Lessons from a Reluctant Healer: On Learning to Listen to that Still Small Voice Within to Better Bring Your Gifts to the World 9781737184003, 1737184001

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Lessons from a Reluctant Healer: On Learning to Listen to that Still Small Voice Within to Better Bring Your Gifts to the World Mary H. A. Kearns

Copyright © 2021 by Mary Hoyt Akiyama Kearns All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author, addressed “Attention: Permissions” at [email protected] The stories in this book reflect the author’s recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted. Dialogue has been re-created from memory. Cover Design: Mary H. A. Kearns Cover Photo: Thomas Kearns eBook ISBN: 978-1-7371840-0-3 Published by Your Stellar Self, LLC Falls Church, VA www.yourstellarself.com Printed in the United States of America. First Edition

Dedication To my family, friends, and all my teachers, with love.

Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: The Journey Begins Chapter 2: A Family of My Own Chapter 3: Impermanence Chapter 4: In and Out of Focus Chapter 5: Healing the Planet with Non-Toxic Soap Chapter 6: A Necessary Detour Chapter 7: The Inner Work Chapter 8: Expanding My Horizons Chapter 9: Confirmations Chapter 10: Answering the Call Chapter 11: Meeting Mary Chapter 12: Past Life Regressions Chapter 13: Intro to Shamanism Chapter 14: Someone’s Definitely Looking Out for Me Chapter 15: The Path Becomes Clearer Chapter 16: Seeking Clarity Chapter 17: Closure Chapter 18: Following My Inner Guidance Chapter 19: Fire Ceremony Chapter 20: The New Grids Chapter 21: Clarity, At Last Chapter 22: On Seeing the Interconnectedness

Acknowledgements Author’s Bio Notes

Introduction If you’re willing to listen to, be guided by, that still small voice… within yourself, to find out what makes you come alive, you will be more than okay. You will be happy, you will be successful, and you will make a difference in the world.[1] —OPRAH WINFREY From a very young age, I was aware of my connection with Spirit. But, as I grew, I allowed myself to be pulled away from this inner knowing, following directions that I felt I should be following, rather than what my heart told me was my true path. I hope that by offering stories of the challenges I’ve overcome, and talking about some of the tools I have learned along the way (such as learning the importance of staying grounded), I can help you avoid some of the mistakes I have made so that you can enjoy a smoother journey. In this book, I share examples of how I have fallen down, gotten up, grown, and regressed and how I kept working to improve my ability to hear that still, small voice within myself and honor my innate gifts. I encourage you to think about similar experiences in your life and how they might be guiding you. I’m guessing that little I say in this book about finding your inner guidance will be absolutely new to you. In your heart, you all know all of this, but you may have set it aside for day-to-day “real life” concerns. Now, however, is a time of remembering—remembering who we are, why we are here, and what innate gifts we have a responsibility to share during our time here on earth. It is always good to have reminders. I hope this book will inspire you to keep striving toward that place where you allow yourself to shine and bring your beautiful authentic self and gifts to the world—gifts that the world needs now more than ever. As I was writing this book, I discovered a pattern in my life. Each time I listened to other people’s opinions about what I “should” be doing or the logical voice in my brain rather than listening to my inner wisdom, things had a tendency to go off the tracks for me, like when I took jobs just for the money or because someone else told me I had to. But when I paid attention to that still, small voice in my heart, my life flowed with ease and I was able to clearly see the steps I needed to take to live my life’s purpose. Even though I have always felt a deep connection with all beings on this planet (people,

animals, insects, plants, minerals, water), it took me a long time to accept the responsibility that I am here on earth at this time to be a healer for all of them. We all have a life purpose, a mission that we are meant to fulfill in this world. At times, following this mission can be difficult, and it can be tempting to ignore the calling, opting instead to follow a more conventional, materially-driven path, but that usually leads to feelings of imbalance and dissatisfaction, an always-searching-for-more. Ignoring your purpose often leads to a nagging feeling of discontent, a desire for something more in your life. In some more extreme cases, Spirit[2] will bonk you on the head, reminding you that you have lost your focus and demanding that you honor the gifts you were given. For example, you may be going along thinking things are just fine, but then an unexpected illness, job loss, loss of a loved one, or any number of other life disruptors come along to remind you of what you are supposed to be doing. Collectively, we have been going through an extreme example of this. I started writing this book two years ago and have been putting the final touches on it during a pandemic, social unrest, increasing economic disparity, and climate change-induced natural disasters affecting everyone and everything on this earth. With all of these challenges placed front and center where we can’t help but see what needs to change, we are clearly being asked to re-evaluate our priorities as individuals, as a society, and as a world community—it is a spiritual call to action to create a better world for all. These times are truly apocalyptic—a word that comes from the Greek apokálypsis, meaning an unveiling of deeper truth and meaning. Along with many others, I have been hearing this call to action for several years and have been doing the self-work I need to be able to show up fully for my part in creating a better world. I believe we each have an important part to play, and that is why I wanted to share my story of discovering (or rather, rediscovering) the gifts with which I came into the world, gifts that allow me to contribute my part to bringing about the positive evolution of our world. Each one of us is born with unique gifts that can help us contribute to the evolution and betterment of humanity, so I hope you find helpful my stories about the tools I have picked up along the way that have helped me to excavate and polish those gifts. Like the musicians in a magnificent orchestra, we each have a part to play. Each of us must play our particular piece of the symphony to create something so much more beautiful and

transcendent than we can without one another. ◊ During times of personal tribulation—my mother’s death, my father’s prolonged illness, my divorce—I have felt abandoned by Spirit and have fallen into deep despair, losing perspective on my reason for being here on this planet. Over time, though, I have learned how to raise myself out of those feelings of despair, by opening myself up to the higher realms of consciousness and reconnecting with my purpose. I have done this by learning ways to raise my vibration, Allow me to take a moment to explain what I mean by “raising my vibration.” If you are like me, you have heard the term “good vibes” all your life and have a vague understanding that it related to a place or person that feels good to be around, but what exactly are these vibrations and how do you raise them? Over the past hundred-plus years the discipline of quantum physics has been exploring the idea that everything in the universe is made up of energy vibrating at different frequencies, a concept that Eastern cultures have talked about for centuries.[3] Energy manifests as different forms of matter, depending on the speed with which it is vibrating, and human consciousness has been found to affect, on a quantum level, how energy manifests—the observer affecting that which is being observed.[4],[5] We humans are composed of several different levels of energy, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.[6] Each of these levels has a vibrational frequency; for example, the human brain oscillates (vibrates) at a frequency of 70–79 MHz, the heart at 60–70 MHz, and our chakras (which are associated with our endocrine centers) have their own particular oscillations. In addition, the entire body contains and is surrounded by an electromagnetic energy field that vibrates a thousand times higher in frequency than nerves and muscle.[7] Each of these systems has an optimal vibrational level that is associated with physical and emotional wellbeing. Low vibrations are associated with disempowering thoughts, negative emotions, poor health, physical pain, and mental confusion. Conversely, high vibrations are associated with empowering thoughts, positive emotions, good physical health, and strong spiritual awareness. So, it makes sense that you benefit by raising your vibration, as do those around you and, by extension, the entire world.[8] When I am consistent in my observation of these practices, I can more easily hear that inner voice of wisdom and appreciate my interconnectedness with all

living beings. As I already mentioned, my main reason for writing this book is to help show you how I learned to stay in tune with that wise, still, small voice within myself so that you can too. And I offer this book as a message of hope during this unique time in history when we have an opportunity to rewrite our individual and collective stories. I encourage us all to learn to raise our vibrations and listen to the still, small voice within ourselves so that we can all do our best to help birth a better world for all.

Chapter 1: The Journey Begins THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT DAYS IN YOUR LIFE ARE THE DAY YOU ARE BORN AND THE DAY YOU FIND OUT WHY. —MARK TWAIN Upon the occasion of my birth in January 1964, the Indian poet Gurdial Malik, a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore as well as my parents, wrote a poem for me.[9] I remember my mother reading it to me on more than one occasion when I was very young. Little Mary, Little Mary From where have you come? “From God,” she said in reply, “God, who loves every one” What message did He give you For us to whom you have come? “God said, Love one another, So that the Kingdom of Heaven May soon come.” I have always held that message in the back of my mind and deep in my heart, even during times when I veered off of my path. My mother liked to tell a story about when I was two years old. I had recently moved to a big-girl bed, and one night she and my father woke to the sound of a loud thud in my room. My father went to check on me and found me on the floor. He picked me up and placed me back in my bed. I looked at him, and without saying a word, I climbed back out of the bed onto the floor. I put myself into the position in which he had found me, and then I climbed back into the bed on my own. I’m not quite sure what was going through my head, but I sense that I wanted to show him that I could take care of myself— thank you very much. My daughters, when they were that age, would often admonish me for trying to help them with tasks they were working on, saying, “No! My do!”

Despite my rugged independence, I was a sensitive child. I recall walking into my parents’ room at night one time when they were watching a documentary on the Wounded Knee Massacre, where more than 250 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children on the Pine Ridge Reservation were killed by United States Army soldiers. I walked in during a scene where people were being slaughtered in their homes. One man was eviscerated by a solder; I felt sick to my stomach and could actually feel the man’s pain. After that, my mother carefully monitored my media consumption. My mother also had to be careful with the foods she fed me and the substances she put on my skin. As an infant, I had allergic reactions to scented and dyed laundry detergent, so my pediatrician recommended she use Ivory Snow, which was the gentlest formula on the market at the time. She told me that he had told her, “It doesn’t matter if your whites are white, as long as your baby doesn’t have a rash.” It’s interesting to think of her having that conversation with him since she was an early adopter of the whole organic and natural movement. Sweetened cereals were rarely allowed in the house. She never fed me anything with artificial colors or flavorings, with the exception of the occasional maraschino cherry, my one guilty pleasure. My mom baked her own bread with organic flour she ordered from Walnut Acres, and we ate mostly vegetarian, with the occasional fish or chicken for dinner. I had several food allergies, so that prevented me from eating certain nuts (almonds and hazelnuts), stone fruit (peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, and cherries), and dried fruit with sulfites. Such foods would make my throat get itchy and start to close up, making it difficult for me to breathe. I had seasonal allergies, rendering fall and spring times of misery. I was also allergic to cats, but I insisted on having them and put up with the sneezing and swollen eyes because my love for them was stronger than my immune system. Fortunately, I would eventually grow out of these allergies. Before I was born and in my early years, my mother had worked and volunteered for various social justice causes. She saw all people as being equal and taught me this perspective through her example. I would tag along with her when she attended local meetings of the League of Women Voters and when she did volunteer work for Pivot Ministries, a faith-based residential addiction recovery program for men. Pivot—founded by her friends Rev. Alonzo Smalls, Rev. Dr. Joseph D. Clemmons Sr., and Reverend Henry Yordon—was located in South Norwalk, Connecticut, which at the

time was suffering from economic hardship. I remember going there with her and noticing that the vast majority of the residents were Black, with a few Hispanic and Latino men and maybe one White man. Through her example in interacting with these men, I saw that there was nothing wrong with them; it was just that their circumstances and life choices had led them to this place. There was no reason that they could not create new paths for themselves, and some of the volunteers were former residents who had reclaimed their lives through the Pivot support system. My mother taught me that our society does not provide an even playing field, so life can be more difficult for those who are not born into the privileges that others take for granted. One day, when I was in second grade, my school sent home letters saying that they would be administering Stanford-Binet IQ tests to the students. My mother took the opportunity to share more about the inequities in our society, commenting that the tests were biased, having been developed by middleand upper-middle-class White men. I kept that in mind when taking the test, imagining how my grandfather (her father) would answer the questions. Later in graduate school, I learned more about Dr. Anne Anastasi’s research into the racial and gender disparities in standardized testing. Looking back, I often think of how ahead of her time my mother was. ◊ When I was in fourth grade, my teacher, Miss Yuko, brought a big rock to class. She held up the rock, the size and shape of a large grapefruit cut in half, and then passed it around the room. When it reached me, I was captivated by its contrasts—plain, dull, boring light brown on the outside with sparkly white crystals on the inside. I ran my fingers across the pointy crystals, mesmerized by their texture and the way they caught the light. At about six inches wide, the crystal felt huge and heavy in my small hand. “That is a geode,” Miss Yuko said and told us a bit about how they are formed. At the end of the day, Miss Yuko announced, “I will give the geode to the person who guesses the number I am thinking. It’s a number between one and forty. You have to pick a unique number. You can’t guess the same number that somebody else has.” There were about twenty-five children in the class, so I figured my odds were pretty good. She went around the room, and when it was my turn, I said, “Nine!” After everyone had made their guess, Miss Yuko announced that I was the winner. I wondered whether I had actually read her mind or she just wanted me to have the geode. Normally, she acted as if she didn’t like me, so I didn’t think she would have motivation to give

me the geode, but either way, I was happy that I was the one heading home with it. And so began my lifelong fascination with crystals and other stones, which would come to play an important role as my mineral messengers at certain times in my life. Intrigued with the possibility that I had read Miss Yuko’s mind, I bought a book at that year’s school book fair about a girl with extrasensory perception (ESP). I saw a lot of similarities between her life experiences and mine, but many were different, so I wasn’t sure if I had “the gift.” As openminded as my mother was about many things, she was weirded out by anything she deemed as occultist, so I couldn’t talk to her about it and was left to my own devices to learn about this aspect of myself. ◊ Being the only child of a White mother and a Japanese immigrant father, I did not consider myself White or Asian; I was both. Because my mother was White and in her 40s when I was born, strangers would sometimes ask, “Is your daughter adopted?” I found this annoying and hurtful. I learned at a young age that the labels people place on others are for their own convenience, helping them to fit others into their idea of how the world is or should be, and do not benefit the person being labeled. Because my mother’s ancestors had arrived in America in 1631, I considered myself an American. I also saw myself very much as a world citizen, not belonging to any one country but rather to the entire world and the whole human family. While my father only taught me a few words in Japanese, he did expose me to some Japanese children’s stories and prepared some Japanese dishes. In addition, every year he and my mother set up a display of beautiful Hina dolls dressed in Heian Period (794 to 1185 CE) imperial court clothing and made a tri-colored gelatin dessert for Hinamatsuri, Japanese Girls’ Day, a holiday for families with young daughters, where they would celebrate them and pray for their health, success, and happiness. The colors of the dessert (which is traditionally made of mochi) represents the pure and cleansing snow (white), the peach blossoms (pink), and the coming springtime (green). My parents shared the meaning of the dolls with me, but as an adult I learned that they were originally believed to have power over evil spirits. My parents had met and married at Pendle Hill, an international Quaker post-graduate study center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.[10] On its lovely park-like campus, students and staff would participate in a daily silent

meeting for worship, study with world-renowned scholars, contribute to the work-life of the place, and participate in a campus community built on the Quaker ideals of integrity, equality, simplicity, community, stewardship of the earth, and peace. They lived there for several years, working and studying, and during that time, they met many people from all over the world who had come to learn, lecture, or sojourn at this exceptional place. When I was growing up, my parents would often host international guests whom they had met during their time at Pendle Hill. I was exposed to many fascinating people and many fascinating philosophical and intellectual conversations. One memorable visitor was a member of the Cadbury family(I don’t recall his first name), a descendant of the chocolatier and relative of the scholar Henry Cadbury. I thought he was a very lucky man to have unlimited access to Cadbury chocolates. ◊ My parents moved to Norwalk, my mother’s family’s hometown, in November 1963, a couple of months before I was born. My mother loved the diversity of the city and felt that it was important to raise me in a place where I would be exposed to many types of people. Plus, she had several family members around to support her. The majority of people who knew us were very kind and did not make me feel like an “other.” A handful of kids throughout my school years were overtly and cruelly racist, and some adults would make unkind or unthoughtful comments (“Where are you from? No, really where are you from?”), but most of my peers and their parents were kind. The city’s diversity had affected my mother’s decision to put me in the public schools, and I had a wonderful group of friends from a variety of racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds (including Ann Marie, Nancy, Mary Beth, Sandy, Pam, Lisa, and Andi, whom I am fortunate to still have in my life). Ironically, one of the people I had the most difficulty with was my fourthgrade teacher, Miss Yuko, the one who gave me the geode. She often acted as if she didn’t like me, and she would make snide comments, like, “Miss Hawaii just won the Miss America Pageant. I guess there is hope for you.” There were some children who called her racist names, clearly learned from their parents. I later found out that Miss Yuko, who was Japanese American, had been a child in Hawaii when World War II broke out. I know there was much animosity toward Japanese Americans, including children, at that time, so I’m sure she endured a lot of hatred. I felt that she resented me for being

half White and for being born in a very different time. I understood where she was coming from, but I also thought it was very unfair of her to unload her stuff on me. I asked my mother to help get me transferred out of Miss Yuko’s class, but my mom didn’t want to cause any problems for her. I was so stressed out about being in her class that I started to get sick. I missed so many days that the school made me meet with the guidance counselor. The counselor’s conclusion was that the reason I was having difficulty in the class was because of underlying issues with my mother. I told my mother about this, and her reaction was “She’s an amateur Freudian!” I agreed that it wasn’t a particularly helpful conclusion. I did have underlying issues with my mother, but that had nothing to do with how Miss Yuko interacted with me. I continued to get sicker—to the point where I developed a bad case of pneumonia, which resulted in my missing a month of school. In a way, I got what I wanted. Friends brought me my homework, and I was able to study in the comfort of my own home. When I eventually went back to class, Miss Yuko was a lot kinder toward me. ◊ I am what is referred to as a birthright Quaker. My mother was raised in the Congregational Church, but she converted to Quakerism (or, in Quaker parlance, became a “convinced Quaker”) while majoring in theology at Mount Holyoke. She said she found that Quaker philosophy and practices matched most closely with her personal beliefs. And I found the community to be very nurturing. From a very young age, I learned to sit in silent worship, quietly listening for the still, small voice within. Words would come to me in a voice not my own. It was a comforting voice. While I enjoyed First Day School (the Quaker version of Sunday School) with the other children, I preferred the first twenty minutes of Meeting for Worship when the children sat with the adults in silent worship before heading off to the First Day School room. I loved the way the tufted upholstered cushions felt on the bench. I loved the woodsy smell of the sunlit room. I especially loved winter at Wilton Friends Meeting (the Quaker “church” I attended from childhood to young adulthood), when the fireplace would crackle and the comforting smell of wood smoke would waft through the room. And I loved the concept of the Light, the essence of the Divine within each of us. When we prayed for other people, we would call it “holding them in the Light.” I was also taught to recognize the Light within

