Expanding in Spirituality & Consciousness

I grew up in safety with shelter, food and love.  My military family relocated every year for the first 15 years of my life.  The lack of a stable environment in which to grow up was difficult in many ways. Yet, we all adapt creatively to whatever are the conditions in the life we are given.

I was the new kid and often felt left out. My need to belong developed a sensitivity and ability to track and feel where and how to be to fit in, to be invited. As with many of us, life taught me to hide negative qualities and feelings, and be a “good girl.”  I learned to push away anger, aggression and messy feelings and go along with others. Fluidity, flexibility and flowing became my way to navigate constant change.

Inwardly, I discovered an inner sanctum of magical play and creativity that filled the space of my aloneness. I was mostly happy and when I wasn’t I learned to retreat inside where God was my best friend.

Deep soul patterns don’t change much and many of the themes articulated here remain essentially so, though perhaps, more understood and refined.

At age 15, the safety of our family container ruptured when my dad divorced my mom and moved to California with his new wife and family.  The tracks of soul laid down in childhood morphed with the overwhelming challenges of adolescence and my psyche split in two: 1. the high functioning, happy, “no-problem daughter” with with good grades and lots of friends and 2. the hidden self that wept alone and struggled with compulsions. This divide gave rise to a pattern of inner conflict that went underground for more than a decade.  

At age 21, I moved from the mid-west to California and new paradigms of consciousness and spirituality begin to influence and shape my soul as I immersed in new thought and A Course in Miracles.  At 28, spiritual guidance directed me to an immersion at Ken Keyes’ Living Love Center in Oregon (Handbook of Higher Consciousness) and within a year I enter the “Metanoia school,” a 4th way school of consciousness based on the teachings of Gurdjieff and Nan McCurdy. I married a man in this school and we open a family business, offering our home in service to the community.  A few years later we have a child.

Overwhelmed by huge life pressures and activities, I lose my spiritual focus and depression emerges.  I take refuge in the Buddha Dharma, which helped with my unhappiness but not my marriage. Years pass and the divide between my inner life and the outer world of work and activities widens.

Then, the Metanoia school studies the Enneagram Personality Typology and I awake to the truth of unseen psychological patterns. I see how I used a spiritual focus to sidestep conflicts and deny personal needs and wants, and those of others. The shock of seeing opened deep layers of hidden feelings. Fear, anger and grief surfaced as I felt the ache of my unmet heart's desire to live a unified life of shared intimacy and love.

I also more clearly understood my loved ones and was drawn to understand the whole psyche of humanity. I wanted to understand the pattern and motion of our interrelatedness.  So, I trained with the best in the field - Don Riso and Russ Hudson - to learn and receive the profound soul-oriented approach to Enneagram knowledge and teachings that I offer today.  

The process was intense. I was changing through ongoing depth psychotherapy and learning how to feel and deal in new ways.  NLP expanded my awareness and communication skills and it was my joy and passion to share what I was learning. So, I began to write and teach and counseling soul work with others naturally unfolded.

Within a few years, I moved my office to be part of a healing arts center with other therapists and am drawn to join them in a “Healer’s Path” training with Jonathan Goldman. Soon after, I enter graduate school in depth psychology which opens the descent into psyche and soul both fresh and alive but also excruciating – like the thawing of a frozen foot.

The forces of change relentlessly move and the result is a new direction. The divorce was amiable and so very sad. I earn my degree from Pacifica Graduate Institute and am able to attend a Healer’s path intensive in Brazil in 2002 where I meet Baixinha - a powerful healer and leader of an Umbanda path of African spirituality. For a decade, I participate with Baixinha and Jonathan in Santo Daime ceremonies and learn how to evoke elemental forces of nature with praises and prayers to access allies and healing energies to help and heal. The profound beauty of music and singing is a way to love God, offer help on earth and comfort my broken heart.  

After Brazil, my son and I move to Boulder to begin a new life near family. I teach at Naropa and hone my skills as a therapist. I train in group process work through Matrixworks with Mukara Meridith, deepen in somatic trauma work with Anna Chitty and Pat Ogden, work briefly in mental health crisis work services and learn EMDR basics. After 5 years in Boulder, I take my seat as a therapist and complete a soul motion of embodiment and individuation.

The soul’s journey to transcendent embodiment is not easy. Yet even as I was living every agony, sorrow and joy, my soul deepened in the view that difficulties well-lived ripen as experiential wisdom that can be offered to others, to help free the burdens and suffering of all.  

Though living the chaos of change feels unsettling and complex in the moment; is inherently filled with uncertainty; and often fraught with delusion and illusions; the stories that unfold make sense but only after they are lived.  And as one chapter of life closes, another opens…