn had perceived in me?

And I must note here, that years later, after I’d started working with angel stories, my mother casually mentioned, “Your grandmother used to host salons. People were always stopping by the house… She read palms and, I think, read tarot cards.”

I was floored. So my Grandma J. had been a mystic – and perhaps, an intuitive. My mother had never mentioned this before.

Back to my job at the magazine…

After six years or so, I began to feel restless. I wanted more from my creative life – I dreamed of writing a book, of teaching. I felt drawn back toward the spiritual community that I’d left behind in order to work my high-pressure job. I longed to be with my children – they were teen agers now, and needed a stable home more than ever.

I began to visualize a job which I could do from home; a job through which my writing skills might be put to use helping others. One day, I found myself praying: God, please change my life. Give me something meaningful to do, and please, oh, please, make it about more than just me.

A  few days later, I was asked to help launch a column about angels.

Each week I would read a huge pile of stories (I’ve read more than 10,000!) from people all over the world who’d had an encounter with a presence—angels, spirit guides, synchronicity and miraculous healing—that changed their lives.

At the same time, I began to be powerfully drawn to the work of Caroline Myss, I practically memorized her Energy Anatomy tapes, which I listened to over and over again in the car as I drove to work. In 2005, as soon as I heard about her two-year training in Sacred Contracts and Spiritual Alchemy, I signed up. It was there that I learned to ‘speak archetypes’ – a language I continue to use in private practice today.

I’d long been a student of spiritual science – and I’d taught creative visualization and law of attraction to many people, including corporate clients.

Still, I didn’t believe in angels. Not yet.

Not until I began to receive signs of my own: feathers on my keyboard, songs on the radio, a voice that whispered my name, directly into my ear as I woke up in the morning.

I began to experience a profound and lasting shift in consciousness; and, as if a veil were being lifted, I began to receive direct, personal guidance. If I were to describe this for you, I’d say: I began to know more.

Through the opening I was experiencing with Caroline, with the steady flow of insight I received from Doreen Virtue each week; and from the letters themselves, I began to ‘see’ more – and to understand the imagery I’d been seeing all of my life.

I received powerful dreams and waking visions. I was ‘shown’ clear and unmistakable imagery that revealed a kind of ‘architecture of the psyche.’ I’d be interviewing someone about their experience and,  as if a curtain was pulled back. I could see, in the room of my mind’s eye, their story – as a structure. I could see how the story held together – and I could see the places where their was scar tissue.

I could see wounds to the heart, to the psyche itself – which appeared to me like dark patches. It was like walking through an architectural drawing come to life, in which wounds and scars show up as areas that are not yet drawn in. These scars were hidden behind a kind of grey veil. When I’d see one, I’d be naturally drawn to ask questions about it – and I always seemed to know what to ask.

Of all that I’ve learned, perhaps the most moving was when I began to be able to perceive what I call the ‘I Am’ energy, a kind of seed of (what seems to me to be) soul tissue. This ‘soul seed’ lives in the heart of every human being – no matter what he or she has done in the past, or whether or not there is any spiritual awareness at all.

Seeing that bright and beautiful light, love, life energy completely changed the way that I see others, the way that I see myself, and the way that I view the world.