myself and others. Because of this formative experience, I was a very spiritual child. When I was clearing out my family home three years ago, I came across an essay I wrote when I six years old. My next-door neighbors and some friends from school (to whom I refer in my essay) were Catholic, and I had a couple of occasions to join them at special services, like my dear friend Ann Marie’s First Communion, which were filled with ritual and fancy clothes. Here is what I wrote, unedited: If I could have anyone in the world as my best friend, I would chose God and Jesus but I all ready love them. I would study religion with them. We would have lots of fun. I would read the bible every day. Someday I might write a bible. I go to a Quaker meeting. I like silent time that is when everybody prays to themselves. Someday when I am in third grade they will give me my own bible. I can keep it for the rest of my life. My friend is catholic and I went to her church. I saw Dana and Paul, they were marching. The thing they were doing was called the Crowning of the mother of Jesus. After I do everything with God and Jesus I will go home and say my prayers and go to bed. I find it interesting that I was focusing on the Bible and the idea of religion. I am guessing that was influenced by my visits to the Catholic church, especially since I mention the pageantry of the ceremony. As an adult, I appreciate the rituals (I find that communion can be a moving experience when the setting is right), but I definitely favor the Quaker faith’s mystical aspects, which encourage the individual to find God/the Light by looking inward. As I grew older, and stayed for the entire hour of Quaker meeting, I enjoyed when people would stand up to speak “when the spirit moved them.” I found that these sharings usually contained interesting insights and observations and provided food for thought. Yet, my favorite part was and continues to be the silent meditation. Sitting in silence amongst a group of like-minded people feels warm and nurturing; the room often feels filled with the Light. Quakers talk about acknowledging the Divine Light within ourselves and other people. This is the basis for the Quaker ideal of seeing everyone as equals. The Quaker church does not have a hierarchy since the Light shines

equally within each person. If anyone behaves in a way that is not in alignment with the greater good, it does not mean they are a “bad” person but rather that they have lost touch with that inner Light. If one can just find their way back to that inner Truth, there is always hope for redemption. I find it interesting that “namaste,” which is literally translated as “I bow to you,” has a deeper meaning of “the Light in me bows to the Light in you.” I use this closing every time I teach a yoga class as a way of letting my students know that I see the Divine in each and every one of them and that I see us all as equal parts of a greater whole. I find it comforting that two such seemingly different traditions focus on the same basic truths. ◊ Some people believe that children are born with a full knowing of Divine Truth, including an understanding of Spirit as well as memories of their past lives, but most begin to forget these things as the world imposes its concepts of reality on them. Around age seven, when significant neurological development occurs in the brain’s temporal and frontal lobes (the seat of impulse control, rational thought), they begin to lose some of their sense of magic and wonder.[11] However, some children remain very connected, and some even retain vivid memories of their past incarnations. Academic researchers, such as Dr. Jim Tucker and the late Dr. Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia, have been studying this phenomenon for over 50 years and have documented several interesting case studies.[12] While I don’t recall having detailed memories of past lives, I do remember having many moments of déjà vu, knowing that I had been in places or situations before. My mother would not have encouraged or inquired about my past life memories, so it is possible they came up, then were lost. But when I was five years old, I had a series of memories that arose through dreams and sensory cues, such as video images, books, and period music. Unlike my peers’ parents, my parents didn’t take me to amusement parks or other child-oriented entertainment venues. Rather, they would take me to dinner at the homes of interesting friends, to museums, and to the annual Dogwood Festival in Southport, Connecticut. And every summer, they would take me with them for their anniversary excursion to the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. I found the plays long but interesting, and I found myself understanding the Elizabethan English after a few minutes into the performance. I especially enjoyed Shakespeare’s comedies, like Much Ado

About Nothing (“O, that he were here to write me down an ass! But masters, remember that I am an ass, though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.”). But the thing that I loved most of all was the picnicking on the grounds. We would sit on a stone bench outside of the theatre, eating our lunch as wandering minstrels strolled by singing and playing their lutes. Even though I was only five years old, I felt an uncanny affinity for this music the first time I heard it. It felt so nostalgic to me, and it tugged at my heartstrings. At this same age, I had dreams about being a boy and longed to be able to write my name in the snow with pee. I also recalled, very vividly, the ability to fly. I told my parents about this, and they said that it was just a dream, but I knew in my heart that it was real. I did have one very vivid lifelike dream of flying. It is morning and I wake up to a beautiful sunny day. I rise from my bed and glide out into the hallway and down the stairs, through the living room and dining room and into the kitchen. The kitchen screen door swings open for me with a squeak of its spring, setting me free to fly around the neighborhood. I look down at the trees, roofs, and backyards of my neighborhood, noting that this is a vantage point that I have not seen before. At this age, I also had an extremely vivid dream that I had a twin brother, a dream that would come to me again as an adult. We are in a king-sized bed, in a large, high-ceilinged, sparsely decorated but modernly elegant, room. We are some type of royalty. A “spaceman” is approaching our room. My brother is afraid, so he hides under the covers. “Don’t hide! You have to show your face! We need to face him!” But my brother doesn’t listen to me, and he dies. I stay above the covers, looking directly at the spaceman. I survive, but I wake up crying, mourning my brother. As a five-year-old, I recall begging my mother for an older brother. She kept telling me that she did not want to have more children. I suggested she adopt, but she said no to that idea. I found it all incredibly unfair. Thinking about it later, I wondered if I was trying to get my brother back, the one I had lost to the spaceman. At age 30, I had the same exact dream. Around that time, my husband and I were talking about how it might be nice to have

another child, but we didn’t feel we had the capacity financially or emotionally. ◊ I had my first experience with yoga was when I was 11 years old. At that age, I had become fascinated with the history of the Beatles, so I had read everything I could about them. This led me to the teachings of Maharishi Mehesh Yogi. I came across his 1968 book, Transcendental Meditation: Serenity Without Drugs, and taught myself some basic meditation techniques, including body scanning and breathwork to gain a sense of calm. I also spontaneously experienced lucid dreams—in one I found myself in extreme danger, and I realized that if I blinked like Jeannie in the television show I Dream of Jeannie, I would wake up, so I did. Around this same time, I discovered a show on PBS called Lilias, Yoga and You. In the mornings before school, I would practice her gentle form of yoga, and I loved the sense of calm it gave me. The next year, my sixth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Goldstein, offered to teach yoga to a small group of students after school. Similar to Lilias’s style, Mrs. Goldstein’s yoga was a simple but nice form of gentle movement and concentration. That year when I went for my annual physical, Dr. Appleby, my pediatrician, measured my resting pulse and then had me walk up and down a set of steps several times to get my pulse rate up. I decided to use this opportunity to control my heart rate with my mind, something I had read about in the Maharishi’s book. When the doctor measured my pulse after this little sprint of exercise, the rate was actually lower than my resting rate. He looked at me and asked, “How did you do that?” Being a pre-adolescent, I just shrugged my shoulders. In hindsight, I realized that I should have fessed up. Every year, Dr. Appleby spent his summers in India, donating his services as a family doctor. He must have been familiar with the techniques I was employing. Around that time, I also had my first peak experience, a euphoric mental state in which I experienced communion with the Infinite. The concept was originally developed by Abraham Maslow in 1964, who said, “In the peak experience, such emotions as wonder, awe, reverence, humility, surrender, and even worship before the greatness of the experience are often reported.”[13] At age nine, I had begun violin lessons at my elementary school. I learned quickly and was an enthusiastic student, so my teacher, Lulu Pilsen, offered to give me private lessons, which my mother easily agreed to. I

practiced daily and enjoyed the more advanced exercises (scales, arpeggios, mordents) and musical pieces. By age 10, I held the position of concertmaster, the first seat of the first violin section, of our school orchestra. Lulu had studied at Juilliard and saw that I had potential to follow in her footsteps. At age 11, I had my first solo performance. I was to play a Bach concerto at the school’s fall concert. In preparation, Lulu had me memorize the piece so I wouldn’t be distracted by reading the music and having to turn pages. The night of the concert, I stepped onto the stage in my long black velvet skirt and white blouse, gently holding my violin by its neck in my left hand and my bow in my right. The orchestra was already seated, and Lulu was at the conductor’s stand. I could hear the applause, but because of the lighting, I couldn’t see most of the audience, just the smiling faces of those in the front row illuminated by the stage lights. The applause faded away. In the anticipation held by the quiet in the room, I surprisingly felt only the slightest of butterflies. Lulu raised her arms, made eye contact with the orchestra, and then gestured for them to begin. I listened for the musical cue two measures before I was to begin. I raised my violin to my left shoulder, laid my chin against it, lifted my bow above the strings, then joined in just at the right moment. As my bow made contact with the string, I watched the familiar puff of rosin rise up like a tiny cloud and took in its familiar comforting scent. I played a few notes, then closed my eyes. I knew the song so well that I was able to just enjoy the playing of it, without having to think. It just flowed naturally. Then I was gone–I had left my body. I am one with the music. There is no violin, no stage, no audience, no me. It’s just the music, and the music is me, floating in this blissful infinite space of pure Light and Love. Before any time has passed, the sound of the audience clapping brings me back into my body. I opened my eyes and bowed, feeling as if I had just come back from a beautiful journey into outer space. I had never experienced anything as transcendent before, and I hoped to be able to capture that feeling again. I have felt it while in nature, meditating, dancing—each time giving me a glimpse into the state of non-beingness, of melding with the Infinite. ◊ As I was beginning to reconnect with Spirit, learning how to access my higher self, my external world was changing. At age 11, I had my first period,

and my mother began experiencing menopause. She started to slip into a clinical depression. One evening, as she was telling me goodnight, she embraced me and started crying. “I am so sorry that I brought you into this terrible world. I am so sorry,” she said. For as long as I could remember, I had known about the myriad injustices in our world, past and present, and the consequent pain and suffering of so many, but I had never felt hopeless. I knew many people were out there working very hard every day to make the world a better place, and I thought she knew that too. She had been one of them, but something had taken away her hope. She began to withdraw from social situations, like attending Friends Meeting and doing volunteer work. Then she stopped going to the dentist. She thought her previous dentist had done damage to her teeth, but she refused to find a new one. Her asthma became more and more of an issue, but she refused to see a doctor. Instead, she relied on over-the-counter inhalers, which are not designed for long-term use. Then, when I was in eighth grade, she took to her bed, not going out of the house at all, with the exception of a late-night trip to the ER because her breathing was so labored. My father was traveling for work at the time, so my mother called our dear family friends, Mel and Gail, to drive her to the hospital. They sat with me in the emergency room until 4:00 a.m. when my mother was discharged with a proper inhaler. I had to stay home from school the next day to watch her. Over the months, she fell deeper into her depression, and I became her caregiver. My father, not knowing how to deal with this, immersed himself in his work, which required extensive travel. As an only child, I was left alone to take care of myself and the household. If it hadn’t been for my angel of a next-door neighbor, Betty Gallacher, I don’t know what would have happened. Betty would take me grocery shopping, making special trips to Gregory’s, a family-owned business farther away than her usual grocery store, because my mother had an account there and I could just put everything on our tab. Betty would also drive me to my weekly violin lessons. I was, and still am, unspeakably grateful for her kindness and generosity of time (she had four children of her own to worry about). She made me feel that somebody cared. Yet I also felt terribly guilty about taking her time. I felt like a pathetic little burden. I distanced myself from my friends because I didn’t feel worth of their time and affection, and I was embarrassed about my abnormal home situation.

To make matters worse, when I started high school, I ended up with a new orchestra teacher who had an unexplainable disdain for me. She did everything she could to make me feel less than. She was cruel and critical in an unconstructive way. Her unwarranted meanness was even worse than the torment inflicted upon me by my fourth-grade teacher, but it came as a shock, given how supportive and kind all of my other music teachers had been. I was still taking lessons with Lulu Pilsen, and outside of school I was a member of the Norwalk Youth Symphony, which was an audition-only group of the best students from all the local high schools. But the high school orchestra teacher’s treatment of me was unbearable. It was the last thing I needed when I felt so alone and unsupported at home. I told her I planned to quit, and she responded that if I wasn’t in the high school orchestra, I couldn’t be in the Youth Symphony. I adored the Youth Symphony, but I couldn’t be around her, so I let everything go. I let go of my dreams of being a concert violinist; I let go of my dreams of Juilliard. A few years ago, I was telling this story to a friend who was in the Youth Symphony. She told me that she wasn’t in the high school orchestra, and that she knew a few other students who weren’t. The orchestra teacher had lied to me. I could have stayed in the Youth Symphony, but it hadn’t occurred to me to consult with anyone else and, for some reason, I didn’t tell Lulu about my unpleasant relationship with the high school orchestra director. Walking away from my music left me feeling empty inside. I didn’t see much point in my life. With the loss of the one thing that gave me meaning and joy, I thought of committing suicide and started to make a plan. But something stopped me. One small thread tethered me to this world. It was the connection I felt with the water, a connection that would come back to me throughout my life, particularly when I found myself in a difficult or pivotal time. I grew up in a small private beach community in Fairfield County, part of Connecticut’s Gold Coast. It was a lost-in-time haven on the Long Island Sound, 48 miles up the coast from New York City. Many residents had lived there for generations, or at least their entire lives. My mother’s family had been in that town since 1653. Being around salt water—the ocean, the sound, the inlets—was the one thing that consistently made me feel alive and whole. Throughout my life, and particularly during my adolescence, I felt set apart by my looks, my opinions, my aesthetics, and my intuition. But when I was a teenager, even

when things felt hopeless and I felt utterly alone in the world, I could always count on the beach to be a place of solace and renewal. At the end of the street in my little neighborhood was a set of benches facing out onto the water. It was the perfect place to sit, meditate, listen to the sea birds and the water lapping against the shore, and just breathe in that life-giving saline air. At night I would go down to the beach and sit, looking out onto the water, taking in its energy. It was my comfort, my solace, my mother. I felt safe there. I felt life flowing through me in a way I didn’t feel anywhere else. I felt gratitude for the salt air. It kept me tethered to this world and gave me hope. But the loneliness still weighed on me, and I sought out ways to distract myself. At age 14, feeling despondent and having very little regard for myself, I began hanging out with a new group of peers whose lives revolved around getting high. I looked forward to the times when I could escape the extreme pain of my existence, not realizing at the time that I was adding to my pain by lowering my vibration and therefore dimming the connection to the Divine and my higher consciousness. I didn’t identify with this group— they were rough around the edges and not what you’d call particularly nice people—and always felt like an outsider, but being with them was better than being alone. Despite the fact that I was dampening my intuition with drugs and spending my time with peers who had no moral compass, I did not completely lose my connection. During this time, I saw three apparitions, all at moments when I was not under the influence of any substances. The first time happened as some peers were driving me home one late evening. I saw a man up ahead in his yard, working in his garden in the dark. How odd, I thought, that he would be working on his garden so late at night. But, as we came close to him, I realized that he was transparent with a luminous outline. We drove by without slowing down, and figuring it was a hallucination, I didn’t say anything to the others in the car. Nobody else mentioned anything. The next incident happened in a cemetery. The group I was hanging out with found it exciting to be there at night under a full moon. While I didn’t think being there was a great idea, I also wasn’t creeped out by it. At one point we stopped near a memorial that had the figure of an angel. I could see the mouth starting to move, as if it were trying to tell me something. I watched for a bit, then closed my eyes to see what would happen. When I opened them again, the statue had returned to its original stone form. The last incident happened one night as friends and I were driving to the

beach in Westport. The road that leads to the beach has a statue of a Minuteman kneeling on one knee, his musket at the ready by his side, a tribute to the many Yankees who were ready to fight the British on short notice (the shores of Fairfield County were one of the many places that King George III’s army landed for surprise attacks).[14] As we drove by the statue that evening, the Minuteman raised his gun, aiming it at some unseen target. He had a glow about him. We drove past and I looked at the road in front of us to see if anything else had changed. I looked back at the Minuteman, and he was back to his regular pose, yet he still had the glow. I now understand what may have been happening. In my teens through my early 30s, I had a few bouts with depression and hypomania, where I was either feeling suicidal or needing very little sleep, my mind racing nonstop. I had an inability to distinguish my feelings from my mother’s depression and other people’s emotions. I would come to learn that this lack of separation is one of the curses and blessings of the empath. That issue, combined with the stress of my life and the chemical soup of my developing adolescent brain, made my mind and body difficult to inhabit. I was being cracked open, allowing me the opportunity to develop spiritually at a younger age than most people. I was experiencing firsthand the intensities of illness, both physical and mental, in myself and those closest to me. What I didn’t know then was that this painful time in my life was a crucible in which I was beginning to be forged as a healer. Shamans across cultures believe that mental illness, like depression and bipolar disorder, are indicative of spiritual healing crises and that they are signs that a gifted healer is being born.[15],[16] Similarly, psychologists Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof believed that psychosis had mystical or spiritual roots.[17] In graduate school, I learned that most non-Western cultures view what we call mental illness as an imbalance in the individual’s environment, not something wrong with the individual. For example, in Chinese medicine, mental and physical health are seen as a balance of the basic elements (represented as wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) that make up the life force, qi, that flows through all things. When a person has too much or too little of a particular element, they may feel depressed, anxious, or exhibit hypomanic behavior.[18] Bringing the person’s elements back into balance helps to restore mental and physical health. Because nobody was overseeing my well-being, I didn’t see a therapist and I wasn’t placed on medication for my depressive and hypomanic

behaviors. While this made it difficult for me to function in my daily life, it did allow me some glimpses of my gifts of intuition, and it allowed me to begin to develop the skills and insights that I use in my current work with others. But it would be a few years before I was in a situation and mindset where I could actually begin to understand, nurture, and cultivate these healing gifts. I would need to face the deep wounds I carried within me, not just try to numb them. I needed to do the work to heal them so that I could turn them into skills I could use to heal others. The journey of the Wounded Healer[19] lay clearly ahead of me, even if I could not yet see it. For the time being, I looked outside of myself for confirmation of my worth. When I was 15, I found a boyfriend, Kevin, a quintessential bad boy, who was a couple of years older than me. I spent most of my time with his large, boisterous family just to get away from my lonely home situation. It was far from ideal since drinking, smoking, and arguing were a big part of his family culture. While they included me in their meat-and-potato meals, I generally didn’t feel comfortable or nourished in that environment. In it, I found myself moving further away from my inner guidance, but I chose to stick around since it was better than being alone. When I was 16, my mother finally began to lift herself from her depression. I was relieved to see her returning to herself, getting out of bed, baking bread, and reconnecting with a couple of close friends. She never returned to Friends Meeting or her volunteer work, and she remained more reclusive than she was before her extended illness, but as her mood lifted, the world looked less bleak to me too. At age 17, I found a new boyfriend, David, who was much more positive and emotionally healthy than the peers I had been spending time with. He was charming and ebullient, and he had a great sense of humor. While he was very materialistic, far from spiritual, and incredibly narcissistic, he also was a pescatarian, ate organic as much as possible, didn’t smoke, and introduced me to Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap and the world of chemical-free household products, so he had that much going for him. He was unfaithful, however, and we broke up a few times, but we kept getting back together. When I met his parents for the first time over dinner, the first thing his father said to me, with unhidden disgust, was, “I never understood why Kamikaze pilots were willing to commit suicide.” I was taken aback and didn’t respond to this strange and racist comment. I stayed with David longer than I should have because I still didn’t think much of myself and couldn’t bear the thought of

being alone. Ironically, however, I often found myself alone since we did not share many common interests. The next year, I started college at Fairfield University. I had originally had my eyes set on colleges in the Southwest, but I chose not to go away to school. Instead, I found a school where I could be a commuter so that I wouldn’t be away from David. As part of my core curriculum, I was required to take a certain amount of philosophy and religion classes. Studying the Gospel parallels reminded me of the essence of Jesus’s teachings and how it all boils down to love. I began to come back to that place where I had been so many years before, thinking about my role in the world and how I could help make it a better place. Through the university, I volunteered at a soup kitchen. I also volunteered for a local candidate who was running for the U.S. Senate. He was a thirty-two-year-old Princeton graduate who’d made his name by writing a senior thesis with instructions for building a working nuclear bomb just by using information he found in the library. (This was pre-internet.) His thesis underscored my concerns about the possibility of a nuclear disaster, concerns that had been stirred by the government’s statements about “contained” nuclear wars. Having an understanding of “mutually assured destruction” and having seen photos of the cities and people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings, I knew that this premise was absurd. I felt helpless at the mercy of politicians who were making decisions about the fate of our world. I wished I could do something to help heal the situation and everyone involved. So, I wrote an article about him and his campaign, which I planned to submit to a Rolling Stone essay contest. Because he had connections there, he offered to connect me with an editor. I thanked him and turned down the offer, wanting to take a chance on my own merit. Looking back, that “my do” attitude may have gotten in the way of an amazing opportunity. The essay did win an English award at Fairfield University that year. The summer before I started college I had heard about an anti-nuke peace rally to be held in New York City. The rally was being coordinated in response to many people’s growing concerns about the political rhetoric around nuclear war. The rally was organized by a diverse group of people from around the world (including from Hiroshima), united by the desire for peace. The coalition included the American Friends Service Committee (a Quaker organization for whom my mother had volunteered for many years before I was born), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (whose first

