My deepest devotion, throughout my life has been to the discovery and embodiment of our truest nature.
I studied organized and mystical religions, I traveled to many countries in our world, getting a taste of different cultures and people, I lived a typical suburban life as a wife and mother, I lived in chronic confusion, and I studied psychology, all with the gnawing question of ‘what is all this really about?’ tugging at my sleeve.
I was born in Brooklyn New York, into a world where appearances were everything, but I tended an inner world that I kept to myself. When I look back on how I was “companioned” throughout my childhood by my inner world that was full of comfort and promise I marvel at the wisdom and strength of this stream of consciousness.
After raising my two sons, I went to graduate school to study psychology and find professional legitimacy, and to focus on my interior. I had, for a long time, known I needed to heal from childhood trauma and I also felt a calling to help others. But, like so many of us, I had looked to the external world for this elusive happiness and healing I felt was missing.
I found some footing in graduate school. It was wonderful to study something so close to my heart, having many opportunities to study, learn, reflect upon, disagree with, argue about and get language for feelings, behaviors, and confusions.
Since none of what I was learning was abstract or removed, I began a serious descent into my inner world.
After completing my degree I built a satisfyingly delicious career – with the same gnawing question in my heart – how do I reconcile pain and confusion with a life-long intuited knowing of a greater consciousness or awareness?
In addition to a private practice of psychotherapy, I taught at California Institute of Integral Studies and the University of California at San Francisco. I was the therapist for a pilot study at Stanford and led workshops and presentations for cultivating resilience.
My first book - The Woman’s Book of Resilience: 12 Qualities to Cultivate - came from my doctoral dissertation. Not surprisingly I was enamored by the question of what allows someone to love, no matter his or her circumstances or temperament. How come some of us thrived in life and others of us crumbled from hardships? I led workshops and seminars and gave talks about discovering or rediscovering our ability to love no matter what.
I began to follow and study spiritual teachers: Adyashanti, David Hawkins, Mooji and Jan Frazier. After decades of devoted searching, I was guided by Jan Frazier and experienced a profound shift in consciousness at the age of 70. This realization allowed the inner and the outer world to melt into each other. After decades of healing and opening to larger and larger states of consciousness, the search ended. This shift set my course, in a humbling and wondrous way, to deeper and further understanding, to embodying and, most importantly, living what had been revealed.
In the sweet presence of now, I am along for the ride of intimate contact with whatever life has in store from moment to moment and day to day. In my bones I understand what it means to be intimate with 10,000 things -