This blog is an attempt to heed my heart’s long time urging to share. And sensing that the best way to do this is through personal stories, experiences and dreams, this is what you’ll be reading here. But being a very private person I must admit that sharing online is way outside my comfort zone. In fact, I’ve done my best to stay hidden and in the background…a fly on the wall, so to speak, watching the online craziness from afar. No online presence whatsoever, until now. And on top of preferring a private life to an online one, I also held the false belief that I somehow must be “perfect” in order to share my heart in this way; hence, my long time resistance to putting anything out there. Because really, who of us can claim to be a perfect person? As for myself, bearing the typical ignorance and subsequent selfishness that come with the human experience, I have admittedly hurt others and made many mistakes. For this reason, I was convinced that my imperfections disqualified me from sharing such virtues as those that I am finally coming to understand and know through my own heart. But the wise counsel that quelled all of these notions and prompted these writings is: “the act of sharing from the heart is, in itself, what brings us closer to the reality of our true perfection.”

To be clear from the start, the truth that my heart is urging me to share is not my truth, it is Universal Truth that has converged, intersected and integrated with my life…even before I realized why – even before I realized that I had asked for it. And over the past 20 years, the origin of this truth has been a variety of spiritual teachings; most of them gracing my life in written form via sacred texts and books. I don’t claim to be an expert or authority in any of these by the way, all I know is that they have opened my heart.

I first picked up a bible on my own when I was 17. On that day, I was walking to work downtown and was drawn to it – a white book with gold embossed letters in a window display. I remember beginning at the end, with Revelations, and perusing through it backward over the course of some years. But the only thing that really stuck with me were the red words – Christ’s words. I wanted to know more about these teachings. It frustrated me to no end that so much of Jesus’ ministry and teachings seemed to be left out! And what about all of those unaccounted for years of his life? Where was he and why was this missing too? “What kind of book is this?!” I wondered? It seemed incomplete to me. Blasphemy? Well in my defense, I grew up outside of the influence of religion and the church. Yes, my mom did make sure to suggest that there was indeed a God but she never forced her own version of God down my throat, and my heart still thanks her for this today. Instead, she was a gentle example, always setting aside time for prayer at the end of the day. And simply teaching me a couple prayers, she made sure to remind me to say my own prayers every night before going to sleep. “Just be thankful to God,” was the message that stuck. And so, I grew up with a mysterious sense that God was everywhere and within everything. There were no limits placed upon my God, which allowed me the freedom to “find” God in the way my soul was naturally inclined to.

When I reached the age of 28, the “missing” red words in the bible that I longed for finally came to me, prompting my first true dive into the world of Spirit. I can recall how it all began. I was sitting in my parked car outside my friend’s North Hollywood apartment waiting until the last minute to head inside for the night. Everything I owned and considered valuable enough to haul across the country was carefully packed into and completely filled the trunk and back seat of my 4-door Nissan Altima. I had been living out of my car for three weeks at this point and looking for an affordable apartment while I attended school for Audio Engineering – my long-time career dream. Thankfully, my gym membership with a national chain afforded me daily showers and workouts, and a friend of mine offered me her couch at night. “What am I doing?!” I suddenly questioned as I looked into the rear-view mirror at all the stuff piled in the back seat. “What am I doing here? What am I doing with my life?!” Had I really just quit my life back home and left everything I knew to drive thousands of miles to a different place, thinking that here is where I would finally find the completion and happiness I was seeking? Really?! I felt so stupid, so lost. Realizing my folly and coming to the conclusion that there had to be something more to life, something real, I finally asked my first real question: “What is my life really for?”

But since I was already in Hollywood and had already come this far, I finished what I started. And in the end, lots of people thought I was crazy for walking away from the internship I had ultimately landed at a well known recording studio and the lifestyle that came with it. But for me there was nothing truly compelling about it all since in my experience, not one person I met while interning was happy. In fact, it was just the opposite and I was regularly warned: “Get out while you can!” Yikes! At first I thought people were just joking when they’d say this to me. Nope! Not all that glitters is gold had become a self realized truth. I had been naive. So although I had indeed reached my “mountain-top” goal and was on the fast track to becoming an audio engineer, I quickly realized that this was not where I was going to find my happiness and fulfillment either. Instead, alone with this realization, I felt more lost than ever! “Well if it’s not here…then where is it?!” I asked myself.

“Go within,” was the clear and surprising inward answer that came to me.

And that was my first true moment of revelation; the moment I truly knew that I would never find what I was seeking outside of myself. “Okay,” I finally surrendered, “then show me.”

And so began a long list and many years of teachings and studies. At first, they just seemed to land in my lap, but later I realized that there was no coincidence involved in the teachings that came to me. Most notably, A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love; these two have resonated with me the strongest, so far. Coupled with a year-long brainwave entrainment program, I completed my first round of A Course in Miracles. Eventually having done its 365 day course work twice, I also took to recording the lengthy text and Teacher’s Manual in my own voice and then listened to it countless times over a number of years. Really, this one book alone could be the focus of a lifetime of study. And it was when I had finally returned to my hometown that this life changing teaching came to me, quite literally.

Audio engineering had turned my interests towards sound/vibration/frequency and their effects upon the human body and energy systems: sound healing. And so, back in my hometown, I sat in the waiting room of an organization that claimed to practice this healing modality; I was there not as a patient but as an inquirer. I randomly pulled a little white booklet off the crowded bookshelf – some kind of daily guide to “A Course in Miracles.” I was intrigued. Already half way through the booklet when my name was called, I made a mental note to remember the title. Twice within that same week I happened upon the book’s title again! “Okay, that’s three times within a very short span of time,” I noted, and this was my sign that it was time to go get the book.

Waiting for a friend to head out to some used book shops with me, he bounded down the stairs of his house asking what I’d be searching for. When I told him, he stopped abruptly and asked, “really…because I just traded some music for a stack of books yesterday and that’s one of ’em…you want it?” Like I said, the book came to me. And that became the typical method of delivery of all the subsequent teachings I engaged in: complete synchronicity. It was the same with A Course of Love.

Other studies have included The I-Ching, The Four Agreements, The Bhagavad Gita, The Gnostic Gospels/Teachings, The Dharmakaya Sutra, The Tibetan Book of Liberation, The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, Queen Afua’s Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind and Spirit, The Sophia Code, the works of J. Krishnamurti, a four year, daily study of the Mayan Calendar and an ongoing fascination with Native American Animal Medicine teachings. And in between all of this, there have been numerous related studies as well. On the more abstract level, silence, stillness, reflection and dreams have been some of my greatest “teachers.” Funny, seeing all this listed here makes me wonder how I ever had time to do anything else! Truly, “seek and ye shall find” has been a very tangible reality in my experience.

But for the seeker there will always be something to seek, for never ending is the potential of the seeker’s quest. So at what point does the seeker finally do something with what has been found, especially something of value? Does the seeking itself become an excuse to do nothing else, to share nothing and to instead just continue to gather and amass, like some kind of spiritual hoarder? What good is treasure found until one does something with it? And what better thing to do with treasure than to share it? Especially treasure of the heart. So in the spirit of those whose sharing has so greatly assisted me, I now extend myself to you with my purest intention, my only reason and my most fervent wish – that through the sharing of my treasure, you too will find your own.

ReV