President was Martin Luther King Jr.), Buddhist monks, Roman Catholic bishops, Dr. Helen Caldicott, and Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr. (one of the Freedom Riders), just to name a few. I was encouraged to know that so many people felt the same way I did. But none of my friends, including David, were interested in joining me, so my mother, who was concerned about my going alone, put me in touch with a woman, Missy, at Wilton Friends Meeting. (My mother had stayed in touch with a couple of Friends even though she no longer attended.) Missy was going to the rally with a small group from the Meeting, and she agreed to be my safety buddy. I don’t remember much about the event other than the fact that vast amounts of people of all ages from all over the world and all walks of life attended. There was a beautiful “we are all in this together” vibe, great signs, the Bread and Puppet theatre, and an amazing concert that included Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Ziggy Marley, and Jackson Browne in Central Park, which I viewed from quite a distance because of the crowds. (I recently Googled the event and found that upwards of one million people attended it.) Not long into the event, I lost Missy, but somehow, I located her just before we were supposed to head back to Grand Central Station to go home. It’s a miracle that I ever found Missy—this was before the days when everyone had cell phones, but at the time, the communal vibe was so positive and uplifting and I was feeling so attuned to my inner guidance that I thought, Of course I will find her. No problem! ◊ During my sophomore year of college, I finally broke up with David, thinking I would take a break from guys, not rely on external validation of my worth, and spend some time just learning to love myself. The courses in religion and philosophy had helped me to put things in perspective. I had begun meditating (something I hadn’t done since I was a child attending Wilton Friends Meeting), and this had helped me to get in touch with my inner guidance. But I wasn’t single for very long. Just one month later, I met the man who would become my first husband.

Chapter 2: A Family of My Own I had recently broken up with David, and my intention was to have a night out just to enjoy myself with Diana, one of my female friends. She had recommended a Chinese restaurant in Norwalk. By day it served food; at night it became a bar and concert venue featuring talented local bands. Diana knew someone in the warmup band. We were underage, but the bar was known for letting in anyone who said they were there to hear the bands and promised not to drink. We were sitting at a table talking when I locked eyes with a tall, athletically built, extremely good-looking guy across the room. It was a moment right out of the movies. Everything faded to black and white, except him. In technicolor, he made his way over to our table and introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Peter.” He smiled. I was riveted by his huge blue eyes. “I’m Mary. This is Diana.” “What are you drinking?” he asked looking at me. “Just ginger ale,” I answered. “Me too,” he said with a smile. He asked Diana what she’d like, then went up to the bar and got us all drinks. It turned out that Peter was in an ascetic Christian phase at the time, so he wasn’t drinking, which was great because I am not much of a drinker. I experience the Asian Glow,[20] as a friend calls it, where my face turns bright red and I get a raging headache with less than half a drink. Because of this, drinking has never been a pleasant experience for me, and I have only turned to it for its numbing effect at times when I found just being alive to be too painful. At this point though, I was in a very good place and had no desire to numb myself. We all chatted for a while. Peter was very polite toward Diana, who was very attractive, but his attention was focused on me. He and I had an intense connection, bonding over topics like U2’s imagery of a new dawn for humanity when “we can be one.” It felt like a soul-level connection, something I had never experienced before. The warmup band finished their last song. Peter said, “I’m sorry. I have to go head up to the stage.” To my surprise, he positioned himself behind the keyboard, and a couple of minutes later, the band launched into some danceable punk-rock-and-roll covers along with a few original songs. Watching his high-energy performance and the exuberant joy he radiated, I fell in love right then and there.

After that night, Peter and I saw each other often, and soon we were spending all of our spare time together. He was four years older than me and had dropped out of college, so he was working a menial day job to support his music habit. I admired that he was pursuing his love of music and that he spent a lot of time reading and thinking about spirituality and religion. We had many deep and meaningful conversations. Having been raised Catholic and now espousing a more born-again perspective, his views on religion and spirituality were much more conservative than mine. But even though I did not agree with much of what he believed, I chose to focus on our common ground. We both agreed on the basic tenets of loving one’s neighbor, making the spiritual a priority over the material, being charitable, and not judging others. ◊ After Peter and I had been together for about three months, we took a trip up to Rangeley, Maine, where his band had been invited to play at a ski lodge owned by one of the drummer’s friends. The owner was a trustafarian whose parents had given him the responsibility of running this lodge as a way to keep him off the streets. He used this opportunity to indulge his love of music and partying by bringing in bands to play in the lodge’s pub. We drove along the country road in my sunshine-yellow five-speed manual transmission Toyota Celica, which had an awesome custom stereo system. A mountain appeared in the distance as we approached a small town. There was a strong odor of decay, as if someone was steaming a huge amount of rotting broccoli in paper bags. It turned out to be a large paper mill. We soon reached the mountain road and began to ascend it. There was surprisingly little snow for January. Eventually we reached the hotel and were taken aback at its rundown appearance. We hoped that the inside would look more habitable. Inside was not much better. It looked like it had last been renovated in the 1940s or 50s, and it had the musty smell of a lakeside home that hadn’t been aired out for several seasons and a distinct haunted vibe. We soon caught up with the other band members who had arrived before we did. “This place feels like it’s right out of a Stephen King novel. Don’t most of his stories take place in Maine?” I commented to the band. “Yeah, it has an Amityville Horror thing going on,” Peter’s brother, Mark, added. “I was washing my hands, and a fly started circling around my head. Where did a fly come from in the middle of January? As I was watching it, it stopped mid-

flight and dropped dead into the sink. There’s definitely something weird about this place.” It was close to dinnertime, so we wandered around the empty main floor until we found the kitchen. The huge industrial space smelled liked it hadn’t been used in a few years, and it looked like it had been just as long since it had had a good scrub down. Cobwebs, mouse droppings, and burnt crumbs covered the floor and work surfaces. We managed to scrounge up the ingredients for peanut butter sandwiches and some tea. An hour later, we all gathered in the pub on the lowest level of the inn. A surprising number of guests, who looked like locals in their jeans and flannel shirts, were having drinks and hanging out. The band consisted of Peter on keyboard and backup vocals, Mark on bass and lead vocals, Mike and Jim on guitar, and Dan on the drums. Dan’s girlfriend, Stephanie, was there too for the adventure. Stephanie and I sat down at a round table closest to the small stage. Soon, the band was playing their signature danceable tunes, a variety of Beatles and Ramones as well as and some original songs. A few minutes into the show, a large, fleshy, pale bear of a man walked up and stood right in front of Mark, who was at the front of the stage. He held a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He swayed to the music but not in a rhythmic way that would indicate he was sober. After a short while, he lost interest and turned around. He caught my eye, then looked at Stephanie. He grabbed a nearby chair, turned it around, and sat astride it. He tried to make eye contact with each of us but seemed to have trouble focusing. Without saying a word, he ate what was left of his cigarette, chugged the remains of his beer, smashed the can flat against his forehead, and emitted an extremely loud, unnaturally long-lasting burp. I could see the worried look on Mark’s face. He was perched on the edge of the stage, ready to jump off if needed. The other band members were watching but didn’t appear to be as concerned. With as little ceremony as he had arrived, the blond bear got up and walked away. The show ended around midnight, and we all decided that it had been a really long day, so everyone headed off to bed. I would have loved to have left right then, but driving down the unlit mountain in the middle of the night felt like a bad idea at the time, so we stayed for the night. For some reason, Peter and I were given a room in an annex off of the main building, far away from the other band members. The annex contained six rooms, and ours was the only one that was occupied. It had no heat, no

hot water, and a distinct moldy smell. That night, in this bizarro, alternate reality hotel, I had a vivid nightmare. I am in a city. It is nighttime. The streetlights are lit, but all of the buildings are dark and several are on fire. I am not panicking, but I am trying to figure out where to go. People are in the streets, carrying suitcases and whatever other possessions they can hold. I am not carrying anything. I see an older White man who looks like an evangelical preacher. He is waving his arm, beckoning people to come to him. As I pass by, he catches my eye and says with a big smile, “Come with me! I will save you!” He points toward a metal arched gate, buttressed by two large stone pillars. Through it, several hundred yards behind, a gigantic spaceship glows in the darkness. People are lined up, eager to board the ship, but a voice in my head tells me not to listen to him—that going with him will be a terrible mistake, so I shake my head no and keep walking until I reach the edge of the city where it is dark, quiet, and calm. A being of bright light appears in front of me. I feel warmth permeating my entire being, and I know that I am “home,” that I am safe. I am grateful for my inner guidance leading me away from the spaceship and the false prophet and to the true Light. I woke up the next morning with a feeling of foreboding. The dream felt like a glimpse of the future but also a clear warning about our present situation. We were supposed to stay another night, but all of the other band members were taking off that morning. It was starting to snow, and it promised to be quite a storm, but Peter thought we may as well take advantage of the free night in the hotel. I did everything I could to convince him that it was a really bad idea to stay, but he wouldn’t listen. I opened the nightstand drawer, took out the Gideon’s Bible (something every hotel seemed to have back then), and flipped through the pages, randomly stopping at one hoping for some words of wisdom. It landed on 1 Kings 13, which happed to be a story about a man who is told by God to leave the place he is visiting and not eat or drink anything there. He encounters another person who, claiming to be a prophet, convinces him to come to his house for some food and drink. While the man is enjoying his meal, God sees what he is doing and says to him, “I warned you not to do

this!” On his way home, the man encounters a lion who kills him and stands by his corpse so that people will notice what happened to him. I showed the passage to Peter, who immediately got the message. We grabbed our bags and headed out to the car. It wouldn’t start. We tried again. Nothing. There were already about six inches of snow on the ground, but I knew we would be able to make it off the mountain if we could get the car to start. We went inside to call a mechanic, but the manager told us the phones were down. The situation was feeling more and more like a Stephen King novel. So, we walked about a quarter mile down the road to a pay phone we had noticed on our way in. We couldn’t get through to any of the local mechanics listed in the phone book. The snow kept coming. We got in the car and tried again to start it. Still nothing. It felt like the hotel was doing everything it could to keep us there. My heart was pounding and my mind was racing, but I managed to find that calm, still place in my being where I would be open to messages and less prone to panicking. Then it dawned on me that we should pray for the car to start, so I shared this idea with Peter, who was up for the suggestion. We held hands and began praying. Peter got back in the car, turned the ignition, and lo and behold, it started! We took off right away, slipping and sliding down the mountain road. The snow was about nine inches deep at this point. We both breathed a huge sigh of relief when we made it to the plowed main road. A few weeks later, I was looking at the photos we had taken in the hotel. In one, I was sitting on a pool table in the game room, smiling with my head tilted to one side. Behind me was a poster of the musician Edgar Winter looking like a ghostly demon. The way he and I were positioned, it looked like he was screaming in my upturned ear. I hadn’t noticed the poster at the time. ◊ Because of Peter’s strong religious views at the time, he didn’t want to have sex outside of marriage. I didn’t love that idea, and it was difficult because we had an extremely strong physical attraction to one another, but I went along with it. The thing that I should not have gone along with was his belief at the time that birth control would make it more tempting for us to have sex. Surprisingly, we made it seven months before we gave in, but that one time was all that was needed for me to become pregnant with our first child. It was the summer before my junior year in college, and I was due the following March, so we had a quick, but sweet wedding at my parents’ home

that August before I started my junior year of college. While I was pregnant, I dreamed of a baby sitting up, with its back to me, wearing a blue football jersey with the number eight. I took that to mean that I would have a boy and he would be born on March 8. I did go into labor on March 8, but the baby arrived the next day after eighteen long hours of labor. I had wanted to have a natural birth, but my body wouldn’t dilate and I was put on Pitocin. The intense contractions brought on by the Pitocin finally caused my water to break, but the baby‘s umbilical cord prolapsed and she went into fetal distress, so the doctors had to perform an emergency cesarean anyway. I refused to undergo general anesthesia because of the risks to myself and my baby, and my spine was too small to accommodate an epidural injection, so I underwent the C-section with just locally administered novocaine. My meditative practices came in very handy during the procedure. Our baby turned out just fine, and she smiled as soon as she opened her eyes. We named our daughter Julia. Once she was old enough to show a color preference, it was always blue, so one of her nicknames was Blulia. When Julia was one year old, I unexpectedly became pregnant with our second child. I went into labor the day after Thanksgiving, two weeks before my due date. When the doctor arrived and examined me, he found that I was not dilated at all, which was the same as last time. We decided not to wait as long this time so as not to put this baby into fetal distress, and I underwent my second novocaine-only C-section. But it was a little early for her, and the fact that she came out with a thicker layer of vernix caseosa, the waxy white substance that protects baby’s skin in utero, was a sign that she wasn’t quite ready. The day after she was born, she developed jaundice, so they put her under an ultraviolet light and placed her in the neonatal intensive care unit. Because of this, I didn’t get to see or hold her as much as I did Julia, and for some reason, we were having a difficult time coming up with a name for her. We had chosen a few different names, but she didn’t look like any of them. By the end of the second day, we chose Kia. With her personality beginning to show, the name somehow fit her very well. Because of the jaundice, Kia had to stay in the hospital for another day after I was discharged. It was extremely painful to leave the hospital without my baby. I saw pity in people’s eyes as they saw me being wheeled out the front door with flowers, balloons and no infant. As heartbreaking as it was, I knew that I would see her soon, but it meant that I would miss a couple of

crucial days of breastfeeding. ◊ To support our little family, Peter took a job working in a state-run facility for people with developmental disabilities whose families, for various reasons, could not take care of them at home. He found the job rewarding, in that he was helping people, yet it was emotionally draining for him. He was only making enough money to pay for us to live in a tiny third-floor apartment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with a very tight food budget, and this seemed to make him feel inadequate, even though I never complained about our situation. Increasingly, he showed signs of stress from the pressure of the job and his feeling that, being a man, he had to provide for his growing family. I had tried going back to work, but it was too difficult. We only had one car, and it was too much to ask my mother to watch both young children every day. I did freelance graphic design and office work when I could. When Kia was about eight months old, Peter caved in from the pressure, experiencing something of a breakdown. He told me that he’d had sexual relations with one of his colleagues who was also going through a difficult time because of her husband’s chronic illness. He qualified it by saying they didn’t have intercourse, but it was everything short of it. I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. I took the kids and went to my mother’s house to figure things out. My mother’s reaction was not as supportive as I would have liked. Being a very empathetic person who liked to see the good in all people, her response was something like, “Oh, poor Peter. He has been under so much pressure.” While this was true, I would have liked her to have stood up for me, to have been on my side for once. I felt utterly alone, just as I had as a fourth-grader confronted with a cruel teacher and as a highschooler with a masochistic orchestra director. Not knowing what to do, feeling that I could not handle being the single parent of two children under the age of three, and ignoring that voice inside of me that was telling me it would be best to cut my losses, I decided to stay with him. The fiercely independent toddler in me had been completely buried by then. Blaming myself for the problems in my marriage, I did what I could to make myself more attractive. One day after having lost much of my baby weight, I put on a new fitted dress with a matching belt and paired it with some cute pumps. Having also donned some lipstick, I was hoping for some positive reinforcement. Instead, Peter’s response was, “It’s a nice dress. It

would look better on someone else.” I felt crushed and never wore the dress again. Even though I knew his reaction was toxic and part of an ongoing pattern, I felt unworthy and unattractive. Maybe I was lucky to have someone who was willing to be married to me. Maybe this was the best I could do. ◊ A year or so later, my parents gave us their old car, so I had more mobility, and my mother was happy to babysit, so I was able to take a thirtyhour per week graphics job for a small local newspaper. Getting out of the house and connecting with others helped immensely to lift my mood, and it eased our financial pressures. We were eventually able to move to a bigger first floor apartment in Norwalk just a five minute walk from my parents’ home. When Julia was four years old and Kia was two, Marilyn, one of the elders from Wilton Friends Meeting, introduced me to her then-daughter-inlaw, Charyn, who owned a boutique graphic design company in Norwalk. Charyn offered me a job that was more creative and interesting than my newspaper job, and it paid more. She also sang the praises of the Montessori School in Wilton, Connecticut, that her children attended and encouraged me to look into the program for Julia and Kia.[21] Even though it had a wait list and Julia was considered old to be starting, we were given a spot in the Primary program after our interview, and we were fortunate to receive a scholarship since we would not have been able to afford the tuition. When Kia turned three, she was also admitted to the school. Montessori was a perfect match for their personalities and learning styles. Peter and I found many kindred spirits among the teachers and parents, and over the years, we had the opportunity to meet a variety of fascinating visitors to the school. I felt so blessed to have found such a perfect community for our whole family, and I found opportunities to nurture my whole self—body, mind, and spirit. A Blackfeet educator came to the school several times to teach the children about American Indian cultures. Then, my daughters and their classmates spent a week at her camp in Massachusetts where they learned to build shelters, identify various plants, and sing Native songs. We parents were so enthralled by our children’s stories of their experiences at the camp that we asked for our own time with the educator, and she complied, offering a weekend for parents. On that weekend, I learned to identify and prepare white birch and sassafras teas. We walked through the woods and talked with

