I was born with a talent for reading people and situations, a love for creative problem solving and a skill for finding humor in most circumstances.

My problem solving abilities and my sense of humor were welcomed by my family but my ability to read a situation was decidely not. My mother, in particular, had devoted her life to religious obedience in a way that squeezed out potential for mystical personal experiences. I now realize she couldn’t understand my read so it frightened her but my toddler’s response to her alarm about my read was to feel shame. I didn’t stop reading situations but I did stop talking about it.

You are now expecting a story of rebellion but that was not the case. I loved my mother and I enjoyed church and in particular Sunday School. I said prayers constantly as a child, to a man in the sky that I believed to be all powerful but fair and benevolent to those who were devout. I remember so clearly lying in bed at night saying thank you for all of the people in my life, one at a time, and then apologizing for the day’s sins and closing with a vow to be perfect the next day. Of course I was never perfect, especially when it came to my read. I apologized to God for waking my mother in the middle of the night, screaming from a nightmare about my sister that was actually a premonition about her future demise. I apologized for knowing my father was going to fall off the roof right before it happened. I apologized to God for dreaming that a kid from the neighboring town whom I had just met would be hit by a car right before he was hit by a car. What sort of horrible soul would think of such things? I wasn’t thinking though, I was sensing. God had given me a great gift and I spent my childhood feeling guilty about it.

I became obsessed with learning more about it, initially driven by a desire to figure out what was wrong with me. As my life began to unfold, I experienced an extraordinary amount of death in my family - three grandparents by the time I was 8, my father when I was 11 and my mother when I was 21. When my mother died I was so grief stricken that I rejected God, stuffed down my read and threw my focus on just the physical and tangible. Things that felt like they were within my control. I got my masters and PhD in technical fields and took up running, biking and lifting weights. When I was 29 I started running with a colleague that was seriously into the teachings of Carolyn Myss, an intuitive healer. She rekindled the fire in me to understand the intersection of spiritual and physical planes, this time absent the fear and shame from my childhood.

Over the course of my life I have absorbed and considered mountains of content on religion, spirituality, intuition, God, love, the science of how the human spirit inhabits a body and studies on how the spirit of one human connects to other spirits - other humans as well as God. I’ve pondered long and hard the meaning of life and the role and responsibility of being a human.

I have come to some solid conclusions. My beliefs may shift slightly as I continue to follow my quest for learning but for now, the big picture seems pretty clear to me.

In this blog I will share what I have learned so far. My goals are to help others, find kindred sprits and to do my part to bring more light into the world. If you have read this far, thank you and I hope we have some fun together on this journey.