Who am I? And how did I end up teaching the Pathwork? As a child, I was very religious, going to church with my good friend (she was Lutheran, I was Methodist) a couple of times a week during Christmas and Easter. When I entered college, I would skip classes to sit in the chapel at the Wesley Foundation church and play the organ for 3, 4, 6 hours a day. I went to Lincoln, NE, during the Christmas break with other Methodist students to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. I was inspired.
But somewhere along the line, I became disillusioned. In my late teens and early 20s, I discovered Ayn Rand and the philosophy of Objectivism. It made sense of my experiences, and I decided at the age of 23 that I was no longer a Christian but an agnostic. God might or might not exist, but it didn’t matter. He had no relevance for me.
This was my belief for nearly the next two decades. As I approached my 40th birthday, a good friend learned of a man who was teaching classes on energy healing. She didn’t want to go alone, so she persuaded me to go to the classes with her. And thus began my journey.
In the very first class, I experienced something that was bizarre to me. We were sitting with our eyes shut, allowing “spirit” to work on the different levels of our auras. I was very skeptical, not believing a bit of it. When the teacher reached the fourth level of the aura, the “emotional body,” she said, my chair began to shake violently. That’s what it felt like. I opened my eyes, and there was nothing and no one near my chair and the chair wasn’t shaking. The minute I closed my eyes, it began to shake again. I knew that it wasn’t a physical shaking, but how to explain what I felt?
This was my first experience of the metaphysical in more than 25 years. As I went through the classes with my friend, I began to have more and more of these experiences. I found I could identify what part of another person’s body was in pain by scanning his or her body with my hands, not touching them, just energetically scanning them. I even managed to heal their pain on several occasions, although I found I tended to absorb the pain.
What was happening? I have always been a very rational person. Logic was my forte. I loved math and chemistry because of their precision and the logical way they operated. This was very much at odds with what I was experiencing. At some point in the two years of studying with this healer, I made a choice: I could decide that everything I was experiencing was not true…or I could suspend my disbelief and see what happened. I chose the latter and never looked back.
I entered the Pathwork Transformation Program in 1987 at Sevenoaks Pathwork Center in Madison, VA. It’s a five-year program of intense personal work, requiring ten weekends a year at the Pathwork Center plus weekly sessions with a helper. It changed my life. I gave up my demand for logic and predictability in exchange for discovering the absolute wonder and mystery of the world that operates beneath the surface. In the Pathwork lectures, I discovered the blueprint for human behavior, clear explanations of why I experienced the difficulties I did in life, why I kept getting hooked into negative patterns and, most important, the bliss and joy of truly understanding myself and others.
When I finished the five-year program, I immediately signed up for the four-year helper training program, which was followed by a four-year apprenticeship as I began using my newfound skills to help others. I began an internet group called the Pathwork Circle in the early 90s and taught the Pathwork to an international group of people. The group grew, with 135 members for part of that time. I taught in the five year program at Sevenoaks for four years. I also began my own private practice, offering Pathwork sessions to individuals and couples. In 2000, I felt an inner call to bring this work to Minnesota, the place of my birth.
This blog is an experiment for me. I want to be able to write freely about the Pathwork in my life and see what comes of it. So here I am…and here you are if you are reading this. Welcome to my world. It’s a world of immense safety, wisdom and love. Each of us on this planet have created it to match our state of spiritual development. It has its challenges, but it’s all designed perfectly to help us live more fully from the divine self that we carry inside, to strip away the masks and pretenses that we use to hide our lower self, and to transform the negativities and cruelties into their original divine nature.
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