the plants and rocks. She told us to go off by ourselves for about thirty minutes and find a place to sit and listen. I found a big flat rock and lay down on it. It was warm and surprisingly comfortable. I waited and I listened. Then I heard a voice in my head. The voice said, “Everything is going to be okay. You are loved.” I experienced in that moment my connectedness to the universe and the place beyond duality where all is one, and Love is all. As I sat in stillness in the woods, my eyes closed, slowing my breath, I was able to effortlessly let go of any thoughts, sensations, or outside stimulation and sink down into that still, small place within me where my higher self, or Spirit, resides. I am in a formless space outside of time, consisting of pure light and the nurturing warmth of the eternal sun. In this place, there is no me or you, no here or there, no good or bad. In this place, everything just is. I am. After this experience, I returned to my meditation practices, revisiting the worlds of the unconscious and higher consciousness, I found I was able to reach peak experiences (even without my violin), and I had many moments where I was flooded with the Light from Spirit, feeling it filling every aspect of my being. The more time I spent meditating, the more easily I could bring this awareness into my everyday life, seeing all things as gradations, rather than absolutes or dualities. One night I experienced a very vivid dream. I am standing in a meadow in front of a single huge tree. I know that this tree contains a very powerful dark spirit. It tries to draw me in, to consume me. I stand my ground, but it keeps pulling at me, trying harder and harder to absorb me. My physical body aches and my energetic body feels like it is being ripped from me. Then it occurs to me to recite the Lord’s Prayer. I speak the words aloud, words I memorized as a small child, and surround myself with Light. The tree releases its hold. I feel a lightness of being, I feel better than I did before the struggle, and I wake, exhausted, as if I have just been in the battle of my life. I have come to learn that the darkness that I perceived in my dream, the “evil” that I felt I had to overcome, was coming from emotional wounds inside of myself, wounds that needed to be brought to the surface, into the

light of day, in order to be healed. I had relationships with people where I felt that I had to fend off the tremendous amounts of negativity that they were throwing at me. Once I stepped back and thought about what I might be bringing to the table that allowed this to happen, I began delving into my own “shadows,” as Carl Jung referred to them. I worked to bring these deeply held emotions and cognitions to my conscious awareness, hoping to come to peace with them through self-reflection. I soon began working with a psychotherapist individually, then, at my therapist’s suggestion, with Peter in couples therapy. Healing emotional wounds and cultivating love and compassion for myself helped me to identify and eliminate unhealthy situations around me. ◊ While my girls were in preschool and elementary school, I continued my studies, finishing up my undergraduate degree in fine arts/communications and starting a master’s degree in statistics and research as preparation to apply for a PhD program in psychology. I continued to work in graphic design too. During this time, my mother became very engaged in helping with childcare. On the days when I had class or had to be in an office, she would pick up the girls from school and take them to her house, where she had a variety of activities for them. They would cook, draw, write, make crafts, and more. My mother was really in her element in the role of grandmother, and I was happy to see her embracing it. Even though she hadn’t been there for me after a certain point, I was grateful that she could be there so fully for my daughters. My girls had the benefit of learning from her best self, and I had the pleasure of seeing it unfold. And I felt incredibly supported by her. I had applied to graduate programs in psychology at five universities within driving distance of my home, and I was accepted into three of them. I chose Fordham’s program because I liked their focus on the application of psychology—conducting and utilizing research in human development from a multicultural perspective to help inform public policy and create programs for people across the lifespan. I was awarded a full scholarship plus a small stipend, which allowed me to pursue my studies full time. The support of family and friends was essential in my being able to make it through the rigorous demands of a doctoral program. After three years, I finished my courses and began the process of writing my dissertation. Peter announced that it was his turn to be a student and that I

now needed to support him financially (although, during my studies, I had held up my end of the family finances through my stipend and students loans I took out at Peter’s request). Not questioning this, as I did want him to be able to pursue work that he was passionate about, in 1997 I took a full-time position at Yankelovich Partners. It was an exceptional market research company started by three sociologists who had their training at Harvard and who coined the term “generation gap” back in the late 1960s. I was surrounded by smart, fun, creative people. ◊ The husband of the director of the Montessori School was a minister. He was recruited to a small, historical church in Darien, Connecticut, to bring it back to life. When he arrived, there were about eight members, the average age being eighty. He invited families from the Montessori School to attend his sermons, and many of us ended up enjoying it so much that we became members. Mitch (who had attended Yale Divinity about thirty years after my mother) had a wonderful way of leading. I loved his open-minded approach to his ministry. He never preached at us. Each week, he would share his observations about life and Spirit, posing questions, rather than giving us answers, and inviting us to explore these ideas in our own way. At one point, I asked Mitch if he could include a bit of silent prayer time during the service. Having attended some Quaker services during his divinity school days, he understood the value of it and agreed to five to ten minutes. I was very grateful to have this nourishing spiritual community. During this time, my marriage wasn’t perfect, but Peter and I continued to engage in couples therapy, and we were in the most stable stage we had ever been. Between the Montessori School, Yankelovich Partners, and the church, I had an amazing support network filled with smart, fun, interesting people. So, in early 1998, everything in my life was coming together, and I was the happiest I had been in a long time. Looking back on it, I was creating a foundation to hold me up over the next few years as things took a 180-degree turn.

Chapter 3: Impermanence In mid-March of 1998, I was at work when Peter called me. He had just been speaking to our accountant, Everett, my mother’s cousin, to schedule an appointment to have our taxes done when Everett told him how sorry he was to hear about my mother. My parents had apparently had an appointment that morning with him, and my father had called to postpone it since he had to take my mother to the hospital. She had been having chest pains the night before. I knew she hadn’t been feeling well for a week or so, but she had thought it was her asthma causing the shortness of breath. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks since I had been busy with work, grad school, kids, and life in general, and the kids had been spending their time at friends’ houses after school instead of going to her. I had been so caught up in work, school, and family that I hadn’t sensed that anything was seriously wrong with her. I felt blindsided. Peter met me at my office, and we drove to Norwalk Hospital, which was just ten minutes away. He wanted to stop and buy some flowers for her, but I sensed that this was a futile effort. He purchased a single rose in a glass vase, and we headed up to the ICU. When we got there and checked in with the nursing station, we found that she had just been transferred about fifteen minutes earlier. They had sent her to St. Vincent’s in Bridgeport, about twenty-five minutes away. We headed over immediately. We found the cardiac unit where she was being held for observation. My father was in the waiting room. I asked if I could go in and see her, and the nursing staff said we had to wait outside. My father said, “Just go in. I did. Don’t let them stop you.” For some reason, I felt that I should be obedient and listen to the medical staff. My stomach was in a knot. My whole body was buzzing, and I had this terrible feeling that I wasn’t going to see my mother again. We waited for about half an hour. Then the doctor came into the room, looking slightly shell-shocked. He said that during testing her heart had burst. She was dead. The doctor asked if I wanted to see her. I shouted at him, “I wanted to see her when she was alive!” It literally felt as if the ground had fallen out from under me, that I was free-falling and could not get my bearings. The room began to spin around me. My knees buckled, but I caught myself and ran to the bathroom, dizzy and nauseous. I was in too much shock to cry. When I got back to the waiting room, my father was back from visiting with her. He encouraged me

to go in, but I couldn’t bring myself to see her lifeless body, devoid of her soul. “She has a beautiful smile on her face,” he said with a half-smile, his eyes silently frantic. I knew in my heart that this was because of the wonder of what she had seen as she was dying. A blurry surreal month after my mother’s unexpected death, we held my mother’s memorial. I hosted a lovely hybrid service at the Quaker Meeting where she had been a member and brought in Mitch Zeman, the minister from the Community Church in Darien that my family and I had been attending, as well as Rev. Henry Yordon, a friend of my mother’s whom she greatly admired. Henry was active in advocating for civil rights, and I knew he and my mother had a lot in common with their Pivot House work. Interestingly, both ministers had Yale Divinity school backgrounds, like my mother. A few of my friends played music, and people offered remembrances. I felt embraced by my community—the Montessori School; my Yankelovich Partners friends; the family members who traveled to support us; and my dear lifelong friends, like the Gallachers, Mel, Gail, and Sandy Sanford, who had been there for me since my childhood. My father was still in something of a state of shock, with a far-off look in his eyes. We had celebrated Easter at his house the previous Sunday, and while we all tried to carry on my mother’s traditions, like a little Easter egg hunt for the girls and Easter bread, it just wasn’t the same. I have a photo of us standing outside near the blooming weeping cherry tree and remember feeling incredibly sad that she was missing her favorite holiday. ◊ A couple of days after my mom’s memorial service, I called my great aunt Ruth to see how she was doing. She lived alone about an hour away, and I hadn’t seen her in a long time. My mother would check in on her regularly, so I felt it was now my duty to do so. I knew she hadn’t been feeling well; she hadn’t been able to come to my mother’s memorial. She was one of only two of my relatives left from that generation. Kia and I had decided to pay her a visit, so I called her that evening around eight to let her know. A kind-sounding nurse with a Jamaican accent answered the phone. I told her who I was, and she passed the phone on to Ruth. Ruth’s voice sounded very strange. It sounded strained, as if she was in pain and having physical trouble forming her words. I told her that Kia and I would be paying her a visit the next day, and she sounded happy about this. When Kia and I arrived around eleven, there were two men in the

apartment. One man asked who we were, and when I told him, he made some sarcastic comment about us being there. I was completely confused. Then he made some offhand comment about my aunt’s will, and it struck me that she had died. My daughter and I burst out crying. I felt as if the rug had once again been pulled out from under me. Holding on to each other, we sobbed deep, mournful sobs for my aunt, for my mother, for ourselves. When we finally caught our breath, the lawyer said gently, “You didn’t know she was dead, did you?” I looked at him incredulously. I can’t remember if he apologized, because I couldn’t really hear anything after that. He said I could take anything I wanted. We walked around her tiny, wellappointed one-bedroom apartment. On her bed was a little embroidered heart pillow I had made many years ago. I had forgotten to give her a Christmas gift one year when the girls were toddlers and had felt badly when I realized my omission. So, I had finished up the pillow, which I had been working on for months, and sent it to her as a Valentine’s Day gift. I was touched that she had kept it and that it was so prominently displayed. I took it home with me. ◊ Over the course of the next two years, my family and I lost several more friends and relatives. Two weeks after my great aunt died, we learned that Bob, my children’s Montessori science teacher, had died of a heart attack at age fifty-three. Then, a couple of weeks after Bob passed away, I learned that a young professor, Anu, whom I was hoping to recruit as my dissertation advisor, had died at age thirty-four, after having been diagnosed with cancer just three months earlier. And during that spring, three other friends were diagnosed with cancer, all of them in their early forties and all of whom had children who were close to my children so I saw them often. I did what I could to support each of them but felt badly that I couldn’t do more. I now had much less support from Peter, who had started a master’s degree in public health, but I did what I could when I could. Over the months, I kept informed of these friends’ various treatments and progress. Thankfully, all of these moms made it through and were cancer-free by the end of the year. Another dear family friend had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year earlier. He succumbed to his cancer at age fifty-seven, the day after Christmas 1998. In the spring of 1999, one year after my mother’s death, my family and I celebrated Easter, managing to enjoy this holiday of rebirth, even though it was a reminder of the loss of our mother, grandmother, and wife. Then,

during that spring break, we received news that the superintendent of the public school system where Julia was now in high school had committed suicide on Easter weekend. Less than a month later, a student who was one year older than Julia chose to end his life too. Two months later, a friend called to let me know that a nurse we knew had committed suicide by overdose at the children’s hospital where we had all worked. What was happening? Several months went by and I was beginning to emerge from my grief when, in November of 2000, I received a call from my cousin Dan. His older brother, Dave, had been driving on a highway with his girlfriend on the back of his motorcycle when he went into a skid. Apparently, he intentionally landed in a way in which he would take the majority of the impact and keep her safe, but he wasn’t wearing a helmet and suffered severe brain trauma. That moment captured his true essence—while he had chosen the persona of a tough biker guy, he was a very sensitive, caring soul. After being in a coma for five days, he succumbed to his injuries. The next month, we received sad news at Yankelovich that one of our colleagues had committed suicide. Most of my colleagues made the drive out to the eastern part of Connecticut, where he had grown up, to attend his funeral, but I didn’t join them. I was emotionally depleted. I was too raw, too exhausted from mourning over the past two years. I was trying to make meaning of it all. I thought about all these deaths and suicides. Why hadn’t these people found that tether—like I had been able to grasp—to keep them here, to bind them this world? What was it that made it so incredibly unbearable for them to stay here? So many of the highly sensitive people I knew seemed to be leaving earth. I got the sense that a shift was happening in the world and people were checking out because the pressure felt too great. I was feeling the same way, but I also knew that it wasn’t my time to leave yet. Something was telling me that I still had important work to do on this earth, but I wasn’t sure what it was. ◊ For my thirty-sixth birthday, Peter booked me for a solo weekend at Gurney’s Spa in Montauk. My room looked out over the Atlantic Ocean, and I fell asleep each night to the soothing rhythmic sounds of the waves splashing against the shore. I felt comforted, nurtured, held, protected in a

way that I didn’t in daily life, and I felt thoroughly alive. I felt gratitude towards the salt air for helping to keep me tethered to this world and giving me hope. I had to occupy myself indoors, since it was winter, so I booked as many treatments as I could. All of the spa treatments involved salt water in some way, like the wonderful thalassotherapy bath made up of warm filtered ocean water. It was the ultimate luxury for me to stay right next to the ocean, spending my days being pampered and taking in the crisp salt air. During one time slot, the only treatment available was Reiki, which I had never heard of. The way it was explained to me, it sounded much less satisfying than a mud wrap, seaweed facial, or thalassotherapy treatment, but it was intriguing enough that I gave it a try. The practitioner had a very kind, soothing demeanor. Since it was my first time, she explained that Reiki entailed very gentle touch with the purpose of helping to free the flow of energy in one’s body. She also explained that people reacted differently to it and listed some things I might experience. I found the treatment very relaxing and enjoyable. That is, until she reached my stomach. After just a few moments of holding her hands on my solar plexus, I began to bawl like a baby. She allowed me the time to let it all out, and I felt so much better afterward—better than I had felt in months! “I don’t know what happened,” I said. She responded, “You must have been holding some old energy, deep grief, in your solar plexus, and the Reiki helped you release it.” After the treatment was complete, she advised me to drink lots of water and be gentle with myself. We talked for a few minutes, and I described the things I had seen and felt. She looked at me and said, “You would make a good Reiki practitioner since you can so clearly sense the energy.” I returned home from that weekend feeling renewed and more at peace than I had been in many years, but I didn’t give the Reiki practitioner idea a second thought. ◊ Needless to say, I’d had a rough couple of years, with one reminder after another of how incredibly fragile the thread of life is—it had been one long, undeniable lesson in impermanence. But this lesson was not over, as I was to experience even more reminders that life is all about change. I felt overwhelmed, beaten down, and I devoted very little time to taking care of myself, feeling that I needed to prioritize the care of everyone and everything else around me. Peter and I stopped couples therapy after the psychologist we were seeing began projecting his divorce-related issues onto us.

I kept pace with all of my responsibilities, but I definitely was not functioning fully. Unsurprisingly, I fell into a depression. I was in therapy, and my psychologist had asked me if I would like to give antidepressants a try. Part of me felt that I might benefit from them, but the other part was really reluctant to rely on medication. Peter felt that I should go on antidepressants. (Ironically, he had long refused to take them even though his therapist had recommended meds on more than one occasion.) He gave me an ultimatum, either I go on antidepressants or he would leave. So, I chose to give the medication a try. It worked well, lifting me out of my funk. But soon it lifted me too high, and I found myself feeling wired all the time; I was sleeping only four or five hours a night, and my mind was always racing. I told the psychiatrist who was overseeing my medication regimen that I was feeling hypomanic, so he recommended some other medications to balance me out. I was reluctant; the side effects sounded awful. In particular, there was a high chance of weight gain. But I couldn’t go on feeling like I was on amphetamines all the time, so I gave in. Now I felt sleepy all the time, and my balance was off. Within a month, I started to gain weight despite keeping a healthy diet and walking several miles each day. I told my doctor about this, and he said to just exercise more and eat fewer calories. This didn’t sound right, but I didn’t know what else to do. Within a few months, I had gained forty pounds and was looking very puffy. Peter made it clear that he found me unattractive. He withdrew from me emotionally and wouldn’t invite me to his school or work events, even those that included partners and spouses. At one point, I had to travel for business, and when I called him from my hotel, he said that he was going out to dinner with one of his fellow students, a woman. I started crying and screaming at him. How could he be so cruel? I felt helpless, stuck in this uncomfortable body, feeling that if I were to leave him, nobody else would want me. ◊ I began working in Manhattan in January 2001. I worked on my dissertation during the long commute on Metro North, relishing that time to myself. But by the time I got home at night, I didn’t have the energy for anything other than making dinner for my family. I felt depleted from the long days and the past three years. That spring, Peter and I started couples therapy with a new psychologist I had been seeing individually for the past year. After a while, I got the sense

that she was frustrated with our lack of progress. Peter had been advocating for us to stay married while he went off to London to pursue his doctorate. My opinion was that we shouldn’t be married if he wanted to live in another country. I didn’t think our marriage was worth saving except for the sake of the girls, but for some reason, I wasn’t ready to just walk away. One day during our session, Peter turned to me and said, “Everything would be fine if you would just change!” I gave him a look of disgust, and I could see the therapist wanted me to say something, so I responded, “It doesn’t work that way. It’s a two-way street.” A couple of months later, I had this awful feeling in my gut. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but something inside me was setting off alarm bells. I opened up Peter’s laptop (something that had never occurred to me to do before) and went into his email. There, plain as day, was an email conversation he was having with a woman he’d met on a plane on a recent business trip. Apparently, they had hit it off and gone out to dinner, and now he was considering having an affair with her. I thought it was weird that he was discussing it with her rather than just diving in. I felt angry, betrayed, sickened. He had convinced me to take medication to even out my moods, it had caused me to gain a ton of weight, and he had rejected me because of that. I would have been better off just staying unmedicated and letting him go. I confronted him and he admitted everything. Yet, he still wasn’t willing to get divorced. He wanted to have the affair, go to school in London, and still be married. The next evening, we went to a Mets game. The company I worked for had season tickets, so we all took turns going to games. They were club level, and we had access to a bar and restaurant. I couldn’t enjoy the game. My life was unraveling, my mind was racing, my gut was clenched; it was unbearable to be in my own skin and mind. Even though my body doesn’t tolerate alcohol, I made a few trips to the bar to get glasses of wine. I also took a couple of Xanax to try to calm down. But it didn’t help, so I took a few more. In the end, I took about 20, and it worked. I finally felt calm and was able to enjoy the last inning. We got home around 10:30 p.m., and I decided I wanted to start a sewing project. The next thing I knew, I was in a hospital with a tube down my throat. Apparently, I had passed out in front of the sewing machine, and Peter had taken me to the emergency room. They kept me overnight for

