About

In my early 30s, I was a mess and didn’t know it. I looked good and was a rising star in corporate strategic planning. But I had also experienced numerous unhealed emotional traumas and was pushing down my distress by overeating, drinking whiskey, and smoking a lot of marijuana. I’d go home many nights, get high, singing and crying to Roberta Flack. At 33, I had also just been through a 4-day state supreme court divorce trial.

A Fortune 100 company recruited me to shift their planning process from number crunching to thoughtful identification of the assumptions and intentions behind the numbers. A year later, after acquiring Tiffany’s, the Chairman of the Board sent me there to deliver a growth plan.

I did a great job but was clueless and emotionally allergic to business politics. I ended up out of a job, banished back to the parent company, and enrolled in an outplacement company to find a new job.

My friend Martha called. She was a fellow alumnus from the first all-women’s MBA program run by Harvard faculty at Simmons College in Boston. She had been relentlessly bugging me to attend an introductory event for a personal growth training. I realized the only way to stop her would be to go so I could tell her I checked it out and was not interested.

When the elevator doors opened, my senses were assaulted by a jammed hallway full of people hugging and looking deeply into each other’s eyes. It was so creepy! I wanted to run but the elevator doors closed before I could escape. Determined to get this over with, I girded my loins and entered the room cloaked in my condescending, know-it-all judgment that these were obviously a bunch of losers with whom I did not want to associate.

Then in a sample exercise from their program, we were divided into two groups. Half of us stood with our eyes closed while the others came and whispered loving messages of encouragement in our ears. I was disarmed by their tenderness and suddenly burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably. I was shocked but somehow knew these people had what I was desperately yearning for. There was something solid, safe, free, and beautifully alive in them.

It was as though the tectonic plates of my being shifted. There was no doubt what was happening inside me was the best thing I had ever experienced. This was IT for me.

That event was my introduction to the teachings of John-Roger, the founder of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness.

Little by little, I lost the need to push down my distress. Instead, I spent my time devouring personal growth and spiritual awakening books and trainings while launching my strategic planning consulting practice.

It was hard work identifying and releasing all the ways I had abandoned myself. I had bought into a game of life that kept me racing about, chasing after material success and the approval of others. I did not realize how disconnected I was from my own internal well-being.

Meanwhile, as I helped companies navigate through complex change, executives began asking me to work with them privately. And so, I shifted into executive coaching before that profession even existed.

That evolved into my mentoring practice, working with individuals and couples, and offering group learning programs to assist others in transforming their lives.

My own process of learning to heal what was wounded inside of me and mastering the art of being authentically myself has served as the foundation for my work helping others.