Later that same evening I would meet Sailor Bob, and he invited me along to a meeting, this was not an AA meeting but more like Satsang. I went along unsure what to expect and I listened to what Bob had to say. Each word was like an arrow that pierced the very heart of my being.  Somehow, I understood what he said to be true, there was no doubt. I experienced an inner joy and freedom that I did not believe was possible. I spent a lot of time with Bob over the next few years, driving to meetings three times a week often in a deep state of despair and hopelessness. I would feel like I ‘got it’ only to lose it again and be plunged back in to the dark well of my suffering mind. I seemed to be walking between worlds of dark and light, guided by a wisdom of heart that would eventually lead to my own unravelling.  

 

I moved to Germany in my early twenties, where I would marry and birth my daughter Lilian. After some years we moved to India where I lived for three-years. In India I met Kamal, my next guide and teacher. During our first meeting together, she asked me to go to the mirror, to look into my eyes and say: ‘I love you’.

Instead of love, unworthiness stared back at me, and that is where our work together began. Kamal taught me Reiki, but more importantly she offered her loving and tender presence, held my hand, and shone a bright light for me to begin to sort and reclaim the disowned neglected parts of myself that lived in the shadows. Eventually I left India along with my marriage, and together with my young daughter travelled across the Nullarbor Desert to a small town called Denmark in the south-west region of Western Australia where we would live for the next few years. 

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Denmark opened me up to the healing power of community and was filled with a unique mix of artists, musicians, dancers, poets, and seekers, who invited connection and inspired expression. Here, on forty-acres of land I got in touch with the profound rage and anger I felt inside. I discovered I could literally dance the self-consciousness I felt, and by doing so it would free the bound-up knots of energy that lived inside. Through direct experience, I learned that feelings and emotions had no real substance to them and became a source of suffering when resisted, and a path to freedom when expressed. Movement, connection to the earth and ocean, and the sub-personality work that spontaneously took place at night when I was alone, became valuable resources to help digest the stale and useless conditioning that had held this loving creative heart captive.  

 

From Denmark we would move to Boulder, Colorado where we both attended school. The Seven Bowls School of Nutrition, Nourishment and Healing was a three-year training program in the art and mechanics of healing. I studied Allopathic, Oriental and Ayurvedic disciplines in depth, I learned how to prepare flower essences and grow food. I explored plant spirit medicine, authentic movement, and so much more. This program was like a de-conditioning and a re-learning of how to love, care and listen to the wisdom of the body. I went on to work as an Integrative Clinical Nutritionist in private practice and would offer community classes on using food as medicine. I started to offer a service to postpartum mothers, where I would create and deliver nourishing foods in the early weeks after birth. Random conversations and meetings with midwives started to happen, and a friend spontaneously handed me the book ‘Spiritual Midwifery’. So, the stirring began, and after a year of dreaming, and almost ten years in Boulder my daughter and I would travel to Australia where I would begin a four-year journey to study nursing and midwifery.  

 

A deep and abiding trust in the wisdom of life’s unfolding lives here now. The darkness has become my friend, and a warm place to rest.

My body has become an intelligent creature that responds to love and care. My mind belongs to presence and the natural unfolding of the heart. It is from this open heart that I am called to be of service to walk with others as guide and companion on this miraculous journey home.