observation. My psychiatrist, who was on staff at the hospital, came by to check on me. I told him what had happened, and he discharged me that morning. On the way home, I told Peter I’d had enough and wanted a divorce. When we got home, we sat down with the girls and let them know. They were devastated. This was the thing I had worried about most all along —tearing their world apart, taking away their sense of home and security. But, for my sake, I had to get out. I should never have let it go for this long, but I had. This painful chapter in my life had to end in order to make room for something new and better. Having experienced so many deaths in such a short time had put things in perspective for me. The message couldn’t have been clearer: life is short; you can die at any time, so please don’t wait to be happy. It took me a while, but I had finally removed myself from a toxic relationship, and this was a huge first step. The past three years had been a big lesson in remembering how to stand up for myself. Every time I felt I was getting my footing I was knocked down again. But I got up, and this time, I finally stood up for myself and listened to my inner guidance. That fiercely independent toddler who had insisted “My do!” had re-emerged. I was healing and finally moving past the grief. Then 9/11 happened. ◊ I fell in love with New York City when I was five years old. I had seen glimpses of it on Sesame Street, but mid-town Manhattan, where my father took me to work with him one day, was much bigger, louder, and more exciting. I remember getting off the train in Grand Central Station and my father taking my hand and briskly navigating the streets filled with cars, taxis, buses, trucks, and lots and lots of people. I had no idea where we were going, but I could tell that we needed to do it quickly and with purpose. Once inside the tall office building, I was introduced to his fellow staff members, then situated at a desk where I proceeded to unpack my briefcase (a toy doctor’s bag that I had filled with paper, crayons, and a snack) and get to work. I don’t remember much of the day, except for the part where I was brought into a screening room where I sat with my father and other executives who were reviewing a film with horses in it. At the end of the day, we made the brisk, purposeful walk back to Grand Central. This time we stopped at one of the bakeries where my father always

picked up a few chocolate éclairs, one of my absolutely favorite desserts. New York City was the best, most exciting place in the world! Over the years, through my visits with friends and family, school trips, various business meetings, and freelance work, I got to know different aspects of the city. As an eleven-year-old, I went with family friends to a concert at Lincoln Center. We sat front and center, so close that I could see the puffs of rosin dust coming off of the violinists’ fingers. As we walked back to the car after the concert, it began to snow. New York City at Christmas time is a magical place. In high school, I visited a friend who had moved to the City as an emancipated minor. She guided me through the maze of subways, popping up at various points of interest, one of which was the World Trade Center. We rode to the top and viewed New York City from high above. Looking down at the streets so far below us made my heart pound. Over the years, I got to know the personalities of the various neighborhoods in the City, each with its own distinct sights and sounds (and smells!). As a whole, there is a beautiful energy, a music, in the City, which I have not experienced anywhere else. New York has always held a special place in my heart. So, in 2001, when I was presented with the opportunity for a full-time position at a marketing research firm in the Flatiron District on Fifth Avenue, between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth, I took it. I would take the train into Grand Central from Connecticut (Cannondale, Wilton, or Westport, depending on my timing that day), then head over to Fifth Avenue, where I would walk south, seventeen blocks to my office. As I approached my building, I would see the Twin Towers looming high in the sky, even though they were about thirty blocks away. I enjoyed my job, using my statistical skills to create new marketing research products, mostly because of my colleagues and the location. Many of us were big foodies, and our work neighborhood provided many opportunities to experience wonderful international cuisine—from inexpensive takeout places to some exquisite restaurants. Our building, though old and drafty, was right across from Madison Park, where we would see scenes from TV shows, like Sex and the City, Law and Order, and Saturday Night Live, being filmed. The area also had lots of great shopping, and I spent more than one lunch hour scouring the stores within a six-block radius.

Another nice thing about the job was that I could work from our Connecticut office once a week if I chose to. It was a small, three-room suite. A half-dozen of us commuted from Connecticut, so we had to check ahead to make sure there was room in the office, but there were usually no more than a couple of us visiting at a time. It was nice to make a twenty-minute commute rather than my usual hour-plus. On one of the days that I decided to work from the Connecticut office, a beautiful September day, I was surprised to find that every other Connecticut person was there. We were crowded in, using up every workable surface. Everyone was easy-going, so it was no problem. Soon after I settled in, the guy who headed up the Connecticut office came out of his office to announce that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We were all shocked and saddened by the news of this tragic accident. When he came out a few minutes later to tell us that a second plane had hit the second tower, we came to the horrible realization that something much more sinister was going on. We called our colleagues in the New York City office and found that they were okay but worried and not sure what to do. A while later, the guy who headed up the Connecticut office came out once again to tell us he had just gotten off the phone with a dear friend of his. His friend was very upset; his son had just called to say goodbye. He was on Flight 93, which had been hijacked. His friend told him that his son said the hijackers had told everyone to call their loved ones to say goodbye. He and some other passengers had made the decision, after hearing what had happened in New York, to take the plane down before it hit its target—whatever that might be. Our colleague was visibly shaken. We all began to think that the entire country might be under attack. We tried contacting the New York office, both by phone and by email but were not able to get through. Not knowing what else to do, we finished out the day in numb astonishment, frequently reading updates on the BBC website and other news sources that we were able to access. I was still numb when I got home late that afternoon and turned on the news to watched images of what I had only heard about during the day. I wanted to help, but I didn’t know what I could do. I wished that I could reach out and comfort all those who were grieving. The next day, we received notice that our office would be closed for the remainder of the week. That evening, several emails and voice messages came through from people who had tried to contact me the day before to see

if I was okay, people who thought I had been in New York City at the time of the attacks. For quite some time, I experienced survivor’s guilt for not having been there that day even though I knew that feeling was irrational. I eventually spoke to a colleague who had been in the office on 9/11. She told me that she had stepped outside and seen a stream of dust-covered people walking up Fifth Avenue. They were expressionless, clearly in shock. They looked like zombies. It broke my heart to hear this, and I wished more than anything that I could take away their pain. But I did not yet have the internal tools to be of help, and instead, I felt helpless in the face of this unfathomable tragedy. I returned to work the following week. When I stepped out of the train in Grand Central, heavily armed police and their guard dogs stood near all the entrances. A notice board contained hundreds of photographs posted by people asking for information on missing family members. When I got out onto the street, the roads were eerily quiet. One of the distinctive sounds in Manhattan is the frequent beeping of car horns. This was noticeably absent. As I walked down Fifth Avenue, I passed a group of firemen in full dress uniform, solemnly walking to a funeral service. I witnessed similar heartbreaking scenes over the next few weeks. I looked down the road to where the Twin Towers had always been visible, rising above the other buildings, and all that was left was an antenna. As I was about to step through the door to my office building, I looked down at my shoes. They were covered with a thick layer of dust, and I realized that the sidewalk in front of my building was too. A sickening thought occurred to me; it was the powdered remnants of the Twin Towers and their occupants. After some time had passed, the comforting noises of New York returned, and the dust dissipated. But for many weeks after, the photographs of missing loved ones, the armed guards, and the sad looks on people’s faces served as a reminder of the painfully horrific events of the day. I grieved, and I hurt for the victims, their families, the City, this country, and the world. I prayed every day for peace and healing, and I marveled at the strength and beauty of the people of New York at their best in the wake of this incredible tragedy. Nineteen years later, I continue to pray for peace and healing, and I hold out hope that one day our world will be a place where nothing like this would happen again. ◊ After three-and-a-half years of being blindsided by one tragedy after

another, I was emotionally exhausted. I had been a spiritually aware child and had had many occasions throughout my life when I would connect to the Divine in a profound way, but many times I also allowed myself to become detached from Spirit, which caused me to slip into lower vibrational realms. When I did this, the feelings of depression and loneliness were overwhelming. I felt as if I were alone at the bottom of a pit, devoid of light and filled with despair. I couldn’t imagine a way out of it. Thoughts of suicide would haunt me, and I’d make plans as to how and where to end my insufferable pain. For those of you who have never seriously entertained thoughts of suicide, I urge you not to hold judgments about those who do choose to take their lives. Each person’s situation is different, and you cannot know what they are experiencing unless they are willing to share their inner world with you. And I want to let you know that it is not always as simple as reaching out and letting people know they are loved. That is, of course, an extremely important thing to do for someone who is feeling so desperately alone, it is a very important thing to do every day with the people you care about, and it may just be the thing needed to pull an individual away from the precipice; but for those who are feeling that life is far too painful to go on, those who can’t see the light ahead, the only thing that can save them is a feeling of being connected, of being part of something greater and having a purpose in this world. That feeling of hope has to come from within. For me, the thought of leaving my daughters motherless provided that tiny pinpoint of light that would guide me out of the deepest, darkest depths of despair. For those of you who have lost a friend or family member to suicide, you may have felt unbearable guilt, felt that you could have done more, said more, but the fact is, even if you did everything humanly possible for them, they made the choice to leave this world. They knew that you cared, but it was not enough to keep them here. They would have had to find that tether, that pinpoint of light, inside themselves.

Chapter 4: In and Out of Focus The following January, my daughters gifted me a Reiki treatment at a local spa for my birthday. This Reiki experience wasn’t as earth-shattering as the first one, but it was still very relaxing and left me with a much-needed feeling of peace. After the session, we talked a bit and the practitioner said she sensed something about the way my energy was flowing and the visions I reported seeing that made her think I would be good at giving Reiki. Given that the last practitioner had said the same thing, I found this intriguing. At the time, however, I wasn’t sure how I would be able to fit the training into in my busy schedule. That month, I was let go from my job in New York City, as was my entire department. The economy had taken a hit from the bursting of the tech bubble and the economic aftermath of 9/11. I was very fortunate to land a new job right away at Harris Interactive, a company that had purchased Yankelovich Partners during my year in New York. I was relieved to be able to work closer to home, and it would be wonderful to be back with many of my old colleagues. ◊ I again had time for side interests, so I signed up for a course through Westport Continuing Education entitled “Developing Your Intuition.” Each week, the teacher would lead us through interesting exercises designed to show us how much intuition we already possessed. My favorite was an exercise in psychometry, or “reading” the energy of objects. She had us reach into a small bag, take out an object, and hold it in our hand without looking at it. When it was my turn, I reached into the bag and grabbed the first object I touched. Then our teacher instructed us to relax and see what came to us. I felt my arms, chest, and upper back growing large and heavy. After a few minutes, she asked us to share our experiences and then take a look at our objects. Mine was a medal of some sort with a picture of a boxer. The teacher said that it had been a medal for a prizewinning fighter back in the 1970s. I was amazed at how the energy from someone could not only remain in an object for some time but also how it could be transferred to someone else. I knew this was possible on some level—I had a hard time wearing vintage clothing and definitely felt the energy in certain places, but the experience was so vivid and literal that it took me by pleasant surprise. The teacher was the first person to teach me about the idea of grounding and how important it

is to come back down to earth after higher-realm experiences. This is something that I continue to emphasize whenever I teach a workshop that involves energy work. In this class, I also experienced my first guided visualization. In it, the teacher guided us through a scene where we imagined approaching a large tree, entering a hole in the trunk, and heading down a set of stairs deep into the ground, then into a room where we met our spirit guides. I was very surprised to find mine was my mother! She had passed away four years earlier and we communicated in dreams, but I did not expect to see her here. It was very comforting. Several years later when I took my daughters on separate guided journeys, they each saw my mother as their guide. It seems she is looking out for all of us. During one of my meditations while I was taking the course, I connected with a higher being or my higher self. The images that came to me were hazy. They were images of people in a wooded area long ago. When I asked the people for identification, they said, “Ojibwa.” I tried to figure out what this meant. I looked up everything I could on the internet (which was much less cluttered in those days) and found a reference to the Ojibwe Nation but could not figure out why this message had come to me. ◊ Throughout my marriage, I’d had dreams where I knew how to fly but was unable to because once I lifted off the ground, people would grab at my legs and try to hold me down. In these dreams, after some effort, I would inevitably break free and take off, soaring higher and higher. After the divorce, I felt a lightness I hadn’t felt in years. The dreams of people holding me down ceased, and I found that the process of writing my dissertation, which had dragged for five years, accelerated. I was able to finish it in just a few months. Once I was separated, I also found that I didn’t need the antidepressants anymore, so I went off of all the medications I was on. Within a month, I had dropped fifteen pounds, but I never returned to my pre-medication weight as my metabolism was never quite the same. ◊ My daughters had two pet rabbits at the time, and I discovered a neighborhood pet supply store where I could buy hay by the bale, which was much more economical than the bags being sold at chain pet stores. The first time I went there, I found all sorts of rabbit accessories and ended up

purchasing a big outdoor hutch. The owner, Christian, offered to carry it to my car. Before I left, he looked at me and said, “I’m a Reiki practitioner. You seem like you could use some. Stop by the store if you ever want me to do some Reiki for you.” I thanked him and wondered as I left the store, Do I look that broken? Or can he see my aura? Over the next several days, I thought about what he had said. It might be weird getting Reiki in a pet supply store rather than a luxury spa, but it didn’t sound like he would charge for it. After mulling it over, I decided that I had nothing to lose by taking him up on his offer. It was a slow day, and he was more than happy to give me a Reiki treatment. He brought out a metal folding chair and invited me to sit down and close my eyes. He placed his hands on my head, and the stress and tension melted away. A vision formed in my mind. I am on a hilltop, looking out over a big rolling field. It is dusk, and I am surrounded by a group of people standing in a circle holding hands. I feel supported and loved. These are my people. Christian asked me, “What do you see?” I told him, expecting him to tell me what it meant, but he just said, “That’s very cool.” Afterwards, he said that he had gotten a strong sense that I would be a really great Reiki practitioner. I thanked him and filed that idea away. I still had a lot going on and was scheduled to defend my dissertation soon. So, once again, even though Spirit was sending me a loud-and-clear message that I should follow the path of being a healer, I brushed it off and told myself that I would get back to it later. In April 2002, having completed my dissertation and divorce, I felt lighter and had more mental and emotional bandwidth. I had been doing a lot of selfwork, trying to figure out what was next. Through a local networking group, I met a lovely woman who was a life coach. Life coaching sounded like it would be a good supplement to my psychology training, so I signed up for a training program and completed my certificate in May 2003. I hoped to use my new skills to help myself and other people who were going through big transitions, and I did by offering individual coaching and a well-received eight-week workshop. After a couple of years, I felt that I should add a healing modality to my toolkit. It dawned on me that Reiki was not only something I enjoyed receiving but also a career path that three separate Reiki practitioners had

encouraged me to look into, so I researched Reiki training programs near me. On the International Reiki Association website, I found a weekend course offered in New York City with Carlos Gonzalez at The New York International Reiki Center. From the description of his mission, he sounded like an excellent teacher, and it was the closest program to where I lived. I signed up for weekend-long course, during which I would be trained in Levels 1 and 2 of Usui Reiki. I arrived at the tall office building where the class was being held and smiled. I had worked just a few blocks away three years earlier, but at that time Reiki training was not at the top of my list of things to do. The teacher, Carlos, was a very kind and knowledgeable man. On the first day of training, he emphasized the fact that we, as Reiki practitioners, are not doing the healing. “We are conduits for the universal energy that flows through us during a Reiki session. When we use our own energy to help others, we can easily become depleted. But, when we simply allow the energy to flow through us, it never runs out, and we benefit from it as much as our clients do.” I found that reassuring since, over the years, I had met a few energy healers who had become very sick, and I thought that was just an occupational hazard. Carlos also said more than once, “It is important to give thanks to the Reiki energy. Gratitude keeps us humble and allows the energy to flow without our egos getting in the way.” He shared stories about his experiences with Reiki and the deep healing he had witnessed in his clients. It sounded wonderful to be able to help people in such a profound way but also heartbreaking to hear about some of the things that clients might be dealing with. Still, I was looking forward to completing my Level I training so I could get out there in the world and start my work as a healer. On the first day, Carlos taught us about the history and philosophy of Reiki and told us stories of his work in the field over the past twenty-five years. On the second day, it was finally time for our Reiki attunement, our initiation into the practice from teacher to student. Carlos worked with us, one at a time, opening up our energetic pathways to allow Reiki energy to flow through us, allowing us to become conduits for this healing energy. We sat in a circle with our eyes closed, meditating as he made his way around the room. When it was my turn, Carlos placed his hands gently on my head as I had experienced in the past during Reiki sessions with other practitioners. I

felt a rush of energy start at the top of my head where his hands lightly rested. This energy made its way through my entire body, pouring out from my hands and feet like life-giving water. I saw brilliant colors: violet, blue, turquoise, green, yellow, orange, and red. Then three distinct symbols—an eye, a sun, and an alien face—presented themselves, one after the other, in my mind’s eye. After he had attuned everyone, Carlos asked, “Would anyone like to share their experience?” I was the first to raise my hand. When I described the symbols I had seen, Carlos said, “The eye means that your third eye has been opened. I don’t know what the other symbols mean. Over the next few days, they may make more sense.” The next day, I had to go back to the normal world of work. I arrived in the large parking lot in the corporate complex, and when I got out of my car to head into the office, I looked up and saw the sun reflecting off the side of the building in a way that looked just like the image I had seen in my mind during the Reiki attunement. As I started walking across the parking lot, I noticed a small alien head on a car antenna, and walking a few feet more, I saw a license plate cover with an iconic sun image. These images were just like the ones I’d seen during my Reiki attunement. I took all this to mean that the Reiki energy was with me and that it would definitely translate into my everyday life. ◊ In early 2005, as Kia’s high school graduation approached, I began the process of putting our house on the market. I gave a lot of thought to where I wanted to move. With both daughters off at college, Julia in Rhinebeck and Kia in Boston, I could move anywhere. I wanted to keep our home, it was lovely, but I couldn’t afford it on my own. Plus, I lived in what I referred to as Stepford, Connecticut. It was very suburban, with very few single people, mostly families who were there for the excellent school system. Plus, it was located in the town next to the one where Ira Levin was living when he wrote The Stepford Wives. While it was a lovely area with a huge nature preserve with great hiking trails nearby and a short drive to the beaches of Long Island Sound, it wasn’t a very exciting place for a thirty-something single woman. I considered four cities where I had friends: Paris; San Francisco; Washington, DC; and New Haven. Each place had its own charms and friends I would enjoy living close to, but I ended up choosing DC because it was within driving distance to where Julia and Kia would be in college. Meg,

a good friend and former Yankelovich colleague, had moved to Falls Church, Virginia, in 2001 to work at a startup. I visited her a couple of times and enjoyed the restaurants and sites in DC and Northern Virginia. When I had first visited Meg in DC in 2004, she and her boyfriend, Chad, had taken me to a party being held by one of his colleagues in Falls Church. When we arrived, the host, Tom, a gregarious man in his mid-thirties, was happily playing the guitar with a group of people who had brought their instruments to jam. I found that the people at the party were very different from the people I had been around in Connecticut. Their work was the main topic of conversation, but they also seemed nice and open-minded. At one point, I had an opportunity to chat with Tom for a short while, but he was busy playing host, so we didn’t have much of a conversation. Meg said that he was “a really good, solid guy.” ◊ In May 2005, with the house newly on the market, I headed back to DC for Meg and Chad’s wedding. That weekend, I was scheduled to present a poster at the Association for Psychological Science Conference in Los Angeles. Because my plan was to fly to DC from LA, I didn’t invite a plusone. I wasn’t in a relationship, and it seemed weird to have a date drive down from Connecticut or New York to meet me in DC. So, for the first time since I was eighteen, I attended a wedding solo. The wedding reception was held at a beautiful farm on the Potomac River, just twenty minutes south of DC. I sat at a table filled with Meg’s friends from Connecticut as well as her brother, Mark, and his partner, Sonia, who were the co-owners of the startup where Meg worked. It was a nice group of people, but I felt like an outsider as the only unpartnered person. After the cake was served, I planned to just go back to my hotel. I went to grab some coffee before the staff took down the beverage station when a man, whom I had not seen during the wedding or reception, came up to get some coffee too. When I turned to look at him, I realized I knew him. He introduced himself with, “Hi, I’m Tom.” “We’ve met,” I replied. “I came to a party at your house with Meg and Chad.” He went on to say there had been so many people there he hadn’t remembered our conversation. I felt a bit put off. It is very rare for people to not remember me, even if we only have a brief interaction. Over time I’ve come to realize that he is not good with faces and has a poor memory for interactions like that, so I no longer take it personally.

We sat down to drink our coffee, and I found out that Tom had also come to the wedding solo. As he’d had to work that day, he had missed the ceremony and most of the reception. We ended up chatting for a long time, and when the wedding party members asked if we’d like to join them for drinks at the hotel where most of the guests were staying, we obliged. Because we were in different cars, Tom and I arrived at the hotel separately, and I struck up conversations with people I had met at the reception. Tom and I didn’t talk until the after party had begun to break up when he asked if I would like to go dancing. He knew of a dance club in DC called Polly Esther’s that specialized in dance music from the 1970s and 1980s. It sounded like fun, so I agreed. We ended up dancing until they closed the club at two in the morning. I flew back to Connecticut the next day, but Tom and I kept in touch, speaking on the phone almost every day. My house sold soon after, and I made plans to move in late August, just after getting Kia off to college, but I still hadn’t figured out where to move. Tom and I had begun to travel back and forth between DC and Connecticut, visiting each other every other weekend. He got to meet Julia and Kia, and I got to know the DC area better. Now that I had an idea of what life was like in the DC Metro region, I thought I would give it a try. The marketing research firm where I was working in Connecticut offered to let me be a telecommuting contractor, and I planned to continue my life coaching practice in DC. I had Tom, Meg, and Chad as a small network of friends to start life in a new town. Tom helped me find a nice condo just a few blocks from his, and once I moved to the DC area, we began spending most of our spare time together, taking advantage of all the great culture available. We found we had a mutual love of travel, so we spent many weekends visiting interesting cities around the U.S. ◊ Before I moved, I made a vision wheel filled with images of the things I wanted to manifest in my life. I wanted to find a significant other who had different characteristics from my first husband, to feel healthy in body and mind, to grow my coaching business, and to live in a lovely home with a view of a sweeping lawn leading to a small forest of trees. And I wanted someone to gift me a Tiffany necklace. I had seen a photograph of a particular silver necklace and had been struck by its beautiful, lacey Victorian pattern. It represented an indulgence, and if someone gave it to me, it would mean they were generous and wanted to spoil me, something I hadn’t

experienced much of in my life. During our first Christmas together, Tom gifted me with that necklace. I had pointed it out a few months earlier when we were in a Tiffany showroom, and he had remembered. I felt heard and cared for. About a year into our relationship, Tom proposed to me. We had a lot of fun together, but I wanted to try living with him before committing in such a big way. I was reluctant to make the relationship legally binding since I’d had such a rough go of it before. I thought it would be good to have an easy out, with no red tape involved. But Tom didn’t want to live together without getting married, so I agreed to marry him, thinking that it would be nice to have a stable relationship with someone I enjoyed being around. I wanted a simple ceremony, but it was his first, so he wanted all the trappings of the traditional wedding. His mother wanted it to be in a church, so we found one. We were planning to just have a dessert buffet, as other friends of mine had had, but Tom’s family members insisted that we had to have a cake, so one week before our wedding, we gave in. In the end, I was doing all the things that I didn’t want to do to please everyone else. But the wedding was lovely, and the guests all seemed to have a good time, so that was good. ◊ While writing this book, I came across a journal entry from May 2007, one month after Tom and I were married. At the time, I had been doing daily meditations, regularly practicing Reiki on myself and others, and taking an Advanced Reiki Training with a local teacher, Suchinta, who turned out to have been the mentor of my children’s Montessori teacher—such a small world! In the journal entry, I had written, “I have come to the realization of what my mission in life is. I am supposed to be a Reiki practitioner.” My marketing research contract ended in June 2007, and by September 2007, feeling that I needed to contribute a steady income to our household, I started a full-time job as a contract Scientific Review Coordinator at the National Cancer Institute’s Research-Tested Intervention Program. By August of 2008, I had also started a new side-hustle organic bath and body products business (something I had done briefly several years earlier), now called Herban Lifestyle.[22] This left little time for the Reiki, and my daily meditation practice suffered as well. Even though I had finally come to terms with my mission of being a healer, I once again strayed from my path, rationalizing that working in research related to cancer prevention and

making healthy personal care products were also forms of healing. Looking back on it, I realize that I had left behind more than just the Reiki. As part of my coaching business, I had also been writing and giving podcast interviews about mind, body, spirit wellness. I had had a newsletter with around 2,000 subscribers and a blog with about 700 followers, before blogs were much of a thing. Had I just stuck with that path, I would have been reaching many, many people by that time. I gave up too soon. I was feeling pressure to work a full-time job, both from Tom and from myself. Here I was again, allowing myself to be steered away from my life purpose as a healer. Time and again I had made decisions based on a sense of obligation toward others rather than toward myself. This is important to do to some extent, especially when one is part of a couple or a family, but it can be taken too far and can derail a person from following their life purpose. I had seen this in my coaching clients. I’d met a woman in her forties, a successful but miserable attorney who had been a gifted dancer but was convinced by her father that she could never make a living with her art form. I’d met a successful financial advisor whose love of plants was squashed by her father. He’d told her that she could never make a living working with plants! As someone who should know better, why did I keep allowing myself to be derailed from my path? My visions were clear, but I was easily pulled away from what the Divine would like me to do in order to do what others said I should be doing. These other people had an earthly viewpoint and could not see the bigger picture. So, I had to follow my visions. The magic would only happen if I stayed on my path. What ever happened to the toddler who firmly told her father, “No! My do!”

Chapter 5: Healing the Planet with Non-Toxic Soap As mentioned earlier, I had resurrected my herbal bath and body product business. I could now sell my products on Etsy, which was at that time a relatively new ecommerce platform for makers, and it was infinitely easier than the days when I had to program my own ecommerce website. By focusing on using only organic, fair-trade, earth-friendly ingredients, I felt that I was doing my part to boost the health of people and the planet. I worked very hard to stick by this principle, vetting my vendors and being a stickler for using only nontoxic ingredients. I sought and achieved certification from Green America (gold certification in sustainability) and Leaping Bunny (cruelty-free certification) and excellent scores in the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics’ Skin Deep database (products with no carcinogenic and endocrine-disrupting ingredients). My motto was, “Making the World a Happier, Healthier, Better-Smelling Place.” I infused my products with Reiki and stated on the label that they were “Made with Love and Gratitude.” Through my bath and body products, I found a non-threatening vehicle for teaching people about the importance of self-care, what we could do to minimize health risks for ourselves and our families, and how we could reduce our environmental impact when purchasing consumer goods. I was helping heal people and the world in a way that wasn’t as direct as I had been doing before, but I found a lot of satisfaction because of the creativity that being an entrepreneur allowed. I continued to use the presentation skills that I had honed in grad school, giving talks to groups, large and small, about the importance of being mindful of what we put on our skin and about how it affects our health and the health of the planet. I was still nurturing my growing herbal bath and body business and offering Reiki, while working in behavioral health at a government contracting firm, when one day, in 2010, I was contacted by a family whose mother was in intensive care. They wanted me to come to the hospital and offer her Reiki. I arrived to find about fifteen people gathered, all there to pray for and support the matriarch of their family. They told me she had volunteered to receive reflexology (a form of massage that involves applying pressure to the feet, hands, and ears) from a niece who was training in it. During the treatment, she suffered a stroke and ended up in the hospital in a coma. The family was very kind and welcoming. They said that they had no

expectations; they just wanted me to do what I could for their mother and grandmother. I was very nervous as I had never worked with an unconscious person before. I entered her machinery-filled room. One wall was made of glass so that the medical staff could keep an eye on her. She was breathing on her own and had no need for tubes. She looked beautiful and peaceful. I closed my eyes, centered myself, called in my Divine guides, then began to do Reiki on her. In my head, I heard a female voice, which I assumed was hers. She kept saying, “Rise up! Rise up!” I didn’t know exactly what she meant by this, but I got the distinct impression that she was ready to let go of her physical form. I sensed she was looking forward to leaving and she wanted her family to know that she was going to be more than okay. I thanked her and went out to talk with them. “What were your impressions?” one of the men asked me. “She kept saying, ‘Rise up.’ Does that mean anything to you?” I asked. They all smiled sadly and nodded their heads; a couple of the women began to cry. I looked at them and said, “It seems she is ready to let go. I sense that she is at peace with the idea.” Then I began sobbing. The family moved in to comfort me. I was so embarrassed; this was their pain, their grief, their sorrow. How could I be so unprofessional? But they offered me their gratitude, insisted on paying me, and thanked me very much for my time. As I headed back home, shaken, I realized I needed to step away from this work for now. It was the first time I had received such a profound message during a Reiki session. I couldn’t believe how intense my emotional reaction had been. I needed time to process it all. I needed to get much better at setting energetic boundaries for myself. I was feeling overwhelmed by the power of the experience—afraid, to some extent, of my own abilities. If healing work was going to be like this for me from now on, I needed to be better prepared. But rather than going out and finding a mentor to help me navigate this new territory, I chose instead to step away from the path of being a healer. I redirected the energy I had used for my Reiki practice into Herban Lifestyle. After all, it was a way to help heal people and the planet, albeit much less directly. I found it to be satisfying and enjoyable work. Besides the enjoyment I derived from using my creativity, I also discovered a large, vital, and fun crafting community in DC. I met many smart, creative, funny, people through Crafty Bastards, one of the biggest indie craft shows in the country, which formed out of and helped to grow the mid-2000s trend toward DIY and

handcrafted products. I went on to sell my herbal products at several Crafty Bastards, BUST Craftacular, Handmade Arcade, and other well-curated, hard-to-get-into craft shows. Tom was great about helping me with setup at these events, and he turned out to be a great salesman who enjoyed interacting with customers. The shows were a lot of work and took up most of our weekends, but they were also a lot of fun. And they gave us an excuse to spend time in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh. ◊ A couple of years after I launched Herban Lifestyle, I learned about a new organization, the American Sustainable Business Council (ASBC), cofounded by David Levine and Jeffrey Hollander, the founder of Seventh Generation, a line of plant-based cleaning products and recycled paper goods. I had been a fan of Seventh Generation since the late 1980s, when I would order their products from a catalog put out by Co-Op America, which became Green America. I finally got to meet the good people of Green America when I applied for Green Seal certification for Herban Lifestyle, and it was through them that I found out about ASBC. Through ASBC, I learned about an effort to update chemical policy. The current law guiding the manufacture of cosmetics dates back to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938. This legislation grants oversight of cosmetics safety to the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, which is funded by a lobbying entity representing the 600 largest U.S. cosmetics companies. While this may or may not have been a good idea in 1938, a lot has changed in the past eighty years. In that time, over 80,000 additional chemicals and nanoparticles have been introduced into the market, and little information is available on the safety of these ingredients.[23] I decided to get involved in lobbying for the updated law, seeing an opportunity to help heal people and the planet by making consumer products less toxic. Having learned of my work in this area, my friend Andi put me in touch with an attorney who had recently started his own law firm after leaving his thirty-year position with the EPA. I talked to him about what I was working on, and he said that similar legislation had been proposed about forty years earlier to no avail. In his experience, special interest groups on both ends of the spectrum had worked very hard to promote their version of this legislation, obfuscating compromise so that ultimately nothing changed. This did not leave me feeling very hopeful, but I decided the issue was a very important one, so I set off to learn more about it.

As part of my research on the history of this issue, I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. I was struck by the beauty of her writing, her prescience, and her ability to so clearly articulate the underlying issues of chemicals in our environment. Through her, I learned about bioaccumulation, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the accumulation over time of a substance and especially a contaminant (such as a pesticide or heavy metal) in a living organism.” I also learned how the level of exposure goes up the food chain: a field is sprayed with pesticides, the water from the field runs off into a body of water, small water creatures ingest the pesticides, a fish eats many of these creatures over its lifetime, and we eat the fish in whose flesh there is now a large accumulation of the pesticides that cannot be metabolized. I was also struck by how little had changed since Carson brought this issue to the public’s attention. Over the course of several years, I helped lobby on Capitol Hill regarding the business case for safer chemicals; provided input to the Breast Cancer Fund for Safe Cosmetics Act revisions; testified in front of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 in defense of the Report on Carcinogens, both from a public health and a business perspective; and was invited to give testimony at a Senate briefing on the 2015 Safe Cosmetics Act. Eventually, I began working with a bipartisan group of senators who were working to draft a compromise bill. Soon, however, large corporations with a vested interest in not changing the policy became involved. Some of the companies that were wholeheartedly devoted to safe chemicals, disillusioned by the compromises, withdrew their efforts. My hopes for helping to support the health of people and the planet through these efforts were dashed. I thought of the former EPA attorney and imagined him giving me an I-told-you-so look. I eventually came to the understanding that, just as the attorney had told me, government can sometimes take a long time to make the changes necessary to keep us from veering off on a destructive trajectory. There had to be another way to bring about the necessary changes, and there was. I saw that conscious consumerism could move things quickly. When a large, vocal group of moms representing millions of dollars in grocery revenue demanded that General Mills remove GMOs from their products, the company moved quickly to change their Cheerios formulation to be GMO-free.[24] While this was just one of their many products, the fact that this change happened within a few short months spoke to the power of voting with the dollar.

But, as I thought about the myriad issues we are facing, I came to the realization that there was no way that we could effect change on a large enough scale in a reasonable amount of time even using this method. We are at a critical period in history where we must collectively evolve to the next level in terms of our relationship to the earth and to each other in order to avoid calamitous environmental and societal outcomes. In contemplating this conundrum, it dawned on me that individual change, changing ourselves from within, was the only way forward. We have to work to raise our own consciousness. Once we can see the Divine in everyone and everything and the interrelatedness of ourselves, the planet, and all living beings, then we will be compelled to take right action. Once people in business and government begin to work for the common good rather than from a place of separateness, they will have no choice but to do what is best for all. When enough people agree to actually do something to create positive change, we can move mountains. We are starting to see this as people begin to question old ways that do not serve everyone. I’ve been encouraged to find many of the people I know from my sustainable business circles showing up at mindfulness conferences. Clearly, I was not the only person to reach this conclusion. To quote Deepak Chopra from his 2012 talk for the National Press Club, “I hope that the day will come when people will realize that there are only spiritual solutions, there aren’t economic solutions.”3 The solutions to the world’s problems can only come from a place of love and compassion toward oneself and others. This comes from freeing ourselves from an egocentric world view and seeing ourselves as part of the greater community of all living beings, and a living earth. When we can see the interconnectedness of all things, then the solutions to economic, environmental, and social problems will come easily. While this may sound abstract, I would eventually come to learn how it can be implemented in a very tangible way that benefits everyone and everything on the planet.

Chapter 6: A Necessary Detour As I was engaged in the work in the sustainable business community, I was still working thirty hours per week as a scientific review coordinator. By late 2011, I had begun feeling the pull to return to my mission as a healer, and I was growing increasingly unhappy at my job as a research contractor for a now-defunct program of the National Institutes of Health. While my work out in the world centered around bringing much needed change, most of colleagues wanted nothing more than to maintain the status quo of the system we were working in, even though the status quo was extremely unhealthy from a psychological and ethical perspective. My entrepreneurial spirit found this suffocating, and the healer in me found it unacceptable. It was taking a toll on me mentally, emotionally, and physically—I developed headaches and I became nauseous whenever I was in the office, unable to eat anything while there. As luck would have it, in the summer of 2012, the government contract I was working on was cancelled, and I was downsized along with several colleagues. This allowed me to pursue Herban Lifestyle full-time. By 2013, things were on a roll. Herban Lifestyle had become a “real” business with several wholesale customers, wonderful press, and a lovely team who helped me with production. I continued to be asked to offer my expertise on matters of safe cosmetics and healthy living. But, as the business grew, I lost sight of a key original component of infusing my products with Reiki energy. I removed “Made With Love and Gratitude” from my labels to make room for the UPC (universal product code) barcodes. Looking back now, I realize that, by losing this focus, I had thoughtlessly lowered the vibration of my products. The universe soon would give me a harsh reminder that I was straying from the path of being a healer. That summer, while harvesting lavender at a local farm, I received a phone call from my father’s next door neighbor and our dear family friend, Betty Gallacher. “Hi Mary,” she said. I sensed something was wrong. “Hi Betty, how is everything?” I replied. “I wanted to let you know that your father is in the hospital. He called me to ask for a ride to pick up his car. He was at a local car dealership, and when he went to leave, he walked into a glass door with enough force that he fell backward and hit his head on the ground. He was knocked unconscious and ended up in the ER. I told him I would be happy to pick him up when the doctors okayed him to leave.” I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my

stomach. “Thank you so much for letting me know, Betty,” I replied. “You are an angel.” When I got home an hour later, I called the hospital right away to find out how he was doing and what needed to happen next. The doctor would only tell me that he had suffered a subdural hematoma. Then she said, “He has already checked himself out of the hospital.” “What? How can he do that if he has a subdural hematoma?” “It resolved itself.” “What do you mean?” “The scan showed that it was reabsorbed.” “How is that possible? I’d like to get a copy of his records.” “I can’t do that because of HIPAA regulations.” I called my father’s house, but he didn’t answer, so I hopped in my car and drove up to Connecticut. I arrived to find his car in the driveway. I knocked on the door, and he greeted me like nothing was wrong. He told me that the first thing he had done was go to the dealership to retrieve his car. The doctors had told him not to drive for a week, but he felt that he was fine. He’d been living alone for fifteen years since mom died, and he’d always been a pack rat, but now I saw that this behavior had tipped over into full-on hoarding. The house had become uninhabitable (broken plumbing, broken heater system, unusable stove and refrigerator, etc.). I couldn’t just sell the place and move him closer, and he was strongly opposed to any help from others. Fifteen months later, in fall 2014, Betty called me to say that a kind woman had dropped my father at her house. The woman said that she found him sitting in front of the Catholic Church a little over a mile from his home. He had been confused and wasn’t quite sure of his address. When I called him, he told me that he had grown tired while walking and that the kind woman who drove him home had brought him to the wrong place because “they” had changed the numbers on the houses. I called my daughter Julia, and we started looking into how we could appeal for guardianship. I knew it wouldn’t be long before a tragedy happened. In November, I received another phone call from Betty. My father had fallen on the sidewalk in front of his house. A passerby helped him up. Apparently, my father seemed disoriented and possibly hurt, so the stranger called 911. The police arrived and tried to convince my father to go to the hospital. Betty saw what was happening from her window and went outside

to help. She said that my father refused to give the police his name and refused their help. I knew that he’d developed an intense fear and hatred of hospitals ever since my mother died, and his paranoia had been growing along with his mental confusion. When my family and I visited my father over the holidays, he looked like he had aged, and his gait was uneven. I sensed he must have had a small stroke, but he insisted that he was in good health. From that point on, whenever we spoke by phone, he had difficulty retrieving words from his memory and his thoughts were repetitive. I worried constantly about him, my thoughts racing at night, keeping me from being able to fall asleep, as I worked through ways that I could intervene, but he kept insisting he did not need any help, did not want any help. On Good Friday in 2015, I received another call from Betty. Each morning, my father would open the shade on the window facing her kitchen, and she would place a little vase of flowers in her kitchen window. This was their signal that everything was okay. That morning, he had not opened his shade, and she was unable to reach him by phone. So, by the afternoon, when she still had not been able to get in touch with him, she called me. I tried calling, but he did not answer. I called Betty and asked her to call 911. Because she had a key to the house, Betty’s oldest daughter, Mary Beth, who is also a dear friend of mine, offered to let the emergency responders in. My father had suffered a stroke, and he’d fallen and hit his head as a result. He was conscious, but he had been bleeding and was unable to move. The responders couldn’t get a stretcher through the mess in the house, so they had to lift him out by hand. Mary Beth said that he looked at her angrily as he passed her on the way out. I wondered if he had been hoping to die in his home. My daughters arrived in DC the next day for Easter weekend, and we drove up to Connecticut where we gathered around my father in the hospital, the same hospital where my daughters and I were all born, the same hospital where—almost exactly sixteen years ago to the day—I had rushed to see my mother, only to find she had been transferred away. My father was happy to see us. He wanted to go home, but we encouraged him to stay for a few more days until his head healed. By this time, I was so caught up in the day-to-day running of my business and I had removed myself so far from the role of Reiki healer that it didn’t once occur to me to offer Reiki to him. I have no idea what he would have thought about the idea,

but I wish I had at least tried. While he was in the hospital, before they transferred him to a rehabilitation center, I pressured the attending physician, who had been reluctant for some reason, to order a neuropsychological test. The results indicated that my father suffered from vascular dementia, which meant that he would continue to have strokes and his condition would continue to decline. That week, Julia and I petitioned the court for guardianship of my father. The judge and other staff in the Norwalk Probate court were extremely helpful and empathetic, and we were granted guardianship within a few days. I was now able to take over his care. I found myself traveling back and forth for a month until I was able to move him closer to me. His month spent in the rehab center allowed my father to regain quite a bit of mental capacity, and he was physically in great shape. I found a beautiful assisted living center not far from my house where he would have his own apartment and share healthy meals with the community. The center was not equipped to work with people with severe dementia, so he could only stay there as long as he was able to care for himself. What a relief to know that he was warm, safe, and cared for—at least for the time being. The time being didn’t last very long. After less than a year in this supportive setting, he wandered off in the early morning, heading to a Hebrew class at the Jewish center next door. He had been taking classes and really enjoying them; languages had always been a passion of his—he spoken seven fluently. He became disoriented on his way to the center and ended up a few blocks in the wrong direction. A kind stranger found him and gave him a ride back to the assisted living center. He assumed that’s where my father had come from. My father’s clothes were muddy. Apparently, he had fallen a few times. In the wake of this incident, the new executive director of the assisted living center told me that I had to hire 24/7 aides to accompany my father everywhere or else move him to another facility that was designed for people with dementia. I hired the aides right away, but my father hated being followed around, and he hated having the aides in his apartment. He would make them wait in the hallway. I explained to him that he either had to tolerate them or move. He didn’t want to do either. My tiny old house was not set up for him to get around easily. His gait was increasingly unstable, and he refused to use handrails on stairways. I knew he would inevitably end up in a wheelchair, and our old narrow

doorways would not be able to accommodate one. The executive director of the assisted living center referred me to a sister facility with available space. The two centers shared a chef who oversaw the healthy, delicious menu. On the day of his move, my father didn’t want to get out of bed. He didn’t want to leave. We finally convinced him to get up, and we drove him to his new home. When we arrived, the movers had already set up his new apartment. Tom asked him, “What do you think?” “It’s just like the other place,” my father replied, seeming relieved. A month later, he had another stroke and became unable to walk. His condition continued to decline. The facility wasn’t perfect, and I didn’t like that he had to be among people with varying degrees of dementia, some of whom had lost their inhibitions, but the staff were very kind, and he gained a bit of weight since he enjoyed the food so much. The facility was twenty-five minutes from my house, so I continued to look for a good alternative that was closer, but the only one I found that I really liked was in Westchester, New York, which was obviously too far away. A year before my father’s first big stroke, I had opened up a brick and mortar shop and production space for Herban Lifestyle. I had shown it to him and he looked very proud. He even inquired about it at a later date. I loved having a gathering space with plenty of room for my employees and me to make organic bath products, but by the end of that year, I had to let it go. I could no longer juggle the business while overseeing my father’s care and making frequent trips to Connecticut to work on the family house. Emergency responders had reported the state of house to the health department, which had deemed it a fire hazard and uninhabitable, so I felt compelled to declutter it to a point of safety. I had spent the past eighteen months sorting through a seemingly endless pile of stuff. Once I dug past the clutter, I found some amazing treasures. The house had been in my family since the 1930s, and my mom had held onto books, photos, letters, and documents going as far back as my great-great grandparents. The house was still structurally sound. It was of modest size and a lovely design with early twentieth century architectural details, and it was set in a community on the Long Island Sound. I had had hopes that I could clear out the house, renovate it, and move there, but Tom had no interest in moving back to Connecticut, where he had also grown up, and I couldn’t figure out how to make the numbers work. How would I move there on my own after my father passed? Doing so would require me to take a job that would veer

me off my path. I had a vague idea that I needed to follow my path, whatever that was, so I figured I could keep the house only if I renovated it and rented it to close friends. Managing renovations from a distance was very stressful. The wonderful contractor I had found was already falling months behind in the initial planning process. I loved the house with all my heart, but the stress and cost of renovations and the very high property taxes were making me wonder if it would be worth it all in the end. That fall, I found myself at a crisis point, feeling that it was all too much, wanting to end it all. I was experiencing shoulder and hip pain that kept me up at night. I scheduled a visit with my very intuitive family physician, who pointed out that I was under a lot of stress and needed to address it. “I do yoga,” I told him. “That’s good,” he replied. But I sensed he wanted me to think a bit more about this. “I could find time to do more of it. And meditate.” “That would help a lot,” he said as he smiled at me empathetically. But I didn’t make time for either one—I was too caught up in feeling sorry for myself, and it still hadn’t occurred to me to return to Reiki for a solution. Here it was right in front of me, a crisis offering an opportunity for my spiritual growth and an opportunity to heal my father and myself, but I wasn’t seeing it. I was too disconnected from my higher self. My father passed away a few months later in the spring of 2017, exactly one week after the nineteenth anniversary of my mother’s death. Within four months of his death, my ex-father-in-law, my mother’s brother (whom I would later recognize in one of my past life regressions as having been my father), Larry Gallacher (who was like another father to me), and my dear dissertation advisor, Kathy Schiaffino, all passed away. Once again, like the time around my mother’s death, people who had been close to me were leaving earth en masse. I got the sense that a huge shift was coming, but, unlike the last time, I wasn’t tempted to leave with them. I sensed that I still had important work to do on this earth, and this time I was determined to figure out exactly what it was.

Chapter 7: The Inner Work Looking back over the past several years, I thought about the decisions I had made, the people I met, the support I had received from others, and the tools I had been collecting. What was it all pointing to? How did it all tie into what I was supposed to be offering to the world in this lifetime? Back in February 2004, when I was still in Connecticut, my friend Lisa, who had recently moved back to Connecticut from California, had introduced me to Bikram Yoga. The first time I tried it at a studio in New Haven, I thought I was going to die. In the humid 103°F room, I got overheated and dizzy and had to run to the bathroom to vomit. Yet, something drew me back, and I continued to practice hot yoga for a long time. It was a great workout, and afterward I felt as if I had been in a sauna and my skin felt great. Not only was it a helpful physical practice, it helped with my overall sense of balance, and the pain in my neck that I’d had since a car accident a couple of years earlier had completely vanished. In this form of yoga, poses are held for a long time, and in those moments of concentrated stillness, I rediscovered a letting go, a being-in-the-moment, that I had left behind a while back. I began to glimpse those moments of flow[25] that had been missing in my life. Soon after I was introduced to this style of yoga, I began practicing regularly at a studio in Norwalk, and my daughter Kia joined me. After practicing for about a year and really enjoying the way it made us feel in body and mind, Kia and I approached our teacher, Dan, to inquire about the requirements for teacher training. He was a lovely, kind, nurturing teacher with a silly sense of humor who would sing James Taylor songs to our class during savasana. I was taken aback when he described the training. It sounded like a hellish, hot, smelly, sadistic, and very expensive boot camp. I couldn’t image how it could be worth the time and money, and it sounded so different from the kind, nurturing way he taught his classes, so I decided to forgo it. This turned out to be the right decision, given how the whole story of Bikram Yoga turned out. (I leave that to you to research if you are interested.) But I continued to practice this form of yoga because the physical and energetic benefits for me were exceptional. When I moved to the Washington, DC, area in 2005, I continued my practice at the small Bikram Yoga studio in my new town, which was less than a mile from my home, for a while. The studio owner was a lovely woman and a wonderful teacher, but I found the studio to be increasingly

crowded. The crowding caused by large numbers of people wanting to try out this form of yoga made for an unpleasant yoga experience—Groupon had become a thing, and newcomers wanting to try this yoga trend were largely unprepared for its intense heat and prolonged holding of poses. Then, in 2006, I discovered Vinyasa Yoga, which included many poses that I hadn’t encountered in the other styles that I practiced before. The first local studio I attended had some inexperienced teachers, one of whom was outright obnoxious and not good at cuing poses. When I later looked at this teacher’s credentials on the studio’s website, I realized he had only been practicing yoga for about a year and had just completed his teacher training at the studio. Most teacher trainings worth their salt require people to have been regular practitioners for at least three years. My experience with my teacher, Dan, at the Norwalk studio had been so nurturing, so I knew that this was not how yoga was supposed to feel, and I went searching for another studio. Over the next several years, I found various teachers and studios near me, but either the studio wasn’t a good fit, my teachers moved away, or the studio closed. During this time, I was also sporadic in my mindfulness practice—at times devoting my attention to meditation and at other times allowing my life to be devoid of it. My physical and emotional health would ebb and flow along with this. When I was practicing yoga and meditating regularly, my body felt strong, my mind was clear, and I had a much more optimistic outlook. I knew this, but I was having trouble finding a consistent support system, and for some reason I was not able to maintain these practices on my own. Then, in 2015, a new studio, which offered a variety of Vinyasa Flow yoga classes, opened up a mile from my home in Northern Virginia. I happily joined. Their classes were the perfect combination of mindful practice and exercise. I was busy with Herban Lifestyle at that point, so I did not practice as often as I would have liked, but yoga gave me an anchor point. It grounded me, and I found myself with more energy and focus for my work and family life. I also met some lovely people through this yoga community, something I hadn’t experienced before. Susan, one of my new friends, enrolled in their teacher training program. I asked her all sorts of questions about it, thinking it would be fun, but the timing didn’t work. Most of the classes were on the weekends, which were very busy for me because of craft shows and family time, but I kept my eyes open for trainings that would fit into my schedule. In 2017, after two solid years of consistent yoga practice, I received a call

from my friend Mary Beth inviting me to enroll in yoga teacher training with her. “Hey! I’m hoping to come down to Virginia for a two-week yoga teacher training. It’s in Reston, so not far from where you live.” “That sounds like fun!” I replied. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while.” “I’ll send you the link,” Mary Beth said. “Take a look and see what you think.” The URL came through by email while we were talking. I clicked on it. “I hope this is something we can do,” she added. “It would be fun for us to take the course together!” “You are welcome to stay with us during the training, of course!” I said. I was excited about the prospect, not only because it would mean getting to spend lots of time with Mary Beth, which was always nice, but also because I would finally be following my desire to do yoga teacher training. Finally, twelve years after first floating the idea to myself, I felt like it was the right time to do it. I looked into the program Mary Beth was recommending, but it focused solely on teaching children, and it didn’t count toward a 200-hour training designation, which is required for most teaching jobs. So, I told Mary Beth I wasn’t interested but that I was planning to research programs in the area that offered intensive 200-hour trainings. Most programs were spread out over several weekends, however, and would not work for her schedule. I was not interested in losing my weekends over the course of a few months either; I had stopped doing craft shows that year to free them up! A few days later, I came across a one-month non-residential intensive yoga teacher training in Old Town Alexandria, just thirty minutes from my house. Refresh’s program required students to attend classes from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, from the beginning of June to the beginning of July. The program appealed to me because it focused on yoga asanas (poses) as well as the principles and practices of yogic philosophy (like guidelines for moral and ethical self-discipline and living a purposeful life as well as acknowledgement of the spiritual aspects of our nature), an introduction to Ayurvedic practices, and anatomy taught by a PhD physiologist who was also a yoga instructor. Others who had done trainings had told me that many of these topics weren’t covered in depth or were taught by people who didn’t necessarily have expert knowledge. This

program, however, looked very thoughtful and thorough. I told Mary Beth about this opportunity, but she decided to forgo this training. Although I understood why she wasn’t interested in a program that would pull her away from home for such a long time, this was exactly what I’d been searching for and I signed up. My family and I had planned a ten-day vacation to Maui that summer, but I would be back in time for the start of the one-month intensive program. It was Tom’s and my tenth anniversary, plus it had been a rough few years, so I thought it would be nice for us to find a place that was not only beautiful but also healing. I did some research and found Lumeria Resort and Spa in Hawaii. Its lush setting and holistic philosophy set it apart from all the other resorts in Maui. Included with the stay were three daily yoga classes, meditation sessions, and other activities. Plus, Lumeria had an organic farm on the property that supplied all of the produce for the small on-site restaurant. Talk about hyperlocal! It seemed the perfect setting for a deeply relaxing, healing vacation, and it would be a perfect opportunity for me to prepare myself—body, mind, and spirit—for my upcoming intensive yoga training. Arriving in the tree-lined entrance, we found Lumeria to be even more wonderful than we had imagined. The resort had a saltwater pool and a huge lawn surrounded by fruit trees and flowering plants. Large crystals were placed throughout the property, and a quiet area at the back of the lawn held a stone labyrinth. I was in my element! Amongst the comforting scent of the water and the beauty of the rocks— my lifelong allies—I felt safe, grounded, and connected. I couldn’t have asked for a more nurturing setting. I took my first-ever Kundalini yoga class with a woman named Ruby, who exuded Zen. All of these things allowed the vital life force energy, prana, chi, Ki, to effortlessly flow through me. In addition to the yoga and meditation sessions, guests could also opt for spa treatments, workshops, and customized Ayurvedic teachings with Arlene, who had been studying under Deepak Chopra for twenty years. We availed ourselves of all of these opportunities. Arlene taught us basic Ayurvedic principles, giving us worksheets so that we could determine our doshas, the energies that define every person’s physical and constitutional makeup,[26] and she taught us primal sound mantras, which she encouraged us to use during meditation. We each practiced our mantras that week during our alone time out in the gardens or under the trees. It was blissful.

Because the week we chose to stay there landed just before the resort’s busy time, we often had the restaurant to ourselves. The chef catered the menu to our vegan and gluten-free food requests. We were so spoiled! After a week of this incredibly healthy, nurturing, cleansing experience, I was reluctant to leave. But I felt fully prepared to start my yoga teacher training, and that was enough to lure me back to Virginia. Two weeks after I returned from Hawaii, I began my yoga teacher training. Arriving early in the morning in Old Town Alexandria, I parked a few blocks from the studio, then headed down the hill. With the studio sitting just a block-and-a-half from the Potomac River, I breathed in the warm, briny air and took in a few seconds of sunshine before heading into the secondfloor studio. There were five of us, Ruby (yes, another Ruby!), Jenny, Lizzie (Jenny’s daughter), Sophia, and myself. Together, we experienced one month of daily yoga practice, shared vegan potluck lunches, and learned Ayurvedic practices, pranayama, yogic philosophy, and of course how to teach yoga. We also had an opportunity to learn Kirtan, a form of chanting in the Vedic tradition. Our eyes closed, singing the repetitive phrases together, we found ourselves transcending the space we were in, lifting up into a blissful space beyond time. As a community, we often found ourselves very much in sync. The students and teachers (Pia, Kathryn, and Amanda) were kind and supportive, but the regimen was intense. We practiced asanas two or three times a day and filled our brains with tons of information. Most of us were not morning people, so commuting to the studio and being ready to learn by half past seven was quite the challenge. On the first day, we were encouraged to adopt Ayurvedic practices that we would follow for at least the month of our training—and hopefully beyond. I chose abhyanga (self-massage with warm oil), dry brushing (using a large body brush or cloth to remove dead skin prior to showering), and tongue scraping (using a specially designed metal scraper to gently remove residue from the tongue). I also gave up coffee. I found it surprisingly easy to live without coffee despite my early mornings. I felt tired, but I also gained a new level of energy from the healthy practices. My body felt stronger than it ever had. I experienced acute mental clarity, and I had vivid dreams each night. Because of the long hours and the physical and mental intensity of the training, we found ourselves face to face with our limitations, and this lent itself to a lot of personal sharing and releasing of old “stuff.” Over the course of the month, everyone took turns having good days and bad days. A couple

of the students had mini breakdowns, and we all comforted them. This elicited a group discussion on self-care and healing modalities. I was able to listen to and empathize with my fellow students without taking on their emotional and physical pain. I was surprised at my ability to do this since we spent so much time with each other. At one point, I revealed that I was trained as a Reiki master. Sophia, one of the other students, said she had also done her Reiki Level I and II training. She offered to give Reiki to one of the students who was in distress, and the student happily accepted. I realized this would be a safe place for me to share too. So, for the first time in seven years, I felt brave enough to use my Reiki skills. One day during our afternoon break, Sophia and I sat outside at the little tables in front of the nearby Starbucks and did a mini Reiki treatment trade. Out in the sun on that beautiful summer day, with the Potomac River less than a block away contributing its powerful water energy to the setting, I sat with my eyes closed as Sophia placed her hands on the top of my head. I saw bursts of color, then a brilliant white light. The palms of my hands tingled, as if electricity was flowing out of them. The Reiki energy was reactivating within me. Then it was my turn to work on Sophia. I placed my hands on her head. Images flashed through my mind, and the energy flowed from my palms into her crown. It felt so good to share my energy again. Emotions floated past me, but I had much better control over my energy at this point than I had had in the past. I had been working on strengthening my energetic field through yoga and meditation, so I was able to observe her emotions empathetically, but objectively. I had come a long way since I worked with the woman in a coma. I felt that I would now be able to offer Reiki freely, purely acting as a conduit for the healing light and energy, without taking on other people’s physical and emotional pain. With each day of yoga teacher training, I felt stronger and more confident in my body, mind, and spirit. I felt healed, focused, and grounded. I felt a strong spiritual “opening” after completing my one-month training. The daily meditation and yoga practice, the beautiful community, and the lifestyle (early to bed, early to rise, no alcohol or caffeine, vegetarian diet) all helped to raise my vibration so that I could sense things more clearly. This whole intense, beautiful experience reminded me of my mission to be a healer. I could no longer run away from the responsibility by healing indirectly through research or soap. I was being reminded once again that one

of the gifts I had come into the world with was the ability to heal people directly. I had complete clarity as to what I needed to do next. I didn’t have to be reminded by the universe via a crisis or other metaphorical bonk on the head. I began to walk solidly on the path, practicing Reiki again, this time with confidence that I was energetically and emotionally strong enough to hold other people’s pain without taking it on. I also began teaching yoga to adults and children. Finally, I was beginning to fully embrace my role as a healer. And I continued to expand my horizons, exploring healing topics that I had never considered before.

Chapter 8: Expanding My Horizons There was a holistic healing center about a mile from my home that offered a variety of workshops. It had been recommended to me by several people over the years, and I had driven by it many times, but for some reason I never made it inside. Now that my schedule was freed up and I was ready for the next stage, I found their website to check out the schedule. To my dismay, I found that their last event had occurred four months earlier. The center had been there for seven years and had hosted several amazing-looking events, but now it was closed. The situation was an undeniable reminder that I should not put things off. Luckily, the owner of the center, Bonita, was still offering workshops and healing services at her home in McLean and at other holistic healing centers in the area. I watched a few of her videos and found some on the topic of past lives and the Akashic Records that included guided meditations.[27] The idea intrigued me. Throughout my life, I’d had glimpses of my past lives, such as feeling very much at home in places I’ve never been before (like the Elizabethan-era setting of the Shakespeare Theatre), recognizing people I’ve never met before, having memories or highly realistic dreams about situations I hadn’t experienced in this lifetime, etc., so I wanted to delve into this topic in a more structured way. The first time I tried visiting the Akashic Records through a meditation I learned in one of Bonita’s videos, the images came easily to me. Sitting on my meditation pillow, I took several slow breaths, then imagined myself walking up a large stairway into the heavens. Reaching the top, I am in front of a beautiful old stone building with a large wooden double door. I open the door and step inside a spacious, light-filled room reminiscent of the great room at Trinity College library in Dublin but with white walls and big windows. I ask for a book, and one floats off the shelf into my hand. The cover is encased in a hunter green fabric with a watercolor painting of a canoe by a lake next to a beautiful evergreen forest. I open the book. I find myself in the forest. I walk toward the canoe. I am a female in my teens wearing an outfit made of deerskin. I am carrying a bow, and my feet are bare. I am in the Northern part of this continent. I am a

member of the Ojibwe Nation. I have a memory of my father showing me how to hunt deer. Quietly watching the deer, I place my arrow in my bow, draw it back, aim, and then release it. It strikes the deer square in the chest. It falls. I am incredibly proud of myself, and my father also beams with pride. I have become one of the best—if not the best—hunters in our tribe, and I am the only female hunter— most are men who are older than me. I close the book, place it on a table, and thank the library for sharing this information with me. I head out the door and back down the stairs. Back on my meditation mat, I realized that this memory was probably related to the Ojibwe message I received fifteen years earlier, when I took one of my earliest self-guided meditation journeys. Back then, I was just learning to use these visualization techniques, so I did not always get clear information. This felt like an opportunity to revisit those first insights into my past lives. And the memory of this independent, capable, skilled young woman was also a reminder of those aspects of myself that I needed to nurture. Returning to Bonita’s website the next day, I found that she was offering a workshop on the Akashic Records in a couple of weeks, so I signed up for it. In the meantime, I wanted to meet with her, so I made an appointment for a past-life reading. I arrived at Bonita’s home—the woodsy, windowed, mid-century house where she grew up. After introducing me to her mother and son, Bonita led me to a room lined with shelves filled with her mother’s pottery. I sat on a small couch across from Bonita. Behind her was a window looking out at the woods. The first message Bonita relayed to me was that I was a multidimensional person. “Your soul is of this earth, but not originally of this earth. When earth was being created, representatives from all beings came to help with the creation of earth, and you were very excited to be part of that project. Because of this, you feel responsible for all of humanity,” she said. I nodded. Bonita continued, “You are supposed to work with people who have already done a lot of their own healing work and are ready to get to the next level.” She told me about some of my past-life selves who were stepping

forward. She explained that people usually connect with past-life personalities that have life lessons relevant to what they are currently dealing with. “Elizabeth, is very eager to speak with you,” Bonita said with a big smile. “She is a red-haired woman from a wealthy family in England who was born in 1600. Her family wanted her to marry, but having an independent spirit, she asserted that she didn’t want that for herself and opted instead to join the clergy. She went off to Scotland to become a nun since Catholics were being persecuted in England. Her family made a handsome donation to the convent so that she would have a comfortable life there.” As Bonita was telling me this, I began to see myself and my surroundings very clearly. Walking through the sparsely decorated room with arched windows, I inhale the familiar scent of the cold stonework in the abbey where I reside. I am blessed to have this opportunity to live out my life’s mission without any distractions. “Good morning, sisters!” I greet my fellow renunciates as I head to the kitchen. I knead the dough on the wide wooden counter, taking in the yeasty smell, delighting in the smooth texture against the palms of my hands. My mouth waters as scented steam wafts from the large pot of raspberry jam that Sister Anna is tending on the stove. My heart is filled with joy. Sometimes my life is so perfect that I fear it must be a dream. “Sister Elizabeth’s message to you is that of self-care,” Bonita said. “She is saying that your heart drives your actions, but you let your brain take over, mix up your priorities, and end up with an unsatisfying burden. Things that should be good platforms for extraordinary growth end up becoming burdens, and you let them go. Often this is because you put other people’s needs ahead of your own.” Ding! Ding! Ding! “But others will benefit if you take care of yourself. When you meditate and do energy work on yourself, bringing the energy from your energetic heart to your physical heart, that’s when you will feel aligned. Love yourself completely, so that you can be the beautiful conduit of Divine love that you are meant to be.” Elizabeth was living the kind of life that I would like to live—one where I am doing the things that bring me joy, in community with others, without worrying about what others think about my choices. And many things about

Elizabeth reminded me of what I knew about my mother’s life before I was born. She had spent her summers after college on the island of Iona, off the coast Scotland, studying at the Iona Community, housed in a renovated old abbey. The founder and director, Rev. George McLeod, emphasized the importance of doing good works out in the world to spread the Light, rather than restricting Christianity to the pulpit on Sundays. I have always felt a deep longing to go to Iona. This past-life personality felt very familiar, and it definitely held important messages for my current situation. Next, Bonita described my life as Ba’haimia, a ruthless, brutal, mandominating, Amazonian warrior woman who lived on an island in the Aegean Sea. At first, I didn’t connect at all with this persona. As a matter of fact, Ba’haimia seemed like the exact opposite of how I see myself. But as I listened, I realized that some aspects of her made sense in my current life. For example, I have always felt taller than I am, and when people stand next to me, they are often surprised at how petite I am. “I thought you were taller!” they say. And Gail, my dear family friend and second grade teacher, loves to tell the story of how my kindergarten teacher would entrust me to take messages to the other teachers because I could find my way around and back and could be trusted to do get the job done. Apparently, I would walk into Gail’s classroom, take a solid wide-footed stance—fists on my hips Wonder Woman style—and announce that I was here with a message. She still gets a kick remembering the tiny, highly confident five-year-old me. So, there were some aspects of Ba’haimia that resonated with me, but overall, I didn’t see the connection with my current self. Later, I would realize that she was there to remind me of the strong, confident young child I’d forgotten. Bonita went on to say that I’ve been in this country on and off for the past 500 years. I have had a tendency in my “recent” past to land in places among oppressed groups of people, the Divine people who were being overpowered, helping maintain their Light as others tried to extinguish it. “Going forward in this life, you will be heading down a more shamanic path, bringing healing to the planet, raising the vibration, and then your work will be done here, having completed the circle from its creation,” Bonita said. Bonita asked if I had questions. “What I am supposed to be doing next?” She smiled and said, “I see you creating a new type of crystal grid.” I wasn’t sure if she meant that literally, but it made sense, since I had been seeing crystals consistently in my meditations recently. And as I thought about my

lifelong relationship with rocks and crystals, her words began to resonate deeply. “We are heading into a time when people will become more intuitive. You are here to help raise the planet’s vibration and to help support others who are raising the vibration of the planet. It is not for you to lift them up or give them your energy. Rather, let it flow in a way that inspires others to raise their vibrations. Nobody will be able to learn to raise their own vibration if you are giving them your energy.” I thought of how far I had come in terms of learning not to give away my energy but rather to simply be a clear channel for the universal life force, the prana, the chi, the Ki. I had experienced how much more energizing it was to allow it to flow through me rather than getting caught up in the fears, concerns, and insecurities of trying to be a good Reiki healer. I already had these skills, and simply by being true to myself and allowing my gifts to flow without ego, I could heal those around me. Bonita continued, “You are also here to reconcile within yourself where you belong, your sense of connection to the whole planet and all life on it. You have been feeling stuck because you have not been following your Divine mission. You keep derailing yourself.” Thanks, but I knew that already! “You just need to release all your old baggage so that you can rise up. You must continually envision what you want and create from your heart. Stop worrying about how it will happen, as that will just manifest the effort rather than the thing you want. Opportunities will then show up. The more you enjoy the experience of going with the Divine flow, the more you will be able to help others. Once you get rid of self-guilt, it will become effortless for you to heal everyone around you.” She smiled at me. “But, in order for this to happen, you have to treat yourself beautifully.” These past-life descriptions helped to confirm and clarify some things about my current life, and they also gave me the confidence to keep moving forward with what I was doing. When I started yoga teacher training, I stepped away from behavioral science research and returned to offering Reiki and teaching mind/body/spirit workshops. This did not pay nearly as well as the research work, but I really enjoyed it and felt that I was helping people much more directly. My past lives reminded me that I need to tap into the unabashed confidence of my early years, listen to my heart, and stay true to my life purpose—both for my sake and for the world.

After our session, Bonita suggested that I work with other healers who could help me move quickly in developing my innate talents. She recommended that I contact her colleague, Joan, an angel communicator. So, a few days later, I found Joan’s contact information online and called her. I was surprised that she actually picked up her phone. She couldn’t have been nicer or perkier. I felt my vibe go up just from speaking with her. “Bonita recommended I connect with you,” I explained after introducing myself. “She told me that if I can learn how to raise my vibration high enough, I can communicate with the higher realms. So, I wanted to find out what I need to do that.” “Your vibration is already up there,” Joan responded. “There’s no reason you can’t talk to them now! You’re here on earth at this time to teach people about the Love and the Light within them.” “So, how do I do that?” I asked. “Well, you need to keep your vibration high. It helps to focus on the positive and surround yourself with highvibration people. You also need to stay grounded,” she added. This was something all of my great teachers have emphasized. Then she said she would pull some angel cards to see what messages they had for me. After a moment, she said, “They say you will be working with crystals. You’ll receive guidance for setting up a new grid for love and prosperity. And I also see you working with the crystal children,[28] who are very intuitive, open to higher realms, and in touch with nature.” It seemed Spirit wanted to make sure I didn’t miss that message about the crystals. ◊ A few months after our conversation, Joan invited me to be a guest on her BlogTalk radio show with her cohost Tim, a wonderful medium. For the show, she asked me to help with intuitive readings for people who called in to get advice. “I don’t know how to do that,” I said. “Sure you do!” Joan responded. I agreed to try. The show turned out to be a lot of fun, and I found it easy to “see” what was going on in people’s lives.

Chapter 9: Confirmations Bonita had also recommended that I work with a woman named Amber, whom I had actually met about nine years earlier at the Green Festival in DC, an annual celebration of sustainable businesses and environmentally friendly products hosted by Green America. At the time of our first meeting, she owned a small shop in Falls Church and I had recently launched Herban Lifestyle, and a mutual friend suggested that we might want to work together. Amber ended up carrying a few of my products. We worked together for about three years, then Amber closed her shop, so I didn’t see her as much after that. But I continued to receive her newsletter and knew that over the past couple of years she had gone in a completely new direction. She was now holding women’s circles and workshops, and I had wanted to get back in touch with her anyway, so I booked a healing session with her—with no specific goal in mind other than to continue the process of clearing old “stuff” to continue to raise my overall vibration. I arrived at her healing center, and she greeted me with big smiles and hugs. She introduced me to Barry, her new partner who was also a healer. They seemed like a great match. Amber showed me to the healing room, which was set up with a massage table topped with an amethyst biomat, a delightful thing to lie on during treatments. The room also had drums, rattles, crystals, sacred geometry artwork, and a golden metal frame in the shape of a pyramid that was large enough for an adult to sit in. Amber had me start by sitting under the pyramid for a couple of minutes to clear my energy. Then she had me stand up, eyes closed, arms out, as she smudged me with sage and a large feather. She asked me to take deep inhales followed by complete exhales as she drummed and talked. I inhaled and exhaled deeply and began to feel lightheaded. I cannot tell where her voice is coming from. She sounds as if she is floating around me. She tells me to make any sounds or movements that I am compelled to make. Something about this ritual feels incredibly familiar. I am an indigenous man living in some unknown time long ago. I flap my arms, which are adorned with feathers and hum a sacred tune that I don’t know from this lifetime. I lift off the ground and soar through the sky,

held aloft by my broad wings. I am powerful. I am free. I remember! Tears of joy and relief stream down my face. She stopped the drumming and had me lie down on the massage table. Ahhh, the biomat. She placed crystals on and around me. I closed my eyes, and images began forming in my mind. I am a woman in a long dress made with a heavy wool fabric. My straight hair flows down to my waist. Sitting on the edge of a rock cliff, I look out over the sea. I inhale the briny air. This place feels so familiar, so comforting, so nurturing. It is nighttime, and the rocks around me look almost black. The sky, barely lit, is a deep purple and dark blue. The ocean is dark blue, too. I opened my eyes and felt a deep longing to be there, to be back home, wherever that was. After my treatment, we took some time to just talk. Amber said she had seen us together as Mongolian shamans in the earliest days of shamanism, and she said that being a shaman was a deep part of my being. That rang very true for me. I had a long-held fascination with shamanism. In addition, whenever I see films about Mongolia, I feel a deep longing to be there. The landscape, while so alien to my current life, somehow feels very familiar. Amber said that I used to work with herbs as my main form of medicine, which made total sense given my long-time fascination with plant medicine. Then she said I had also used animal products in my formulas. This was ironic since I had a commitment to vegan and cruelty-free ingredients in my bath and body products. “Back then, we didn’t have easy access to fairtrade coconut oil,” she said. I responded, “I loved my yak butter!” After I left Amber’s house, I took my phone out of airplane mode. A couple of seconds later, a text came through. My friend Emily was asking if I would like to make lamb tallow soap. I had worked with Emily for the past seven years, having met her through the vibrant DC crafting community, and she knew that my thing was vegan and cruelty-free, so it was incredibly weird that she would ask such a question. I texted back immediately, saying, “Sure!” She texted back, “Really?!” I replied, “Yes! Your timing is perfect! Tell you more when I see you.” When Emily came by my house the next day, I told her what had just

transpired before her text. She seemed slightly skeptical, but she couldn’t deny the synchronicity. Emily had recently started a job with a Kosher, grassfinished, ethically-raised meat company with a “nose-to-tail” policy of using every part of the animal. She had been in a meeting talking about uses for tallow when she had texted me. I ended up making two hundred bars of lamb tallow soap for her, honoring my Mongolian shaman past. But my current incarnation really hated working with the raw tallow. The smell and the feel of it made me want to gag. It did make for some really lovely soap though as the saponification process took away any greasy feel and lamb-y smell. ◊ Going through my list of people that Bonita had recommend I contact, I next scheduled a meeting with Liz and Giselle, a mother-daughter team of intuitive healers. Arriving at their huge tract home about thirty minutes west of where I live, I was greeted by Liz. Giselle soon joined us. She was 13 years old at the time but was clearly an old soul. I saw her as the mother and Liz and the daughter. Giselle asked why I had come there. “Bonita recommended I talk to you about learning how to get my vibration up high enough so that I can become an angel communicator.” Like Joan, Giselle responded by saying, “Your vibration is already very high. You already communicate with the higher realms.” She then asked me, “What do you think you are supposed to do?” “I feel I have been called to work with children for the past twenty-eight years, but I keep resisting it.” I told her about my work with the children in Danbury Hospital’s outpatient program and how wonderful, yet heartbreaking, it was. I found it too painful. Giselle responded, “I see a rainbow aura around you. This makes you a perfect match with children. You are energetically mature enough to be very effective with the crystal children.” This, too, echoed what Joan had said. I sensed that the mention of crystals and crystal children was not only affirmation that this would be an important part of my path but also a signal that I was on the right path in this very moment. “Very few adults can see past the child’s personality to their essence,” she added. “Your work with children can be very powerful if you let it. But you have to work from the higher levels, your higher self with their higher selves, rather than from an emotional basis.” In the end, Giselle said that I know what I am supposed to do and that I am ready for the big changes. This really resonated with me. I felt ready. I did

know what to do. I just needed to listen to my inner voice and connect with my higher self for clear guidance.

Chapter 10: Answering the Call The next week, I saw a post on Facebook from a friend, Rita. Her teenage daughter, Amy, was in the ICU with a severe undiagnosed illness. Rita was asking people to pray for her health. I texted her right away. “I’m so sorry to hear about Amy. I am holding you both in my prayers.” She texted back, “Thank you